My O.S, Hardware and Computer Solutions

Bluetooth Obex Server

2010-05-24T01:19:00.000-07:00

The KDE Bluetooth Framework is a set of tools built on top of Linux' Bluetooth stack BlueZ. It provides easy access to the most common Bluetooth profiles and makes data exchange with Bluetooth devices like phones and PDAs as straightforward as possible.

Features:
* kbluetooth -- a tray applet to handle incoming inquiries
* kbtobexclient -- to send files via bluetooth
* kbluemon -- a bluetooth monitor
* kinputwizard -- a wizard to configure Input Devices
* kbluelock -- a bluetooth screen locker

X-CD-Roast a burner for Linux

2010-03-25T09:41:00.000-07:00

X-CD-Roast is a full X based CD-Writer-program and is the successor of cdwtools-0.93. It is a frontend for CD related programs like cdwrite and mkisofs

Feature list of 0.98alpha:

* Easy setup and intuitive X11 user interface
* GUI based on GTK+ instead of TCL/TK (100% new C-code)
* Copies most data/mixed-mode/audio-CDs (data also on-the-fly)
* Master data-CDs and rearrange audio-CDs (data also on-the-fly)
* Create your own audio-CDs (full Disk-at-Once support)
* Multisession/Bootable CD creation.
* Supports most SCSI/ATAPI/Parallel-CD-Writers available
* Supports different international languages
* CDDB-Lookups and CD-Text
* Online help
* Administration mode for usage in computer pools.
* Fully themeable via GTK-Themes
* Runs on most common Unix-Operation-Systems (Primary platforms: Linux and Solaris)

Alleyoop Memory Checker

2010-03-09T07:26:00.000-08:00

Alleyoop is a GNOME front-end to the Valgrind memory checker, including features like intelligently suppressing errors and launching editors at the error position in the source code.

Valgrind helps you to find memory-management problems in your programs. When a program is run under Valgrind's supervision, all reads and writes of memory are checked, and calls to malloc/new/free/delete are intercepted.

PalmOS Devices

2010-02-27T12:23:00.000-08:00

A Linux solutions for GNOME applet for management of your Palm PDA

gnome-pilot is a GNOME applet with a daemon that monitors for connections from a PalmOS-based device. It features a conduit system, although it contains only basic conduits.
gnome-pilot-conduits is recommended for a full set of conduits.

pilot-link is used to make the connection to the device, and as such, this package should work with serial devices, USB devices given proper kernel support, and with XCopilot. See the package documentation or pilot-link's documentation for more information on configuring various types of interfaces.

Classrooom control for Linux

2010-02-26T11:43:00.000-08:00

Get your solutions for Classroom management tool

Assists teachers in the management of a classroom with computers in the students desktops. It also gives to the student tools to share files and work in groups and send messages to the teacher or the other collegues.

This package has to be installed in the teacher pc and the students workstations. When using LTSP this package must not be installed inside the clients chroot.
Check the documentation for detailed instructions to set it up.

BASIC-256

2010-02-25T12:30:00.000-08:00

Here is a solutions to educational BASIC programming environment for children

BASIC-256 is an easy to use version of BASIC designed to teach young children the basics of computer programming. It uses traditional control structures like gosub, for/next, and goto, which helps kids easily see how program flow-control works. It has a built-in graphics mode which lets them draw pictures on screen in minutes, and a set of detailed, easy-to-follow tutorials that introduce programming concepts through fun exercises.

Homepage: http://kidbasic.sourceforge.net/

Anki

2010-02-24T08:38:00.000-08:00

Flashcard learning program with special support for Japanese

Anki is a program designed to help you remember facts (such as words and phrases in a foreign language) as easily, quickly and efficiently as possible. To do this, it tracks how well you remember each fact, and uses that information to optimally schedule review times.

While Anki can be used for studying anything, it also ships with special features designed to make studying Japanese and English easier: integrated dictionary lookups, missing kanji reports, and more.

Besides text, it supports sounds, images and rendering TeX snippets in the cards. Sample card decks are included for a subset of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test vocabulary and for some Russian vocabulary.

gscan2pdf

2010-02-23T11:25:00.000-08:00

Here is a solution for GUI to produce PDFs from scanned documents

Only two clicks are required to scan several pages and then save all or a selection as a PDF or DjVu file, including metadata if required.

gscan2pdf can control regular or sheet-fed (ADF) scanners with SANE via scanimage or scanadf, and can scan multiple pages at once. It presents a thumbnail view of scanned pages, and permits simple operations such as rotating and deleting pages.

PDF conversion is done by PDF::API2.
The resulting document may be saved as a PDF, DjVu, multipage TIFF file, or single page image file.

Album Shaper

2010-02-22T14:15:00.000-08:00

Photo album creator and photo manipulator

Album Shaper strives to be the most friendly, easy to use, open source application for organizing, annotating, framing, enhancing, stylizing, and sharing your digital photos. Album Shaper embraces open formats like XML, JPEG, and XSLT, while supporting Windows, Mac OS X, and Unix users who speak a multitude of languages around the world!
Two-layer albums can be created in a drag-n-drop interface which allows quick and easy arrangement and categorization of photos.

A few simple image manipulations such as rotation and flipping are provided to help you get your photos presentable as quick as possible.
Photos, collections, and albums themselves can be labeled as needed and modified at a later time by saving and loading from a simple XML format. Albums are exported as HTML which can then be posted directly on the web or viewed straight from your hard drive.

Album Shaper supports themes which means you can completely customize the look of the Albums you produce. Album Shaper is designed to help you share your photos with your friends and family as easily as possible, as well as update and maintain these Albums in the most efficient and easy way possible.

BatMon

2010-02-21T11:48:00.000-08:00

Battery monitor for GNUstep

Battery Monitor is a battery monitor for laptops. It displays the current status of the battery (charge/discharge and energy level) as well as some information about the general health of the cell.

Due to the way Battery Monitor is implemented it currently works only on linux 2.6 kernels with ACPI and that too reliably only on some acpi/bios combination (it is being worked on: the /proc file system is very inconsistent.) A user-contributed patch to make it work on FreeBSD has been merged in.

Klibido

2010-02-20T11:57:00.000-08:00

usenet binary grabber for KDE

KLibido is a KDE program to download encoded articles from the usenet news service, using the nntp protocol. It supports multiple servers, multiple download threads per server, automatic joining and decoding of articles.

KLibido is not a newsreader. It doesn't let you easily display the articles, only their subject, and it discards all non-binary posts. If you want a nice newsreader for KDE, try Knode.

Features include:

* Getting the group list and subscribe to newsgroups

* Getting headers, sorting, filtering by subject, state and "completeness"

* downloading and decoding of binary posts (including yEnc).

* Queue management: it's possible to drag and drop items around in the download queue to change the order of download, pause the queue, pause and cancel the items in the queue.

* Server priorities and balancing

* Requeueing: if an article fails on a server, it is automatically tried on the other servers.

* Viewing nfo's, covers, at all inside the program using kparts.

* Group categories and aliases

* .nzb support

* KLibido uses KDE and the KDE libraries for the interface, Berkeley DB for storing the newsgroups' headers, and UUDeview for decoding the posts.

CheckGmail

2010-02-19T20:23:00.000-08:00

For those of you who are Gmail users and would like to have a solution of mail notifier then try:

CheckGMail

CheckGmail is an alternative Gmail Notifier for Linux and other *nix systems. It is fast, secure and uses minimal bandwidth via the use of Atom feeds.

CheckGmail is a system tray application that checks a Gmail account for new mail. When new mail is present the tray icon changes, an optional animated popup is displayed and a tooltip displays the number and details of new messages. Configuration is GUI-based and the application is designed to be simple, elegant and unobtrusive.

Balsa a solution for your mail Client

2010-02-18T20:20:00.000-08:00

Balsa is a highly configurable and robust mail client for the GNOME desktop. It supports both POP3 and IMAP servers as well as the mbox, maildir and mh local mailbox formats. Balsa also supports SMTP and/or the use of a local MTA such as Sendmail.
Some of Balsa's other features include:
* Allowing nested mailboxes
* Printing
* Spell Checking
* Multi-threaded mail retrieval
* MIME support (view images inline, save parts)
* GPE Palmtop, LDAP, LDIF and vCard address book support
* Multiple character sets for composing and reading messages
* File attachments on outgoing messages
* GPG/OpenPGP mail signing and encryption
Support for Kerberos and SSL has been enabled in this package.

A Solution your download Manager

2010-02-17T08:16:00.000-08:00

My last post was about download manager on Linux. Well I have done my homework and found another good downloading software that I have tasted on my Debian Lenny 5.0 and worked fine. Try it, and give me a comment.

Axel

Axel tries to accelerate the downloading process by using multiple connections for one file. It can also use multiple mirrors for one download. Axel tries to be as light as possible (25-30k in binary form), so it might be useful as a wget clone on byte-critical systems.

This package provides a QT based graphical front-end as a wrapper around Axel

Aria download manager

2010-02-15T12:06:00.000-08:00

For your solution on downloads with linux please get:

Aria download manager.

The transfer can be paused, resumed, queued and saved. It has a very user friendly GTK based GUI, and useful log consoles. Program supports CRC checking, HTTP proxy server, cut-and-paste, drag-and-drop, and can define specific file retrieving procedure for particular web servers.

aMSN for Linux your solution for messaging

2010-02-14T13:22:00.000-08:00

Here is a solution for those of you using Linux as an operating system and want a program that is similar to MSN for windows:-

aMSN

A very nice MSN compatible messenger application. Works pretty much like its Windows based counterpart. Perfect for keeping in touch with those friends who have not yet seen the light.

some of its future are like:-

Offline Messaging
Group support
Webcam support and many more

For more information Please visit: http://amsn.sourceforge.net/

KTorrent for Linux

2010-02-13T08:41:00.000-08:00

For those of you who are newbies to Linux and are looking for a software that can do the same work as Bittorrent commonly used in Ms Windows then you can try:-

KTorrent

KTorrent is a BitTorrent program for KDE. You can use it to download and upload files on the BitTorrent network. This package contains the latest revision of KTorrent 2.2 series which is the last release for KDE3.

Additional KTorrent features include:

* uTorrent compatible peer exchange

* Zeroconf extension to find peers on the local network

* WebGUI plugin

* RSS plugin

* Grouping feature to put torrents into groups

* Downloads torrent files

* Upload and download speed capping

* Speed limits for individual torrents

* Internet searching using various search engines, you can even add your own

* UDP Trackers

* Port forwarding with UPnP

* IP blocking plugin

* Importing of partially or fully downloaded files

* Support for distributed hash tables (mainline version)

* Protocol encryption

* Bandwith scheduling

* Directory scanner to automatically load torrents in certain directories

* Trackers can now be added to torrents

* File prioritization for multi file torrents

* Option to fully preallocate diskspace to avoid fragmentation

* Diskspace monitoring, with option to stop torrents when diskspace is running low

* Statistics plugin

I hope this will be your download solution if you are new on Linux. I have tested it on my Debian Lenney 5.0 and also on OpenSuse 10.3, 11.0 and 11.1 and it works just fine.

GnuCash for your Linux Accounting Solution

2010-02-12T06:11:00.000-08:00

Well I decided before moving to another topic, I should give my readers another option for an accounting software to choose from if you are running Linux as an operating system.

GnuCash Finance Management

Gnucash can track finances in multiple accounts, keeping running and reconciled balances. It has an X based graphical user interface, double entry, a hierarchy of accounts, expense accounts (categories), and can import Quicken QIF files and OFX files.

I have tested this software on my GNOME Debian Lenny 5.0 and also on both KDE and GNOME on OpenSuse 10.3 ,11.1 and 11.2 and it works fine.

Another Accounting solutions

2010-02-11T04:00:00.000-08:00

As I had promised yesterday that I am going to give more solutions on accounting software to use on your Linux system which was to appear on my next post. Well I did my home work and here Is another software you can use and it works just fine.

HomeBank

HomeBank is a fast, simple and easy to use program to manage your accounts. It differs from gnucash for the better look and feel, and for the greatest start-up speed. It has a lot of features such as easy analysis with graphical charts (statistics, budget, overdrawn, car cost), multi-accounts support, budget management, reminder, import from OFX/QFX-CSV files, visual status of operations. It is based on GTK2.

I tested This software on my Debian Lenney 5.0 distro and it works fine, you can also get an Ms Windows version if you are running Ms Windows on your system.

Well For more information you can visit: http://homebank.free.fr/

Accounting solutions for Linux

2010-02-10T03:24:00.000-08:00

Most of my friends stuck on Linux wanted a simple solutions for their financial accounting software they can use at home and this is what I came up with.

Eqonomize.

Eqonomize! is a personal accounting software for KDE, with focus on efficiency and ease of use for the small household economy. It provides a complete solution, with bookkeeping by double entry and support for scheduled recurring transactions, security investments, and budgeting. It gives a clear overview of past and present transactions, and development of incomes and expenses, with descriptive tables and charts, as well as an approximation of future account values.

I have installed this on my Debian Lenney 5.0 and hope will work with you too.

Look out for more accounting sofware for Linux on my next post

AbiWord for Linux

2010-02-08T21:45:00.000-08:00

AbiWord is a full-featured, efficient word processing application. It is suitable for a wide variety of word processing tasks, and is extensible with a variety of plugins.

This package includes many of the available import/export plugins allowing AbiWord to interact with ODT, WordPerfect, and other formats. It also includes tools plugins, offering live collaboration with AbiWord users on Linux and Windows (using TCP or Jabber/XMPP), web translation and dictionary support, and more.

Additional plugins that require significant amounts of extra software to function are in the various abiword-plugin-* packages.

Bluetooth Obex Server

2010-02-07T07:03:00.000-08:00

The KDE Bluetooth Framework is a set of tools built on top of Linux' Bluetooth stack BlueZ. It provides easy access to the most common Bluetooth profiles and makes data exchange with Bluetooth devices like phones and PDAs as straightforward as possible.

Features:

* kbluetooth -- a tray applet to handle incoming inquiries

* kbtobexclient -- to send files via bluetooth

* kbluemon -- a bluetooth monitor

* kinputwizard -- a wizard to configure Input Devices

* kbluelock -- a bluetooth screen locker

Kbabel a PO-file editing suite for KDE

2010-02-06T11:51:00.000-08:00

This is a suite of programs for editing gettext message files (PO-files). It is designed to help you translate fast and consistently.

This suite includes KBabel, CatalogManager and KBabelDict. KBabel is an advanced and easy to use PO-file editor with full navigational and editing capabilities, syntax checking and statistics.

CatalogManager is a multi functional catalog manager which allows you to keep track of many PO-files at once. KBabelDict is a dictionary to assist with searching for common translations.

This package is part of KDE, and a component of the KDE SDK module. See the 'kde' and 'kdesdk' packages for more information.

Screenlets

2010-02-05T10:07:00.000-08:00

Screenlets are small owner-drawn applications (written in Python) that can be described as "the virtual representation of things lying/standing around on your desk". Sticky notes, clocks, rulers, ... the possibilities are endless.

The goal of the Screenlets base-classes is to simplify the creation of fully themable mini-apps that each solve basic desktop-work-related needs and generally improve the usability and eye-candy of the modern composited Linux-desktop.

Features:

* Real applications, no HTML-"widgets"

* Easy to use, easy to develop

* Full compositing support

* Works with any composited X desktop (compiz, xfce4, ...)

* Works also on non-composited desktop

* Included ability to apply themes (SVG, PNG or mixed)

* Fully scalable when using SVGs

* Embedded drag&drop-support

* Automated storing of options (using ini or GConf)

* Controllable through customizable D-Bus service

* Can be used together with compiz' widget-plugin to create a Dashboard-like feature as seen on OS X

* Uses Cairo and GTK2 for drawing and windowing

Fyrdman

2010-02-04T14:26:00.000-08:00

GGZ games are games that can be played online against other people while all having some features in common, like table chat, seats configuration, bot players, game spectators, savegames, statistics, and others. Some games also work in single-player mode.

This package provides a complete collection of GGZ game frontends that make use of the KDE/Qt3 toolkit. It includes:

* Connect-the-Dots

* Koenig (chess game)

* Krosswater

* Muehle (Nine Men's Morris)

* Reversi

* TicTacToe

* Fyrdman (Hastings1066)

* KCC (Chinese Checkers)

* Keepalive (role-playing game) and much more.

This package is part of the GGZ Gaming Zone, a multiuser networked gaming environment.

Orca Screen Reader and Magnifier

2010-02-04T08:50:00.000-08:00

Orca is a flexible, extensible, and powerful assistive technology that provides end-user access to applications and toolkits that support the AT-SPI (e.g., the GNOME desktop). With early input from and continued engagement with its end users, Orca has been designed and implemented by the Sun Microsystems, Inc., Accessibility Program Office.

Orca defines a set of default behaviors (reactions to application events) and key bindings (reaction to user key presses). These default behaviors and key bindings can be overwritten on a per-application basis. Orca creates a script object for each running application, which merges both the default behaviors and key bindings, and the application specific ones. Orca provides the infrastructure to activate and deactivate scripts, as well as a host of services accessible from within the scripts.

Note: gnome-orca works without gnome-mag, you just need it for magnification.

K-3D for Linux

2010-02-03T09:56:00.000-08:00

K-3D is designed from-the-ground-up to generate motion-picture-quality animation with RenderMan-compliant render engines (such as aqsis).

Some of its features are:

* Record and play back interactive tutorials and macros.

* Able to create and edit documents in multiple realtime OpenGL solid, shaded, texture-mapped views. You can even model, animate, and interact with animations while they play back.

* Unlimited Undos/Redos.

* Default output to Pixar Renderman Interface Bytestream (RIB) files.

* K-3D documents are stored using a simple, flexible, easy-to-understand XML markup.

* Scripting interface supports Python, with open API for other scripting languages.

* Plugin support through its architecture in ANSI C++ and GTK+.

Figaro's Password Manager 2

2010-02-01T08:31:00.000-08:00

Figaro's Password Manager 2 (FPM2) is a program that allows you to securely store the passwords. Passwords are encrypted with the blowfish algorithm.

If the password is for a web site, FPM2 can keep track of the URLs of your login screens and can automatically launch your browser. In this capacity, FPM2 acts as a kind of bookmark manager. You can teach FPM2 to launch other applications, and optionally pass hostnames, usernames or passwords to the command line.

FPM2 also has a password generator that can choose passwords for you. It allows you to determine how long the password should be, and what types of characters (lower case, upper case, numbers and symbols) should be used. You can even have it avoid ambiguous characters such as a capital O or the number zero.

For more information please visit : http://als.regnet.cz/fpm2/

Album Shaper For Linux

2010-01-29T23:33:00.001-08:00

Album Shaper strives to be the most friendly, easy to use, open source application for organizing, annotating, framing, enhancing, stylizing, and sharing your digital photos. Album Shaper embraces open formats like XML, JPEG, and XSLT, while supporting Windows, Mac OS X, and Unix users who speak a multitude of languages around the world!

Two-layer albums can be created in a drag-n-drop interface which allows quick and easy arrangement and categorization of photos.

A few simple image manipulations such as rotation and flipping are provided to help you get your photos presentable as quick as possible.

Photos, collections, and albums themselves can be labeled as needed and modified at a later time by saving and loading from a simple XML format. Albums are exported as HTML which can then be posted directly on the web or viewed straight from your hard drive.

Album Shaper supports themes which means you can completely customize the look of the Albums you produce. Album Shaper is designed to help you share your photos with your friends and family as easily as possible, as well as update and maintain these Albums in the most efficient and easy way possible.

Homepage: http://albumshaper.sourceforge.net/

How to speed up your computer

2010-01-25T11:40:00.000-08:00

There are a few things one should know in order to keep his computer running smoothly. This article will cover a few simple guidelines that one can apply only if you are running Microsoft windows XP, Vista or Windows 7.

Free up disk space

By default when window is installed on your computer, a system tool called Disk Cleanup is installed. This tool can be used to remove temporary internet files, Empty the Recycle Bin, Remove temporary files such as error reports, remove optional windows components that you do not use, remove programs that you no longer use, remove downloaded program files and also to remove unused restore points and shadow copies form the System Restore

Defragmenting.

Disk fragmentation makes your hard disk do extra work that can slow down your computer; therefore by performing disk defragmenter rearranges fragmented data so your drives can work more efficiently. Removable devices such as USB flash disks can also be fragmented.

Disk defragmenter might take from several minutes to a few hours to finish, depending on the size and degree of fragmentation of your hard disk.

Remember it is not possible to defragmenter drives that are not formatted using a file system other than NTFS, FAT or FAT32 or even drives on a network.

Scan for viruses, Spyware and Adware.

The most important thing before scanning your computer for any viruses, spyware or even Adware is to make sure you have an antivirus installed on you system and it is up to date if not please update before performing the scan.

Uninstall unused programs.

If you have been using your computer for some time now, probable you might have installed programs that you no longer use, when a program is installed it creates connections between program and the operating system that means even if you do not use the programs they will in one way or another slow down your system, therefore if you have the programs on a CD then I advice to uninstall the unused programs.

Use ReadyBoost

If you are using Windows Vista or Windows 7, your can increase the speed of your computer by using ReadyBoost to speed up your system, this is a new concept in adding memory to a system, it allows you to use non-volatile flash memory like a USB flash disk or a memory card to improve performance without having to add additional memory.

Reinstall the operating system and programs

If all the above steps would not work then you might consider doing a reinstallation of your operating system and your programs too, but remember to BACKUP your data before performing a reinstallation.

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2010-01-24T11:38:00.000-08:00

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Sysprof Profiler a system-wide Linux profiler

2010-01-22T08:59:00.000-08:00

Sysprof is a sampling CPU profiler that uses a Linux kernel module to profile the entire system, not just a single application. Sysprof handles shared libraries and applications do not need to be recompiled. In fact they don't even have to be restarted.

It has the following features:

* profiles all running processes, not just a single application

* has a simple graphical interface

* shows the time spent in each branch of the call tree

* profiles can be loaded and saved

You need the sysprof kernel module (provided in sysprof-module-source) to use sysprof.

Archive Manager for GNOME

2010-01-20T10:52:00.000-08:00

File-roller is an archive manager for the GNOME environment. It allows you to:

* Create and modify archives.

* View the content of an archive.

* View a file contained in an archive.

* Extract files from the archive.

File-roller supports the following formats:

* Tar (.tar) archives, including those compressed with gzip (.tar.gz, .tgz), bzip (.tar.bz, .tbz), bzip2 (.tar.bz2, .tbz2), compress (.tar.Z, .taz), lzop (.tar.lzo, .tzo) and lzma (.tar.lzma)

* Zip archives (.zip)

* Jar archives (.jar, .ear, .war)

* 7z archives (.7z)

* iso9660 CD images (.iso)

* Lha archives (.lzh)

* Single files compressed with gzip (.gz), bzip (.bz), bzip2 (.bz2), compress (.Z), lzop (.lzo) and lzma (.lzma)
File-roller doesn't perform archive operations by itself, but relies on standard tools for this.

For more information please visit : http://fileroller.sourceforge.net

Euler an interactive mathematical programming environment

2010-01-17T11:09:00.000-08:00

Euler is a powerful numerical laboratory with a programming language. The system can handle real, complex and interval numbers, vectors and matrices. It can produce 2D/3D plots.

Euler features among other things:

* real, complex and interval scalars and matrices

* a programming language, with local variables, default values for parameters, variable parameter number, passing of functions

* two and three dimensional graphs

* marker plots

* density and contour plots

* animations

* numerical integration and differentiation

* statistical functions and tests

* differential equations

* interval methods with guaranteed inclusions

* function minimizers (Brent, Nelder-Mean)

* simplex algorithm

* interpolation and approximation

* finding roots of polynomials

* fast Fourier transform (FFT)

* an exact scalar product using a long accumulator

* PostScript graphics export

This package contains the main program. Documentation for Euler is included in the euler-doc package.

For more information please visit : http://euler.sourceforge.net

Disk Usage Analyzer for Gnome desktop utilities

2010-01-15T09:41:00.000-08:00

GNOME is the "GNU Network Object Model Environment". It is a project to build a complete, user-friendly desktop based entirely on free software.

This package contains the following utilities for the GNOME desktop:

* baobab, a disk usage analyser

* gfloppy, a tool for formatting floppy disks

* gnome-dictionary, a program which can look up the definition of words over the internet (including a panel applet to do the same)

* gnome-search-tool, with which one can find files by name or content

* gnome-system-log, a log viewing application

* gnome-screenshot, a tool to take desktop screenshots and save them into a file

Eric python IDE a full featured Python IDE

2010-01-13T11:23:00.001-08:00

Eric is a full featured Python IDE written in PyQt using the QScintilla editor widget. Some highlights

* Any number of editors with configurable syntax highlighting, code folding, auto indenting and brace highlighting.

* Integrated Project Management facility to organize your projects. The project browser shows all source files, all forms and all translations each on its own tab. The source browser has built in class browsing capabilities.

* Integrated and full featured debuggers for Python and Ruby.

* Interactive shells for Python and Ruby.

* An explorer window for walking through your directory structure with built in class browsing capabilities for Python files.

* Variable windows that display local and global variables in the current scope while debugging a program.

* An integrated interface to the Python Module "unittest".

* An integrated help viewer to display HTML help files. Alternatively you can choose to use Qt-Assistant to view help files.

* Display of the UI in different languages.

* The capability to start Qt-Designer and Qt-Linguist from within eric4.

* The ability to compile Qt-Designer forms, to produce Qt-Linguist files and release them from within the IDE.

Homepage: http://www.die-offenbachs.de/eric/index.html

Bluefish an advanced Gtk+ HTML editor

2010-01-11T05:59:00.001-08:00

Bluefish is a GTK+ HTML editor for the experienced web designer. Its features include nice wizards for startup, tables and frames; a fully featured image insert dialog; thumbnail creation and automatically linking of the thumbnail with the original image; and configurable HTML syntax highlighting.

For validation to work you need weblint and xmllint. For preview to work, you need a web browser that can view local files given to it on the command line.

For more information pleas visit : http://bluefish.openoffice.nl

Boa Constructor

2010-01-08T11:39:00.000-08:00

Boa-constructor is an IDE oriented towards creating cross-platform applications built on top of the Python language and the WxWindows GUI toolkit.

It features:

* visual wxWindows frame design,

* object inspector and explorer,

* syntax highlighting editor with code completion, call tips and code browsing for Python code,

* syntax highlighting editor for C, C++, HTML, XML, config files (INI style),

* documentation generation,

* an integrated Python debugger,

* integrated help,

* a Python Shell,

* an explorer able to browse, open/edit, inspect and interact with various data sources including files, CVS, Zope, FTP, DAV and SSH,

* an UML view generator.

Homepage: http://boa-constructor.sourceforge.net/

Bittornado, bittorrent client with enhanced GUI interface

2010-01-06T10:08:00.001-08:00

Bittorrent is a tool for distributing files. It's extremely easy to use - downloads are started by clicking on hyperlinks. Whenever more than one person is downloading at once they send pieces of the file(s) to each other, thus relieving the central server's bandwidth burden. Even with many simultaneous downloads, the upload burden on the central server remains quite small, since each new downloader introduces new upload capacity.

BitTornado is the next generation bittorrent client built on the original BitTorrent. This client features an enhanced GUI, lots of new features under the hood, and is generally one of the most advanced clients out there. Get this if you need to limit your bandwidth, or you want more control of your torrents. It does everything the original bittorrent does, plus more...

For more information please visit : http://bittornado.com

DigiKam a digital photo management application for KDE

2010-01-04T12:30:00.000-08:00

An easy to use and powerful digital photo management application, which makes importing, organizing and manipulating digital photos a "snap". An interface is provided to connect to your digital camera, preview the images and download and/or delete them.

The digiKam built-in image editor makes the common photo correction a simple task. The image editor is extensible via plugins and, the digikamimageplugins project has been merged to digiKam core since release 0.9.2, all useful image editor plugins are available in the base installation.

digiKam can also make use of the KIPI image handling plugins to extend its capabilities even further for photo manipulations, import and export, etc. The kipi-plugins package contains many very useful extentions.

digiKam is based in part on the work of the Independent JPEG Group.

Homepage: http://www.digikam.org

Balsa an e-mail client for GNOME

2010-01-02T08:54:00.000-08:00

Balsa is a highly configurable and robust mail client for the GNOME desktop. It supports both POP3 and IMAP servers as well as the mbox, maildir and mh local mailbox formats. Balsa also supports SMTP and/or the use of a local MTA such as Sendmail.

Some of Balsa's other features include:

* Allowing nested mailboxes

* Printing

* Spell Checking

* Multi-threaded mail retrieval

* MIME support (view images inline, save parts)

* GPE Palmtop, LDAP, LDIF and vCard address book support

* Multiple character sets for composing and reading messages

* File attachments on outgoing messages

* GPG/OpenPGP mail signing and encryption

Support for Kerberos and SSL has been enabled in this package.

Homepage: http://balsa.gnome.org/

Cheese a tool to take pictures and videos from your webcam

2009-12-29T12:38:00.000-08:00

Cheese is a cheesy program to take pictures and videos from your web cam. It also provides some graphical effects in order to please the users play instinct.

This program is installed by default on both KDE or Gnome on your linux system. You can install it if you add a USB webcam later after you have install Linux on your system.

Please visit : http://live.gnome.org/Cheese/

Kformula a formula editor for the KDE Office Suite

2009-12-26T22:43:00.000-08:00

KFormula is a formula editor that provides the basic input facilities and the support functionality expected of a KOffice application.

Features include easy Greek letter insertion, intelligent cursor movement, advanced syntax highlighting, multi-level undo support, LaTeX export and MathML import.

This package is part of the KDE Office Suite.

For more information please visit: http://www.koffice.org

Stock commodity and stock market charting and technical analysis

2009-12-25T10:48:00.000-08:00

Qtstalker is a user friendly Technical Analysis package for GNU/Linux. It is similar to commercial software such as Metastock, Supercharts and Tradestation.

Qtstalker's features include:

* A point-and-click graphical user interface.

* Chart types include line, bar, candlestick, point and figure, swing.

* Chart objects: trendlines, buy/sell arrows, fibonacci retracement, text.

* Indicator plugins include MACD, MAs, Bollinger Bands, RSI and many more.

* Custom indicators can be composed without programming.

* Quote plugins download data from online sources like Yahoo, CME, NYBOT.

* Data import plugins for plain-text CSV files and MySQL databases.

* Intra-day, daily, weekly and monthly chart compression.

* Can manage stocks, futures, indices, ratios and spreads.

* Back testing function allowing indicator tests using actual chart data.

* Scanner to filter symbols based on a user defined formula.

A basic portfolio manager.

This package contains the main program and plugins. Documentation is in the qtstalker-doc package.

Qtstalker is 100% free software, distributed under the terms of the GNU GPL. An active development community is continually adding new features.

Homepage: http://qtstalker.sourceforge.net/

OpenOffice.org office suite - database

2009-12-23T09:56:00.000-08:00

OpenOffice.org is a full-featured office productivity suite that provides a near drop-in replacement for Microsoft(R) Office.

This package contains the database component for OpenOffice.org.

You can extend the functionality of OpenOffice.org Base by installing these packages:

* unixodbc: ODBC database support

* libmyodbc | odbc-postgresql | libsqliteodbc | tdsodbc | mdbtools: ODBC drivers for:

* MySQL

* PostgreSQL

* SQLite

* MS SQL / Sybase SQL

* .mdb (JET / MS Access)

* libmysql-java | libpg-java: JDBC Drivers for:

* MySQL

* PostgreSQL

For more information please visit: http://www.go-oo.org

Digital photo management application for KDE

2009-12-19T12:13:00.000-08:00

Didikam is an easy to use and powerful digital photo management application, which makes importing, organizing and manipulating digital photos a "snap". An interface is provided to connect to your digital camera, preview the images and download and/or delete them.

The digiKam built-in image editor makes the common photo correction a simple task. The image editor is extensible via plugins and, the digikam image plugins project has been merged to digiKam core since the release of version 0.9.2, all useful image editor plugins are available in the base installation.

digiKam can also make use of the KIPI image handling plugins to extend its capabilities even further for photo manipulations, import and export, etc. The kipi-plugins package contains many very useful extentions.

DigiKam is based in part on the work of the Independent JPEG Group.

For more information please visit: http://www.digikam.org

Microsoft Security Essentials one of the best anti-virus

2009-12-17T11:16:00.000-08:00

Having used quite a number of anti-virus programs, I recently add Microsoft Security Essentials anti-virus to my list of one of the best antivirus program in the market today. This anti-virus is light meaning you will not experience any difference on your computer speed and does the job perfectly.

I installed Microsoft Security Essentials two months ago just to see if it will pass the test and the results were tremendous.

Although I recommend this anti-virus, it might not work for everyone mostly for those people who do not have an internet connection because you will be required to update the program for the anti-virus to be active and therefore ready to use and their after you will be required to update the anti-virus at least once every day but twice is better, the program take less than a five minutes to update that is if you have a fast internet connection.

Some of the features that this anti-virus has include:

Real time protection

Real-time protection alerts you when viruses, spyware or other potentially unwanted software attempts to install itself or run on your computer.

Monitor file and program activity on your computer

Scan all downloaded files and attachments and many more features.

You can download Microsoft Security Essentials or find more information by visiting:

http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/

Microsoft Security Essentials is free.

Groupware suite with mail client and organizer

2009-12-15T10:11:00.000-08:00

Evolution is a groupware suite which integrates mail, calendar, address book, to-do list and memo tools.

Additional features include integration with Exchange and Groupwise servers, newsgroup client, LDAP support, web calendars and synchronization with Palm devices.

Evolution is a graphical application that is part of GNOME, and is distributed by Novell, Inc.
See http://www.novell.com/products/evolution/ for more information.

The following plugins belonging to the "base" set are included.

* calendar-file
* calendar-http
* calendar-weather
* itip-formatter
* plugin-manager
* default-source
* addressbook-file
* startup-wizard
* print-message
* mark-all-read
* groupwise-features
* groupwise-account-setup
* hula-account-setup
* mail-account-disable
* publish-calendar
* caldav
* imap-features
* google-account-setup
* sa-junk-plugin
* bogo-junk-plugin
* exchange-operations
* mono

Homepage: http://www.gnome.org/projects/evolution/

OpenOffice.org

2009-12-13T09:31:00.000-08:00

OpenOffice.org is a full-featured office productivity suite that provides a near drop-in replacement for Microsoft(R) Office.
This metapackage installs all components of openoffice.org:
* openoffice.org-writer: Word processor
* openoffice.org-calc: Spreadsheet
* openoffice.org-impress: Presentation
* openoffice.org-draw: Drawing
* openoffice.org-base: Database
* openoffice.org-math: Equation editor
* openoffice.org-filter-mobiledev: Mobile Devices filters
* openoffice.org-filter-binfilter: legacy filters (e.g. StarOffice 5.2)
You can extend the functionality of OpenOffice.org by installing these packages:
* hunspell-dictionary-/myspell-dictionary-: Hunspell/Myspell dictionaries for use with OpenOffice.org
* openoffice.org-l10n-: UI interface translation
* openoffice.org-help-: User help
* openoffice.org-thesaurus-: Thesauri for the use with OpenOffice.org
* openoffice.org-hyphenation-: Hyphenation patterns for OpenOffice.org
* openoffice.org-gtk: Gtk UI Plugin, GNOME File Picker support, QuickStarter for GNOMEs notification are
* openoffice.org-gnome: GNOME VFS, GConf backend
* openoffice.org-kde: KDE UI Plugin and KDE File Picker support
* openoffice.org-headless: Headless (svp) UI Plugin
* menu: Will add openoffice.org menu entries for every Debian window manager.
* unixodbc: ODBC database support
* cupsys-bsd: Allows OpenOffice.org to detect your CUPS printer queues automatically
* libsane: Use your sane-supported scanner with OpenOffice.org
* libxrender1: Speed up display by using Xrender library
* libgl1: OpenGL support
* openclipart-openoffice.org: Open Clip Art Gallery with OOo index files
* iceweasel | firefox | icedove | thunderbird | iceape-browser | mozilla-browser: Mozilla profile with Certificates needed for XML Security...
* java-gcj-compat | sun-java5-jre | java2-runtime Java Runtime Environment for use with OpenOffice.org
* pstoedit / imagemagick: helper tools for EPS thumbnails
* gstreamer0.10-plugins-: GStreamer plugins for use with OOos media backend
* libpaper-utils: papersize detection support via paperconf

Homepage: http://www.go-oo.org

Use audacious in Linux to play your music

2009-12-11T08:22:00.000-08:00

Audacious is a fork of beep-media-player which supports winamp skins and many codecs.
In the default install, the following codecs are supported:
* MP3
* Ogg Vorbis
* AAC and AAC+
* FLAC
* Windows Media (WMA)
* Musepack
* TTA
* Many module formats and much more!
Additionally, Audacious is extendable through plugins, and contains other useful features like LIRC support and support for last.fm.
This package contains the core player and its localization.

Homepage: http://www.audacious-media-player.org/

Play audio CDs with Serpentine on Linux

2009-12-08T06:10:00.000-08:00

Serpentine is an application that lets you master (create) audio CDs.

* Supports multiple file formats such as WAV, MP3, OGG, FLAC and every other format that GStreamer can read

* Supports PLS, M3U and XSPF playlists

* Can extract the audio track from video files

* Supports drag and drop: files can be dropped from Rhythmbox, Nautilus, etc.

* Clean and easy to use GNOME interface

For more information please visit: http://developer.berlios.de/projects/serpentine/

Play music and movies with banshee

2009-12-06T00:26:00.000-08:00

Banshee is an audio management and playback application for the GNOME Desktop, allowing users to import audio from CDs, search their library, create play lists of selections of their library, sync music to/from iPods, and burn selections to a CD.

Also banshee can now play a number of visual extensions

A screen shot of banshee click to expand

Homepage: http://www.banshee-project.org

Use Rhythmbox to play mp3, ogg, and more

2009-12-04T10:59:00.000-08:00

Rhythmbox is a very easy to use music playing and management program which supports a wide range of audio formats (including mp3 and ogg). Originally inspired by Apple's iTunes, the current version also supports Internet Radio, iPod integration and generic portable audio player support, Audio CD burning, Audio CD playback, music sharing, and Podcasts.
You need the python-coherence package for DLNA/UPnp sharing plugin.

A screen shot of Rhythmbox click the image to expand

Play Music with amarok on Linux

2009-12-02T20:50:00.000-08:00

Amarok tries to be a little different, providing a simple drag and drop interface that really makes playlist handling easy.

Features include:
* rapid playlist creation, with drag and drop from a directory view
* nice playlist browser for your existing playlists (PLS or M3U formats)
* collection-indexing support, for smart browsing and playlist creation
* possibility of accessing media via kioslaves, allowing you to play via smb:// or fish:// (normal streams are of course supported)
* inline ID3 tag editing, capable of retrieving tags via MusicBrainz
* album cover support: automatically displays album covers from the filesystem, or downloaded on the fly
* miscellaneous audio effects, including crossfading
* easy bindable global shortcuts, rich DCOP interface
* On-Screen Display (OSD), on track change or at keypress
* iPod and iRiver support
* Last.fm stream playing support
* Track "mood" display (requires moodbar package installed)

Support for libvisual visualization plugins is also compiled in (you need to have libvisual-0.4-plugins installed to be able to use it).

A screen shot of Amarok, click on the image to expand

Homepage: http://amarok.kde.org

Play your CDs and DVDs with Kaffeine on Linux

2009-12-01T01:26:00.000-08:00

Kaffeine is a media player for KDE. While it supports multiple player engines, its default engine is Xine, giving Kaffeine a wide variety of supported media types and letting Kaffeine access CDs, DVDs, and network streams easily.

Kaffeine can keep track of multiple playlists simultaneously, and supports autoloading of subtitles files for use while playing video.

A screen shot of kaffeine click the image to expand

Homepage: http://kaffeine.sourceforge.net

Movie Player for Unix-like systems

2009-11-28T22:42:00.000-08:00

MPlayer plays most MPEG, VOB, AVI, Ogg/OGM, VIVO, ASF/WMA/WMV, QT/MOV/MP4, FLI, RM, NuppelVideo, yuv4mpeg, FILM, RoQ, PVA files, supported by many native, XAnim, RealPlayer, and Win32 DLL codecs. It can also play VideoCD, SVCD, DVD, 3ivx, RealMedia, and DivX movies.

Another big feature of MPlayer is the wide range of supported output drivers. It works with X11, Xv, DGA, OpenGL, SVGAlib, fbdev, DirectFB, but also SDL (plus all its drivers) and some low level card-specific drivers (for Matrox, 3Dfx and Radeon, Mach64 and Permedia3). Most of them support software or hardware scaling, therefore allowing fullscreen display. MPlayer is also able to use some hardware MPEG decoder boards, such as the DVB and DXR3/Hollywood+.

Not all of the upstream code is distributed in the source tarball. See the README.Debian and copyright files for details.

A screen shot of Mplayer Click on it to expand

For more information on Mplayer Visit: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/

Totem Movie Player (Gstreamer)

2009-11-27T10:17:00.000-08:00

A simple media player for the GNOME desktop based on GStreamer
Totem is a simple yet featureful media player for GNOME which can read a large number of file formats. It features :
* Shoutcast, m3u, asx, SMIL and ra playlists support
* DVD (with menus), VCD and Digital CD (with CDDB) playback
* TV-Out configuration with optional resolution switching
* 4.0, 5.0, 5.1 and stereo audio output
* Full-screen mode (move your mouse and you get nice controls) with Xinerama, dual-head and RandR support
* Aspect ratio toggling, scaling based on the video's original size
* Full keyboard control
* Simple playlist with repeat mode and saving feature
* GNOME, Nautilus and GnomeVFS integration
* Screenshot of the current movie
* Brightness and Contrast control
* Visualisation plugin when playing audio-only files
* Video thumbnailer for nautilus
* Nautilus properties page
* Works on remote displays
* DVD, VCD and OGG/OGM subtitles with automatic language selection
* Extensible with plugins

A screen shot of Totem click to expand

Homepage: http://www.gnome.org/projects/totem/

Play movies with VlC Media Player.

2009-11-26T10:02:00.000-08:00

For the next few day I am going to highlight and display a few media player on Linux that you can use and works best with many media extensions.

VLC media player.

This is one media player that is very popular, if you have been using Ms windows then you don't need an introduction for it. Here is a description on VLC

VLC is the VideoLAN project's media player. It plays MPEG, MPEG2, MPEG4, DivX, MOV, WMV, QuickTime, mp3, Ogg/Vorbis files, DVDs, VCDs, and multimedia streams from various network sources.

VLC can also be used as a streaming server that duplicates the stream it reads and multicasts them through the network to other clients, or serves them through HTTP.

VLC has support for on-the-fly transcoding of audio and video formats, either for broadcasting purposes or for movie format transformations. Support for most output methods is provided by this package, but features can be added by installing additional audio plugins (vlc-plugin-esd, vlc-plugin-sdl, vlc-plugin-arts) or video plugins (vlc-plugin-sdl, vlc-plugin-ggi, vlc-plugin-glide, vlc-plugin-svgalib). There is also a web browser plugin in the mozilla-plugin-vlc package.

A screen shot of VLC, click to expand.

For more information visit: http://www.videolan.org/vlc

How to rip your CD's or DVD's on Linux

2009-11-25T05:52:00.000-08:00

Today I have to en-back on my earlier discussion and answer what most of my friends who are interested in migrating to Linux do ask, how do you rip your audio CD's or even DVD's on Linux.

Well for music extracting then there are a lot of softwares to use but I will name the commonly used, use Sound Juicer which works perfectly and for those DVD's you are interested in riping use Devede it works perfectly.

I will be back with more of this next time

Play your DVD's on Linux

2009-11-23T07:08:00.001-08:00

Will I be able to watch movies on my Linux system is a question I always encounter everyday of my life. The answer is yes.

There are many audio player and also movie plays in Linux but I will name just a few to help you kick start.

Well if you installed KDE on your system then I am quite sure that you have Kaffeine installed as a default movie play and Amarok as an audio play.

Kaffeine can play quite a lot of extensions if you are to use it for purposes of playing video clips or even DVDs. Apart from Kaffiene you can add players like Mplayer, Smplayer, xine player and the list is endless.

Also when it comes to playing audio then we have Amarok for KDE users and the list goes on and on.

For GNOME users, by default Totem will be installed used for the purposes of playing Movies or any other extension in form of visual.

Also in gnome banshee will most of the times be install for playing mp3, audio and many other extensions, note that banshee can handle more extension because it will also play most visual extensions.

How to save your document on Linux and use it on Ms Windows

2009-11-21T04:03:00.000-08:00

Another big problem encountered by most of the Linux newbie’s is the problem of saving there documents so that they can be viewed on a system running on Ms Windows.

Now that you are here on this blog, you just found the answer. This is very simple and depending on which Linux you are using then this is how you are going to go about it.

Save the document you are working on as usual meaning use the Save As button then on the Save As dialog box you should be able to locate the save as type pull down menu. From the menu you can select to save your document as Ms Word 97, 2000, XP.

From here you will be able to view your document at any system running on Microsoft Windows.

Burning data using KDE or GNOME

2009-11-14T23:59:00.000-08:00

Today I want to start answering most of the questions asked by most of the people and probably it’s the reason why most of them don’t hang around for too long with their Linux system.

I want to burn my data to a CD or to a DVD, what software to use.

Well this depends with which desktop environment you are in, and for example if you installed KDE desktop and left out GNOME then most probably you must be having K3B installed in your system.

K3B is easy to use and from a personal experience it is user friendly and work more or less like Nero that is used in Microsoft Windows environment.

But if you have only GNOME installed on your system, them most probably Brasero was installed on your system as a default software for burning which is also easy to use.

Note that one can install and use both K3B and Brasero on a single desktop environment, be it on KDE or GNOME the choice is yours.

a) To install K3B from a Debian system then type this at your console

#apt-get install k3b

b) To install Brasero, replace the k3b with Brasero in the above procedure.

c) To install both then type

#apt-get install k3b Brasero

All the above commands should be entered as root

NB: Use yast to install if you are using opensuse (Novel system).

A screen shot of K3B click to expand

A screen shot of Brasero click to expand

openSUSE 11.1 finally out

2009-11-12T22:43:00.000-08:00

If you’ve been counting down days for the openSUSE 11.2 release then it’s now finally out. You can down free download it from www.opensuse.org/en

Frequently asked question about Linux

2009-11-12T03:51:00.000-08:00

Now that you have installed Linux on your system and ready to go, probably you may be having questions like most of my friends do.

Most of the questions asked are

- I want to burn my data to a CD or to a DVD, what software to use.
- My documents can’t open on Ms Office, how do I solve this.
- I want to watch a movie or clip, which software to use.
- How do I rip my music or even DVD

Join me on my next lesson on a guide on how to solve the above questions and even more.

Two days to go for the release of openSUSE 11.2

2009-11-09T22:33:00.000-08:00

I am a fun of openSUSE and I have been using it for years now although I recently switched to Debian Lenny 5.0, but I always find myself visiting the openSUSE website to see whats cutting on the other side .

Today as I was reading through the website, this is what surprised me, its only remaining two days for openSUSE 11.2 to be released.

I am so tempted to try it because it has new futures than the debian lenny 5.0 am currently using. e.g

Linux kernel 2.6.31.5
Firefox 3.5.4
Samba 3.4.2
SeaMonkey 2.0
Bluez 4.56 and many more if you would like to have a full list of the new changes visit: www.opensuse.org

openSUSE 11.2 looks good and too attracting but what am really not sure of is, if this version is stable with less bugs.

GNOME OR KDE WHICH ONE TO CHOOSE. Lesson iii

2009-11-08T11:19:00.000-08:00

I might have forgotten this on my last lesson, whether to install the KDE desktop or GNOME desktop.

When doing your installation one might be stack on which one to choose or install on your system. Well most Linux will give you an option of installing the two desktop or even more and a good example is the openSUSE Linux system. Others like Debin Lenny 5 will give only one option when doing the installation that is installing GNOME desktop, this does not have to make you worried though because after installing GNOME you can proceed to install the KDE desktop environment if that’s what you prefer.

Maybe I should explain a little on the two desktop environments

Linux KDE
For those of you who like the Microsoft windows like environment then you can choose KDE to be the default desktop on you system, for newbie’s or lets say is you are migrating from Ms Windows then I recommend this environment so that you can feel at home, and pick up slowly.

Linux GNOME
This desktop environment in more or less like the Mac O.S environment and if you are very familiar with Mac then you can proceed and install gnome on your system or even make it your default desktop while doing your installation.

May be you might be asking yourself which of the two is more stronger than the other as most people do ask me, but I will leave that to you try both of them and make a conclusion, I won’t what to have sides on this.

There are other desktop environments in Linux which one can choose from but for newbie’s and working on a comfort zone I recommend either the two mentioned above, then you can try the other later.

How to install Linux on your system, Lesson ii

2009-11-05T11:44:00.000-08:00

Well, if you read carefully and followed everything on my last lesson, then what follows is easy meat to chew.

What is required of you now is to have a bootable CD/ DVD of your Linux that contains the operating system and boot from it.

I won’t be specific or give any direction on how to install your Linux O.S because most of them vary on the procedures to install but the good news is most of them provide the HELP option on the wizard. Just follow the wizard and all will be well bye and see you on the next lesson

How to install Linux on your system, Lesson (i)

2009-10-30T23:57:00.000-07:00

I am assuming that your computer is running on Microsoft Operating System and you would like to keep your Ms Windows meaning your system will be running on both MS O.S and Linux O.S, here are the step by step on what we are going to do.

1.Get enough free space on your hard disk, this is were you are going to install and get your Linux up and running on your system.

2.If you like you can partition your hard disk using a software of your choice, but I recommend using partition magic because its easy to use. Remember there are two options here and the other one is to let Linux to automatically use the free space you created this will be done when installing your Linux which is a bit easier for me than manually partitioning.

3.If you are to use partition magic then this is how to do it. Assuming you do not have any partitions on your drive then proceed as follows, open Partition magic and select your root partition that is drive C: and make the following changes before applying:-
- Create a Linux Swap partition
- After the swap create a root (/) partition and not forgetting most of the latest Linux will what you to create another partition called home.

4.Here is my advice for those doing a manual partitioning, your swap partition should be twice the size of your RAM. For example if your computer RAM is 1024 then your swap should be approximately 2GB.

5.For ROOT and HOME partition I would recommend to work with Ext3 file system

The Root Partition (/)
This is where Linux will install the O.S (Operation System). In other word this is the partition where your O.S runs from and because after installation one might need to add some few programs so please allow enough space for additional programs.

Home Partition
This partition is used by your Linux O.S to store your data. For example Music, pictures e.t.c. Please don't confuse this with the Home directory.
One thing that interests me with Linux that creates the home partitions during installation is, you do not loose any data when your O.S has a problem and you decide to do a re- installation unlike MS Windows O.S where data is lost.
Don't be over exited on the above point, because you have to be careful when doing the re-installation meaning only choose to format the root (/) partition and leave the home Partition intact and this way you are safe. (I have only tested his with openSUSE 10.3 and 11.1 and works perfectly)

Why Linux

2009-10-24T06:37:00.000-07:00

I figured out that most of the people using computer or say owing computers today have several problem starting from computer viruses to everyday system crash yet most of this people are aware of the world of Linux but a few things will keep them away. Like
• Linux assumes that you are intelligent and if not don’t try it.
• You may not find drivers for your hardware when using Linux
• And last but not least must people talk of you may miss some applications. But will are going to solve all this on this blog
Today I will start by introducing what is needed to kick start your system to a Linux environment.
First we do not need to loose any data if any so I will ask you to back up you data and attend my next lesson. See you

For Linux Newbies

2009-10-22T12:06:00.000-07:00

For the next few weeks please Check Out this blog as I take Linux newbies on how to migrate to Linux and feel at home

How to configure Huawei E220 on Linux openSUSE

2009-10-18T13:10:00.000-07:00

Here is how I configured my Huawei E220 on My Linux openSUSE 10.3, 11.0 and 11.1

You will first need to install gnome-ppp and by doing this a file wvdial.conf will be install under the directory /etc/, since the internet connection isn't running yet you will need to install using your dvd.

Now lets move on to the next step, we will need to configure the wvdial.conf file that you installed:
1.Make sure your device in plugged in and let it settle for a while

2.Enter as root, using the console

3.Enter this command # lsusb.

4.What appears next is a bunch lines of the form
Bus ABC Device ABC: ID AACC : FFCC [Name of Device]

5.If in any case you don't see your device listed then unplug any other USB device expect the modem and repeat step 3. and if it does not work then restart your computer with the the modem plugged in and leave out the other devices, you will plug them later.

6.You will need to note down the ABC and FFCC part of your modem device

7.Type the following command : and replace the xxxx with the ID you noted down
#modprobe usbserial vendor=xxxx product=xxxx

8.Its now time to configure the file wvdial.conf by inputting this on the console
vi /etc/wvdial.conf

9.This is what you should input on the file
[Dialer Defaults]
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Stupid Mode = 1
Modem Type = USB Modem
ISDN = 0
Phone = #777
New PPPD = yes
Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0
Username = xxx {username here}
Password = xxx {Password here}
Baud = 460800

10.Depending on you provider, the Phone, Username and Password might vary

11.Then save your changes

12.To test if the modem works type: wvdial. And everything should be up and running

openSUSE 11.2 Release

2009-10-14T01:42:00.000-07:00

The openSUSE project is a community program sponsored by Novell. Promoting the use of Linux everywhere, this program provides free, easy access to openSUSE, a complete Linux distribution. The openSUSE project has three main goals: make openSUSE the easiest Linux for anyone to obtain and the most widely used Linux distribution

OpenSUSE 11.2 is about to be released and the official date is said to be on 15th of this month of October. Although some people have been using the openSUSE 11.2 at its testing stages for the purposes of fixing the most annoying bugs, and the current stage before the release is milestone 8 which is the final version of the openSUSE 11.2 branding.

Milestone 8 includes many updated packages:
Linux kernel 2.6.31
GNOME 2.28 RC
OpenOffice.org 3.1.1
openSUSE 11.2 theming is in place
PulseAudio 0.9.17
Samba 3.4.1
postgresql 8.4.1
To find out more about openSUSE, please visit: http://www.opensuse.org/en