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In the past I’ve used other sites, and struggled to find great professional quality fonts released in free ways, but this site looks like the nicest single collection of free fonts out there right now – be sure to submit any you already know about and keep the site going!

In 2008, Stani Michiels entered and won a competition being held by the Dutch Finance Ministry to design a collectable coin using the theme “Netherlands and Architecture”.  Using a strict toolbox of only 100% free software, he designed the coin on Ubuntu using Python in his self-written SPE Editor, and also used GIMP, Inkscape and Phatch throughout the process.  He commented that some of the finishing touches were completed on his Asus EEE pc taking advantage of Ubuntu’s performance on limited hardware.

Here is an image of the coin, and below is a breakdown of some of the symbolism he built into his design, much of which may not be apparent the first time any of us who aren’t Dutch take a look at it.

These are the finished illustrations.  For the design of the coin, he used the names of many influential Dutch architects, and used the weight of the letters in the names as a sort of half-tone representation of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands.

On the back of the coin, he wanted to represent both books written on the subject of architecture by Dutch artists, as well as to arrange the books in an order that when wrapped around the outside of the coin produce an empty shape in the middle that shares the same silhouette as the Netherlands.  He placed birds over the map to represent regional capitals and the entire back of the coin also resembles looking up from street level toward the sky, surrounded by buildings.

Being trained as a Graphic Designer, I have to applaud Stani’s design on a conceptual level, and his design skills and composition are unsurpassed.  He managed to use the entire potential of the surface of this coin to express the theme and it truly stands alone in its design.  As an open-source and particularily as an Ubuntu user I applaud his choice of software, proving that not only is Ubuntu able and ready to participate with creative work on a professional level, but that it’s award winning and second-to-none.

Great work Stani, we can’t wait to see more from you!

{ images used in this post are licenced cc-by from Stani Michiels, whose blog you can read here }

Now, for those of you who are new to Ubuntu, you might not be aware of Gnome Do, so be sure to check out our article on Gnome Do here.  What Ubiquity does, is provide a command interface for Firefox that knows everything about you that Firefox does (it can access your Gmail, Facebook, Flickr, or Twitter if you have chosen to stay logged in in Firefox), and also likely has commands for your most-used web services either already installed, easily downloadable, or soon to be released.  Ubiquity is still in the earliest stages of its sure-to-be revolutionary existence so even a lot of web developers haven’t discovered it yet.

To install Ubiquity, you will need to click here and  allow Firefox to install the add-on.

Firefox will ask you to retart the application to enable it.  When you first relaunch Firefox, Ubiquity will display its documentation page.

Be sure to note the shortcut or set your own here.  When you summon Ubiquity it launches a command interface window with a text field.  The default shortcut,  alt-space  doesn’t work well for me, so I set mine to  shift-space  instead.

As you type it displays the closest available commands, and gives you a description of their usage.  You can navigate the list up and down using the arrow keys and you can auto-complete with tab.

Some of the most useful commands are Google, Twitter, Facebook friend search and Wikipedia, but some of the other tools like Google maps, tinyURL and define make reference simpler than ever.

Not only does Ubiquity save you time, but it’s also themeable and highly customizable making it easy for anybody to make a theme or a command plugin.

Watch this video to see some of the things you can do with Ubiquity…

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XpfwvOvtO0

First, you’ll need to register an account at Flickr if you don’t already have one.  The basic service is free, and the Pro account if you should choose to purchase it, is well worth the money.

Now that you have an account, you’ll notice that you have the chance to fill out a profile and manage your uploads, as well as upload files through your web browser.  This is easy, but there has to be an even easier way than that.

Enter F-spot—the simple and easy-to-use photo manager for your Ubuntu desktop.  If you don’t find it pre-installed, it’s easy to find in Synaptic and install in just moments.  If you need a little refresher on how to install applications through Synaptic, check out the beginning of our article on Gnome Do.

To use F-spot to upload your photos you simply need to have the photos somewhere on your hard drive.  Import them into F-spot using the  Import button and add any tags about the photos you want—location, people, events.

Once the images are in F-spot’s catalog, you can rate them, modify them and view them in a variety of ways.

Go to  edit > preferences and locate the flickr uploader and make sure the plugin is installed and enabled.

Now, to upload to Flickr all you need to do is select the images you wish to upload in F-spot, and go to the  file > export to > Flickr dialog.

You’ll need to authorize F-spot to upload to your Flickr account by clicking the Authorize button, and once you have allowed access to your Flickr account from F-spot, confirm the authorization and you’re ready to upload.

Click the  Export button and watch the images go.

Your albums and all information about your photos can be edited online on Flickr after they are uploaded as well, so if you want to change or add captions or tags you can easily do so at any time.

Sharing photos with your friends has never been more simple than this!  Watch the whole process from start to finish in the video below and enjoy sharing your photos, and check back soon for more Ubuntu tutorials!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgeWnAqvlXU

Plenty of stories have appeared on various news sites claiming Obama has approached the leader of Sun Microsystems and asked for a report showing the benefits of Open-Source in the Whitehouse.  Since parts of the US government already use and benefit from Open-Source technology, and they were allowed to use whatever software they chose in the past, I can only hope that this report will bring about total adoption of Open-Source Technology in the US government.

How does that affect us here in the Ubuntu community?  Well, as Ubuntu is the leader in Open-Source operating systems, it seems to be the logical step for me.  If you mandated use of Open-Source software for everybody, why would you provide allowance for OS X or Vista in the budget if they were not required to run the software in question?  I think we’ll see either Ubuntu in the Whitehouse, or large steps in that direction in the next few years.

Go ahead and comment below—what do you think will happen, and how do you think Open-Source could provide an advantage over Windows XP Service-Pack 1 with proprietary software?

Have you ever downloaded a great application but wished it had a better icon?  In Ubuntu you can not only change any icon to a new one, but you can even use image formats that are so advanced neither windows nor OSX support it yet.  Find out how!

So for the sake of this article, I’ll use a great program that has an ugly icon as an example: Sonic Visualiser.  It’s a program that analyzes audio in a variety of visual ways and lets you see the sounds you’re hearing.

I looked through the Tango icons and Oxygen icons that I had and found one icon I would really like to replace it with.  Both of these icon sets are wonderfully developed and free, so you can’t possibly go wrong.

Before I can change my icon, I have to have to have a file I want to change - for Sonic Visualiser I created a Launcher on my desktop by  right click > Create Launcher.

I have filled out the Create Launcher dialog box with the proper information, making sure that the text in the Command field will open the desired application from the command-line.

To change my icon, I have to find the file itself and right click on it.  You’ll see a menu appear and at the bottom you’ll see an option called  Properties.  Click on  Properties to access the file properties dialog box.

Once we have this dialog box the rest is easy, click on the current icon you see in the top-left of the box, and it will launch a window allowing you to select whatever new icon you want.

For me, I just have to locate my icon and click and poof! it’s set as the new icon.  Now doesn’t that look a lot better?

Now we can take this to the next stage: what’s the difference between icon formats?  Surely a windows user will immediately remember the old .ico format, but Ubuntu will support many many common image formats as icons.  Typically, the best format for icons is .png, since it has support for something called variable transparency, meaning it can have beautiful edges and shadows without being a square of colour.

But PNG isn’t really more advanced than the other icon formats out there for OS X or Vista, I promised to take it one step further didn’t I?  Enter SVG.  In Ubuntu you can use vector images as icons too!  Why would you want a vector image over a PNG?

Because vector images are scalable, meaning you can resize them as big as you want and they always stay the same quality.  Go ahead and try it, find an SVG and set it as an icon, then you can stretch it the size of your entire desktop if you want and it will stay at full quality.

There you have it—straight from the source.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd2IoJOP9wU

First, the only way we can produce a professional quality document is by using a professional quality typeface. Since designing a typeface can take years, they often don’t come cheaply, however there are sometimes moderately priced fonts that you can find online. The single cheapest way to get fonts is to look for old software that is on sale that would have bundled fonts with it. Corel Draw and Adobe Creative Suite are excellent finds.

For the purposes of this article we will download a couple excellent typefaces from Jos Buveinga, called Fontin, and Fontin Sans. Simply click on those two links, scroll down to the bottom of the page and find the download link.  Also, if you’re looking for a great head-turning font, Jos also relased Museo Sans, the first 2 font files are free, the remaining 8 are moderately priced, but well worth the cost - be sure to check it out.

In Ubuntu there are two places the computer reads fonts:

/usr/share/fonts/ these fonts are installed in the system, and shared between all users of the computer. This is where you should put fonts that everybody will need, or fonts you won’t need to ‘deactivate’ from time to time because you will need to be logged in as administrator in order to move the files there.

~/.fonts/ these fonts are installed for your user only. This is quick and simple, and for the majority of what you’ll need this is perfect.

Any folder with a ‘.’ at the beginning makes it invisible, or a hidden folder, but we can easily reveal it or visit it either through going view > hidden files or typing the address ~/.fonts/ directly into our address bar.

If this is the first time you’re doing this, the folder may not yet exist and you’ll have to create it.

Now, any fonts that are inside this folder when a program starts, should appear within the font selection drop-down menu.

To keep your fonts organized you can place them in sub-folders, so I often like to place fonts that belong to a certain project together in one folder so I can ‘activate’ or ‘deactivate’ all of the necessary fonts for a project simply by moving the folder from my ~/.fonts/ folder into any other folder.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=06bMA_Lxe8Q

I’m pleased to introduce you to Gnome Do, a launcher that takes inspiration from Quicksilver for mac.  The goal of Gnome Do is to simply appear with a keystroke, search for the program or file you start to type as you are writing it, and then do something with it.  Here, lets go on a little tour of the software.

First we need to find Gnome Do, if we don’t have it installed already.  To install Gnome Do go into your menu and locate synaptic  System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager.  Search for gnome-do and then mark for installation and apply changes to download and install the latest version of Gnome Do.

Now, find Do in the applications menu after installation here  Applications > Accessories > Gnome Do and launch the program.  You will notice that the program opens a small icon in the menubar in the system tray and clicking on this will show the launcher.  If you go into the preferences by right-clicking on the icon, you can set a keyboard shortcut (I use Alt~ for mine) and then I never have to take my finger from the mouse to launch anything.

If the result you intended doesn’t show up right away, you can continue typing until it does or navigate through the search results by using the up and down arrow keys.  Some files will have multiple actions associated with them, so to switch the actions press  tab to move the focus from the first pane to the second, and then use up and down arrows to navigate through possible alternate actions.  Go ahead, explore!

There are many plugins available, including internet and chat related, web browsing, file managing and program controllers, so no matter what software you use already, it is likely ready to be enhanced by Gnome Do.  To activate a plugin go to the ‘Plugins’ tab of the Gnome Do Preferences window and check the boxes for the plugins you wish to enable.

Here’s a video showing off the best parts of Gnome Do:

Gnome See, Gnome Do from uSource Magazine on Vimeo.

uSource Magazine is a website devoted to bringing you premier tutorials and content related to the Ubuntu operating system.