My Ubuntu Blog

Google Chrome arrived and I had to log on MS Windows to see how it works. I am so impressed that I don’t really feel like going back to Ubuntu and use Firefox. I have installed Windows Vista, which has Aero theme. I use Chrome and the world is beautiful again.

Honestly, I don’t like Microsoft Windows much. Previously I had trouble getting it configured for my internet, graphics and audio settings. It is just too much work with windows, I thought. But may be I was a little bit too biased towards freedom. I had this feeling that I am a software freedom fighter, I can not use Windows. But I am starting to think differently now.

If I use Windows I have Aero which looks 10 times better than Gnome with compiz and it has Google Chrome which is faster than Firefox and works like a charm.

These new things make me feel good. The graphics aren’t ugly, I have the same visual effects on Ubuntu too but they don’t look that good. Gnome’s interface that I have loved so much, now looks childish and boring. The simplicity has gone to a point where it feels like an insult to the human intelligence.

The windows are too big they take a lot of screen space. The fonts are ugly. Definitely Ubuntu has better support for Urdu Language but Vista is not that bad either. Using Vista I can use the new VLC media player that uses QT and has good looking interface.

I tried searching the Gnome website to see if they have any plans to give me something thats more beautiful than Mac OS X, Vista and KDE4. But I don’t think they have any plans to bring something modern and new for at least a few more decades. I can go for KDE4, and I did. I tried it with opensuse. But it crashed so often and after a week of trial I gave up. I tried KDE4 on ubuntu and the result was the same.

Developers at Gnome should think about improving their simplicity. Give me an intelligent user interface that is smarter than me. Give me better fonts. Don’t fill my screen with thick windows, fat buttons, and king size Icons. The KDE folks if they read it, please make it available for Ubuntu and make rock solid. Every body hates to see the crash handler poping up now and then. and I want VLC with QT ASAP.

Please bring me back to the free world. Please bring something exciting and modern.
BTW, after finishing this post I am going to try KDE for windows and see how it works. It might be unstable like hell but I want to do try it anyways.

Note: I haven’t completely switched to Windows yet. I am just jealous.

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.

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 a 4 year old niece, Minahil. She has an interest in my computer. Her parents don’t own a computer at home, so whenever she is visiting us with her mom, she likes to sit with me when I am working and ask me questions. I am not an education expert and don’t know how to teach basic computing skills to young children. So I am trying it on my own by allowing her to learn on the basis of her likes and dislikes, easyness and difficulty level and other things. She can differentiate betweeen Xubuntu, XP and Ubuntu and she thinks that Ubuntu is the coolest “System”. She can find Alphabates on the keyboard and type slowly, She also likes to use TuxPaint but finds it difficult to control the mouse. I can not understand how to teach her about the mouse. May be the mouse we have is too big for her little hands? Or may be children of her age can not learn how to keep their eyes on the screen and move the pointer? I hope we will soon get over it.

I downloaded her Klettres but she lost interest in it very soon. She has already mastered the alphabate. Now I needed something that teaches how to group things, identify things, introduces to the concepts of sizes, shapes, measurements, numbers, addition and substraction.

Childsplay in Ubuntu Dapper’s repository came with only two games. One is a Memory Card game and the other is a letter game. Minahil played and enjoyed them both but they were too childish for her. She learnt them quickly but the sounds and graphics kept her interested. I realized that children like to repeat things alot.

I checked out Childsplay’s original website, and found that there are several other games available. But it didn’t explain how to add other games. The link to the documentation page didn’t work. I figured out that may be these other games are available as plugins and checked out the project’s sourceforge files. I downloaded plugin files but later found that Ubuntu has Chilsplay installed on a different path. Now I opened synaptic and found that the same plugins package is also available in synaptic. Downloaded it again, this time with synaptic. It taught me once again that I should first look for packages in Synaptic.

So now we have some more games to play with, I haven’t played them with Minahil yet but I am sure that she is going to love them all. There are games that are not for Minahil’s age and skills and I am still looking for ways to teach my little fairy how to use computer as a learning tool. If anyone of you knows about some good online resource on this topic, please let me know.
Tags: Education, Children.

So many people complained to me that they do not enjoy gaim because it does not supports Yahoo! web cam. Personally I don’t like web cams, but there are so many people out there who love to use Yahoo! messenger with web cam support. I wanted to assure people that they can chat with their Yahoo buddies and with Web Cams, this led me to search for an Instant messenger that supports Yahoo Web Cams and is available on Linux and I found GYachE.

It has all the features of Official Windows Yahoo Client and then some more. It is a little buggy at the moment. Like whenever someone invites me for voice chat I get disconnected from Yahoo servers. Popup menu that appears when someone right clicks disappears as soon as I remove my finger from the mouse button. So I need to hold it until I select an option from the menu. The extra information that it displays in a Chat window is really annoying specially when one is in a crowded chat room. Documentation on official site is empty and there no FAQs or Wiki. To get information about troubleshooting you will have to join their mailing list.

With all these minor issues, I still think that it is quite usable.

I downloaded the deb package for Ubuntu Dapper and installed it. Once logged in and joined a Yahoo! Chatroom, I instantly noticed the enhanced spam protection which is a blessing since usually there are quite many spam bots on all popular yahoo chatrooms spamming users with spam instant messages. I do not have a web cam so I decided to check the performance of Web Cam feature by viewing some one’s web cam. I don’t have any one on my Yahoo messenger buddy list with a web cam. So I had to request strangers to show me their web cam. This was difficult and I felt awkward but I needed to write this post so this was required. Some guy kindly showed me his webcam which worked quite well.

So I think now I can tell people that they can use Yahoo! web cam on Ubuntu. It is not as good as in Windows, but its there waiting to be polished.

We have recently made little but very significant progress toward the translation of Ubuntu in Urdu. When I joined the Ubuntu community, we already had Ubuntu Pakistani Team and Ubuntu Urdu Translators team. Both had a few members, bad Wiki pages and no community leaders at all. Following the guidelines provided by Ubuntu I stepped into the role of community leader and made the following changes:

• Improved the wiki pages for Ubuntu Urdu Translators and Pakistani teams.
• Persuaded the Canonical and got a mailing list for Ubuntu Urdu translators.
• Encouraged the teams to actively take part in the translation efforts.
• Discussed the collabration with Gnome Urdu Translation group.
• Encouraged the team to adopt a goal oriented strategy.

Currently I am involved in the translation of some templates on Ubuntu. I will be spending more time on developing a small software to assist Urdu Translators everywhere to find out the translations of most commonly used terms and phrases and add new translations. This project will provide a web interface to search for an English term and provide its translation in Urdu. It is not a dictionary but a word bank where any one can deposit, change, improve and look up for translations. With this project in action, I am hoping to see great improvements in the quality and progress of open source software translations in Urdu. Every one is invited to join the team or start translating templates without joining the team. Below are some links that would help new contributors get started:

• Ubuntu Urdu Translation Templates
• Ubuntu Urdu Translators Team
• Ubuntu Urdu Translators Mailing list

Once you have Ubuntu GNU/Linux installed and you find it useful then it is the time for you to consider ways to contribute in Ubuntu. Ubuntu Wiki now has a detailed page Contribute to Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is most of all a community. All of the software, artwork and documentation in Ubuntu has been created, tested, used and discussed openly by people around the world participating in the Open Source community made possible by the Internet. Anyone who uses Ubuntu is part of this global community, and we invite you to help shape Ubuntu to better meet your needs. To make it yours!

Here is a list of how I am contributing to Ubuntu GNU/Linux. It is not much comparing to what so many others are doing for the community. But I think showing off contributions is one way to inspire others specially those who are un-familiar with open and free software philosophy.

• The easiest way to contribute is to use Ubuntu. I am using it for five months now.
• I have distributed Ubuntu Linux CDs to some friends. Successfully convinced one of them to use Ubuntu at home.
• I am spreading the word on Ubuntu by blogging and writing about my Ubuntu experience on various local forums.
• Currently I am trying to improve the out of box Urdu support in Ubuntu. I am trying to get in touch with MOTU’s and Developers.

I am also a member of Urdu Translators and Ubuntu Pakistan Teams. Not much progress going on in both of these teams I think we don’t have good leaders to motivate rest of the team members. We need to organize small events in Pakistan to promote Ubuntu particularly for schools, Internet Cafes, small businesses and home users. We also need translators for Urdu translation of Ubuntu. I want to do lots of things but it seems like may be I am over excited or the other community members are busy somewhere else.