My Ubuntu Blog

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.

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.

1. Akregator
2. Blam
3. Liferea
4. 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.

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.

During last few weeks I had been working on the Localization of Ubuntu and Gnome into Urdu. As part of Ubuntu Urdu Translators Team and Gnome Localization Project on UrduWeb, I spent my time organizing the teams and translating some files. I also made a tool Word Bank for Urdu software translators. This little utility acts as a glossary of terms used in software translations. Any one can add an English phrase and its translation in Urdu.

I didn’t get much out of the Ubuntu team, because:

• It is difficult to communicate with team members.
• Most team members are not very enthusiastic. I hardly see any reply from team members on the mailing list and even after several emails I failed to get them work on Rosetta.
• They don’t have the tools (ability to read and write Urdu on their computers) and knowledge (Working knowledge of English and Urdu languages) necessary to work on the project.

I tried my best to develop an interest and enthusiasm among team members but so far it hasn’t worked out the way I expected.

On the other hand UrduWeb already had a localization team and some very enthusiastic members when I joined them to get help with Ubuntu Translators. Admins at Urdu Web approved my suggestions and provided me the freedom to carry out my projects and helped me implement them. We are not seeing great progress on Urdu Web front either, but it is moving a head, slowly but steadily.

After the launch of Word Bank we sparked an interest and hope among Urdu Web Localization team members. We created a Localization Policy Guideline and I took responsibility to coordinate the team effort. We have also made a team to review the quality of translations on Word Bank and Gnome. The glossary we have made on Urdu Word Bank is the greatest achievement we have made so far. It is going to help lots of translators in the future. I am now working hard to get Gnome translated on UrduWeb and then I will upload those po files on Rosetta.

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

Support forums and Ubuntu Wiki are full of articles to help out people using Ubuntu Dapper on older machines. I am using Ubuntu Dapper with a 800 MHZ processor and 256 MB of RAM. Ubuntu runs well on my system it is not slower than my previous operating system (Windows XP) at least. But there are some tweaks that I made to make Ubuntu faster and more responsive. There is no scripting or writing difficult to understand commands in the shell involved in these tweaks and these minor tricks has improved performance of Ubuntu on my computer significantly.

1. I added a 280 MB of swap space during the installation. I had more disk space but I found that adding a big Swap space could have an inverse effect.
2. I use themes that use less cpu resources. I use customized Clearlooks theme, with atlanta window border and gnome icons.
3. I have stopped icons to appear in menus, to do that go to System -> Preferences -> Menus and toolbars uncheck “Show icons in menus” option and select ‘Text only’ in Toolbar button labels dropdown menu. Doing so I am not able to view icons but it improves overall system performance.
4. I have also made changes under Preferences in Nautilus. To do that open any location using Nautilus, go to Edit -> Preferences, in the view tab select List view as Default view instead of icon view. In the Preview tab I select never for all options. It stops nautilus to generate previews of files which saves time and makes nautilus even faster.
5. Instead of Gedit, I use mousepad which is similar to MS notepad. Mousepad lacks certain features such as syntax highlighting, tabs, spell check, etc. But this doesn’t mean that it is any less capable of handling files.
6. Right now I am having trouble with web browsers. I can not just settle on one. Firefox on my computer is terribly slow and I am developing a taste for Epiphany which is faster than Firefox but lacks certain features.
7. There are many other settings that one can change to make Gnome faster using Gnome Configuration Editor. For more information check out Improving Performance and Using Gconf sections in Gnome 2.14 Desktop System Administration Guide.
8. These guides also come with default Ubuntu Dapper installation available under System -> Help -> System Documentation but then again Yelp the Gnome help browser loads like a turtle. I would instead read the same pages on my web browser either from my hard disk or on the web.

Have a look at what I have done with my Desktop. I am using Gartoon icons and Baby Tux Blue background image. To change the looks of my Gnome Desktop environment all I need to do is to drag and drop amazing themes, backgrounds, icons and theme engines directly from Gnome Art to theme manager. Its simple and fun.