…after I installed Kubuntu 11.04 beta, everything was going smooth, wireless worked out of the box, (unlike 10.10 where I had to install some freedom hating broadcom driver) I had the awesome kde 4.6.2, seating on top what has been tagged the most significant Linux kernel release for desktop users in a long time kernel v2.6.38 (with the magic patch and all). Life was good.

Then it happened!

Trouble started when I wanted to send some files to my phone from laptop via the bluetooth. (You see I happen to be among the unfortunate set of people who have the same button for enabling wireless and bluetooth.) I tried enabling the laptop’s bluetooth when the whole system came to a standstill. I did a forceful shut-down after which my install never saw the light of the day again. Everytime I tried booting the PC, it always got stuck at the boot process. The scary part was even the the Kubuntu 11.04 Livecd stopped Booting at all! Only Kubuntu 10.10 was able to boot (from Livecd).

Searching for Answers

The most frustrating part of my Nasty Natty experience (pun intended) was trying to determine the root cause. How to explain how an OS installs fine, then crashes and not only does it become unable to boot, even attempts to do a clean install also hits a dead then. Here were a list of my suspicions

Corrupt system Memory (I know from experience that the best way to test if a system has bad memory is to load in a Live cd, this was ruled out by the fact that I was able to load on Kubuntu 10.10 on Live cd without issues)

Then I thought maybe a bad system Bios (I really wanted to pursue this option and upgrade the system BIOS via windows. Thankfully windows won’t install, complained about some partition issues)

I also considered a badly burnt media (but checked its integrity and it was said to be ok)

Kde 4.6 bug? (Xubuntu 11.04 had the same problem) kernel bug? hmmm

Light Bulb Moment…

Came while talking to a friend about the problem on irc and he suggested it was most like kernel problem probably some bad module. This got me thinking, I remembered the last thing I was doing (or wanted to do) when all this started was enabling bluetooth (shares the same button as the wireless)

I then decided to go into the system BIOS and disable the wireless / bluetooth radio. Fired the LiveCD of Xubuntu 11.04 and Voilà Xubuntu booted successfully, no hangs or freeze. But also no wireless.

Work Around

After I was able to get Xubuntu to successfully boot. I proceeded to install it. (for testing purpose I enabled the wireless radio from Bios and had the issue the freshly install Xubuntu 11.04 freeze at login screen (again) disabled it and everything worked fine (But no wireless)

Here is what I now did to fix the issue on my laptop. I did not have this issue on 10.10 mostly because that version of Kubuntu did not ship with the opensource broadcom drivers. I had to use the binary only driver from broadcom, hence the idea was to revert back to that setup.

first I installed the broadcom-sta-common (It provide a binary only closed source driver for broadcom)

sudo apt-get install broadcom-sta-common


Once installed, I edited the following file /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf

NB its always a good thing to backup before making any change to config file.
backup with this command

cp /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf-orig

In case things gets jammed up and you want to revert, you can easily do so with

cp /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf-orig /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf

kdesudo kate /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf


NB gnome user should use gtksudo gedit in place of kdesudo kate (and if you are like me, you can use ever reliable vim )

Anyway I blacklisted the brcm80211 open source broadcom driver by adding this line to, /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf blacklist brcm80211 Before the last line. When done, everything looked like this

# wl module from Broadcom conflicts with ssb
# We must blacklist the following modules:
blacklist b44
blacklist b43legacy
blacklist b43
blacklist ssb
blacklist brcm80211
install wl /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install wl $CMDLINE_OPTS

I saved the file and then edited this file /etc/modules (again backup before editing)

cp /etc/modules /etc/modules-orig

By adding the module for the closed source (freedom hating but stable) broadcom driver so it is loaded at every system boot

I added lw to the end of /etc/modules so the file looks like this

# /etc/modules: kernel modules to load at boot time.
#
# This file contains the names of kernel modules that should be loaded
# at boot time, one per line. Lines beginning with "#" are ignored.

lp
lw

Saved the file, exited, and rebooted this time with the wireless on to test if the issue as been fixed. The laptop rebooted fine, no issue, but still no wireless. Then I started the Kubuntu additional driver tool or kdesudo jockey-kde (from commandline on Kubuntu) or gtksudo jockey (from commandline on Ubuntu) which searched and informed me I needed to activate some proprietary drivers to make the wireless card work properly. I enabled them, It did its magic and voilà the wireless card came on. I was able to enable and disable it without the system kernel panicing.

I rebooted my laptop and there was no problem at all, everything worked just like it did on 10.10.
I explained the same step to some dude on irc having similar problem and my solution worked for him so I decided to share in case anyone is having such problems.

I hope someone finds this useful.

if you are on U|K|Xubuntu 11.04 there is a better workaround were both right / middle click and multitouch works and works way better than this. Although I don’t know if same would work on Ubuntu 10.10.

One thing admire about Macbooks is their Multitouch enabled Touchpads which allows for advanced gestures like pinch to zoom, double tapping to right click, Two finger scroll etc.  I recently bought a new laptop which did not ship with the traditional laptop touchpad but with something called a clickpad.

The Good News

Clickpads are the latest innovations from Synaptic (Not the package Manager Gui ) It replaces the traditional touchpad which is convention with most laptops.  It is  (From what I read)  suppose to bring better gesture support and (Mac like) multitouch. Unlike tranditional Touchpads which has 3 physical button, built with single touch in mind. The clickpad is just one Click Button which has been mapped into Zones (i.e there is the right and left click zone etc)

Naturally this should mean that all the awesome gesture support I have always admired about Macs is finally available for my laptop?

The Bad News

Well not Quite. Support the for clickpad on Ubuntu is still a bit flaky (to say the least). Not only are advanced features like enhanced gesture support and multitouch not available out of the box on Ubuntu. Other basic features like right clicking, horizontal scrolling, click and drag etc can be quite a hassle. On Ubuntu 10.04 some of the basic features have been fixed (although multitouch support is still lacking).

Same thing can not be said of Ubuntu 10.10 because there was a regression which make it impossible to right click using the touchpad. Already a bug has been filled concerning the issue and I wrote about a work around which works quite well.

Ray of Hope

It came yesterday when I stumbled on this bug report . Some (Awesome) dude created a package which brings basic Multitouch support for Clickpad on *buntu 10.10 . According to him

“the attached dkms package should provide multitouch support for a family of synaptics touchpads. Install and reboot. Please report both success and failure here. Thanks!”

source
And from feed backs there seems to be more success than failures.

Installation, configuration and Caveats

Installation

is very easy, Just download the deb package here and download click to install. Once installed, Reboot

Configuration

If everything goes well, Out of the box you should get basic multitouch goodness like two finger tapping to right click. To get more you have go a step further.

Kubuntu users

should head over to Systemsettings  > Input Devices > Touchpad Go to the “Scrolling” section and enable “Vertical Two Finger Scrolling” (There are other options there like “Horizontal Two Finger Scrolling” which I did not enable cause I am not really sure what it does, if you do please let me know how it goes :p) Then head over to the next Tab called “Tapping” what I did was to enable tabbing, then I went on to map Two fingers tapping to the Left click action menu and mapped three fingers tapping to the Middle key Again there are couple of options that can be set but I choose to limit myself by what I felt I needed.

Ubuntu users

Go to System > Preferences > Mouse > Touchpad and select “Two-finger scrolling”.

When all is set and done I logged out (rebooted? I can’t remember) and Voilà! I am able to use basic Multitouch support like two finger scrolling, three fingers to right click, three fingers to middle click. And my work flow? It increased by 50% percent (well more or less)

Caveat

While I hate to be a kill joy, I have to say that Ubuntu support for Clickpad even with this patch installed is not yet Nirvana. There are still some draw backs and advance gestures support like pinch to zoom are still not yet supported. Here is a list of what works and what doesn’t

What works

• Two Finger Scrolling
• Two fingers tapping to right click
• Three Fingers Tapping to Left click

NB There are lots of configuration (at least on Kubuntu) I only enabled the ones which made sense to me and which I was certain I needed hence this should not be seen as a conclusive list of which gestures are supported.

What doesn’t work

• Pinch to Zoom: Simply does not work period
• Traditional Right click: there is a regression with Ubuntu 10.10 which make it impossible to right click using the clickpad. I wrote about a work around this bug a while back Unfortunately the fix for the clickpad right click issue is not compatible with the patch that enabled multitouch. Hence the user has to pick which they are comfortable with. Either you still with the Traditional (single touch) Touchpad where right and left click are supported. Or you go with the Multitouch Clickpad where right | middle click is not supported (At least the traditional way)

I choose to stick with the latter .As many users most have noticed, the right click support in my work around is quite flaky, and pretty annoying sometimes. I have been using the Multitouch package now for 2 days and the difference is clear, while it might not be as smooth as the Mac experience (Yet), Its a generation better than the situation in my previous workaround. Just remember that this is a work in progress and Work is been done to bring an even better support to the next version of Ubuntu 11.04. It is important to subscribe to this bug report and follow its progress. With all the activities and work going into clickpad and multitouch on Linux both upstream and downstream, the only way is up

NB:

If you applied the patch (which enables right | middle click for clickpad) in my previous post. You need to remove it for the multitouch patch to work. You can remove the pmouse patch by doing the following

sudo dkms uninstall -m psmouse -v 2.6.35-22-generic
sudo dkms remove -m psmouse -v 2.6.35-22-generic --all

Reboot (not sure if that is necessary but its not bad to play it safe), and then install the Multitouch patch.

Hope someone finds this useful.

My previous favourite was winff. It is a nice frontend to ffmpeg and is capable of some pretty neat stuff. However there is a new* kid on the block which I found to be the coolest Media Converter  on Linux in terms of easy of use and number of cool features it packs.

Mobile Media Converter

(The name is self explanatory I guess)

is a free video and audio converter for converting between popular desktop media formats like MP3, Windows Media Audio (wma), Ogg Vorbis Audio (ogg), Wave Audio (wav), MPEG video, AVI, Windows Media Video (wmv), Flash Video (flv), QuickTime Video (mov) and commonly used mobile devices/phones formats like AMR audio (amr) and 3GPvideo. iPod/iPhone and PSP compatible MP4 video are supported. Moreover, you can remove and add new formats  or devices through the internet

source

Features

Some of the really cool features packed into MMC include

• Integrated YoutTube downloader for on the fly downloading of files from youtube and converting to preferred formats
• Trim and Crop Support It allows the user to trip audio clips or crop video clips taking out unwanted parts (excellent for rings tones and stuff)
• Subtitles Support Allow subtitles to be encoded onto the video for watching even on devices that does not supports them. Just drag and drop your video files and their subtitles on Mobile Media Converter

My Experience

Ease of Use

The first impression I got from using MMC is the ease of use. Even though it does comes with some very powerful features it manages to (brilliantly) expose these features allowing the users to easily make use of them. A good example is how the Video Trim feature is implemented It uses two sliders (top and bottom) the top slider is used to select where to start the trim and the bottom slider for where to stop the trim. I found this to be very intuitive and easy to use. The Crop feature is just as dumb proof. There are two vertical sliders (left and right) and two Horizontal sliders (Top and Bottom) Adjusting the sliders can be used to crop out unwanted section of the screen

Simple Sleek and Logical UI

One of the things that struck me about MMC was just how simple sleek and logical the UI was. It is not cluttered by menus and every feature is implemented in a way that makes them easy to discover and logical to use It supports dragging and dropping files to convert. To edit a file all you have to do is right click and edit It also makes use of very unobtrusive animation which provide smooth transitions between tasks. Overall it manages to unlock some of the most powerful features of FFmpeg and mencoder (Both commandline utilities) and exposes them to the user in a very simple way.

Features and Stability

Ability to embed subtitles to files, download files from youtube and encode them on the fly are just some of the neat features packed into MMC yet it manages to performs all the function without crashing or hogging my CPU. It also supports quite a large number of preset and allows for additional preset to be downloaded from the web providing a UI for the latter

Usage and Result

I have to admit I did not do a thorough test of MMC. But couple of Videos I tried converting all seems to work fine without any issues. The encoding went fast. The output was pretty decent. I have unable to test out some of the advanced features because I have not had any need for them. In all MMC is pretty much a frontend to FFmpeg which is a pretty solid tried and tested (knock on wood) commandline tool for doing that kind of stuff.

Installation

MMC is cross platform hence they are packages for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X If you are running Ubuntu Then you can easily download a .deb package and double click to install. The download instruction can be found here

So I guess you can call this my little review for the Mobile Media Converter. I hope someone finds it useful.

There is a Post on how to enable Multitouch support using a patch not supported with this work around, you might want to take a look first.

I got my self a new laptop recently. The old one was well getting old and starting to lose it, so when I got an offer I could not refuse, I sold it and didn’t look back. I settle for the HP Probook 4420s which turned out to be the best notebook in terms of performance, under the hood awesomeness, and build (Hopefully a review would come later. )

The first thing I did after unboxing my laptop was to install Kubuntu 10.04 which installed and ran smoothly with everything working out of the box. When the beta version of Kubuntu 10.10 was released, I decided to give it a go but noticed that I was unable to rightclick with the laptop’s clickpad.

Clickpad

Clickpads are the latest innovations from Synaptic (Not the package Manager Gui ) It replaces the traditional touchpad which is convention with most laptops.  It is  (From what I read)  suppose to bring better gesture support and multi touch. Unlike tranditional Touchpads which has 3 physical button, built with single touch in mind. The clickpad is just one Click Button which has been mapped into Zones (i.e there is the right and left click zone etc)

Ubuntu Support

Support the for clickpad on Ubuntu is still a bit flaky.  Not only are advanced features like enhanced gesture support and multitouch not available out of the box on Ubuntu. Other basic features like right clicking, horizontal scrolling, click and drag etc can be quite a hassle.  On Ubuntu 10.04 some of the basic features have been fixed (although multitouch support is still lacking).

Same thing can not be said of Ubuntu 10.10 because there was a regression which make it impossible to right click using the touchpad.  Already a bug has been filled concerning the issue which should hopefully be fixed during the Maverick release circle.

Walk  Around

The Good news is there is a walk around this issue for those who won’t mind getting their hands dirty with messing around with the command-line. The walk around involves using a psmouse patch submitted by Paul which fixes the issue. (At least for me)

For this walk around some packages would have to be installed namely the build-essential package and the dkms packages. Build-essentials helps install basic tools needed for compiling packages from source, while the dkms  ”is a framework designed to allow individual kernel modules to be upgraded without changing the whole kernel. It is also very easy to rebuild modules as you upgrade kernels. framework designed to allow individual kernel modules to be upgraded without changing the whole kernel. It is also very easy to rebuild modules as you upgrade kernels.” which in English means whatever module we patch  would not need to be repatched should the system’s kernel be upgraded. (At least that’s the idea)

sudo apt-get install dkms build-essential

The fix involves patching the psmouse module using the paul’s archive which is the mouse source directory for   linux 2.6.35-22-generic (The version of Linux Kernal which shipped with Ubuntu 10.10 as at blog time)

First download the archive file from here

save the downloaded file to your desktop

Open a terminal (Application/Accessories/Terminal –  Kubuntu users should go /System/Konsole)

Move to the Directory where the archive was saved (In this case the desktop) and extract the content of the archive

cd $HOME/Desktop && tar xvf  psmouse-2.6.35-22-generic-patched.tar.bz2.tar

The name of the package as changed since writing this post the new command which reflects the change is

cd $HOME/Desktop && tar jxvf psmouse-2.6.35-22-generic-patched.tar.bz2


Move the extracted folder to /usr/src which is under the root directory hence the command would have to be executed with sudo

sudo mv psmouse-2.6.35-22-generic /usr/src

Move into the /usr/src directory

cd /usr/src

Then install the psmouse module with the following commands running them one after the other

sudo dkms add -m psmouse -v 2.6.35-22-generic

sudo dkms build -m psmouse -v 2.6.35-22-generic

sudo dkms install -m psmouse -v 2.6.35-22-generic

Once installed reboot for the module to be loaded.

If you are still having issues with right clicks. This command would help check if the psmodule is installed

sudo dkms status -m psmouse -v 2.6.35-22-generic

The output should be something like this

psmouse, 2.6.35-22-generic, 2.6.35-22-generic, i686: installed

If it is not installed. It can always be rebuilt with the following command

sudo dkms build -m psmouse -v 2.6.35-22-generic

sudo dkms install -m psmouse -v 2.6.35-22-generic

In case you followed this guide and it did not work for you, or Ubuntu releases an official fix for the issue (in which case you would have to remove the changes made following this guide to prevent conflicts) or for some reason you would like to revert the changes made following this guide. simply do

sudo dkms uninstall -m psmouse -v 2.6.35-22-generic

sudo dkms remove -m psmouse -v 2.6.35-22-generic --all

Following this guide does not lead to the nirvana of clickpad awesomeness (at least not for me). There are still some issues with Jumpy mouse which also affect windows 7. However it does make the clickpad much more useful under Ubuntu even then I would suggest that for serious work it won’t hurt to have a mouse handy

NB You can track the bug concerning this issue here

Thanks to Paul and Tob who really helped with the patch which fixes this issue.

I hope someone finds this useful.

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.

So some months ago I got me an E71 Nokia phone, among other things I was hoping to use it as a music device so I slammed in an 8gb memory card, and was all set but for one factor: 60% of my music collection are in ogg format and nokia default music player does recognize ogg. Sure there are some 3rd party music apps for E71 which can play ogg files out of the box but they all lack the kind of integration which you get with the Nokia default music player. While in confused mode I decided to call up a friend nucco and he gave me the tip about .is_audio_player.

What is .is_audio_player

If like me, you have a music library made up of different music formats, and you want to be able to sync them to your portable music player in one music format say mp3. Example, my music collection is composed of different formats, .mp3, ogg, aac but I want to sync everyone of them as mp3 to my Nokia e71. This is where .is_audio_player comes in handy. Nope its not an application, nope its not a codec, its not a library either. Its just a file (yeah file) its a file you place in the root directory of the storage of your music device from where it does its magic.

Configuration

First you open your favorite text editor (gedit, kate, emac, nano, vi whatever). Then you place in the following entries:

audio_folders=Sounds/Digital/

folder_depth=3

output_formats=audio/mpeg

Explanation

audio_folders = Here you indicate the relative path of the music folder on your portable device. On my Nokia its in Sound/Digital

folder_depth = Here you indicate the folder depth of the music folder (remember that every storage device attached to your Linux computer is mounted on /media/ hence you will start counting from the device mount point. In my case it was.

/media/e71/Sound/Digital

Since our final destination ™ is Digital (in my case that is) which is 3 step away from /media I indicated the value for folder_depth to be 3

out_formats = The last parameter is quite straight forward it’s asking what media format you want your files to be encoded in before sync. In my case i want them encoded to mp3 hence i added audio/mpeg

Now configure the file the way it meets your needs and then save as .is_audio_player remember the . (dot) in-front of is_audio_player. Once the file is saved, place it at the root of your music device (Nokia, Sony Erikson, China Mp3 device etc). In my case i placed it inside the memory card of my nokia phone (make sure you are using a mobile phone that can be seen as a mass storage device)

Note: Any file with a . (dot) in-front of its name is hidden by default in Linux hence you may not see the file after saving it until you tell your filemanager to view hidden files (ctrl +h) for (gnome) and (alt + .) for (kde)

Below is the .is_audio_player file inside the memory card of my nokia.

Once all is set, you can now plug your portable music player to your Linux computer and open Rhythmbox.

If all goes well Rhythmbox will detect your audio device. (in my case my nokia.)

All that is left is for you to select the tracks you want to sync. (you can always create a playlist) Drag and drop them into your portable music player’s icon. (You can also drag from your portable music player into your Music library.)

Transferring from your music library in rhythmbox to your portable music device might be slow, especially if it has to encode them to another music format before the transfer.

In the end I was able to encode all my ogg to mp3 files and sync them with my freedom hating E71 on the fly. I hope this helps someone out there.

FYI:

• I don’t know if this method would work with ipods.
• Legends have it that Amarok supports .is_audio_player I can’t tell since I have not been able to get it to work in amarok 2.1. If you have been able to please let me know.
• The Original ogg file on my music computer library is unaltered.

=-=-=-=-=
Powered by Bilbo Blogger

How it all started

Ever since i started a blog i had always wanted a wanted a application which would allow me do my blogging (preferably offline ) without having to use the web browser. One of the reasons for this was because i (as at then) did not have a stable Internet connection and had to go to Internet cafe to do my blogging which wasn’t really convenient. I wanted a way to do my blogging offline and then upload later. Even when i had a stable Internet connection i still prefer to having to use a browser for blogging. Unfortunately for me most of the blogging applications ( Drivel BloGTK KBlogger gnome-blog) i tried on Linux just didn’t cut it, some didn’t work with wordpress and the once that did weren’t powerful enough or were buggy or just too basic.

I gave up and resigned my self to the web for blogging. This was until recently when (I Cant quite remember how it happened) i found about about Bilbo Blogger and Beng. I saw the tool i just needed

Bilbo Blogger

Bilbo Blogger is a free/Open Source Blogging client, focused on simplicity and usability. Its is based on Qt4 (KDE) but should work well on gnome (i haven’t tried it but it should.. just remember i said should)

Here are some Summary of some of its Features

Currently featured:

• A full featured WYSIWYG editor + An HTML editor

• Previewing your post with your blog style! like when you are visiting it at your blog.

• Support for Blogger1.0, MetaWeblog, MovableType (WordPress supports All of these!) and Google GData (used on Blogspot.com blogs) APIs!

• Support for Creating/Modifying/Deleting posts.

• Support for creating drafts and scheduled posts!

• Support for uploading media files to your blog (Just on supported APIs e.g. MetaWeblog and MovableType)

• Support for Fetching your recent blog entries.

• Support for adding Images to post from your system. It will upload them on

• Submitting post to blog (Just on supported APIs e.g. MetaWeblog and MovableType)

• Support for saving local entries before publishing.Saving your writing copy to prevent data loss, at configurable intervals.
• Internal auto spell checker. (KDE spell checker used so most of languages are supported)

Installation

Although as of blog time there were only two binaries available for Linux and one for windows.

Archlinux users Bilbo should be available in the arch community repository ( am not sure about this as i don’t have an arch installation to confirm) but in any case an arch package can be downloaded from here

(K)Ubuntu

To install on ubuntu. You are going to add a third party repository popularly called PPA To your system. This is not hard.

To start open Terminal and copy and paste the following command (you can do this via GUI but when writing a guide some things are better down using commandline copy and paste of cause i would explain every process so at least you know what you are doing)

First we download and add the key for the repository we are about to use and add it to how system.

sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com \ 0xfe0272d55c41c17774052e575646f8b10331274d

Then we add the repository with this command

echo deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/neversfelde/ppa/ubuntu `lsb_release --short --codename` main | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list

Then we refresh the system and download bilbo with

sudo apt-get update ; sudo apt-get install bilbo

Once installed you can find Bilbo on the Internet section of your application Menu

Now i give a brief guide on how to configure Bilbi blogger to your blog

First your start bilbo ( like you don’t know that already hehe) once installed you will find it under the Internet section of your application menu.

The first thing you want to do is to add a blog, (my blog is hosted on wordpress.com hence that is what this guide would be based on. )

Just select Add Blog from under Blog menu

This would open a dialog box, something like this

Type in the URL of your blog then enter your blogs username and password and click the Auto Configure button. In my case it was http://ubuntunigeria.wordpress.com and i clicked the Auto Configure button. Then Bilbo would work its magic and Auto configure the settings for the blog. If all goes well (and it always did in my case) The dialog box would now look like this.

Bilbo has auto configured my blog settings, pulling the Title of the blog, the correct URL. You can go to the Supported features tab and check out the list of features bilbo has support in your blog here is mine

Once your blog is configured and loaded up. you would see a page which looks like this.

So here is the layout of Bilbo Blogger, it always you to use both WYSIWYG, or for code warriors you can always use the HTML editor field. one really cool feature with bilbo is the ability to preview you draft and see how it would look like on the blog page, This for me is one of its killer features

HTML Editor

Normal Preview

Preview with blog style

Other cool features of Bilbo

• It support multiple blogs hence you can setup more than one blog at a time.
• It also allows you to edit previous blog posts ( or delete them)
• If you are working on a blog post, you can always tell it to save locally, like as i was writing this post, i got disconnected, if i was using the web interface i might have lost some of my works or would have to wait for the Internet to get back before i continue. With bilbo i just told it to save my work locally and continued working.
• It also allows you to add tags and post the blog to a category

Bilbo also supports tabs you can edit more than one blog at a time with it just by opening a new tab.

Most importantly i found bilbo to be very stable, its doesn’t slow down on me or crash on me. i never experience on crash with it.

There is just so much to talk about Bilbo you would have to give it a spin to see your self.

I
hope someone finds this useful.

However one thing i have always wish it had was the ability to run in the background so that if i close thunderbird i want it to minimize to the system-tray/notification area and inform me real time when i have a new mail. Thunderbird has a small memory footprint hence am not bothered about it sucking up my system resources. For a very long time i took what life offered and made do with opening thunderbird to check for a new mail and closing it when i am done (i hate having my task manager side of the system panel filed up with running applications). Then one day i was like heck i have had enough and decided out to find a way to get thunderbird to do exactly what i want (run in the system-tray when not needed.) i did some googling and the name firetray came up, turned out it was just want i wanted.

Installation and Configuration

Firetray is an add-on for thunderbird and can be downloaded from here download and save the file to your hard disk. In Mozilla Thunderbird, open Add-ons from the Tools menu.

Click the Install button, and locate/select the file you downloaded and click “OK”.

After this you need to restart Thunderbird for the firetray to start working. You might also want to go through the preference of firetray to configure how you want it to behave, for example by default thunderbird does not minimize to the system-tray when you close it. You can go through the settings and configure it to your taste. Here is how i have configured mine.

Conclusion

I have come to find firetray a very valuable plugin for thunderbird.

It allows me to make Thunderbird run in the background and get out of my way. when they is a new mail, i get notified and it tells me how many unread mail i have in-box

One more cool thing i love about it is how it makes it easy to check for new messages and even send a quick email, By just right clicking on the icon on the system-tray

Ok that is the end of my rant. Hope this helps somebody.

FYI: Firetray can also be added to firefox, sunbird, seamonkey 2 and songbird, allowing to set up custom icon, minimizing to tray instead of closing, control playback using multimedia keys in songbird

Thankfully i found a workaround

Work around
Open Pidgin and go to Account menu

select manage account, choose your yahoo account and click on modify

go to the advance tab. and in the page server field replace whatever is there with the following
cs101.msg.mud.yahoo.com

save and close.

Try connecting to yahoo again from pidgin. It sure worked for me. I hope it works for you

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

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