Tux Tweaks

Command Line Basics: Ripping Audio CD’s, Part 1

There are many GUI based CD rippers available for the Linux desktop. While many of these applications do a great job of ripping, I like to understand the underlying technology. For that reason, I decided to figure out how to rip CD's from the command line. There is one command line CD ripper that is [...]

Transcode Video For The HTC Incredible on Linux

If you regularly follow my blog you know that I recently got an HTC Droid Incredible smartphone. This phone has a native screen resolution of 480x320 pixels. MPEG4 video with AAC audio is supported in both the .mp4 and .3gp container formats. To do the transcoding we'll need the ffmpeg and libfaac packages. Check your [...]

Shorten Your Links The Open Source Way

If you're a big social networking user, you're probably familiar with link shortening services. The most popular of these are TinyURL and bit.ly. As an open source fan, you may be wondering, "where can I find a free and open source link shortener?" You're in luck. ur1.ca is just such a free and open source [...]

Gnumeric: A Light Weight Spreadsheet Program

Most Linux and Open Source enthusiasts are familiar with the OpenOffice.Org office suite. OpenOffice is great, but sometimes you just need a lighter and faster alternative. Maybe you've got a netbook or an older computer and you don't need a full, integrated, office suite, but just a few of the main applications like a word [...]

New Android Phone

So I finally got myself an Android smarphone. It's the HTC Incredible on Verizon Wireless. I'm still getting it figured out, but so far it's pretty cool. I downloaded the WordPress application for Android and I'm using it to write this post. Well, I was able to upload the post, but it went in as [...]

Free vs. Proprietary and HTML5

I just read a couple of articles (x264Dev and Phoronix) about the latest open source decoder for the recently open sourced VP8 codec from Google/On2. It turns out that the new ffvp8 decoder library from the FFmpeg developers is already outperforming the libvpx decoder that was released as open source by Google back in May. [...]

Enable The Flash Plugin For Chromium In Ubuntu

I've shown previously how install the Chromium web browser in Ubuntu. Today I'm going to show you how to easily enable the Adobe Flash plugin for use in Chromium. You've probably already installed the Flash plugin for Mozilla Firefox, but if not, install it from the command line with: Now, all you need to [...]

Install The Chromium Browser in Ubuntu

Most of us by now have heard of Google's Chrome web browser. The Chrome browser is based on an open source project called Chromium. There's not really much difference between the two. Chromium is basically just Chrome without the Google branding and without the extensive EULA. You can install the Chromium browser from the PPA [...]

How To Reload The Gnome Panel Menu

Sometimes when you install a new program from the Ubuntu repositories, it doesn't show up on the menu until you log out and log back in. You can easily reload the Gnome panel though by killing the process and restarting it. Simply open a terminal window and enter the following: Gnome should automatically restart the [...]

Keep Your Screen Awake With Caffeine

Many Linux media players do a great job of keeping your screen saver from activating when you're watching a video. But what about when you're watching videos online? Firefox and other major browsers have no such feature to keep your screen active while watching videos. There's a cool application for the Gnome desktop called Caffeine [...]