My Ubuntu Blog

I am using twitter a lot since last few days (Follow me) and naturally I looked around for applications that I can install on my Ubuntu Linux to make tweeting easier. I fired up Synaptic and found these two applications:

Twitux

A GTK+ Twitter client, using Twitux I can send messages to twitter without opening a new tab in browser. It can display notifications when a new message arrives. The interface is very simple, easy to understand and use.

gTwitter

Gtwitter is also a simple intutive Twitter client. What I loved about gTwitter is that it has a text box right there in the main window to send messages. In Twitux you need to open the new message text area from menu.

Both these applications are very similar in their interface but both of them has this problem that the links in messages are not clickable. You can read the messages but you can not click and open a URL. I also felt that there should be a button or something to reply individual messages quickly. Just like the tiny reply button that appears on messages in Twitter homepage.

Closing the synaptic I looked around the web for more Twitter applications on Linux and found Phil Wilson’s hack that allows you to post to twitter from deskbar widget. I also found Saad Hamid’s list of Twitter clients for Linux which lists some more applications that use Adobe AIR framework.

For now I think I will be using Twitux as it displays notifications when there is a new message in the timeline. I may not be using it for sending messages though and I think without clickable links it is not very useful for reading messages either.

Update Apr 1, 2009. 03:19 PM: In the comments below and on Twitter every one mentioned Gwibber and how cool it is. Thank you all for your suggestions. So I installed Gwibber and its wonderful. Gwibber makes it easier to reply, send and read messages not only from Twitter but also from facebook and identi.ca and it could also be used as a feed reader. The interface is simple and intuitive. Links are clickable and there is a reply button with each message in my timeline. It can also search messages and display results in a new tab. So Gwibber is now my Twitter Client on Ubuntu Linux. There is just this one little thing, since I am using Gnome Global Menu the menu bar for Gwibber does not show anything under the Accounts. But then again Both of these applications are not officially supported on Ubuntu 8.10. Gnome Global Menu does not even work with Firefox and other non-GTK+ applications.

I was looking for something to help me manage my movies collection. Ubuntu comes with many collection manager applications. In this post I will talk about three of them.

GCstar

Predecessor of Gcfilms which is not developed any more. GCstar is not just a movie manager. Basically it is a collection manager to manage your movies, music, games, books, etc. It is a GTK/Perl application and blends well with in Ubuntu. It has many features that you would want from your personal collection manager and then a few more. For example:

• When you add a new item to your collection you can search and retrieve information about that item from the internet with just one click.
• You can import your collection data from other catalog or collection managers such as Alexander, DVD Profiler, Ant Video Manager, tellico, etc.
• GCstar also allows you to export your data in CSV, HTML, LATEX, SQL, .tar.gz, tellico and XML formats. I particularly loved the way it exports the in HTML format. The default templates are quite good and the page generated is good enough to be uploaded to a web server. See my sample list.
• You can locate the video file on your hard disk and play it.

Griffith

Griffith is a simple media collection manager. It does not have as many features as GCstar but it is good enough to maintain a list of your collection. Just like GCstar it can fetch information from the internet, retrieve thumbnail posters from the web. Griffith can export the collection in PDF, HTML, iPOD, CSV and XML formats. I didn’t like the PDF it generated which was just a simple list with the title of the movies. I liked the HTML page it generated which had the links to the imdb pages for the movies, poster thumbnails and a few other details. See my sample list

There were a few little things that I didn’t like about Griffith. First of all Griffith does not have a play button. Which means if I have my collection of movies saved on my hard disk there is no way I can play the movie from inside the Griffith. Secondly, I can not understand how to add my own tags to the movies.

Tellico

Tellico is a collection manager for KDE. It has all the features of GCstar and then some more. It can be used to manage your collections of books, games, movies, coins, stamps, wine, files, etc. You can import GCstar and Griffith data into tellico. You can also import and export data in various other formats (See my tellico sample list). Tellico beats GCstar with the “Search and Add” option. Using this option you can search the web for an item, fetch the information, add it, and then keep searching for other items to be added. This makes adding items to tellico faster than GCstar.

Definitely Tellico wins with a clear margin for its intutive approach to manage, display, import, export, search, retrieve and manipulate data. But since I use Ubuntu with Gnome Desktop environment I would stick to GCstar.

Translating movie subtitles is my new hobby. I had no previous knowledge of what subtitles are, how they are embedded in a DVD movie, how to rip them off, how to create new subtitles, and then finally how to prepare a DVD with translated subtitles that could be played on most popular software, hardware and standalone DVD players. I found out that it was not an easy job to embed UTF-8 encoded text on DVD as a separate subtitle stream. So I decided to hardsub my movie, which means that users will not have the option to turn off the Urdu subtitles.

First I needed to rip the DVD to my hard disk and there are some very good tools available for Ubuntu Linux that work great. (Warning: As always, check the relevant copyright laws for your country regarding the backup of DVDs). I used dvd::rip which rips and transcodes the files into avi format. It also provides the option to rip the subtitles separately, but since most DVD movies has subtitles embedded in streams with Pictures it was basically useless for me. However there are other tools that rip the subtitles and also help you save them as text using OCR.

There are many tools available for Ubuntu/Linux to create or translate subtitles in many different formats. I needed to figure out a Subtitle format that supports utf-8. Then I needed to find a software that allows me to embed the subtitles on the Video without any significant quality loss. After trying Subtitle Editor, Gnome Subtitles, Gaupol and Ksubtitle; I finally settled on Subtitle Editor. I had lots of trouble to use the preview features but some how I worked my out. I started working on subtitles and was very disappointed to find out that the preview didn’t display Urdu characters perfectly. Even though the subtitle format I was using had formatting and stylizing support too.

I decided to work on my subtitles without previewing them but even then I need to know if I have the tools available that would demux my subtitles on the video. Luckily we have a very nice dvdauthor tool available. It comes with a tool called Spumux. I generated a movie with my sample translated subtitles and the results were very bad. The quality of video was outstanding but Spumux didn’t displayed Urdu Characters correctly. May be, it was all my fault, may be I forgot something. But even after hours of checking through subtitles, xml file (required to use with spumux to tell it about the job) and creating many clips; I wasn’t able to get my text right.

I was disappointed and had to log on to Windows XP to see if there are any open source software for windows that do what I wanted to do. While there, I opened Windows Movie Maker, playing little with it I realized that I can add Subtitles with Windows Movie Maker. Windows Movie Maker not only did the subtitles but it also displayed them beautifully on the screen. I saved the clip and it was brilliant. But then it occured to me that if Windows Movie Maker can do this then there must be some alternate to it for Ubuntu Linux.

So lets see what we got in Linux to do the job. For video editing I tried Kino, Cinelera, and LiVES. To be very honest, it was a really very frustrating experience for me to figure out how these tools work. Kino is probably the most user friendly of all three but still Kino is a difficult thing to learn and you definitely can not work with it if you are working on an entire movie. It is good for movies you capture using your mobile phone, cam corder or other such devices. Even if I saved my movies in several small clips, it was difficult to navigate around my storyboard and add subtitles on a precise location. I wouldn’t spend time telling you about how it went with Cinelera or Lives. They both have horrible user interfaces and they are bundled with features that were completely useless for me.

In short I failed to add subtitles to my videos using Ubuntu Linux. I am now doing it on MS Windows XP, using Aegisub
and some other little open source or free applications. Aegisub is available for Linux but I was not able to install it on my Ubuntu 7.10 due to unmatched dependencies. I feel that the options for video editing are not very good for Ubuntu/Linux users. The tools we have are not user-friendly, advanced and there is not much to choose from.

Even if I failed to do my work with these tools but it does not mean that they are useless for every one else too. In fact some of them are quite sophisticated and as it is with most open source applications, they give you a lot more control than proprietary solutions. What we need to do is to concentrate more on improving them. We need to use these software, file bug reports, submit feature requests and help each other using these tools. We need to appreciate all those who are working on these projects (Guys if you are reading this, your tools didn’t help me. But thank you anyways). May be the community should organize some events where we gather around to focus on these tools and improve them.

Ok so you have installed Ubuntu and loved the pretty and easy Gnome interface, now what? May be you are thinking, that this Ubuntu is just another operating system. It is indeed just another operating system. But, this one is a Debian Linux based operating system. Sooner or later you are going to realize that your OS is equipped with powerful tools and utilities. Most of these power tools and utilities show their true powers when they are run from the Terminal.

For example there is an FTP client that you can run from Terminal.


$ ftp
ftp>
ftp> open ftp.example.com
Connected to ftp.example.com.
220 ProFTPD 1.3.0rc2 Server (YourHost FTP) [XXX.XXX.XXX.XX]
Name (ftp.sabza.org:nom): yourusername
331 Password required for yourusername.
Password:
230 User yourusername logged in.
Remote system type is UNIX.
Using binary mode to transfer files.
ftp>


Playing with this ftp tool for a while would make you feel that it is not all that powerful. So you need a powerful ftp tool that you can run from Terminal? Try ncftp.


$ sudo apt-get install ncftp

$ ncftp
NcFTP 3.2.0 (Aug 05, 2006) by Mike Gleason (http://www.NcFTP.com/contact/).
ncftp>


Want something even more powerful? Well you have ssh but to use ssh your remote host should have SSH enabled.


$ ssh yourusername@ftp.example.com
yourusername@ftp.example.com's password:
[hostmachine]$


Using Terminal gives you the power to do things quickly. Head over to The Linux Terminal – a Beginners’ Bash and learn to do things the Linux way.

Tags: Linux

I have uninstalled Open Office from my Ubuntu because I have found web based Office tools to be more reliable. I am talking about Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Using such a web based tool instead of a fully featured super sophisticated Office suite has many benefits.

• My documents are accessible from every where. To access my documents I just need an internet connection.
• I can share documents with friends, colleagues and any one and publish it easily on the web to make it accessible for everyone to read.
• Searching the documents is easier with tags and Google’s superior search powers.
• I have Ubuntu 6.06 and Debian Testing installed on my computer. So no matter what operating system I boot at the startup, I can still work on my documents. This feature alone is a great reason for me to use Google Docs. With the Google’s Browser Sync Firefox plugin my browser settings get automatically synchronized on both Operating systems so now it doesn’t really matter what operating system I am using I just need Firefox or Debian’s Iceweasel to resume my working environment.

Google Docs & Spreadsheets are near to perfect for me, but still there are a few limitations. Below is a small list of features I would like to see implemented in Google docs in near future.

• I don’t know how to set page margins. May be the functionality is around but I can not see it. I needed this functionality because sometimes I am being asked to create documents with page margins set to half an inch or more. I can do this in MS office and Open office I don’t know how to do that in Google Docs.
• There are no document templates available. I believe that templates are necessary, they save time and improve the productivity. Google docs should have some templates available and there should be functionality to create, save and share templates.
• In the Style menu, there should be functionality to add new user defined styles.
• Users should have ability to add new fonts in the font menu for a particular document. This is specially useful for people who are writing documents in other languages. I can do this by going to ‘Edit HTML’ and add the font manually. But I guess it wouldn’t be easy for all users.
• Adding images works great but I have a problem with this tool. A document takes more time to load when I add a larger picture and resize it to fit in a paragraph. A better solution would be that Google automatically creates different optimized versions of the image, displays them in a table with their size in caption and asks the users to select one of them or insert the original one. I believe that most people do not have time to open some graphic tool to resize image and optimize it to be used on the web.
• When publishing a document from Google Docs to my Wordpress blog, Google Docs doesn’t insert my Document title as the post title and Tags as categories.

Even with limitations I will be using Google Office suite for my daily needs as it promises easy sharing, collabration, hassle free storage and publishing.

After disliking camera phones and people using camera phones for a long long time, I finally gave up and bought myself one. I am totally in love with my new camera phone. I love it for making things so easier. I can plugin my phone and share pictures and videos with the world. It is time for me to install some nice software to organize these audio, video and image files. Specially I am looking for some tool to organize image files and upload them to Flickr.

Unfortunately there is no plenty of such tools. I only found Picasa and F-spot. Picasa is Google’s proprietary software, I don’t mind using proprietary software but it is too slow, cluttery and doesn’t match with the rest of the environment. I don’t like installing software if they are not available via synaptic. But the lack of good alternates forced me to try Glimmr and Gnickr. Glimmr installed but I can not do anything with it as the program freezes often, doesn’t connect to my flickr account and crashes whenever I try to use anything in the Go menu. I installed the deb package for Gnickr but was unable to launch it for some unknown reasons.

Now my only choice is F-spot ubuntu’s photo management utility with the release of Edgy Eft(ubuntu 6.10). I am using Dapper Drake (ubuntu 6.06 LTS) so I had to install F-spot via synaptic.

The problem I am facing with F-spot is that I would prefer adding tags in a much more easier way. I just want to select an image right click and enter all the tags I want. F-spot also comes with some pre defined categories. May be I will learn how to do these things easily with f-spot after using it for sometime.

Right now I am using Nautilus to manage photos on my hard drive. It is much easier that way. Though I am unable to tag images but I can save them in different folders and nautilus’ default preview generation makes it easy to browse these galleries. There is a Nautilus script available to upload images to flickr directly from the file manager, but I was unable to try it as the script depends on a perl module and that perl module has other dependency issues.

After spending sometime looking at the available tools for photo management on Ubuntu I have made a set of features that I want from my ideal photo management utility:

1. There is no need to import and make copies of image files stored on my computer.
2. Tagging should be simpler. The application should use xml and save meta data inside the image.
3. Clicking on a image provides me a menu to fill meta data information such as camera used, date picture taken, whether its a modified or an original version, who owns this image, tags, notes, comments, etc.
4. Image editing is a plus but it should be simpler. I would rather use image editing applications to create different versions of image.
5. Uploading to flickr or web albums should be easier.

Update: I tried Digikam with Kipi-plugins under Gnome desktop environment. Unfortunately it needs Konqueror to communicate with Flickr.