5 KDE applications that I can't do without

It has been more than 5 years since I started using Linux - I've always been on GNOME, making a brief switch to XFCE in between. Although KDE is more eye-candy and better than GNOME in few instances, I never liked to use it much. But these days, there are many KDE applications that you probably cannot live without, if you're using Linux.

Here are few such applications:

1) [w:Amarok|Amarok]
[Amarok is something like (repeat *something like*) ITunes for Linux. But the features it provides with not much complexity is mind blowing (for a Linux user)]

2) [w:Kate (text editor)|Kate].

3) [:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_KDE_applications#Multimedia|KdeTV]

4) [w:KSnapshot|KSnapshot]

5) [w:Konsole|Konsole]

Recently, I switched back to Human theme on Ubuntu from [:http://art.gnome.org/themes/gtk2/468|Industrial] and found out that it is far more optimized now; looks better too. But one feature I'll always miss on GNOME is the analog clock that is available on KDE panel. :)

Barrage

Boredom surfaced, I play games on Linux. There are whole bunch of little games on Ubuntu (thanks to the debian repositories). But for last year or so, games like barrage, lbreakout have been the 'regulars'. lbreakout2, especially, has a very good interface and gameplay.

When searching for something about Osho Rajneesh, the project page of these nice games was one of the surprise results! [The maintainer of these games is in India and has mentioned Koregon park in his post, so google picked it up! ;) ] A gem of a website for those who like taking peek into the source code of little pearls of open source.

Converting and merging TIFF files to PDF

Found this on a forum. Very useful in converting Tiffs to PDF.


tiff2ps -h 8.5 -w 11 *.tif > tiffs.ps
ps2pdfwr -g7920x6120 tiffs.ps


OR


$ for f in *.tiff; do convert [options] $f $f.ps; done
$ convert *.ps merged.ps
$ ps2pdf merged.pdf


For the first method, you'll need Ghostscript Utilities installed. For the second, you'll need imagemagick installed.

Converting multiple JPG files to PNG

(Quite handy - and you can even go ahead to shrink the two commands to one).

for A in *.jpg; do convert $A $A.png; done
rename -v 's/\.jpg.png$/.png/' *.jpg.png

This, on GNU/Linux, with [:http://www.imagemagick.org/|imagemagick].

D-Link technical support is very nice in India

I was on hunt for a good wifi router and had seen a really sleek, good looking Netgear router in Delhi last week at a client's place; had a hard time finding the NetGear model with any of the vendors in Jayanagar, though.
Yesterday, when the computer vendor I go to regularly told me to go for D-Link instead and mounted heavy praise on it, suspicion was in the air. But when I took it home, tried it and took help from their extremely good technical support I had nothing but praise for this company.
The Wireless router I bought yesterday got installed in a jiffy, and at just the first attempt - blimey!

The technical support number given on the manuals shipped with D-Link devices is wrong, though. The correct number (toll free) for India is:
1800 222 002

Drupal multi-site sequence issue

If you are running a Drupal multi-site installation, and the sequence tables are shared, then here's an admonition: take real care of the changed prefix for each shared database. Cross check on the sequence tables if you ever had to rename the database or just the unshared tables.

For instance,

[dbprefix_dbname]

becomes

[dbprefixnew_dbname]

The first thing you have to do is go check the sequence table and change the values manually on the new sequence table entries corresponding to the database appropriately.

If you've ever had to change the database name on a live production site that gets significant visitors each minute, it might as well be a good idea to avoid the change! :)

Epson CX 1500 on ubuntu linux

Epson's CX1500 works pretty fine on Linux. All I had to do to get it running was to "add the printer" with the GUI (the windows way) which was auto detected. Something to rejoice for non-geeks using Linux.

The only catch was that though gimp-print (or gutenprint) supports the printer, the printer wasn't in the list on the Dialog that props up the available drivers... not even with the latest gimp-print - the gutenprint package. Searching around on Google BlogSearch led me to a fellow Indian's blog who had got it working by selecting the model "Stylus-C42UX" instead.

Scanner too gets detected, but I haven't braved to scan documents with this machine on Linux, yet.

Extracting an rpm

Its been quite a while since I used fedora or distributions using rpms, but needed to extract [:http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/fedora/devel/s390/fonts-kannada-2.0.6-1.noarch.html|this package] on debian to check out the fonts.

[:http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/how-to-extract-an-rpm-package-without-installing-it.html|A little tip] about a little utility called rpm2cpio helped.

Here's what I used:

$ rpm2cpio fonts-kannada-2.0.6-1.noarch.rpm | cpio -idmv


Firefox 1.5.0.3 Pango enabled build (for Indic)

UPDATE: Just two days later to this post, 1.5.0.3 was released. Updating the note for that, and the link now holds 1.5.0.3 build of Firefox.

Here's a shared build of pango enabled Firefox latest stable version - 1.5.0.3.

Download.

Please note:
* This is a shared build, so it would look for the necessary shared libraries on your system.

I'll soon be uploading a static build as well.

Indrajal Comics

When I had almost thought that Indrajal comics were only to be seen in very old Libraries now, there has been some [:http://thecomicproject.blogspot.com/|very] [:http://members.shaw.ca/sundar1/Home.htm|nice efforts] to bring them back in circulation on the Internet (The books have been out of print for a long time now).

KMFL - The Keyboard Mapping for Linux project

[:http://kmfl.sourceforge.net/|KMLF] is a wonderful project that makes it even more easier to write keymaps for different languages. Unlike [:http://m17n.org|scim-m17n] (where .mim files are used to parse the layouts), this uses binary files compiled from source containing mapping. The source files are not very difficult to prepare.

Keyboard for Kannada

HP Labs India has come up with a peripheral device that has a [:http://deccanherald.com/deccanherald/feb72006/spectrum104717200626.asp|"keyboard" for Kannada].

The device would be priced at Rs 2000, and requires Windows 2000 Operating System and Microsoft Office 2003. 

and Bharathi Prabhu, the author of the article on DH, says "This Gesture Keyboard can help take computers to the remotest part of Karnataka".

Interesting, I would say. Nothing more than that. :)

Openoffice woes

Nothing new in Openoffice crashing on your Linux installation. It does, most of the times :P

But for the users who rely on SCIM (Stanadard Chinese Input Method) for Input in their regional language, Openoffice is completely unusable as of now on Ubuntu. It never takes off from the splash screen that appears. Turns out that Openoffice.org doesn't like the GTK_IM_MODULE set to scim.

There is a work around, though. But not so convenient one. Setting
GTK_IM_MODULE=xim
on terminal before launching the application,

OR

adding as below on /usr/bin/ooffice:

#!/bin/sh
GTK_IM_MODULE=xim
export OOO_EXTRA_ARG=''
/usr/lib/openoffice/program/ooqstart "$@"

worked for me, and I've also been able to use SCIM keymaps.

But I'd like to see SCIM working with Openoffice.org out of box, and Openoffice not crashing much. New comers to Linux gripe about such tweaks and it is a real hindrance for those who advocate Openoffice in the sub-continent (and one of the reasons why I've consciously stopped advocating Openoffice.org).

Opera on Linux

If Opera sets right the Indic rendering issues on Linux version of it, it might as well become the best browser for Indic languages on Linux!

Today, I filed a bug report with Opera on the rendering issue.

Re-installing bootloader on Ubuntu

Some network issues left me in a bit of fix during last few days. While restoring everything back to normal, there was the usual 'you know what' blue screen on the Windows installation after which it wouldn't boot. Since I have ubuntu installed as well on my laptop, it is more than 'irritation' to repair or reinstall Windows XP - the GRUB/LILO bootloaders on MBR get overwritten.

Ofcourse one way was to [:http://ubuntu.wordpress.com/2005/10/20/backing-up-the-mbr/|back up the MBR].  The other way was to re-install Windows XP and then worry about [:http://ubuntu.wordpress.com/2005/10/20/backing-up-the-mbr/#499|getting back the bootloader in place]. I went for the latter.

Nice about the whole thing is that installing bootloader is a three (simple) steps affair now :) 

Re-write with Apache2 - one trivial stuff that Apache 1.x users might usually tend to overlook

I've had to remind myself this every time I upgrade the distributions on my Workstations and notebook. Being used to Apache 1.x, I tend to go back to editing the old way - changing httpd.conf or apache2.conf for vhost configuration. On Apache 2 there are separate files for this (under sites-available) which is clean and much more trouble free.

But one thing you might overlook for a moment while upgrading distributions, is about mod_rewrite. You see that the module is enabled, you see the rewrite.load file under modules-enabled directory in the apache conf directory (which is usually under /etc/apache2 for standard installs). But the mod_rewrite still doesn't work.

Trivial as it is (something that might not even deserve this lengthy note about it), it might baffle you for a bit unless you figure that the AllowOverride all directive that you wrongly placed on apache2.conf should have been on sites-available/default.

Renaming multiple files at one go

rename -v 's/\.php5$/.php/' *.php5

(the above command renames .php5 to .php in the present folder)

Sessions on Firefox

One feature I missed very much on Firefox was the option to easily and automatically save browsing sessions. Opera had this feature even in the old days, out-of-box.

[:http://tmp.garyr.net/|Tab Mix Plus] - an extension to Firefox adds the feature in a pretty nice way. It saves all the tabs even when the browser crashes and more importantly, lets the user open back the tab closed accidentally. Another cannot-do-without extension for Firefox. Hope features like this one get added to the core distribution.

Setting SCIM as default Input Method on Ubuntu Dapper and Edgy

Many people have asked me about this, so let me point to this wonderful piece of documentation on Ubuntu Wiki.

[:https://wiki.ubuntu.com/InputMethods/SCIM/Setup]

and if you're still stuck wondering why GTK IM Module isn't working for you on OpenOffice, there's [:http://www.scim-im.org/wiki/faq/gtk_gnome/why_i_can_not_input_with_scim_under_openoffice_oo|another] [:http://www.scim-im.org/wiki/documentation/installation_and_configuration/all/system_configuration|wonderful piece of documentation] for you.

Tata Indicom Broadband

Finally switched to the [:http://tataindicombraodband.in|Tata Indicom Broadband Service] from BSNL dataone today. The Tata Indicom folks made me wait for almost a month for the connection, but first look at it seems to say that it was worth the wait.

Few good things I observed about the service:
* They provide a very good quality D-Link modem/router.
* Pricing is good.
* No installation charges (on advance payment for 4 months).
* No limits on data transfers.

But the connection wasn't as straightforward and easy to use on Ubuntu as on Windows. There are no Linux drivers for the USB interface.

The first thing I tried was to get hold of the the latest kubuntu iso torrent :)
Azureus kept warning me of the "NAT problem", so instead of disabling the NAT on the router, I enabled UPnP on it which made things just fine.

Again, DNS entries kept flushing on this connection - thanks to DHCP and slowing things down, so this gave a temporary relief:
sudo chattr +i /etc/resolv.conf

Now, to try and figure out how I can use a wifi router over this, and make the router they've supplied to just act as a bridge ;)

Trac

[:http://trac.edgewall.org/|Trac] is indeed a very useful software. When swamped with too many things to do, this is a good tool to keep track of all the tasks and issues in a better way (at least it has been that, for me). It even has a wiki that is very much similar to [w:Mediawiki|Mediawiki].

Just few steps were needed to get it running on the local machine. The data is stored on SQLite by default.

Planning to use this wonderful tool at many other places. :)

Tvtime and Kannada

So, whats the relation between TvTime and Kannada? some of you reading this title might be wondering. There is!

Kannada rendering on Linux, Ubuntu Linux - especially, breaks up once you install TvTime. The ttf-free-fonts package that gets installed with TvTime is the real culprit.

How do you rectify that? - you'll probably have to get rid of ttf-free-fonts package (and since TvTime is dependent on that, it will also have to go!).

Ubuntu Dapper

Thanks to Prashanth Pandit, I got a copy of [:http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/flight6|flight 6 release] yesterday.

Ubuntu Dapper, at first sight looks way too cool. The touchpad craziness that was there in breezy badger seems to have vanished. Using touchpad on my hp nx6120 laptop is now as easy as it is on Windows.

The more significant changes that could be caught at the first sight with Dapper are the changes in the installer. It is more like the Windows XP installer now (or say even better). The installation went smooth, and everything, almost everything is working fine :)

Now, to install all my regularly used applications that were missing on the CD. ;)

Ubuntu on Pentium D processor

For some new hardware I bought recently, I was almost lost in a maze recompiling the kernel and applying patches for SATA (libata) until I found out that the AMD-Xeon kernel on the Ubuntu repositories work just fine for Pentium-D processor.

The particular [:http://www.intel.com/cd/channel/reseller/asmo-na/eng/products/desktop/processor/processors/pentium-d/feature/index.htm|Pentium-D I have] has a feature called EMT64, so 64-bit version of Ubuntu runs quite smoothly, with both cores getting detected.

Users on your MySQL server

So what do you do when you want to know all user names created on your mysql server?

mysql> select distinct User from mysql.user

Vim 7.0 released

...download it from [:http://www.vim.org/download.php|here]

Welcome to the notes section.

This place is for the lilliputian notes I keep jotting down. If you find them useful, feel free to drop a comment or [:contact|drop me an email].

webdeveloper toolbar

...has just gotten better. Released on Jan 23rd, it now sports options that can highlight even the positioned elements on a web page (float, relative, absolute etc) amongst many other new features.

The extension can be installed [:https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=60|from this page].

Grisbi

Looking around for some good Open source payroll software for a friend of mine, I came across this personal finance management tool by name [:http://www.grisbi.org/|Grisbi].

It is a lot simpler than GnuCash (GnuCash looks heavily bloated and the latest version keeps crashing most times). It also has .QIF file support (although .QIF exported from Paypal didn't work very well). GnuCash files can also be imported into it.

Good interface and usability makes it one of the best application to keep personal finance records. If you're a Windows user, try [:http://buddi.sourceforge.net/en/|buddi].

Screenshot