There are many issues with Firefox, it takes a lot of memory, it is slower and does not fit well into over-all desktop environment. On the other hand, Google Chrome fits well into Gnome since it has an option to use either default theme or the GTK Theme. Chrome’s GTK theme fits perfectly well and attempts to blend in beautifully. It is much faster and uses less memory than Firefox.

As you all know Google is working on releasing an Open Source operating system of its own which is currently called ChromeOS. A sneak preview of this operating system can be seen here. Those who want to try its very early alpha builds should follow these instructions.

ChromeOS is basically a browser based operating system that uses the web as its hard disk. It is focused around working on the web. Google already has many tools available that will be part of this operating system. Such as Gmail which will be used as the email client, Google Docs will be used as an office suite, Picassa as photo manager, gtalk as instant messaging client, and so on.

This operating system will have linux at its core and the web browser, Chromium or Google Chrome. So may be this is the reason that Google Chrome performs better on Ubuntu Linux.

I have started feeling that may be I am using two operating systems at once. Google OS and Ubuntu Linux. I am using Google Chrome to access Gmail, Google Docs, Gamil Chat, Google Search, and keeping in touch with my social networks. I use Google’s Picassa photo manager. I ocassionally use Movie Player to watch movies, I use Empathy for voice chat with my gmail contacts. So basically I use Google OS components more than I use default desktop applications. So can I say that I am actually using Google Operating System on Ubuntu Linux platform?

1. Fast

Ubuntu uses a new technology called Upstart which has significantly improved the bootup performance. Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala is fast. On start up it quickly boots up and takes you to your working space, the desktop. It comes with Firefox 3.5.4 web browser which is much faster than the previous versions of Firefox. Tuxradar posted an interesting video showing Microsoft’s Windows Vista, Windows 7, Ubuntu 9.04 and Ubuntu 9.10 booting up. Ubuntu 9.10 wins the race.

2. Good looking

Ubuntu 9.10 comes with many visual improvements. Animated boot splash, compiz visual effects, better font rendering, default theme improvements and improvements in Gnome’s user interface. All these changes give Ubuntu 9.10 a much sleeker and visually pleasing look of a modern Operating System.
Screenshot 1 (OpenOffice Writer):

Screenshot 2 (Compiz visual effects):

3. Secure and Reliable

Ubuntu is a Linux based Operating System. It is generally considered to be much less vulnerable to security threats such as malware, adware, viruses and trojans. It comes with Firefox to make your browsing even more secure and better. Also Ubuntu offers free updates. These updates are not offered for the operating system alone. Ubuntu offers updates for each and every software installed on your machine. In Ubuntu’s default installation, update manager is configured to notify you when ever there are updates available for you to install. Using Ubuntu you can spend more time working without worrying about security problems.

Screenshot 3 (Update manager):

4. Amazing software

Ubuntu is an Open Source operating system and it comes with the greatest Open Source applications. Unlike other Operating Systems which come only with a limited default set of a few very basic applications. Ubuntu comes with Open Office suite, instant messaging, photo manager, media player and Gimp image editing program. It also comes with Ubuntu Software Center which is a great way to browse through the thousands of free software offered by Open Source community.

Screenshot 4 (Software Center):

5. All of this is free
All of this is free for you to download and install.

Migrate to Ubuntu

You must have heard from people that installing Linux is difficult. Yes they are right, But they forget to tell you that Linux based Operating Systems come in many flavors from many distributions. Ubuntu is a distribution that gives importance to ease of use. Hence, Downloading and Installing Ubuntu is a piece of cake. In fact Ubuntu’s installer is easier than MS Windows. In six easy, well designed, well described and well documented steps you can install Ubuntu with in 15 to 20 minutes. You can download and burn a CD image, then you can try Ubuntu with out making any changes to your current Operating System. Or you can try Ubuntu from with in your MS windows installation.

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.

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.

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.

Ubuntu is not just free, it is better too. As I mentioned in my earlier post that Windows XP and Vista fail to detect my hardware during a default installation. Ubuntu detects and configures all my hardware in the default installation. With Ubuntu Feisty I wasn’t able to use amazing visual effects. I had to apply a hack to do that and even then the effects were not at all plea sent. But now, Ubuntu Hardy Heron takes full advantage of my hardware and compiz effects are enabled by default and they work fantastic.

This new version of Ubuntu has Firefox 3 Beta 4 installed as default web browser. This was my first time trying Firefox 3. I didn’t like the way it suggests URI’s as I type something in the address bar and I can not install Google’s browser sync plugin, I hope there is a work around to get it working. But for the first time Firefox looked like a well integrated part of Ubuntu.

There is a new tool called “Hardware Testing” accessible from Applications > System Tools. This little wizard attempts to detect your hardware, prepares a report and you can then send this report with your launchpad email address. I think it is a great way to collect information about user hardware and help them troubleshoot common problems.

Hardy Heron also has a new tool to manage “Passwords and Encryption Keys”. Which helps you create and manage your PGP and SSH keys, cache your pass phrases and encrypt/decrypt your clipboard content.

The Language support for Urdu remains like it was in previous version. I had to go through a well practised procedure to enable my computer for Urdu. It is quite easy for me to do that but for new Ubuntu users it is still difficult. I wish that Ubuntu makes ttf-Nafess (already available in the main repository) installed by default and the Urdu/Pakistan keyboard layout should be replaced by this one. The default Ubuntu Urdu/Pakistan keyboard layout has its keys placed differently and new users find it difficult to use and eventually they replace it with the one I mentioned above.

The release notes mentioned Inkscape, which made me and others believe that it would be installed by default. But it is not installed by default in this beta version. It may be available by default in the final release. The final stable version will be available in April 2008.

Overall I am very pleased with Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron Beta, I used Dapper for a very long time and I loved it. I hope that Hardy will be even better than the Dapper and will help me convert more people to freedom.

More screenshots:

I have tried a few Linux distros and of course Microsoft Windows and I can say confidently that Ubuntu’s installation is the easiest and the best. All my hardware works out of the box like they were made for Ubuntu (They were not actually my hardware is very Windowish). This time, I was now trying to install Debian (testing) on one of the remaining partitions on my hard disk. Debian’s net install cd booted just fine but failed to deal with my CD-ROM drive. I was asked to provide drivers for it or manually select a driver. I didn’t have a floppy with drivers and none of the Debian drivers worked. After spending a few hours to get the installation media work, I finally gave up and opted to install from USB flash drive. Once again for some unknown reasons I failed to boot from USB.

Then I tried to install Debian from hard disk and it worked smoothly. I think you can install Debian from any operating system but not from an NTFS partition. In my case, I installed it from Ubuntu and it was much easier this way because Ubuntu itself is a GNU/Linux/Debian based operating system. Instructions to do that are available on the official Debian Installer Manual (Debian Installer Manual’s instructions are not Ubuntu specific but it does not matter). I would just try to make it a little more simpler. Please note that there are many other ways to do this, it will be a good idea to review other methods before trying this one.

In this example we are trying to Install Debian tesing. You need to download:

• initrd.gz
• vmlinuz
• debian-testing-i386-netinst.iso

Place these three files in /boot/newinstall directory. Now open Grub menu.lst located at /boot/grub/menu.lst with your favorite text editor.

Scroll down until you see something like this:


title Ubuntu 7.10, kernel 2.6.22-14-generic
root (hd0,6)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22-14-generic root=UUID=3599efe8-de32-4c9f-aed1-33c1c61d4bdf ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.22-14-generic
quiet


Note the root (hd0,6) line this is the partition where your Ubuntu is installed. It could be different for you depending your partition location. And now, we are going to boot Debian Installer from here. Add the following lines to your Grub.lst file.

title New Install
kernel (hd0,6)/boot/newinstall/vmlinuz
initrd (hd0,6)/boot/newinstall/initrd.gz


Now save the file and reboot your computer and you will see Grub showing you “New Install” as an option in the menu. Select it to boot Debian Installer and install it.

There is a similar way to install Ubuntu from a GNU/Linux based operating system. You can also Install Ubuntu, Debian and many other Linux distributions from your Windows or anyother operating system by using UNetbootin. To be very honest, I am kind of surprised to find out the many ways to install freedom for my computing needs.

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.

I am not trying KDE 4.0 yet, I think it is still in development phase and since I am not an advanced KDE user I might find it difficult to use. Reading about KDE 4 at OpenSuse website and Kubuntu I feel that I might run into problem if I try to install it. DistroWatch weekly scares me further away in the featured story titled “Distributions and KDE 4:

KDE 4 is the start of something amazing and this is possibly the best definition of the current release – it’s here, it’s available, but it’s nowhere near ready for the prime time. It’s a decent start, though. So let’s give the KDE developers a round of applause for the courage to try something new and extraordinary, something that will eventually mature into a stable and reliable desktop environment we can all be proud to use on our computers.

Right now I have Kubuntu 7.10 and I am trying to get familiar with the K environment. I hope that KDE4 will be available with Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron which is a long term support release. It will be much safer and enjoyable to try KDE 4.0 then or may be I should wait till the release of KDE 4.1.

XFCE does not come with a system monitor utility like the one I had in Gnome. I used the utility to kill unresponsive processes. So how do we kill unresponsive programs using the terminal? To understand how Linux handles processes and how you can control them read this great article by Gary Sim (in plain English). Here is what I learnt from Gary’s article.

We need to know the process id of the program that is not responding. We find out process id or PID by running the command

ps aux

This command displays all running processes. Below are a few of the many running processes on my computer. The list is long so I am only showing you a few to give you an idea.

USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
nom 3006 0.0 0.3 2476 772 ? S 23:15 0:00 gnome-pty-helpe
nom 3097 0.0 4.0 16584 10348 ? Ss 23:23 0:01 gksu -u root /u
root 3102 0.0 0.4 3712 1068 pts/1 Ss+ 23:23 0:00 /bin/su root -c
root 3105 0.0 0.2 2256 592 pts/1 S+ 23:23 0:00 /usr/lib/libgks
nom 3321 0.7 3.2 14920 8364 ? Ss 23:44 0:01 mousepad


Now find out which one of them you want to kill. I want to kill the mousepad it has the PID 3321 and I kill it by running this command:

kill 3321

Just incase if this command doesn’t work you can try

kill -9 3321


I am very happy with XFCE. But I need to find out a nice and lite pdf viewer. Evince is great but how could I download evince without downloading so many gnome libs? There is an evince-gtk package in Debian experimental but I can not install it due to dependency issues.