The Enlightenment project is raising funds for purchasing a new dedicated server. The target amount is $4000 and almost 48.6% of it is done. Donate as much as you can to support a open source project. Do read my previous post on installing E17 on Ubuntu.
Monthly Archive for January, 2007
Xfce the light-weight desktop environment and the latest version 4.4 was released two days back. It has been a favorite desktop for many users and the latest version has numerous features like Desktop icons, File Manager, text editor, removable drives or media. Read about the many features in this version in this tour.
I have tried Flock long time back when it was released. But wasn’t impressed by it. But now thought of trying it out. For all those who haven’t known what is Flock - it is called the social web browser.
To quote the website “Flock is an amazing new web browser that makes it easier to share media and connect to other people online. Share photos, automatically stay up-to-date with new content from your favorite sites, and search the Web with the most advanced Search Toolbar available today.”
As of now you can’t install Flock through synaptic. you have to download the archive and just run it.
Download flock from the website.
Extract the archive by typing
sudo tar -C /opt -xzvf flock-*.linux-i686.tar.gz
Create a symbolic link to the executable
sudo ln -s /opt/flock flock /usr/bin/flock
Now you can run flock by typing flock or you can instead create a menu item.
sudo gedit /usr/share/applications/flock.desktop
[Desktop Entry] Encoding=UTF-8 Name=Flock Comment=Flock Web Browser Exec=flock Icon=/opt/flock/icons/mozicon128.png StartupNotify=true Terminal=false Type=Application Categories=Applications;Network
Then refrech the menu
killall gnome-panel
After that when you start flock it will automatically set up all your blog, photo, bookmark account and will be ready to use.
Blogged with Flock
For many days I wanted to try Enlightenment after reading and seeing many screenshots about it. Yesterday in the LUG meeting I saw it live and was impressed by E. Enlightenment is an open source window manager for X Window system which can be used alone or in conjunction with GNOME or KDE. It has extensive theming support and advanced graphics without sacrificing system performance. This window manager is fully configurable making it the best one out there
The latest stable version is 0.16.8.5 but the development release 0.17 also called DR17 is pretty usable and nice. I have installed DR17 on my Edgy. Here are the steps.
First you have to add a few repositories to your sources.list.
In terminal type sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
Add the following repositories to the file
## E17 repository "edevelop.org"
deb http://edevelop.org/pkg-e/ubuntu edgy e17
deb-src http://edevelop.org/pkg-e/ubuntu edgy e17
You can replace edgy with dapper if you are using Ubuntu 6.06.
Then type the following lines to download the gpg keys and to add it
wget http://lut1n.ifrance.com/repo_key.asc
sudo apt-key add repo_key.asc
After the repositories are added, do a sudo apt-get update to update the packages list.
Then finally install e17 by issuing this command. sudo apt-get install e17
You have successfully installed e17 and can now logout of GNOME and again login by changing the session as Enlightenment.
Goto any website and paste
javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true'; document.designMode='on'; void 0
in the address bar.
Now you can edit anything in that page. Really cool trick.
Ubuntu Studio aims to be a multimedia editing flavor of Ubuntu for the Linux audio, video, and graphic enthusiast or professional who is already familiar with the Ubuntu-Gnome environment. Their ultimate goal is to build a solid Ubuntu distro based on Ubuntu-Gnome by Feisty Fawn. This distro has various packages for audio, graphics and video editing. Take a look at their wiki for more info.
The Open Source Advocate has a thorough usability analysis of Ubuntu and tells us what makes it “ready to use” for us. He takes each step for completing an operation and categorizes them into Very Easy, Easy, Medium, Hard and Very Hard. He also explains what can be made to improve the user experience.
Drupal the most popular open source content management system has moved on to version 5 after almost 8 months of development. The most important feature included in this version is the easy to use web based installer. The UI is also greatly improved and is easy to use. This version also allows themers to develop better themes for Drupal.
Drupal also celebrates its 6th birthday with its release of version 5.
Fedora Core 6 is now available as a live CD. This is great news to the old fedora fans out there. Fedora is a project that is sponsored by RedHat and is contributed by many developers around the world. These people create high quality open source software which can be used by anyone.
It was a great distro back in those old days. But after Ubuntu came along, it lost its place. I haven’t tried FC for the past 2 years and this live CD would be a nice way to try it.
The live CD is available for i386 architecture only and you can download it from the official website or from torrents. It is about 683mb.
I got mail about a nice website called in pictures from Chris Charuhas. It is a nice site having tutorials about using Office, OpenOffice.org, Dreamweaver, etc.
The interesting part of this is that it is fully based on pictures. All the tutorials have nice explanations with screenshots explaining how to do every step. They are easy to understand and I would like to see more such tutorials for other open source softwares. Their press release says that they would bring in more tutorials for programming languages like PHP, Perl, etc. I would also like to see tutorials for other applications like Gimp, Evolution, etc., for the normal user.
Maybe this mode of teaching will help bring in more people to FOSS world.