My Ubuntu Blog » Gnome

How do I Modify Notification Area? – Ubuntu 8.10

Noumaan — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 05:11:50 +0000

How do I modify notification applet so that it only notifies me about things that I want to be notified about. For example I don’t want it to display notifications about network connection but I want it to display notification when there are updates available to install.

Totem Youtube Search and Play Plugin

Noumaan — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 14:04:26 +0000

I recently started using Totem movie player. Before that, VLC was my prefered media player on Ubuntu and Debian. It is still default media player on my Windows partition. But on Linux I think Totem is wonderful. I love the simplicity of Totem’s interface. Which is weird because in past I disliked Totem for the same interface but after using it a while I have become a fan. The interface is not only simple, it is also very intuitive. Totem is also feature rich in its own Gnomish way.

I specially liked Totem’s Youtube video search and play plugin. It looks fantastic, you can search and play youtube videos right inside Totem and it works great with Ubuntu 8.10. I loved it but I don’t think I will be using it that much. Totem also has BBC video plugin but unfortunately I failed to connect to the BBC servers.

Screenshot Totem's YouTube plugin - Click to enlarge

While watching videos on YouTube you can read description provided by the uploader, you can read comments, add yours, add the video to favorites and do lots of other cool things. It is currently not possible to do all these things in Totem. You can add a video to a playlist in Totem and save that playlist on your computer, but what about the playlists I have on my youtube account?

I think some added features will make this plugin more interesting for users. Like for example the description and comments could be displayed just like it displays related videos in an extra tab on the sidebar when a video is played.

I am also thinking how one can add other video sites to totem?

Bring Me Back To Freedom

Noumaan — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 22:09:20 +0000

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.

Troubleshooting Volume and Sound Card Configuration in Debian

Noumaan — Mon, 07 May 2007 14:12:26 +0000

I had a problem with gnome-volume-control. It didn’t save my volume control settings and displayed a mute sign on every startup.

While trying to solve this issue, I did something (I don’t remember what it was) that totally messed my sound configuration and now gnome-volume-control stopped working at all. Today I solved this problem and thought that I should write it here may be some one would find it useful. Please note that these instructions are written for Gnome. You can use these settings for KDE too but for that you will have to set sound system to use Alsa.

The first step is to make sure that you have following packages installed:

alsa-base
alsa-source
alsa-tools
alsa-tools-gui
alsa-utils

ALSA is Advanced Linux Sound Architecture. It provides sound drivers and provides audio and MIDI functionality to Linux Operating System. With the above packages installed we are now equipped to move on. Now start the Terminal and run:

# alsaconf

Remember that # sign tells you that the command should be entered with super user privileges.

This command will start a wizard ‘Alsa Configurator’ to assist you configure your ALSA settings. Read and follow the instructions, they are self explanatory and you just need to press the enter button on your keyboard. This script automatically closes gnome-volume-control and a notification appears informing you about that and asking you whether or not you want to reload gnome-volume-control applet. Choose Don’t load or do nothing and press the Reload button when you are done with Alsa Configurator script.

Now if you pressed the Don’t load button then you will have to start gnome-volume-control. I will tell you only the easiest way. Move your mouse to the panel, right click and select Add to Panel and then add Volume Control applet. Double click the volume icon on your panel and set the sound. Don’t worry we are going to test it later.

Exit volume control and type

# alsactl store

now run

# speaker-test

You hear the sound?

Yes: Thats good now close the terminal to get rid of this annoying noise. You can now set your volume control settings to your desired levels.

No: Try again, reboot your system and they try to play some music or sound files. Sound doesn’t work at all? Then I suggest you read the expert advise. If the expert advise is too difficult for you to follow then you should try Debian IRC chat room for help.

Using Terminal as FTP Client

Noumaan — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 13:36:47 +0000

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


and then:

$ 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

Photo Management Applications

Noumaan — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 12:30:28 +0000

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:

There is no need to import and make copies of image files stored on my computer.
Tagging should be simpler. The application should use xml and save meta data inside the image.
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.
Image editing is a plus but it should be simpler. I would rather use image editing applications to create different versions of image.
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.

Deleting Unwanted Files

Noumaan — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 22:20:47 +0000

Recently I realized that the Disks utility was showing 8.6 GiB consumed on my Ubuntu partition (I have Xubuntu installed on another partition and have one FAT partition). I decided to free up some disk space by deleting temporary files. I found that there is no tool in Dapper to automate this process. There is a tool for KDE called ‘Kleansweep‘ and also there is a feature specification on launchpad to integrate a similar tool in Ubuntu. But right now Dapper users should do it manually relying on Google and their own instincts to decide what is safe to delete and what could break their system’s stability.

To free up disk space we need to delete unnecessary files. But where are these files and how do I know that it is safe to delete them? I have found that it is safe to delete files in /home/username/.thumbnails/normal and /home/username/.thumbnails/fail folder.

It is also safe to delete the downloaded packages in /var/cache/apt/archives I personally don’t like to delete these files. Infact I even copy and paste these files to a separate partition on my hard disk. Why? Because these files are the downloaded packages we install using apt (apt-get or synaptic). If we uninstall a package and then later decide to reinstall it we will have to download it again which consumes time and bandwidth. But if you are not like one of those people who install and uninstall software on a daily basis without need or reason then it is safe to delete these files.

You can also free up disk space by emptying browser cache, saved chat files, old log files, etc.

Have we cleaned all unnecessary files? I don’t think so. I really think that there should be an easy to use application to do this job.

Gnome Applets for Newbies

Noumaan — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 09:09:34 +0000

Applets are little applications that sit on your panels and make things easier for you. In Ubuntu, your default Gnome Desktop comes equipped with some very useful applets pre-installed but not activated by default. People who are absolutely new to Ubuntu and Gnome desktop are usually unaware of these applets and it takes sometime before a newbie finds them.

It is easy to drop and activate one of these applets by right clicking on an empty space in your panel and selecting “Add to Panel…“. This will open a new window displaying some applets and providing you an interface to create your own application launchers and custom application launchers. Listed below are the descriptions of some of the applets I use on my panels.

Network Monitor Applet
As the name suggests, this little utility helps you monitor the status and activity of your network connections. It displays a network activity indicator icon which you can move around your panel. Clicking the icon would display your connection properties and a button to configure your connection.
Run Application…
This applet provides you an interface to quickly run your commands, applications and do lots of other useful things using a command line. It is very useful when you want to quickly run an application with super user privileges (gksudo), or when you want to quickly run a command without launching Terminal.
Deskbar Applet
This is an all in one Desktop search utility for your Gnome Panel. Using Deskbar, you can search your computer and the web in many ways. You can look up for a word in dictionary, search for it on Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Amazon, Answers, and ebay. This all in one action bar is quite enough and it saves your panel space but If you don’t want to use Deskbar then you can always add Address Book search, Dictionary Lookup and Search for files applets on your panel.
Battery Charge Monitor
For laptops there is a useful Batter Charge Monitor Applet. Which monitors your laptop’s remaining power, presents it in a nice format and notifies you about the battery status.
Separator
There is a little separator utility which helps you organize your panel applets and launchers by adding separators between them.
Not so Useful Applets
To balance the overwhelming usefulness of applets, you have some not so useful applets as well. You have Geyes a set of eyeballs for your panel and Wanda the contemporary Oracle. Wanda is a fish that lives on your desktop and keeps you informed about future. Remember, Wanda has no use what-so-ever. It only takes up disk space and compilation time, and if loaded it also takes up precious panel space and memory. Anybody found using it should be promptly sent for a psychiatric evaluation.

Feed Reader for Ubuntu

Noumaan — Sun, 08 Oct 2006 10:20:03 +0000

I need an RSS Feed reader. I would definitely like to use some web based tool, but currently no bloglines, Google reader or any other feed aggregator satisfies me. I need something with a very simple user interface, little or no advance features and rock solid support for all type of feeds. After looking around for sometime I shortlisted these four feed readers.

Akregator
Blam
Liferea
Straw

Akregator is great but it is made for KDE not for Gnome. I liked it a lot when I was testing Kubuntu but KDE is not my kind of environment and using akregator on Gnome is slow and you need to fetch lots of other kdelibs.

Blam! has a very simple user interface. No advance features for you to configure. It displays my feeds correctly. It has an icon that sits in the system tray, but unlike akregator or liferea this icon disappears when you close Blam window. I would like Blam to keep monitoring my RSS feeds and display a notification when there is something new to read.

Liferea is what people consider the best feed reader available on Ubuntu Linux. I do not agree with them. I added an RSS 0.92 feed and liferea didn’t display it according to the post’s publishing time. Blam displays the same feed correctly. Liferea beats Blam with its system tray icon and support for integrated browsing in tabs, just like akregator. It also has folders to organize your news feeds. It has a simple user friendly interface and the people behind this project are so nice that they have links to other RSS feed readers for Linux, right there on the front page of Liferea project. Followed the link to Straw I decided to install it.

Straw is similar to Blam. It is simple, easy to use and cute. It also has support for Categories. But it does not allow you to add a category while subscribing a new feed. You will have to select the feed later and then select categories. These categories are defined in preferences. Not a very usable approach.
I really want to use Blam because it displays my feeds correctly, but I also want to use Liferea because it has a system tray icon, folders and tabbed browser integration. I guess I will have to compromise on how Liferea displays one feed.

Whats New in Ubuntu 6.10

Noumaan — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 12:18:05 +0000

I am excited all over again on the new release of Ubuntu. Expected to be released next month but the beta version is currently availabe for download. It has:

Firefox 2.0 RC 1 (code named: Bon Echo):
- New Theme (Tangerine) and user interface have been updated to improve usability.
- It has inline spell check support in web forms.
- You can now restore session that crashed.
- Bebuilt in phishing protection, Phishing Protection warns users when they encounter suspected Web forgeries, and offers to return the user to their home page. Phishing Protection is turned on by default, and works by checking sites against either a local or online list of known phishing sites. This list is automatically downloaded and regularly updated when the Phishing Protection feature is enabled.
- Enhanced search engine management with built in OpenSearch support
- Improved tab support: By default, Firefox will open links in new tabs instead of new windows. Each tab will now have a close tab button and users who open more tabs than can fit in a single window will see arrows on the left and right side of the tab strip. Epiphany had these features since some time now. and I found them very useful. History menu will keep a list of recently closed tabs, and a shortcut lets users quickly re-open an accidentally closed tab.
- Improved support for previewing and subscribing to web feeds.
GNOME 2.16: I am currently using Gnome 2.14.3, so I checked out whats new in Gnome.
- Laptop support has improved with the integration of power management support. Since I don’t use a laptop so I don’t think that this tool would benefit me anyways. But it is quite obvious that it is going to help lots of other users.
- A new utility Baobab now displays Disk usage, available free space and other useful information about your hard disks. Particularly useful for me.
- Totem has new support for reading and writing XSPF playlists, an open standard allowing people to share playlists.
- You can now preview a screensaver in fullscreen. Just a few days ago I was showing screensavers to my younger brother we talked about this feature and now it is made available.
- You can now also use Reminder Notes from existing GroupWise accounts by using Evolution. I don’t use Evolution, I use Thunderbird + Gmail.
- Improvements in menus, graphics and eye candy.
OpenOffice.org 2.0.4 RC 2: I checked OpenOffice.org 2.0.4 RC 2, OpenOffice.org says “The software is not recommended for production deployment at this stage.” I am sure that Ubuntu maintainers had some solid reasons for this upgrade. Ubuntu Edgy Beta’s release notes mention this upgrade as “This is mostly a security and bugfix release, dealing with specific issues regarding sandboxing of Java applets and macros.”
F-spot has replaced gthumb. F-spot allows easy tagging, editing and uploading to various online photo websites, including Flickr. Hence, making the photo sharing easier.
Faster Boot and shut down with new Upstart – init. On my machine Ubuntu shut downs quickly but it takes a long time to boot. I have tried many solutions to improve this but still it is not fast enough.