GIMP lovers are going to be disappointed to hear that GIMP is going away in the next release of much awaited Ubuntu 10.04. Today we take a look at installing in on Lucid Lynx using PPA.

The reason for getting rid of it as cited by the GIMP developers, is that GIMP is too professional a software to be included in regular desktop version of Ubuntu. And it takes up too much of space on the disk. Also, the fact that it’s too complicated for regular users.

If you can’t live without it…let’s see how to install GIMP 2.7.1 on Lucid Lynx (Currently in Alpha). The new version of GIMP supports single window mode and we will also see how to enable this feature as well.

First we need to add the official GIMP 2.7.1 PPA in the software sources of Ubuntu 10.04, by opening the terminal window and typing the following command:

sudo sh -c “echo ‘deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/matthaeus123/mrw-gimp-svn/ubuntu lucid main’ >> /etc/apt/sources.list”

Now that we have added the PPA we need to add the GPG key, so type the following in your Terminal window.

sudo apt-key adv –recv-keys –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 405A15CB

Next up we have to update the software repository…

sudo apt-get update

All that is left is to install GIMP 2.7.1 by typing in the following…

sudo apt-get install gimp

Click ‘Y’ (for yes) to install GIMP

Once GIMP is installed you can start it by going to Applications > Graphics > GNU Image Manipulation Program.

You now have your favorite GIMP on your favorite Ubuntu 10.04.

As you can see in the image below, GIMP still comes with default 3 windows, which could clog up your lower panel In Ubuntu 10.04.

However, now you can run GIMP in single window mode by going to Windows > Single-Window mode.

That’s all! Now you have your GIMP running in single window mode with less of hassle to manage 3 windows.

It’s unfortunate that GIMP will not be included, but by following these instructions, you’ll be able to enjoy using it in Ubuntu 10.04.

Are you looking for some high seas adventure for your desktop? Then get ready to hoist the colors with our Pirate Theme Wallpapers collection.

Note: Click on the picture to see the full-size image—these wallpapers vary in size so you may need to crop, stretch, or place them on a colored background in order to best match them to your screen’s resolution.

?

?

?

?

?

?

?

?

?

?

?

?

For more fun wallpapers be certain to visit our new Desktop Fun section.

Do you want to make Internet Explorer safer and more helpful for you and family? Then join us as we look at the CEOP (Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre) enhanced version of Internet Explorer 8.

Setting CEOP Up

We chose to install the whole CEOP pack in order to have access to complete set of CEOP Tools. The install process will be comprised of two parts…it will begin with CEOP branded windows showing the components being installed…

Note: The components can be downloaded separately for those who only want certain CEOP components added to their browser.

Then it will move to the traditional Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 install windows. One thing that we did notice is that here you will be told that you will need to restart your computer but in other windows a log off/log on process is mentioned. Just to make certain that everything goes smoothly we recommend restarting your computer when the installation process is complete.

In the EULA section you can see the versions of Windows that the CEOP Pack works with.

Once you get past the traditional Microsoft install windows you will be dropped back into the CEOP branded windows.

CEOP in Action

After you have restarted your computer and opened Internet Explorer you will notice that your homepage has been changed. When it comes to your children that is not a bad thing in this instance. It will also give you an opportunity to look through the CEOP online resources.

For the moment you may be wondering where everything is but do not worry. First you can find the two new search providers in the drop-down menu for your “Search Bar” and select a new default if desired.

The second thing to look for are the new links that have been added to your “Favorites Menu”. These links can definitely be helpful for you and your family.

The third part will require your “Favorites Bar” to be visible in order to see the “Click CEOP Button”. If you have not previously done so you will need to turn on subscribing for “Web Slices”.

Click on “Yes” to finish the subscription process.

Clicking on the “CEOP Button” again will show all kinds of new links to help provide information for you and your children. Notice that the top part is broken down into “topic categories” while the bottom part is set up for “age brackets”…very nice for helping you focus on the information that you want and/or need.

Looking for information and help on a particular topic? Clicking on the “Cyberbullying Link” for example will open the following webpage with information about cyberbullying and a link to get help with the problem.

Need something that is focused on your child’s age group? Clicking on the “8-10? Link” as an example opened this page.

Want information that is focused on you? The “Parent? Link” leads to this page. The “topic categories & age brackets” make the CEOP Button a very helpful and “family friendly” addition to Internet Explorer.

Perhaps you (or your child) want to conduct a search for something that is affecting your child. As you type in a “search term” both of the search providers will provide helpful suggestions for dealing with the problem. We felt that these were very nice suggestions in both instances here…

Conclusion

We have been able to give you a good peek at what the CEOP Tools can do but the best way to see how helpful it can be for you and your family is try it for yourself. Your children’s safety and happiness is worth it.

Links

Download the Internet Explorer CEOP Pack (link at bottom of webpage)

Note: If you are interested in a singular component or only some use these links.

Download the Click CEOP Button

Download Search CEOP

Download Internet Safety and Security Search

Do you want to make Internet Explorer safer and more helpful for you and family? Then join us as we look at the CEOP (Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre) enhanced version of Internet Explorer 8.

Setting CEOP Up

We chose to install the whole CEOP pack in order to have access to complete set of CEOP Tools. The install process will be comprised of two parts…it will begin with CEOP branded windows showing the components being installed…

Note: The components can be downloaded separately for those who only want certain CEOP components added to their browser.

Then it will move to the traditional Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 install windows. One thing that we did notice is that here you will be told that you will need to restart your computer but in other windows a log off/log on process is mentioned. Just to make certain that everything goes smoothly we recommend restarting your computer when the installation process is complete.

In the EULA section you can see the versions of Windows that the CEOP Pack works with.

Once you get past the traditional Microsoft install windows you will be dropped back into the CEOP branded windows.

CEOP in Action

After you have restarted your computer and opened Internet Explorer you will notice that your homepage has been changed. When it comes to your children that is not a bad thing in this instance. It will also give you an opportunity to look through the CEOP online resources.

For the moment you may be wondering where everything is but do not worry. First you can find the two new search providers in the drop-down menu for your “Search Bar” and select a new default if desired.

The second thing to look for are the new links that have been added to your “Favorites Menu”. These links can definitely be helpful for you and your family.

The third part will require your “Favorites Bar” to be visible in order to see the “Click CEOP Button”. If you have not previously done so you will need to turn on subscribing for “Web Slices”.

Click on “Yes” to finish the subscription process.

Clicking on the “CEOP Button” again will show all kinds of new links to help provide information for you and your children. Notice that the top part is broken down into “topic categories” while the bottom part is set up for “age brackets”…very nice for helping you focus on the information that you want and/or need.

Looking for information and help on a particular topic? Clicking on the “Cyberbullying Link” for example will open the following webpage with information about cyberbullying and a link to get help with the problem.

Need something that is focused on your child’s age group? Clicking on the “8-10? Link” as an example opened this page.

Want information that is focused on you? The “Parent? Link” leads to this page. The “topic categories & age brackets” make the CEOP Button a very helpful and “family friendly” addition to Internet Explorer.

Perhaps you (or your child) want to conduct a search for something that is affecting your child. As you type in a “search term” both of the search providers will provide helpful suggestions for dealing with the problem. We felt that these were very nice suggestions in both instances here…

Conclusion

We have been able to give you a good peek at what the CEOP Tools can do but the best way to see how helpful it can be for you and your family is try it for yourself. Your children’s safety and happiness is worth it.

Links

Download the Internet Explorer CEOP Pack (link at bottom of webpage)

Note: If you are interested in a singular component or only some use these links.

Download the Click CEOP Button

Download Search CEOP

Download Internet Safety and Security Search

We’ve been showing you fun flash games to play during company time on a Friday afternoon. Hopefully while playing them, you haven’t received a “talking to”. Today we show you some cool games to play that look like productivity apps, so the boss will be none the wiser.

The website cantyouseeimbusy.com has developed some very neat little games that look like productivity apps like Word and Excel. These apps look exactly like some project you would be working on, but are really neat little games. Here we take a look at three cool ones on the site called Breakdown, Leadership, and Cost Cutter.

Leadership

Leadership is a cool game that looks like something you would be working in Excel and is a spin off of the classic game Moon Lander.

You navigate your ship through a variety of challenging line graphs.

Breakdown

This one is a knock off of the classic game Break Out. Use your mouse to scroll the racket at the bottom and bounce the ball off of the text in the document. Press the space bar to pause the game and the elements will disappear…good for when the boss comes around.

Cost Cutter

This one is a puzzle game where it looks like your working on some bar charts in Excel. You need to click combinations of two or more blocks that are the same color. Again, hit the spacebar and the game elements will disappear.

If you’re looking for a way to goof off with some simple games without the boss knowing, these will definitely do the trick. Another cool game along these lines is Excit! which we covered previously.

Play Cost Cutter, Breakdown, and Leadership at cantyouseeimbusy.com

If you have a supported tuner card and connected FM antenna, you can listen to your favorite local over-the-air FM stations in Windows 7 Media Center.

Before the FM radio option will be available in Windows Media Center, you’ll need to have a TV or Radio tuner card installed and configured. If you have a TV tuner card installed, you may already have a Radio tuner as well. Many TV tuner cards also have built in FM tuners.

Open Windows Media Center, scroll the “Music” and over to “Radio.”

Click on “FM Radio.”

?

The radio will turn on and you’ll see the current station number listed in the white box. Just below are standard “Seek” and “Tune” buttons, as well as “Preset” options. Tuning works just like a typical FM radio. Click on the (-) or (+) buttons to “Tune” or “Seek” up and down the dial. If you already know the frequency of the station, enter the numbers using the numeric keypad on the remote control or keyboard.

To save the current station you’re listening to as a preset, click on the “Save as Preset” button.

Type in a custom name for your preset station and click “Save.”

?

Once you set your presets, they will also be available on the main FM Radio screen.

The transport controls at the bottom of the screen also allow you to control Volume, Pause, Play, Skip back, and Skip forward. Fast Forward and Rewind, however, are not supported.

?

This is a nice option if you’d like to listen to your local FM favorites on your computer, especially if those stations aren’t available online. If you don’t have an FM tuner and want to listen to thousands of online radio streams, check out our article on RadioTime in WMC.

Want to take a trip down memory lane with old school DOS games?? D-Fend Reloaded makes it easy for you to play your favorite DOS games directly on XP, Vista, and Windows 7.

D-Fend Reloaded is a great frontend for DOSBox, the popular DOS emulator.? It lets you install and run many DOS games and applications directly from its interface without ever touching a DOS prompt.? It works great on XP, Vista, and Windows 7 32 & 64-bit versions.??

Getting Started

Download D-Fend Reloaded (link below), and install with the default settings.? You don’t need to install DOSBox, as D-Fend Reloaded will automatically install all the components you need to run DOS games on Windows.

D-Fend Reloaded can also be installed as a portable application, so you can run it from a flash drive on any Windows computer by selecting User defined installation.

Then select Portable mode installation.

Once D-Fend Reloaded is installed, you can go ahead and open the program. Then simply click “Accept all settings” to apply the default settings.

?

D-Fend is now ready to run all of your favorite DOS games.

Installing DOS Games and Applications:

To install a DOS game or application, simply drag-and-drop a zip file of the app into D-Fend Reloaded’s window.? D-Fend Reloaded will automatically extract the program…

Then will ask you to name the application and choose where to store it — by default it uses the name of the DOS app.

Now you’ll see a new entry for the app you just installed.? Simply double-click to run it.

?

D-Fend will remind you that you can switch out of fullscreen mode by pressing Alt+Enter, and can also close the DOS application by pressing Ctrl+F9.? Press Ok to run the program.

Here we’re running Ms. PacPC, a remake of the classic game Ms. Pac-Man, in full-screen mode.? All features work automatically, including sound, and you never have to setup anything from DOS command line — it just works.

Here it’s in windowed mode running on Windows 7.

Please note that your color scheme may change to Windows Basic while running DOS applications.

You can run DOS application just as easily.? Here’s Word 5.5 running in in DOSBox through D-Fend Reloaded…

Game Packs:

Want to quickly install many old DOS freeware and trial games?? D-Fend Reloaded offers several game packs that let you install dozens of DOS games with only four clicks…just download and run the game pack installer of your choice (link below).

Now you’ve got a selection of DOS games to choose from.

Here’s a group of poor lemmings walking around … in Windows 7.

Conclusion

D-Fend Reloaded gives you a great way to run your favorite DOS games and applications directly from XP, Vista, and Windows 7.? Give it a try, and relive your DOS days from the comfort of your Windows desktop.

What were some of your favorite DOS games and applications? Leave a comment and let us know.

Links

Download D-Fend Reloaded

Download DOS game packs for D-Fend Reloaded

Download Ms. Pac-PC

Do you have a webpage that needs to be reloaded every so often or perhaps you have multiple webpages that each need their own individual reload time? Now you can have the best of both with the AutoReloader extension for Google Chrome.

Using AutoReloader

When you first look at the drop-down window everything will be in a neutral “waiting” state. You can start using the extension immediately by simply entering the desired “time frame” for reloading a webpage. Notice for the “Repeat Option” that “0 = Continuous”…

You may want to have a quick look through the “Options” to see if there are any “operational changes” that you would like to make.

Once you enter a time click on the “Set Link” to start the timer.

Notice that you can view the time remaining on the “Toolbar Button” unless you disabled the feature in the “Options”.

Clicking on the “Toolbar Button” will show a larger version of the timer in the drop-down window along with a “Cancel Current Timer Link”.

Here is the best part of all with AutoReloader…you can set up your own customized list of “Reload Times” and then access them through the drop-down window. Using the two times shown here we were able to set the “Productive Geek Webpage” up for 30 second reloads and the “TinyHacker Webpage” up for 1 minute reloads at the same time. There was no conflict whatsoever in running both “reload times” simultaneously. This is a really terrific feature!

Conclusion

Whether you have only one webpage or multiple pages that need periodic reloading (such as tracking a Woot-Off or an Ebay auction) the AutoReloader extension is the perfect tool for the job. Running custom reload times simultaneously have never been easier.

Links

Download the AutoReloader extension (Google Chrome Extensions)

The default balloon tooltip in Firefox does well at times but then there are instances when a person finds that more information would be much better. The Tooltip Plus extension for Firefox will give your browser that nice extra information boost.

Before & After

For our example we have placed the “before & after shots” together for better comparison. First off we started with the How-To Geek logo.

Note: Does not display the original URL behind shortened URLs.

Next we moved on to a permanently linked article title.

The “Reviews Tab” in the How-To Geek website toolbar.

The article tags listing just beneath the HTG website toolbar.

And the link for subscribing to our RSS Feed. In each instance you could actually see the address behind the links.

The Tooltip Plus extension will also help out with images in webpages (including “Alt Text” if present). Notice that the link for the image is now available for you to view.

Options

The options are extremely simple to work with. Decide if you want a document icon to display, the size of the icon, and if you would like “Alt Text” for images to be displayed or not.

Conclusion

The Tooltip Plus extension does one thing and does it very well…it gives you that extra bit of information when you need it.

Links

Download the Tooltip Plus extension (Mozilla Add-ons)

Are you looking for a way to take the music videos you watch on YouTube and convert them to MP3? Today we take a look at an easy way to convert those YouTube videos to MP3 for free with YouTube Downloader.

The YouTube Downloader functions in two steps. First, it downloads the video from YouTube in MP4 format, and then allows you to convert that MP4 file to MP3.

Note: It also supports conversion conversion to some other formats such as AVI video, MOV, iPhone, PSP, 3GP, and WMV. ?

Installation and usage

Download and Install YouTube Downloader. (See download link below)

Open the YouTube Downloader by clicking on the desktop icon.

Find a YouTube video you’d like to convert to MP3 and copy the URL.

Paste the URL into the “Enter video URL” text box in YouTube Downloader. When you hover your mouse over the text box, the text box will auto-fill with the URL from your clipboard.

Select the “Download video from YouTube” radio button and click “Ok.”

Choose a folder to location to download your YouTube video and click “Save.” The video is downloaded in MP4 format.

Now wait while the video is downloaded to your hard drive.

?

Select the “Convert video (previously downloaded) from file” radio button.

Click the (…) button to the right of the “Select video file” text box to browse for and select the MP4 file you just downloaded.

Then select “MPEG Audio Layer (MP3) from the “Convert to” drop down list.

Select “OK” to begin the conversion.

Choose the conversion quality by moving the slider to the right or left. The options are: Low (96kbps bite rate), Medium (128kbps bit rate), Optimal (192kbps bit rate), and High 256kbps bit rate). Here you can select the output volume as well. Click “OK” when finished.

If there is a portion of the beginning or end of the video that you wish to cut out of the MP3, select the “Cut video” check box and choose a Start and End time. Click “OK” when finished. Note: The start and end time represent the audio portion of the MP3 you wish to keep. All portions before and after these times will be cut.

?

The conversion process will begin and should only take a few moments. Times will vary depending on the size of the video you’re converting.

Conversion was successful!

The MP3 you converted will be in the same directory you downloaded the video to.

Now you’re ready to listen to your MP3 or import it to your Zune, iTunes, or music library. You may also want to delete the MP4 files after the conversion if you will no longer need them.

Conclusion

YouTube Downloader features a very simple interface that’s user friendly and easy to use. It comes in handy when you watch videos that look horrible, but the sound quality is good. Or if you just need to hear the audio of something posted and don’t need the video. It also allows you to download from Google Video, MySpace, and others.

Download YouTube Downloader