Artha is a free cross-platform English thesaurus that works completely off-line and is based on WordNet. It is released under the GNU General Public Licence version

Source

Features

Although a gtk app  it has very little gnome dependencies (So KDE fans dont have to worry -much. Yeah yeah I know its would have been better if written in Qt but then “what can we do”  :(  ) However Artha has tons of features to make anyone (Gnome, Kde, whatever floats your boat) Drool.

• Offline : Unlike most dictionaries which can only be used if you are online. Artha works completely offline. So if you like me are not completely bought up by all this cloud computing craze and live in Africa where Internet sucks. Then Artha is a no brainer for you.  (Even if you are lucky and have highspeed internet Artha is also a no brainer )
• Regular Expressions Search : OK lets say there is a word you  vaguely know or you are unclear as to its meaning or spelling. (Happens to me a lot ) you can speed up/narrow the search using regular expression to locate the particular word they have in mind.
• Suggestions : Say you mispelled a word Artha can give you near matching suggestions (I also love this)
• Relative to Sense Mapping : Artha doesn’t just give you the meaning of words. It so includes words like Synonyms, antonyms. When you Select a relative its corresponding definition is scrolled and highlighted for easy comprehension.

The Awesomest  Feature that rules them all : Yeah I saved best for the last.  For me the feature of Artha which kills every other Dictionary software out there is its support for Notifications.  Here is how it works – Lets say I was going through my RSS reader and I found a word am not familiar with I just need to highlight the word, press the keyboard combination Ctrl+Alt+W (Which can be changed to any key combo that suits you) The meaning of the word gets displayed as a Notification Bubble .

Hence I can easily check the meaning of the word without having to launch the application window.

The notification feature of Artha is supported system wide and works with just about every application which support text highlighting.

Installation

Ubuntu / Debian : Although Artha is available in the Ubuntu / Debian Repository The version there is quite dated. However the latest version has been compiled to .deb and can be downloaded from   here

Fedora (Leonidas/11 or above) :  Artha can be installed with

yum install artha

Note* The version in the Fedora Reposittory is 0.9.1

Other Linuxes : If a binary package is not available for your distribution, you can easy download the source code from here and follow this installation instructions on how to compile from source.

Configuration: After installation, the rest is easy. When you start Artha Its minimizes in the Notification area of your desktop.  From the application window you can easily set you keyboard short cut by clicking on the settings. The default keyboard shortcut is Ctrl+Alt-W.  By default the Notification feature is disabled but can be easily enabled by right clicking on the notification area icon. The rest is easy.


I found Artha to be very useful and goes a long way to enhance my workflow and user experience.  I hope someone find this useful.

PDF-Shuffler is a small python-gtk application, which helps the user to merge or split PDF documents. You can also rotate, crop and rearrange their pages using an interactive and intuitive graphical interface.

Source: Softpedia

I tested  it and found pdfshuffler so easy to use that it might amount to waste of space writing about how to use it. Once you import pdf(s) its splits it into pages which can be rearrange by dragging them with your mouse, you can also delete any page you don’t want.

Here is a Screencast

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90zJC1Y2D7M]

Installation

Debian/Ubuntu users can download a Deb here which can be installed by double clicking on it (the installer might download other dependencies from the Debian/Ubuntu repositories which the application needs to install but it does this automatically)

Edit: I tried installing this on Ubuntu 8.04 (hardy heron) but its threw up some dependencies errors. which i got round by installing the following packages from the ubuntu 9.04 repositories

http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/p/python-pypdf/python-pypdf_1.12-1_all.deb

http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/p/python-pdftools/python-pdftools_0.37-1_all.deb

Everything went fine from then on.

Once installed you can launch it from Application/Graphic/Pdf-Shuffler

Other Linux Distributions

I can either download the source package and compile it from source, or search Google for a package compiled for their distribution for their distribution Thanks to pete who pointed out that

Since it is a python application people do not need a distribution specific package. They can just download the source package, unpackage it and run the file “pdfshuffler” ($python pdfshuffler) assuming that all required additional packages (http://pybrary.net/pyPdf/) are installed on the system. Maybe it’s worth to tell a little about that. Advantage is here that even a user without root privileges can run it.

here are the dependencies that pdf-shuffler needs to run

· pyPdf 1.10 or later
· Python
· PyGTK

( I found an rpm for fedora 11 here and one for suse 11 here )

Hope this helps somebody

Scilab is an open source software.

Since 1994 it has been distributed freely along with the source code via the Internet. It is currently used in educational and industrial environments around the world.
Source: http://www.scilab.org/platform/

Scilab is a very good alternative to very expensive and proprietary programs like Matlab. It is used Extensively in the school where I work.

Free Beer + Speech

Scilab is can be downloaded and used free of charge, and although it is not released under the GPL, its License allows you to modify and/or redistribute the software.

The world just got better

I remembered the last time i had to install a 5.x version of scilab on ubuntu (hardy heron) it was a hellish experience because there was no installable binary package and i had to download and compile from source which was just a PITA because most of the dependencies needed were not available in the Hady Heron Repo. what made things worse is after compiling, The package was very buggy and kept crashing especially when i try the translation tool from the application menu. Rather than witch and whine about this, in true Free software Culture i filled a bug which thankfully as been fixed in the latest version 5.1.

Another good thing about scilab 5.1 is this time around installation is quite easy and straight forward, No more compiling or downloading some strange dependencies. There is Binary package available for Linux that comes bundled with all the dependencies that scilab needs to work

Installation

To install Scilab goto their download page and download the Scilab 5.1 binary file version for Linux (available for both 32 and 64 bit) you can grab a copy here http://www.scilab.org/download/

Once Downloaded save the file to your desktop and extract (in gnome/Kde right click and choose extract here) or via Terminal (Application/Accessories/Terminal) cd $HOME/Desktop/ ; tar xzvf scilab-5.1.bin.linux-i686.tar.gz

Now you can run the program from the scilab directory that was extracted. just go to /scilab-5.1/bin and double click on the file named scilab, but you will have to agree with me that this is a less than ideal situation. To do a proper installation we can either move the scilab directory to your /home
or better still /opt in your root directory (which is the directory meant for 3rd party Applications)
This guide is based on the latter

With the scilab Package that we extracted earlier still saved on your desktop we mv it to /opt. To do this Open Terminal and copy and paste the following command then press enter.

sudo mv scilab-5.1/ /opt/

Now we need to be able to launch it from our application menu. To go this we would have to create a menu item for it. Thankfully this is dead easy under gnome (and KDE to but this guide was written in gnome)

To create a menu item right click on the Application menu of your gnome panel and choose Edit Menu

Enable the Education Menu (by checking it) now click on Education (on the left side of the menu editor) and create new item under the Education menu by clicking on New Item (on the right side of the Menu Editor) . Doing this would Open a New Dialog box fill it like this

Name : Scilab-5.1

Command: /opt/scilab-5.1/bin/scilab

Comment: Matrix-based scientific Software Package

Now we give it an Icon

Click on the icon field and copy  this to the navigation address bar   /opt/scilab-5.1/share/scilab/icons/scilab.xpm  (for some reason browsing to the icon location doesn’t  work)

Now you would be able to start Scilab under  /Application/Education/Scilab/

You can download Toolboxes for scilab from here

Hope someone finds this useful.

* Kriging
* Multi-variate kriging (co-kriging)
* Sequential Gaussian simulation
* Sequential indicator simulation
* Multi-variate sequential Gaussian and indicator simulation
* Multiple-point statistics simulation

For news, tutorials, and an FAQ, visit the SGeMS wiki.

Main Features

* Comprehensive geostatistical toolbox
* Standard data analysis tools: histogram, QQ-plots, variograms,…
* interactive 3D visualization
* Scripting capabilities: SGeMS embeds the Python scripting language, that allows to automatically perform several (repetitive) actions.
* Use of plug-ins to add new geostatistics algorithms, support new file formats, or increase the set of script commands.

http://sgems.sourceforge.net/

Where do i start? ..OK so i happen to be a Linux SysAdmin for some school. we use Linux on all our workstations including the laptops we gave to the students. so when i prof said he need a program called SGeMS for his class, it my job to get it done   i searched synaptic and that came with nothing (hmm sign of trouble) a little search on google took me to where i could download the source code. i downloaded it. checked the readme to see what is needs .. that was when i knew i was in for some serious ish. cut the long story short i went through hell  just to get the program to compile. but i the end i did. so i decided i no man should ever go through what i went through and i decided to document how i got SGeMS to install on ubuntu..

WARNING!!!
the following guide involve the use of command line, although i try to make it as simple as possible so you shouldn’t have any problem. .. remember i said shouldn’t

first we download sgems from here http://sourceforge.net/projects/sgems/
for this guide am using version 2.0

once the source code is downloaded.. we now have to install the dependencies it needs to compile which are
- GsTL (Geostatistics Template Library)
- Qt (GUI library) version 3.1 or higher
- Coin3D (OpenIventor library), version 2.x
- SoQt (Qt bindings for OpenIventor), version 1.x
- SimVoleon (Volume rendering extension for Coin3D), version 2.x
- Python
qt , coin,python and SoQt can all be installed from the ubuntu repositories

Qt when i tried searching for qt in synaptic .. billions of files came up out of the lot i installed

libqt3-mt-dev qt3-assistant qt3-qtconfig
and it seem to work fine (guess am lucky)

Coin3D for coin i installed libcoin40-dev libcoin40-runtime

SoQt i installed libsoqt-dev

Python i installed python2.4-dev

you can always open synaptic /System/Admin/Synaptic and search for libqt3-mt-dev libcoin40-dev libcoin40-runtime qt3-assistant qt3-qtconfig python2.4-dev libsoqt-dev

better still you can install everything at a go via terminal /Applications/Accessories/Terminal

install with this command (copy and paste is allowed )

sudo aptitude install libqt3-mt-dev libcoin40-dev libcoin40-runtime qt3-assistant qt3-qtconfig python2.4-dev libsoqt-dev

Now we have installed all the dependencies that can be gotten from the ubuntu repositories

time to install other dependencies

for some reasons downloading and compiling SimVoleon from here http://www.coin3d.org/lib/simvoleon threw up some funky errors about gcc .. anyway i went round that by downloading the latest version from subversion

Note: to use subversion you need to have it installed .. it can be easily installed by

sudo aptitude install subversion or search and install from synaptic.

now to download simvoleon we do the following

create a directory called svn in your home directory

mkdir $HOME/svn

move into the directory

cd $HOME/svn

next we run the command that would download simvoleon from svn

svn co https://svn.coin3d.org/repos/SIMVoleon/trunk SIMVoleon

give it some time.. you would see a prompt asking you to accept a certificate or some stuff like that .. you can choose to accept temporarily or permanently just don’t reject it

once simvoleon is downloaded you will find it under svn/ directory you created earlier .. now we need to go into the directory so we can compile it.

N.B before compiling any source code on ubuntu you need to install build-essentials meta-package which contains all tools needed for compilations mainly the GNU C compiler gcc

sudo aptitude install build-essential ; cd $HOME/svn/SIMVoleon

the above command install the build-essential package and moves us into the SIMVoleon directory next we run

./configure

then

make

lastly we run

sudo make install

the last command would install SIMvoleon .. i didnt experience any error when i went about it this way.

now to download the last dependencies

GsTL can be download here http://sourceforge.net/projects/gstl/

we don’t need to compile GsTL just place it in the same directory that you would like to install SGeMS.

so place both SGeMS-2.0.tgz and GsTL-1.3.tgz in your home directory and we extract it using the tar command

tar xzvf SGeMS* ; tar xzvf GsTL*

now we enter into the SGeMS Directory to make some pre-compile preparations

cd SGeMS-2.0/

we need to edit a hidden config file named .qmake.cache we would edit this point the variables to the correct location on your computer

gedit .qmake.cache

look for the following lines and

GSTLHOME = /tmp/Linux/GsTL-1.2.1
GSTLAPPLI_HOME = /tmp/Linux/SGeMS-1.4.1

edit them to look like this (we would point the location of GSTL and SGeMS if you followed the guide then there should be in your home directory so you edit them accordingly)

GSTLHOME = /home/bigbrovar/GsTL-1.3
GSTLAPPLI_HOME = /home/bigbrovar/SGeMS-2.0

save the text editor and close

now we need to edit you .bashrc file to include the paths necessarily for SGeMS to work

gedit $HOME/.bashrc

now we add the following to the bottom of the text file

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/SGeMS-2.0/lib/linux:$HOME/SGeMS-2.0/plugins/designer:/usr/local/lib/
export GSTLAPPLIHOME=$HOME/SGeMS-2.0/

now save and close

once this is done we now need to compile SGeMS (about time right) so we move into the SGeMS directory

cd $HOME/SGeMS-2.0

and run

qmake

make

lastly

sudo make install

now the last thing we need to don is direct Qt to libGsTLwidgets.so which can be found under the SGeMS directory

so run this in terminal qtconfig

go to Library Paths and browse to this path under the SGeMS directory /plugins/designer/ click add save and close

now lets see if all the hard work paid up .. to run the program do this

cd $HOME/SGeMS-2.0/bin/linux
then
./s-gems

you can write a script that starts it

open a test file and paste the following into it

#!/usr/bin/env bash

exec $HOME/SGeMS-2.0/bin/linux/s-gems

save it as sgems and move it to /usr/local/bin (remember you have to do that has root)

sudo mv sgems /usr/local/bin

make it executible
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/sgems

so now when you want to start sgems .. just open your terminal and type sgems ..

i Hope this helps some one .

If this works for your please let me know.

Thanks to Ting Li from the SGeMS mailing list for the tips he gave me without which i would still be hitting my head at the wall in frustration.

Sage is a free open-source mathematics software system licensed under the GPL. It combines the power of many existing open-source packages into a common Python-based interface.
you can read more about sage here http://www.sagemath.org/tour.html
unfortunately sage is not available in the Ubuntu repositories and in-fact any repositories as a .deb package. ( at the time of writing this). did you say compiling? dont even go there i tried building it. and failed woefully. fortunately i found a nice and easy to install it on Ubuntu. there is a binary package already compiled for Ubuntu. which makes installation on Ubuntu quite easy and straight forward.

first we download the ubuntu binary here http://www.sagemath.org/bin/linux/32bit. the guide is based on version 3.1.4 so i just did

wget http://www.sagemath.org/bin/linux/32bit/sage-3.1.4-ubuntu32-intel-XEON-x86-i686-Linux.tar.gz
the above link seem to be broken. although i have not tried it. but this link should work

Ubuntu 8.0.4
wget -c ftp://ftp.sun.ac.za/pub/mirrors/www.sagemath.org/linux/32bit/sage-3.4-linux-PentiumM-ubuntu-8.04.1-i686-Linux.tar.gz

Ubuntu 8.10
wget -c ftp://ftp.sun.ac.za/pub/mirrors/www.sagemath.org/linux/32bit/sage-3.4-linux-Ubuntu_8.10-i686-Linux.tar.gz

once downloaded . i untar it (extracted the archive)
in my case

tar xzvf sage-3.1.4-ubuntu32-intel-XEON-x86-i686-Linux.tar.gz

then i moved it to /usr/local/src/

sudo mv sage-3.1.4-ubuntu32-intel-XEON-x86-i686-Linux /usr/local/src

then i copied the sage script in to /usr/local/bin

sudo cp /usr/local/src/sage-3.1.4-ubuntu32-intel-XEON-x86-i686-Linux/sage /usr/local/bin

then i edited SAGE_ROOT in /usr/local/bin/sage to point to /usr/local/src/sage-3.1.4-ubuntu32-intel-XEON-x86-i686-Linux

gksu gedit /usr/local/bin/sage

modified it to look like this

# Set SAGE_ROOT to the location of the sage install.
SAGE_ROOT="/usr/local/src/sage-3.1.4-ubuntu32-intel-XEON-x86-i686-Linux/"

i modified the sage root directory permission settings
sudo chmod -R 755 /usr/local/src/sage-3.1.4-ubuntu32-intel-XEON-x86-i686-Linux

now run you can run it

sage

to get a webbased ui
run notebook()

hope someone finds this useful

They say if u want something done you’d better do it your self. Since there was no deb package for the latest scilab 5.0.3. I had no choice than to build one from source. it wasn’t easy hunting down the needed dependency many of which are not available in the hardy repository. I had to download online from the intrepid repo . here are the things  i did to get it to compile.

first download the latest scilab 5.0.3

wget http://www.scilab.org/download/5.0.3/scilab-5.0.3-src.tar.gz

mv it to your home directory

mv scilab-5.0.3-src.tar.gz $HOME

then we install the scilab dependencies that are available in that hardy repository

sudo apt-get build-dep scilab
sudo apt-get install liblaf-plugin-java libjgoodies-looks-java scilab-doc ant sun-java5-jdk

once that is done
time to download and install the external dependencies that are not available in hardy repo to make things easy we create a directory called dependencies

mkdir dependencies

now we enter into the dependencies directory we just created

cd dependencies

then we download the required dependencies

libflexdock-jni
wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/libf/libflexdock-java/libflexdock-jni_0.5.1-dfsg1-4_i386.deb

libflexdock-java-doc
wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/libf/libflexdock-java/libflexdock-java-doc_0.5.1-dfsg1-4_all.deb

libflexdock-java-demo
wget [url]http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/libf/libflexdock-java/libflexdock-java-demo_0.5.1-dfsg1-4_all.deb[/url]

libjogl-jni
wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/multiverse/libj/libjogl-java/libjogl-jni_1.1.1-2ubuntu1_i386.deb

libjogl-java
wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/multiverse/libj/libjogl-java/libjogl-java_1.1.1-2ubuntu1_all.deb

libjrosetta-java
wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/libj/libjrosetta-java/libjrosetta-java_1.0.1+gpl-1_all.deb

libmatio0
wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/libm/libmatio/libmatio0_1.3.3-2_i386.deb

libmatio-dev
wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/libm/libmatio/libmatio-dev_1.3.3-2_i386.deb

libflexdock-java
wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/libf/libflexdock-java/libflexdock-java_0.5.1-dfsg1-4_all.deb

libskinlf-java
wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/libs/libskinlf-java/libskinlf-java_6.7-3_all.deb

once every last one of the dependency as been downloaded
we then install all of them with one command

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

once done . we have installed all the dependencies needed by the application.

NOTE: I didnt build this on a fresh ubuntu so they maybe some needed which didnt show up because there were already installed on my computer. so to be save make sure you install build-essential
sudo apt-get install build-essential

now we start the build.

cd ..

extract the scilab

tar -xzvf scilab-5.0.3-src.tar.gz

enter the directory

cd scilab-5.0.3

then run configure

./configure

it would take a while. and if all went well it would return no errors meaning all the dependencies needed for compiling the package is installed. now we run make

make

this would take a very very long time.. if you have anything else to do .. this is the right time.
i ran this on a pentium dual core 1.8ghz 2gb ram and it took almost 1 hour.

but once its done

sudo make install

it would also take some time to complete .. but once its done without errors that means that scilab 5.0.3 has been installed and can be found in /Application/Education/Scilab

hope some one finds this useful.

PS.. if u run ibex. you dont just

sudo apt-get build-dep scilab
sudo apt-get install liblaf-plugin-java libjgoodies-looks-java scilab-doc ant sun-java5-jdk

and

sudo apt-get install libflexdock-jni libskinlf-java libflexdock-java libmatio-dev libmatio0 libjrosetta-java jogl-java libjogl-jni libflexdock-java-demo libflexdock-java-doc

before starting the compiling

For those using Intrepid good news is that u dont have to go thru all the process i went thru just
In /etc/apt/sources, add the line:

deb http://www.scilab.org/team/sylvestre.ledru/repository/ubuntu/ intrepid main

sudo aptitude update

sudo aptitude install scilab

Reference http://www.scilab.org/team/sylvestre.ledru/