Lohit Open Type font for Kannada
[:http://fedora.redhat.com/|Fedora 6] has a new Kannada Unicode (Opentype) font released with the distribution. The font seems to be Kannada the counterpart of Lohit series of fonts for Indian languages.
Linux
Extracting an rpm
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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.no…|this package] on debian to check out the fonts.
[:http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/how-to-extract-an-rpm-package-without-ins…|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
Grisbi
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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.
KMFL - The Keyboard Mapping for Linux project
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[: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.
Thunderbird vs Evolution
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Shifting back recently to a stand-alone mail client from web-mail client, it was back to the tricky decision about which mail client to use.
I chose [:http://www.mozilla.com/thunderbird/|thunderbird].
Mozilla Firefox - Kannada myth
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Out-of-box flawless rendering of Kannada on Firefox is still a myth for normal Kannada user on Linux.
5 KDE applications that I can't do without
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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.
Ubuntu Dapper
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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.
Barrage
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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.