Rastageeks provides a hacked driver for webcams. My webcam was listed on the Working Webcams webpage. The installation instructions were simple, and since I was familiar with adding third party repositories I had no trouble installing the debian packages. Running the module assistant installed the driver on my computer and now I was able to see it working in Ekiga.

But I don’t use Ekiga, I use Yahoo! Messenger, so it has to work with Yahoo. We have Pidgin (Gaim) installed by default in Ubuntu. But it does not support Yahoo webcams. I have seen webcams working on Gyachi but I didn’t like its cluttered interface. So I decided to try Kopete. KDE Wiki has a very helpful Kopete Webcam Support page. From there I found out that I need to download libjasper-runtime package to see my webcam working. Jasper Runtime package is called libjasper-runtime and is available from Ubuntu Archives so it was much easier to download and install it. After that I ran Kopete and by clicking on Settings > Configure > Devices I was able to see my webcam working. Fantastic!

I was pleased with the picture quality. It was much better than Windows, and what I saw on Yahoo! messenger installed on my Windows PC. But unfortunately Kopete does not support Yahoo Public Chatrooms. So I had to try Gyachi again. While trying to Install Gyachi, I came across more dependency issues. But these were no big issues, I simply had to install two packages libgpgme11 and libmcrypt4. Finally getting Gyachi installed, this is what I got:

I browsed the forums to find out a solution, I read about adjusting brightness, contrast and colors. I did that too, but nothing worked. I am still unable to use the web cam in Yahoo chat rooms.

Firefox is unable to resume downloads so I needed a download manager. I quickly found Gwget the download manager for Gnome and installed it. I copied the link of Alternate CD and pasted it in Gwget and now as I write this post I have downloaded 58% of Alternate CD.

What I liked most about Gnome download manager is that it has powerful preferences option where one can setup proxy settings. I didn’t really need to setup proxy settings as the Gwget automatically used my default Gnome settings but I think all open source products must have this option. While downloading a file Gwget nicely displays progress of download. Enabling all columns in preferences I found that I can download this 700 MB file in a few days. I have also downloaded a few movie clips using Gwget and I am very happy that I found it. It would be unfair if I don’t mention Ubuntu Blog which helped me find this great tool.

Tags: gnome, ubuntu, linux, download manager

Og Maciel expresses his desire to see Epiphany as the default browser with Gnome. He writes:

I could be wrong, but maybe all that it really need is a bit more love? Add a bit of “cosmetics” updates (a face-lift if you will) and some way to get to the more advanced properties for max tweakage et voilá! Sure I’m way out of my league here, but Epiphany, IMHO, has a lot of untapped potential!

I wrote about my experience with Epiphany and I do not agree with Og Maciel that it needs a face lift actually it is already looking as great as possible and lack of themes is not the reason why people prefer Firefox over Epiphany. I think it is lack of technical features that makes Firefox an ultimate choice. I think Firefox should have better integration with Gnome Desktop environment.

Tags: ubuntu, linux, gnome, firefox, browser

I checked Add New Applications and found “KcolorChooser”, a utility which is part of KDE graphic utilities but you can install it on Gnome aswell. It comes with another utility called “Kcolor Edit” which is another great utility to replace and edit the color pallete. After downloading and installing these two tools I added Kcolor Chooser in my panel and now I can easily access it from anywhere and pick colors from any part of my computer screen.

Tags: ubuntu, graphics, linux, KDE

• Tabs, you can open multiple files in the same window using tabs. This feature adds great productivity to Gedit and makes it a great choice for people who work a lot on text files, HTML, css, php. etc. Switching between documents, saving and closing documents becomes a lot more convenient.
• Syntax highlighting C, C++, Java, HTML, XML, Python, Perl and many others.
• Spell Check
• Plugins

There is no doubt that developers made the perfect decision by making Gedit the default text editor in Ubuntu.

I used Gedit for a while but then I switched to leafpad which is another text editor which is a lot more similar to notepad. Unlike Gedit, leafpad is fast. Since I don’t work with many text files at once and I don’t work much with HTML, PHP, CSS, etc. So syntax highlighting is not necessary for me. As far as spell check is concerned I use blogger’s spell check interface for that. My needs gave leafpad an edge over the perfect choice that is Gedit and I switched. This is what I am loving about Linux, you can modify things to meet your needs.

Tags: ubuntu, linux, gnome, gedit, leafpad

I love Open Source because it makes me a part of a community. A community eager to help each other. There are lots of support options for almost every Open Source software. There are online forums, wikis, mailing lists, IRC channels and free manuals and books available on the web. I Googled for Linux, Ubuntu and Open Office and found these three great resources:

• Introduction to Linux
• Unofficial Ubuntu Starter Guide for 5.10 Breezy
• Tutorials for Open Office

Tags: ubuntu, linux, open office

Most windows users who are new to Linux would find anything that involves terminal as a highly advanced and unreliable way to do some thing. They would prefer Synaptic because it has an interface, it shows valueable information about packages before installation and it is easy to use.

Unfortunately, most Ubuntu Wiki Documentation pages do not mention that the packages they are instructing us to apt-get can also be installed using Synaptic. When I was first trying to get media files work on Ubuntu, I failed to apt-get install gstreamer plugins and then I wasted so much time to figure out what media players would work for me. Later I found that I can download all gstreamer plugins using Synaptic.

May be there are some strong reasons behind using apt-get through out the documentation pages but I can not figure them out.

Tags: ubuntu, linux, debian

VLC GTK+

VLC multimedia player is a crossplatform multimedia player from Video Lan. It plays MPEG, MPEG2, MPEG4, DivX, MOV, WMV, QuickTime, mp3, Ogg/Vorbis files, DVDs, VCDs, and multimedia streams from various network sources. If you have universe and multiverse repositories enabled. You can download it from Applications > Add Applications > Sound and Video.

Real Player 10

Real Player is a streaming sound and video player from RealNetworks. RealNetworks does not allow redistribution of their software. Therefore, this package requires the user to fetch the real player archive separately from their web site. Here is how I installed Real Player:

Download the package realplayer_10.0.6-0.0_i386.deb OR realplayer_10.0.6-0.1_i386.deb to your Desktop. You will also need a support package libstdc++5 to successfully install Real Player.

cd ~/Desktop
 sudo apt-get install libstdc++5
 sudo dpkg -i realplayer_10.0.6-0.0_i386.deb

OR

cd ~/Desktop
 sudo apt-get install libstdc++5
 sudo dpkg -i realplayer_10.0.6-0.1_i386.deb

Depends on which realplayer package you downloaded. Just incase if you fail to apt-get libstdc++5 you can try installing it from Synaptic.

Thats all I have on my computer to enjoy music and videos in non-free formats.

Ubuntu by default restricts direct root account login to make Ubuntu more secure. Default user can take all the actions as super user (user with root or super user priviledges) by providing password whenever needed. You do not need a password to launch and use applications but you do need password when playing around with System Tools, Administration and some tasks in Preferences. Ubuntu documentation clearly states that it is highly recommended not to allow root to login graphically. But isn’t open source software means freedom? Yes it does and if you enjoy freedom by taking risks then you can enable root login via graphical interface. In Gnome, Open System –> Administration –> Login Screen Setup. Click on the security tab and check Allow root login. I am doing great with out enabling root login and I find it quite fun to have full control without switching between sessions.

Default user can run all the Administrative tasks using terminal aswell as Graphical interface for different utilities. Below are a few examples of using sudo in various ways:

To copy paste a file in a directory where you can not normally paste anything without sudo priviledges. For example, when adding fonts into share directory:

sudo cp /home/username/Desktop/fontname.ttf /usr/share/fonts

To launch any application with super user privileges do this:

gksudo gedit

The above given command opens Gedit, default text editor in Ubuntu. You can replace gedit with any other application you want to launch. You can launch your file browser and edit files which you can not normaly edit without super user privileges:

gksudo nautilus

Your password is stored by default for fifteen minutes after this time you will be asked to re-enter super user/ root password.

Ubuntu Wiki has detailed information about using the sudo and root account.