Monthly Archives: March 2010 - Page 2

Easily finding the Linux alternatives of favorite WINDOWS softwares for the newbie Open Source guys

Posted by on March 8, 2010 No comments

For all the freedom loving computer users it has become even more tempting to shift to the Open Source Computing with the latest high-end distros released with performance at par with the Windows Operating System and sometimes even more better with increased Security Options and Performance Charts. Also for many commercial groups struck by the Economic Meltdown this would be a cheaper option when each penny in the budget counts.

For these enlightened ones the major reason for stepping back is the difficulty in finding suitable alternatives for their favourite Linux applications. The web has made their search even more easier with many websites providing free search engine for finding the best alternatives of their favourite applications. Though the migration would definitely require time and patience, when compared with the large sum they spend for the User Licenses, this would turn out to be a wiser option.

Here are a few websites which provide the Open Sources alternatives of Windows applications at finger tips.

1. Osalt.com
This website gives you not just the alternate option for you but assists you in knowing about other siblings of the same category. This website even provides a comparison of a jack-on-both side.

2. Linux App finder
This communtiy website provides is not just for Windows users but even MAC OS X fans can use this as their guide for shifting to Open Source.

3. The Linux Alternative Project
This is yet another website for the same purpose specified above.

Install Softwares in Ubuntu 9.10 without internet connection

Posted by on March 7, 2010 7 comments

Weeks ago when I was trying to setup Ubuntu in my pc for the first time, installing new software you need in your new pc would be a impossible process without internet or any Repository DVDs. I managed to get a few resources from net and here I will explain it as a step by step procedure. First you should have another computer which is well connected to the internet or you should have an APTonCD created by someone. Once you install the required softwares with the help of internet connected PC, you could backup all the packages into a CD for using next time.

  • Generating List of required files to be downloaded.

After you have installed Ubuntu in your system, you will definetely need files to keep it updated. First of all you have to generate the list of files to be downloaded. You use the following command for generating the required files list.

sudo apt-get update -qq –print-uris |cut -d’ -f 2 > filelist.txt

This will generate a text file filelist.txt with all the essential update files to be downloaded.

Now if you want any specific softwares to installed like APTonCD you would need more files to be downloaded. To get the additional files to be downloaded use the following command

apt-get -qq –print-uris install ***packagename*** | cut -d’ -f2 >filelist2.txt

Move both filelist.txt and filelist2.txt into a removable media like pen drive.

  • Downloading the required files to be downloaded.

In the computer with internet connection create a folder called files in the desktop.
Copy the two text files into that folder.
Move to the folder with the following command in terminal

cd Desktop/files
wget -i filelist.txt -x
wget -i filelist2.txt -x

Now you will have all your required files downloaded to the new folder in separate directories. Also keep the two text files inside the pen drive itself.

  • Final installation process

Now move the files to the computer in which the new software are to be installed. Now you will have to open the file manager with root privileges to copy files into the root directory.

Press Alt+F2

In the popup window type

gksudo nautilus

Copy the folder into the root directory. You can move into the root directory by clicking the tab with the symbol of a harddisk in the upper part.

Now using the same file manager window move to ‘etc’ folder in root directory.
Now locate the sources.list found in ‘apt’ directory in ‘etc’./etc/apt/sources.list

Make a duplicate copy of that file and name it “sources.list.cpy” (right-click on the file, copy, and then paste). This is just a safety precaution in-case something goes wrong.

Now right-click the file sources.list and select “Open gedit” or any other text editor

Now add all the contents of filelist2.txt at the end of sources.list
Now using the Replace option under the Search menu in gedit replace all http:/ on that file with file:/files

Ubuntu

Next everything will be over with

sudo apt-get update

FOOBAR2000: The Damn Small Audio Player

Posted by on March 7, 2010 1 comment

The name foobar is derived from a common meta-syntactic variable name used in computer programming. Foobar2000 is an advanced freeware audio player for windows, it has highly modular design and extensive SDK which allows third-party developers to customize even change the interface. The core structure is closed source but the SDK is under BSD license. Foobar2000 is very small in size and includes many tools like tagging and audio conversion and all this and more at merely a size of 3MB. Many other audio players more than double the size wont offer such features. Foobar2000 increases audio fidelity using noise shaping and dithering. Ask anyone if they have opened a 7z file with an audio player, well Foobar2000 does that with no problems, all you need is an addon.

The Main Feature of Foobar are:

  • Audio formats supported natively: MP1, MP2, MP3, MPC, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC / Ogg FLAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, AU, SND, CDDA, WMA, and more.
  • Full Unicode support.
  • Customizable user interface .
  • Advanced tagging capabilities.
  • Support for ripping Audio CDs as well as transcoding all supported audio formats with command line support.
  • ReplayGain support – both playback and calculation.
  • Gapless playback support.
  • Customizable keyboard shortcuts.
  • Media Library with automated folder watching.
  • Open component architecture allowing third-party developers to extend functionality of the player.
  • Embedded support for album list, album art, spectrum visualization.
  • Metadata support and file organization.

Moreover Additional components can be added providing more support

  • APE, ALAC support.
  • Playback statistics.
  • Kernel streaming support.
  • ASIO support.
  • WASAPI output support.
  • CD burning support.
  • Ability to open archives (7z, RAR, ZIP ).

Foobar2000 is a must for all music fans out there. So Check it out.

Screenshots:

Download

Plus there are additional components here.

There are also skins available here.

Or If you are interested in developing additional tools download the SDK here.

So Have fun with Foobar2000.

Download Youtube Videos in Ubuntu Linux the easiest way

Posted by on March 6, 2010 9 comments

If you are using a linux based operating system like Ubuntu, literally downloading the youtube videos is as easy as just watching it. I mean it when I said it. Anyway here I explain the best and the easiest options I found in downloading the youtube videos.

1.Just Watch the video.
One thing you would have rarely noticed is that when a video is buffered completely in Youtube, a copy of that video is saved in /tmp directory. So after watching the video make sure the you do not close or change the page in the browser. After the video is streamed fully in the browser just move to the /tmp directory and you can find a .flv file with name beginning with Flash*. Just copy that file into your desktop and it’s done. This is not the case with just youtube videos but any flash videos on net can be downloaded this way.

2.Command Line way.
If are comfortable with using command line, this way is for you. Youtube-dl is a Python script, which  can run under Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows platforms as long a latest version of python is installed. For installing the script in Ubuntu just type

sudo apt-get install youtube-dl

Now for downloading a youtube video, in the terminal type

youtube-dl **video page url***

There are also a number of options available for you with this python script. You can view this by typing

youtube-dl –help

Options:
-h, –help            print this help text and exit
-v, –version         print program version and exit
-u USERNAME, –username=USERNAME
account username
-p PASSWORD, –password=PASSWORD
account password
-o FILE, –output=FILE
output video file name
-q, –quiet           activates quiet mode
-s, –simulate        do not download video
-t, –title           use title in file name
-l, –literal         use literal title in file name
-n, –netrc           use .netrc authentication data
-g, –get-url         print final video URL only
-2, –title-too       used with -g, print title too
-f FORMAT, –format=FORMAT
append &fmt=FORMAT to the URL
-b, –best-quality    alias for -f 18

3. Grabber websites.
There are many websites like keepvid.com which allow users to download the youtube video by entering the url. But in many cases I have found this way do not work well.

4.Firefox plugins
If you are a Mozilla Firefox user there are a number of plugins which automatically detect any flash videos being played in the page. It need not be a ‘you’ tube page. This supports most of the other favourite websites. The below are just a few to name.

1-Click YouTube Video Download

Download Flash and Video

Flash Video Downloader

Fast YouTube Download

This is way I personally follow :)

XBMC:The Full-Fledged Media Centre

Posted by on March 5, 2010 No comments

XBMC (Formely Known as Xbox Media Center) is basically a free and open source cross platform media centre to suit all your media needs. It is written in C and using some python. Comes with a large codec support so that you can play all your media files with ease. It outperforms the default media center. A lot of plugins and addons like BBC player, Radio, ESPN makes XBMC more additive. Using XBMC makes you forget all about the Operating System that is siting ideal, such that they are providing it as Live CD and Live USB.

XBMC has greater basic hardware requirements than a traditional 2D software applications, this basically means that it needs 3D capable GPU graphics hardware controller for all rendering; on the other hand, powerful 3D GPU chips are common today in most modern computers. It even plays pure 1080p media files using a core 2 duo processor using only the CPU power. Hardware accelerated video decoding using VDPAU is supported in XBMC 9.04 (and later) under Linux on Nvidia graphics hardware.

You can make a cool library by adding covers, description, fanart etc. It moreover supports network playback so you can stream media anywhere in your house or from the net using practically any protocol available.

XBMC is used as a application framework platform for others projects to base their media center software on, and today at least Boxee, MediaPortal, Plex, and Voddler are separate derivative products that are all known to initially have copied the GUI and media player parts of their software from XBMC’s source code.

XBMC features a Python Scripts Engine and WindowXML application framework (a XML-based widget toolkit for creating a GUI for widgets) in a similar to Apple Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets and Microsoft Gadgets in Windows Sidebar. Plugin scripts like Internet-TV and movie-trailer browsers, weather forecast, TV-guides, e-mail clients, instant messaging, scripts to front-end control PVR software and hardware, Internet-radio-station browsers, P2P file-sharing downloaders, IRC, also casual games such as Tetris, Snake, Space Invaders, Sudoku, and much more.

XBMC is distributed as a GPL and is developed by a global community, so there is lot to offer. Moreover it doesn’t require a high-end PC making it is easy to build a Economical HTPC. If you want a HTPC you got to have XBMC, The Ultimate one. The difficult to put all the feature of XBMC in words, to know it ,you got to experience it.

XBMC supports a lot of platforms, namely Windows, Mac, Linux, Apple TV and there are also Live versions.

Download

and also dont forget to check out skins and plugins.

here is a site dedicated for all plugins and scripts.

Setting Up a Virtual Supercomputer Using BOINC

Posted by on March 5, 2010 7 comments

Campuses have always been the places of innovation. The presence of of a super computing facility in a campus can greatly aid in R&D associated with the campus. The students will get an exposure to super computing arena and they can contribute to indigenous projects.

But what if we can setup such a facility using the computers already present in the campus with no extra investment??? And what if the  implementation do not induce any bottleneck in the proper functioning of those computers. Well it was a project we where working on..for quiet a long time… So that we can setup a virtual supercomputing facility in a campus in a cost effective way..which uses the unused processing power of all computers present in the campus.

We have derived the idea of implementation from grid and volunteer computing notions. For those not so tech-savvy people who may stumble across these lines, Grid computing is a variant of distributed computing. Lets say someone has a very complex, resource draining program and a dozen computers. He designs the program in a such a manner that he could divide it into pieces of program each running autonomously in one of the computers and giving the same solution as if we used a very powerful computer with the the high capabilities the program demanded. So GRID computing is called a distributed computing form with loosely coupled (the computers will not have to communicate with each other in solving a problem assigned to them), Heterogenous (computers can be of diffrent forms,using diffrent latforms etc..) and geographically dispersed.

In volunteer computing any person with his mind bent a bit (towards the side of greater human cause) can donate a part of their pc’s computational power as a service. Many data intensive projects like the SETI@home runs on volunteer computing with people all around the world participating in it.

So in a campus we have the computers in labs as well as those in the hands of students. Using an Open Source  middle ware called BOINC we can pool the unused processing power of all these computers. Here we will be using something like cycle stealing where idle processor cycles will be nicked from the participating nodes to setup the required virtual super computer.

The concept in its essence is similar to a volunteer computing project but essentially the BOINC middle ware should be adapted to perform in a smaller arena with the maximum number of nodes being 200 or 300. For this we developed some changes to  the original BOINC as such like the development of a hierarchal tree searching technique, development of an IDS(Intrusion Detection System) etc..

I have tried to outline the basic concepts of this implementation in a not-so-techie manner. In the next post i will outline the technical procedure to setup the same in a campus and more details on the changes we made to BOINC s/w..

And for those techie guys who i am sure will be bit disappointed after skimming through this – BOINC stands for Berkeley Open Infrastructure For Network Computing. It is an architecture developed by David Anderson to support GRID based projects.It is available in open source..thanks to those great minds.. And it is this middle-ware which integrates various nodes present in the virtual supercomputing facility, enabling them to interact with each other and manage multiple work modules…

Technical Procedure To Set Up the Virtual Supercomputer

How to add GUI for your applications?

Posted by on March 4, 2010 10 comments

When do you think you are ready for creating your own application? You have to be good enough with coding but obviously that is not enough. The applications which you are creating for your targeted users, be it commercially or just for fun sake, need not be professional coders but are mere end users. The users want the developers to build applications that meet their needs and also help with it the easiest way. You needn’t be an artist for creating the best interfaces but should be able to deliver what the users want the easiest way.

GTK and Qt ,the same toolkits behind GNOME and KDE, are the best graphical toolkits fit for this job. Providing the same functionality they have their own advantages and disadvantages.

The GTK+ toolkit, otherwise known as the GIMP toolkit is coded in C but has got bindings for just all of the favourite languages programmers speak nowadays. Ruby-gtk2, PyGTK, Gtk# are just a few to name. The GNOME desktop utilities are built on GTK+ libraries. The popular music player – Banshee, Photo Organizer – F-spot, Evolution – official personal information manager and workgroup information management tool for GNOME, popular IM client – Pidgin are just a few of the popular Linux Based applications built with GTK+ libraries and it’s various bindings. The code for the interface of your application actually consists of pages of codes but now the coding the interface has been simplified with various tools like Glade for GTK+. These GUI builders help in easily designing the interface without having it code it manually. Glade gives output as what is referred to as a “glade file” which is actually an XML file which describes the heirachy of the widgets comprising the interface. The most interesting aspect of GTK is the GNU LGPL 2.1 which binds it ( not GPL ). This allows development of both free and proprietary software with GTK+ without any license fees or royalties.

Qt is another popular cross-platform application development framework, widely used for the development of GUI programs. Originally released by Trolltech now it’s development is controlled by Nokia’s Qt Development Frameworks division after Nokia’s recent acquisition.Google Earth, KDE, Opera, OPIE, VoxOx, Skype, VLC media player and VirtualBox are a few of the popular applications with Qt. Qt is implemented in C++  and it has got full fledged support libraries  for database manipulation, multimedia operations, OpenGL graphics, scripting, Web-based programming through WebKit and not just GUI construction. Qt comes with a load of developer tools in it’s kitty including Qt Designer GUI designer, Qt Linquist, Qt Assistant and QMake for building and distribution of software packages.

In my next post I will be discussing about getting started in GUI development with GTK and Glade.

Hello World !!

Posted by on March 4, 2010 No comments

Techie- Blogger has just started blogging. :)

He likes to blog about Open Source and the anything technical that fascinates him . So just subscribe for keeping you updated with latest buzz on web. He is also a Ubuntu Linux user, so you can expect about that too.

Keep Tuned.