Actually complex UI is not the only decision why GIMP should be vanished from Ubuntu so here is the full list:

• the general user doesn’t use it
• its user-interface is too complex
• it’s an application for professionals
• desktop users just want to edit photos and they can do that in F-Spot
• it’s a photoshop replacement and photoshop isn’t included by default in Windows…
• it takes up room on the disc

(taken from here)

Still sounds like fresh nonsense? What about F-Spot as a replacement? Well, an average user most probably claim that above mentioned reasons are true. Maybe that’s why GIMP already dropped from latest Fedora 12. But what should do people who use GIMP every day and loves Ubuntu???

Just execute ‘sudo aptitude install gimp‘

Text editors like gedit, emacs, nano or vi will certainly live forever but thankfully there are numerous visual html editors for my Ubuntu They are sometimes called WYSIWYG editors, it mean “What You See Is What You Get”.

1. Quanta Plus

This is KDE/Qt visual html editor available as binary package for numerous Linux distributions
including Debian and Ubuntu. From developers’ site:

Quanta Plus is a highly stable and feature rich web development environment.
The vision with Quanta has always been to start with the best architectural
foundations, design for efficient and natural use and enable maximal user
extensibility.

In order to install it in Debian/Ubuntu run the following CLI command:

sudo apt-get install quanta

Fedora, Centos, Redhat users type this:

sudo yum install kdewebdev

I found Quanta html editor extremely useful, this is just an outstanding application of this
field.

2. Bluefish

Bluefish is a powerful editor targeted towards programmers and webdesigners,
with many options to write websites, scripts and programming code. Bluefish
supports many programming and markup languages, and it focuses on editing
dynamic and interactive websites.

I found this really versatile html editor. Besides HTML/CSS it handles C,
Java, Perl, Python, XML and others.

Ubuntu and Debian users type:

sudo apt-get install bluefish

Fedora/Redhat/Centos:

sudo yum install bluefish

Gentoo:

emerge bluefish

3. Screem

SCREEM is a web development environment. It’s purpose is to increase
productivity when constructing a site, by providing quick access to commonly
used features. While it is written for use with the GNOME desktop environment
in mind it does not specifically require you to be running it, just have the
libraries installed.

This is one of the most user-friendly Gnome HTML editor. Its simple interface
brings extremely powerfull HTML editor so if like minimalistic design Screem
is your choice.

Update: below is the bottom line from Linux.com’s review of three Linux HTML editors (Quanta Plus, Blowfish,
Screem). I found that review after I wrote this post.

• If you use GNOME, use Screem. It’s a fast, simple, and powerful tool for web editing. However, it does not have the large feature sets that Bluefish and Quanta Plus have, especially for languages other than those directly related to Web page editing.
• If you use GNOME and need the more powerful features of Quanta Plus, load the required libraries and run it.
• If you use KDE and want a code editor, choose Quanta Plus. Ignore the WYSIWYG capabilities and take advantage of the tremendous editing capabilities, especially for CSS style sheets.
• If you use Xfce, Quanta Plus should run fine. Screem would still require loading additional libraries.
• Finally, if you use GNOME, find that Screem does not meet all your needs, and you don’t want to bother with loading the KDE-native Quanta Plus, then load Bluefish. It is nearly as capable as Quanta Plus, but will run well without a lot of fussing with libraries.

First let your Ubuntu know where it should find chromium-browser deb package:

vi /etc/apt/sources.list

add the following lines:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

Replace jaunty with hardy, intrepid or karmic depending which version you run at your computer. If you feel this information is not sufficient for you, follow this link to get Ubuntu official information on this matter or follow Launchpad help.

The next step is to install Chromium browser:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install chromium-browser
or
sudo aptitude install chromium-browser

Once you press enter Ubuntu will download around 18 MB of data from launchpad’s server and will install Chromium with gnome menu entries and shortcuts. Now you can go to System menu –> Internet –> Chromium Web Browser in order to launch Google browser.

Ubuntu Chromium Google browser (Google Chrome Ubuntu)

As you might know there is still no official release of chromium/chrome available for Linux, so these daily builds from launchpad are for testing/observations purposes only. For example, there is no flash plugin available so you will be able to see html pages like this one and no swf/flash content. Anyway thanks to Google for great browser which has all chances to become “browser number one” for Linux or even for the rest of operating system such as Windows or Mac. Who knows?

You might also find this page using Google and the following keywords: Ubuntu Chrome, Google Chrome Ubuntu, Chrome for Ubuntu and others.

This article is presented to you by LaptopLogic.com. Go there to read the latest info on the top rated laptops and the best laptop accessories.

The High Definition (HD) content is everywhere these days, from HD and Blue Ray Discs to streaming HD media. Although HD content gives best picture quality, it also uses a lot of computational power to decode and play.

This was made easy for Windows by the introduction of new drivers from graphics card manufacturers, Nvidia and ATI, which allowed the whole media to be decoded on the dedicated graphics card, saving cost in computational power, and the need to have a stronger processor.

Nvidia recently released a new set of drivers for Linux supporting PureVideo technology for its line of graphics hardware, enabling full hardware HD-decoding, and giving smooth HD content playback, even on less powerful computers. The 180 series supports PureVideo decode acceleration. These drivers adds a new VDPAU API, which provides PureVideo like features on Linux, adds CUDA support, X Render optimizations, new workstation performance optimizations and some other improvements. The new versions offer optimizations and support for a wide range of Nvidia hardware, and is expected to improve with future releases.

Linux uses X-Video (Xv) as output extensions, where as X-Video MotionCompensation (XvMC) is an X-Video extension which offers some video decoding on GPU. With the new drivers, Nvidia implements VDPAU (Video Decode and Presentation API for UNIX).

VDAPU is capable of hardware acceleration and the decoding of MPEG-1, MPEG-2, VC-1 and H.264 bit streams. It also provides an API for post-processing of decoded video in order to apply operations such as noise reduction and temporal and spatial de-interlacing, timestamp-based presentation of final video frames, and compositing of sub-picture elements.

AMD also supports hardware acceleration through X-Video Bit stream Acceleration or XvBA API. The recent drivers can take advantage of Unified Video Decoder (UVD2).

These new technologies are also supported by new video playback softwares, which can fully utilize the Graphics Hardware for video playback, providing smooth frames in HD and Blue-Ray movies. The VDPAU supported players include libavcodec, mplayer and ffmpeg.

CUDA support is also provided with 180 series drivers for Linux, and it can also be used to accelerate videos, and also to do any processing involved, like CoreAVC 1.9.0 is the first media player to offer this decoding.

The video acceleration on Linux came late, but certainly, with these new advancements by Graphics chips manufacturers, Linux users will be able to experience HD media playback, even on less powerful systems.

sudo modprobe -r pcspkr

Add the the line “blacklist pcspkr” to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist to turn off the speaker forever

Imagine the following situation: you have to compile some Linux/Unix application or kernel module that requires kernel source present at your hard drive, say, in /usr/src/kernels/kernel-2.6.21-i386/ or elsewhere. But there is not enough disk space to copy these sources or install kernel-devel or linux-source packages (in Fedora/RedHat or Ubuntu/Debian distros respectively)… Sounds familiar? Believe me, sometimes it happens

As a solution you can mount the directory of some remote PC that contains needed kernel source. It can be done via several protocols like smb, ftp etc. In this article we will mount remote directory using ssh protocol that is one the most popular for remote and secure access to Linux boxes over the network.

Below are the steps which should be taken to get the ball rolling. We need two packages: sshfs and fuse-utils.

1. Install necessary packages:

a. Ubuntu/Debian:

sudo aptitude install fuse-utils sshfs

b. Fedora/Centos/RedHat:

yum install fuse-sshfs fuse fuse-libs

c. Other Linux: download and compile sshfs/fuse from sources

2. Check that kernel module fuse is loaded:

lsmod | grep fuse

There should be the line containing “fuse” in the output (of not try modprobe fuse).

3. Mount remote filesystem using something like this (two commands):

mkdir -p /mnt/sshfs/
sshfs remote-user@remote-machine:/some/directory /mnt/sshfs

where remote-user is the username allowed to login remote-machine via ssh protocol. It will ask you to type the password so just type it and press return

4. That’s it. Good luck!

Below you can find a list of articles on the Web helping to understand the logic of Ubuntu iptables setup as well as create powerful firewall from your Ubuntu system:

1. Official Ubuntu Iptables How To:

There is a wealth of information available about iptables, but much of it is fairly complex, and if you want to do a few basic things, this How To is for you.

2. Simple firewall for Ubuntu using iptables

Don’t forget to look through page’s comments as there is a lot of useful staff there.

3. Setting Up An Iptables Firewall On Ubuntu With Firehol from Howtoforge:

FireHOL is a stateful iptables packet filtering firewall configurator. It is abstracted, extensible, easy and powerful. It can handle any kind of firewall, but most importantly, it gives you the means to configure it, the same way you think of it.

4. Basic sshd and iptables security in Ubuntu

5. Use iptables as firewall with a daemon on system startup

This howto is intended to set up a firewall without installing firestarter (useful if you don’t use any wm, eg: servers). It uses iptables which is available with a fresh Ubuntu install, and a init.d script to run it as a daemon on boot.

6. Set up Ubuntu as a firewall/gateway router with webmin

7. Netfilter & Iptables in Ubuntu (French)

8. Set a custom firewall (iptables) and Tips [Beginners edition]

9. Set a custom firewall (iptables) and Tips [Advanced user only]

10. iptables premier

“Do I need a firewall?” is a FAQ on the Ubuntu Forums. In order to answer that question we need to understand what you want to do accomplish by using (configuring) a firewall. The purpose of this post is to introduce iptables and encourage appropriate use.

11. Block brute force attacks with iptables in Ubuntu or Turning away the bruters

Without proper protection your server is a sitting duck waiting for a bot to guess the right combination and hit the jackpot. But with just 2 commands we can stop that.

Of course you can try google to find more articles about how to configure iptables in Ubuntu Linux but I am sure that above mentioned links will help you to move forward with configuring Ubuntu iptable and take the first steps on builing secure and stable iptables firewall box.

]]> http://www.linuxscrew.com/2008/12/23/christmas%e2%80%a6-linux%e2%80%a6-wallpapers%e2%80%a6/feed/ 12 http://www.linuxscrew.com/2008/12/19/vmware-server-console-keyboard-problem-in-ubuntu-intrepid-ibex/ http://www.linuxscrew.com/2008/12/19/vmware-server-console-keyboard-problem-in-ubuntu-intrepid-ibex/#comments Fri, 19 Dec 2008 12:13:23 +0000 artiomix http://www.linuxscrew.com/?p=649 Few days ago I have upgraded my Ubuntu to latest 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) and found that keyboard just doesn’t work in VMware Server Console. The problem was that I couldn’t use keyboard under guest operating system including Windows, Linux etc. After few hours of research I found simple solution which works for me:

$ setxkbmap
$ echo "xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = true" >> ~/.vmware/config

After this restart vmware-server-console and see if it helps. If not you can see other solutions of the same problem at this site:
http://nthrbldyblg.blogspot.com/2008/06/vmware-and-fubar-keyboard-effect.html

I hope it helps!

P.S. Here are vmware-server-console’s libs I use:

artemn@artemn-laptop:~$ ls -la /usr/lib/vmware-server-console/lib
total 172
drwxr-xr-x 40 root root  4096 2008-12-24 12:56 .
drwxr-xr-x 11 root root  4096 2008-12-24 12:56 ..
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-12-24 12:56 libart_lgpl_2.so.2
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-12-24 12:56 libatk-1.0.so.0
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-12-24 12:56 libatkmm-1.6.so.1
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-12-24 12:56 libcrypto.so.0.9.7
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-12-24 12:56 libexpat.so.0
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-12-24 12:56 libfontconfig.so.1
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-12-24 12:56 libfreetype.so.6
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-12-24 12:56 libgcc_s.so.1
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-12-24 12:56 libgdkmm-2.4.so.1
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-12-24 12:56 libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-12-24 12:56 libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-12-24 12:56 libglade-2.0.so.0
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-12-24 12:56 libglib-2.0.so.0
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-12-24 12:56 libglibmm-2.4.so.1
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-12-24 12:56 libglibmm_generate_extra_defs-2.4.so.1
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-12-24 12:56 libgmodule-2.0.so.0
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-12-24 12:56 libgnomecanvas-2.so.0
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-12-24 12:56 libgnomecanvasmm-2.6.so.1
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-12-24 12:56 libgobject-2.0.so.0
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-12-24 12:56 libgthread-2.0.so.0
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-12-24 12:56 libgtkmm-2.4.so.1
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-12-24 12:56 libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-12-24 12:56 libpango-1.0.so.0
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-12-24 12:56 libpangoft2-1.0.so.0
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-12-24 12:56 libpangomm-1.4.so.1
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-12-24 12:56 libpangox-1.0.so.0
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-12-24 12:56 libpangoxft-1.0.so.0
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-12-24 12:56 libpng12.so.0
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-12-24 12:56 librsvg-2.so.2
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-12-24 12:56 libsexymm.so.1
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-12-24 12:56 libsexy.so.1
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-12-24 12:56 libsigc-2.0.so.0
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-12-24 12:56 libssl.so.0.9.7
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-12-24 12:56 libstdc++.so.5
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-12-24 12:56 libview.so.2
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-12-24 12:56 libXft.so.2
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-12-24 12:56 libxml2.so.2
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 2008-12-24 12:56 libXrender.so.1
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root root 10173 2008-12-24 12:56 wrapper-gtk24.sh

Apple iTunes is one of the most popular proprietary digital media players in the whole world. Using this no doubts outstanding application you can organize, play music/video files in very comfortable and user friendly way (it’s not an advertisement but real truth). Moreover iTunes is the only way to access Apple’s onilne music store and thus people often seeks the possibility to seamlessly access it after moving to Linux from Mac or Windows.

Well, unfortunately Apple doesn’t believe in magic so there is no native support of iTunes in Linux. At the same time none would deny that Wine does and guys from this project do their best to make things with iTunes in Linux better. In our example we use iTunes 7.3 which comes with Quick Time player 7.1.6, Apple iPhone support and of course iPods of any version, family and generation.

Install Apple iTunes 7.3 in Linux

1. Download iTunes 7.3 from apple.com or filehippo.com

2. Prepare Wine for itunes installation (if not installed do “apt-get install wine -y” or “yum install wine -y” in Ubuntu/Debian or Fedora/Redhat/Centos respectively):

$winecfg
wine: creating configuration directory ‘/home/artemn/.wine’…
fixme:midi:OSS_MidiInit Synthesizer supports MIDI in. Not yet supported.
wine: ‘/home/artemn/.wine’ created successfully.

Select your audio driver, it may be something like OSS or Alsa so use one u actually use Set Hardware Acceleration to “Emulation” option. All other Wine settings are per your consideration e.g. Graphics tab.

3. Update richedit30 (Win32 Cabinet Self-Extractor):

cd ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32
mv richedit32.dll richedit32.bak
mv richedit20.dll richedit20.bak
wine richedit30.exe

Set richedit20.dll and richedit32.dll as native through winecfg.

4. $wine iTunesSetup.exe
It will open iTune’s installation program under wine so you just install itunes as usually you did it in Windows. If error happens just re-run installer. See screenshot below:

5. Now you can start itunes and go through first run setup (all related screenshots are here). Just don’t care about errors thrown into the console:

$ cd ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/iTunes
$ wine itunes.exe

6. That’s it! Now u can use iTunes in Linux as you did it before in other operatin system:

P.S. By the way there are numerous Linux really native alternatives for comfortable music/video organizing and iPod management. At the same time latter can’t be as native and seamless as it’s in iTunes because those playes use Apple’s proprietary file storage system.

But I definitely recommend banshee, amarok and… exaile