Articles

Manage Debian or Ubuntu based systems offline using Keryx

shredder12 — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 21:50:00 +0000

I still remember how much labor I did in order to get Ubuntu running on my home desktop which was supposed to stay offline. As you might have guessed, the whole trouble was with the post-installation part - the updates, installation of other useful packages etc. Because of no Internet connectivity I had to carry the computer to my friend's house and get everything done. Keryx is something I could have really used then.

A ncurses based VLC audio player for console - nVLC

shredder12 — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 19:13:04 +0000

I never realized that vlc also ships a ncurses based small audio player called nvlc. You don't need to install it separately. Its available in the default vlc installation. We have already discussed Moc, another ncurses based console player, nvlc seems to be a good option too.

The name for Fedora 15 has been announced - Lovelock

shredder12 — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 05:14:22 +0000

So, the legacy continues. After the release of Fedora 14, laughlin, the name for the next release Fedora 15 has been decided by the community - its going to be Lovelock. Why this name? Well, laughlin is a city in Nevada and so is Lovelock, nothing much to think about .

Set Gmail as the default email-client on your Gnome Desktop using gnome-gmail

shredder12 — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 09:36:54 +0000

I use Thunderbird to manage all my mail accounts on my desktop instead of using a web interface, but most of my friends don't. They use gmail and are always annoyed when clicking on a mailto link opens Evolution. I am guessing this would be the case with many of you. What if your desktop could understand that you default email-client is gmail and not a desktop based email client? Yes, this is possible with this small but very useful application, gnome-gmail.

jUploadr - A flickr uploader for Linux

shredder12 — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 07:27:40 +0000

So, when I finally thought of creating a nice photo collection on flickr, I realized that there doesn't exist an official app for Linux. I tried out the one available in the repo - flickr uploader(or postr), but it didn't seem very good for mass uploading, which is what I was actually looking for. After searching a bit, I came across this pretty smart Java based flickr uploader - jUploadr.

Download videos from youtube, metacafe, dailymotion etc. easily using this python script - Youtube-dl

shredder12 — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 13:51:28 +0000

I think there is a time in every Internet user's life when he/she is crazy about Youtube, provided the bandwidth is not an issue . I went through the same phase in the 2nd year of my graduation. I kept searching and downloading youtube for more bball videos - jordan, kobe, iversion, freestyle etc. I didn't know then how to download videos and usually wasted a lot of my time, copying and renaming the videos from the cached buffer of firefox. I still remember, I had a freshly installed ubuntu hardy and I searched for youtube in synaptic and found this great python script to download youtube videos, youtube-dl.

How to get text highlighted with various colours in grep and ls on Linux

shredder12 — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 16:41:02 +0000

Ever wondered why grep shows the matched text/string in colour where as its not the same on other systems? or why ls on you system shows different colour for different file-types while the output on your buddy's desktop, running some other flavour of linux, is so lifeless(without colours)? Well, thats because of the magic of dircolors and alias.

Wget Password: How to use passwords securely with wget

shredder12 — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 11:07:06 +0000

Before the Wget 1.12 version, in order to fetch the authenticated http/ftp pages, we had to provide the password in clear text which was quite insecure. Since that version, a new option, --ask-password, has been included which prompts the user to fill the password in a secure manner(hidden like unix passwd).

The exaile Mini mode

shredder12 — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 04:00:01 +0000

Because of its being light on resources, I prefer to use Exaile over amarok. The tray icon(top-right corner) works great in making it easily accessible on all workspaces with no need to mark the window "always on visible workspace". Yet, I always wished for a smaller version of the player, as powerful as exaile, but smaller. This is what Exaile's mini-mode aims to do. It bundles the whole full screen music player into a 1-2cm display.

Its time for Multi-touch on Ubuntu - uTouch for Unity

shredder12 — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 19:11:49 +0000

I guess most of us would have tried Ubuntu 10.10 aka Maverick Meerkat by now. This version was no doubt going to bring many new things but the one I was really looking forward to is the netbook edition. We have been looking at Shuttleworth's constant efforts to make the netbook edition more usable - Increasing vertical space by using a global menu, using a single panel instead of one, a whole new unity shell interface and a lot others.