#Ubuntu-eg

bur a bud bud, sknaht rof eht burg

2010-06-11T03:16:00.002+03:00

For a while I've been thinking to myself, my bootloader looks so boring, I think it would look much better if I add some form of background, maybe that would spruce it up a bit.
So I did some googling and stumbled across a new loader called Burg (note Grub backwards hehe).

Installation couldn't have been any easier, in terminal type the following:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bean123ch/burg
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install burg burg-themes

once that's done, just reboot. In the event you don't see any changes, just run

sudo update-burg

then reboot.

Here is a sample theme made by our very own local Egyptian Ubuntu enthusiast Ahmed M. Abouzaid. Thanks a lot for that theme sir! :)

Oh, Ubuntu!

2010-05-19T03:35:00.000+03:00

...If you happen to be a linux fan and a fan of The Big Bang Theory series would have noticed, Sheldon Cooper, the self-proclaimed genius and nerd mentioning Ubuntu :)

Ubuntu Lucid Lynx Release Party Cairo, Egypt

2010-05-02T00:01:00.001+03:00

Ubuntu-eg is organizing the Ubuntu Lucid Lynx Release Party on Saturday May 8th at Cairo University. The release party will include installing the new Ubuntu release in addition to side items such as:

Facebook Event Link

Licensing and Free culture - Mohammed Gamal
How to install Ubuntu - Mohammed Saudi
Desktop programming using Qt - Ahmed Toulan
Desktop programming using GTK - Mohamed Habib
Drupal - AbdelRahman Ghareeb
Joomla - Jonathan
Graphic design using Inkscape - Anas Emad
Java programming on Ubuntu - Ahmed Saad
Open source 3D graphics using Blender - Islam AlWazery
Software Alternatives and Desktop walkthrough - Mahmoud Mohammed

Being an open invitation to the public, the event is promising to be useful, interesting and entertaining. See you there!

Do you Ubuntu like I do?

2009-10-20T17:42:00.003+02:00

Little poem I wrote towards my love for Ubuntu.

I'm gonna be King of Pride Rock.

2009-05-24T05:08:00.004+03:00

Not a lot of people know about this application made by Yahoo, and I'm sure a lot of those that do might have preferred not to use it since it's not GPL standard but YPL, or have seen alternatives such as thunderbird. But I do have to say that this is one app I find comforting to use, just for the sheer fact it has a nice interface, setup of email accounts are automagic and well I'm pretty much fed up from Thunderbird.

Installation is pretty straight forward, download Yahoo Zimbra Desktop and double click on it and it will start the installation procedure.

five mp3, six mp3, seven mp3 more. Icha bacha, soda cracker, Icha bacha boo. Icha bacha, soda cracker, more songs for Y-O-U!

2008-08-28T10:05:00.007+03:00

I constantly love to listen to trance, house and other forms of ambient-chill out grooves. But I've noticed that sometimes after you've converted your original cd into mp3's they've been split into their respective files. So you have each song in a separate file. But like me, and those who listen to trance and house will understand this, that when that's done and you play it on your mp3 player whether it be software or hardware, sometimes you dont have the "gapless playback" feature, so you get clips or pauses between each song, which is VERY annoying, let alone it distracts you from the focus you've had into the song transissions. So I decided to look for an mp3 merger...

Here is where mp3wrap comes in. It's available in your ubuntu repository so all you have to do is

sudo apt-get install mp3wrap

Notice mp3split is it's counterpart if you ever decide to want to split the tracks again, it will automatically detect you've had your mp3's merged with mp3wrap and resplit it once again.

then after that it's only a matter of entering the syntax to merge the mp3's. In my case for example I wanted to merge an ablum that had 13 songs, and were all in the correct order since I name my mp3's with track number first. So all I needed to do was enter the folder where my mp3's reside and:

mp3wrap mergedalbum.mp3 *.mp3

and that's it :) if you want to merge specific mp3's all you do is

mp3wrap mergedalbum.mp3 name_of_1st.mp3 name_of_2nd.mp3 name_of_3rd.mp3

and etc. you get the point.

The best flash a man can get

2008-08-22T11:55:00.005+03:00

Getting Adobe's latest Flash 10 development module installed.

Go to the flash 10 download site, and download the latest tar.gz file (which happens to be Flash Player 10 release candidate released on 8/11/2008).

Start Terminal:
sudo apt-get remove flashplugin-nonfree (This removes Flash 9)
wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/flashplayer10_install_linux_081108.tar.gz (This downloads the module)
tar -zxvf flashplayer10_install_linux_081108.tar.gz (This extracts the files)
cd flashplay10_install_linux
./flashplayer-installer
follow the instructions as normal, the average user will just say yes to the default options.

There I was just a-usin' my desktop, singin' "Gnome-Do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do"

2008-06-23T22:18:00.004+03:00

Almost everyone is using some form of docking bar such as AWN, Cairo dock and Kiba dock. But some of us would like a more practical alternative with less eye candy :)

Basically Gnome-Do is a nice little launcher application that is activated using the super key+space bar and when you start typing the name of the application or function it gives you possible actions. For example if you wanted to start firefox browser, you would just press the superkey+space bar then start typing Fi and intelligently the app will show you the first thing it picks up..

Installation is also pretty straight forward, and what's nice about this app is that you can add a plethora of plugins that have already been made to work with Do, such as being able to SSH or modify your pidgin status all but a couple of keystrokes away.

To be fair, most people might still say, "Yea but I like my dock it's got all the apps I need to run and it's got some nice effects". Ok I'll give you that part, granted. BUT Do offers a wider variety of being able to do things with a minimal amount of effort and clutter. Efficiency is key here and who doesn't like some efficiency with their morning cup of coffee :)

Préférez-vous que rouge ou blanc?

2008-06-17T00:57:00.004+03:00

... Don't worry I didn't forget about WINE (Wine Is Not An Emulator). Also a reminder that Wine 1.0 Final will be released on the same day as FF3. What a day, oh also I'm being put up for official Ubuntu membership on the same day :) nice eh? Let's hope with all what's going on, things work out well for me.

Wish me good luck.

I pledge to the flag of the United Firefox's of Mozilla

2008-06-16T03:58:00.003+03:00

Just a small reminder that Firefox 3 FINAL will be available for all supporting operating systems on June 17th, 2008 (That's tomorrow according to my timezone as of 3:53AM June 16th, 2008 :)

so don't forget to pledge and receive a reminder when the application has gone live!

Or just write a small script to refresh firefox's main download site every 3 seconds hehehe.

Hopefully with enough entries it will be entered officially in the Guinness Book of World Records for most downloaded application in one day.

So good luck to Mozilla and to all the Firefox fan boys out there.

How to undo an apt-get build-dep...

2008-06-14T08:24:00.003+03:00

Sometimes you might come across an application and may find that even though it is available in the repositories, the application itself is outdated or not updated as often in the repositories, so you might want to get your hands a bit dirty and walk a little bit on the wild side and download a subversion or a more recent tarball of that application.

Note for argument's sake I will pick an application that is quite commonly used for such procedures (aMSN), but any application installed this way can be then removed with a command line which will be clear to you by the end:

After you've downloaded and extracted the application, the prerequisits of doing so would have you type the following:

sam@sambuntu-desktop:~$ sudo apt-get build-dep amsnsudo apt-get build-dep amsn
...
What this does, is it downloads and configures dependencies for the source package that you will eventually compile and build.

you will then be presented with something similar to this:

...
Reading package lists... Done

Building dependency tree

Reading state information... Done

The following NEW packages will be installed:
debhelper dpatch gettext html2text intltool-debian libjpeg62-dev libpng12-dev libpthread-stubs0
libpthread-stubs0-dev libx11-dev libxau-dev libxcb-xlib0-dev libxcb1-dev libxdmcp-dev po-debconf
tcl8.5-dev tk8.5-dev x11proto-core-dev x11proto-input-dev x11proto-kb-dev xtrans-dev zlib1g-dev

0 upgraded, 22 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

Need to get 7332kB of archives.

After this operation, 23.5MB of additional disk space will be used.

Do you want to continue [Y/n]?
...

I will skip to the point where after you have followed instructions and did all what you need to do to install the tarball, you may decide that you want to get rid of all this including the updated version of the application and want to revert back to the one that in the repositories. Unfortunately apt-get does not have a way to "undo" all the dependencies installed, except for doing a search what dependencies were required or checking the dpkg logs.

But never fear, to get rid of all that, all you need to do is run this:

sudo aptitude markauto $(apt-cache showsrc amsn | grep Build-Depends: | sed -e 's/Build-Depends:\|,\|([^)]*)//g')

and all the dependencies that were installed, will be removed. there is no worry here since it will not remove cross linked dependencies and break other applications.

Just remember to substitute amsn with your application of choice :)

Cheese - Smile you're on candid camera!

2008-06-13T21:50:00.009+03:00

Many of you use webcams for one reason or other, but one of the most common uses other than having it enabled with your instant messenger such as aMSN, Skype, Mercury, is the fact that people like to take snapshots or self made video clips made by their webcams, to be able to attach them to emails, upload them to photo and video blog websites.

This is where Cheese comes into the picture (no pun intended hehe).

It's a pretty straightforward application where you have the option to take snapshot photos and record video, it even has the option to add special effects to your photos.

The following are self made screenshots and a video OGG file sample made using Cheese.

This is the initial startup screen for Cheese. I decided to take a nice snapshot of an Ubuntu 8.04 official CD.

Once you click, it actually does a nice little countdown and takes the snapshot with a little flash visual and shutter sound effect.

You can add visual effects from a selection of items.

The photo is then placed on the bottom, in a preview file placeholder.

I noticed that when I uploaded my video to Blogger, during the conversion something occurred and my video plays at a speedy Charlie Chaplin pace.

Deluge - The bittorrent client that could.

2008-06-12T01:56:00.004+03:00

For those that know me, are aware of the love I have for the bittorrent protocol, because it helps takes off bandwidth loads off servers that would normally be serving files and data directly. Besides, 10 dsl/cable users is way better than 1 T1 line :)

Alright enough of that, let's get to business.

I first heard of Deluge while I was using Feisty at the time. I was running µtorrent under wine (Yea Yea I know, why do it that way when there are native torrent clients available such as rtorrent/ktorrent/Azureus). But I wasn't satisfied enough with the features it provided, I had longed for a client such as µtorrent to swipe me off my feet and..ok I'm going off course.

Anyway, after some research I discovered a client called Deluge-Torrent. So I decided to try it out, I said to myself what's another client to try out anyway...

To be honest I didn't have my hopes up since the client I found to love wasn't even native to linux. But here's where it all turned for me.

All I can say is that Deluge is the µtorrent of Linux. Yes I said it. Ever since using it, I haven't gone to another client since. The features alone and it's lightweight stance is alone to knockout the competition out of the stadium. It's available to download for a bunch of operating systems. Just click your distro of choice (Ubuntu) and click the arch platform you want, in our case double click the .deb file, install it and it will appear under the Internet tab.

Samples of Deluge's Preferences Menu (Deluge 0.5.9.1 at the time of this post)

Blueman Project

2008-06-11T07:07:00.004+03:00

The Blueman Project developed by walmis caught my eye quite a long time ago ever since I was on a constant watch looking for new bluetooth applications being developed for Linux. My first use was at version 0.3 and currently it's at 0.5. I must admit that with this new version a number of new features were added either by request from the users or by logical deduction from the main developer himself.

People will ask, so what does this application have that the Ubuntu built in bluetooth manager doesn't have?

For starters it's a very rich application with the idea of having anything you want done via your bluetooth and mobile device can be done within one simple application. Setting up HID (Human Interface Device) which basically means I can use a bluetooth device such as a HID capable mobile phone to control my mouse movements for example. I own a SonyEricsson w300i clamshell phone, and after browsing the web, I came across HID templates for totem player and vlc, which I now control quite comfortably on my couch via bluetooth.

Downloading and installing is pretty straight forward on the author's website. So I won't be repeating how to do it here.

I will however post some screenshots of the latest version (currently 0.5)

Clicking on Browse pops up the nautilus file manager window, showing the phone's memory and memory card contents via bluetooth connectivity.