Filling my Technological Void|Learning to Adapt to new Technology…… The Hard Way.

Well I know I haven’t been exactly active through the past month. However in my defense I’ll say that I have been working on alot of things at once. I’ve finished reading “Let Us C” by Yaswant Kanetkar in the past month and after starting to read Brian Kerninghan and Denis Ritchie’s book on Programming in Ansi C I must say that the “Let Us C” book is a horrible excuse for a book.

Anyway rants aside I have also been reading up on “Core Python Programming” by Wesley Chun and I must say that after the first few chapters I find no faults in it and that the author definitely keeps me interested in the topic at hand. Anyway the reason I started on Python early than what I had planned for is because I’m sick and tired of using C for the www.projecteuler.net questions. For the uninformed the site has a series of mathematical questions which you are to solve. After solving about 20 of them with C I must say that I have had enough with it. Although it is definitely doable I think that the questions would be much easier using Python than C.

For those of you who are in SMU Distance Education and haven’t gotten their assignment questions. It is on the website under Notices and Announcements. By the way, what’s the deal with us MCA’s getting our assignment questions last?  Something tells me  that someone in the IT department of SMU is definitely slacking off and should try better to get the assignments on the website much earlier.

To end this post I have been seriously been thinking of changing from Ubuntu to something else like Debian or Sabayon. Initially I was planning to try Sabayon using the DVD I got from last months Linux For You magazine. That plan was shot down when I found out that Sabayon Professional Edition 1.1 is not supported any longer as explained by the folks in #Sabayon on IRC. I have half the mind to go to the Trivandrum Linux Install Fest however considering its distance I might have to reconsider. I wouldpost the link but thats going to have to wait as it seems this Reliance WebWorld Internet Cafe won’t allow folks to open up extra browser windows as it has been restricted. If you are somewhere from the Trivandrum area and are able to go for the event then I highly recommend it as they will be more than happy to install whatever distro they have available (Ubuntu by default and others based on request and availability) on your system at no charge :). If you have been wondering about diving into Linux now would be a good time for you.

By the way you can find the details for thew Linux Install Fest here .

I’ve been busy for the past few days ( read as slacking off). Anyway I thought of sharing this video of me using Compiz Fusion on my Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon Desktop. To record the movie I used the software called gtk-recordmydesktop. Then used the command ffmpeg to convert my video to a size which I cold upload easily. Although converting it did come with a noticeable degrade in quality of the video. But in my defense theres no way I’m ever going to be able to upload a 300 MB video for 5 minutes on my Desktop. You can also access my video here.

Heres the steps I used for the process. First lets install both the required software.

sudo apt-get install gtk-recordmydesktop
sudo apt-get install ffmpeg

Once you have them installed you can record your video by clicking Applications > Sound and Video > gtk-recordmydesktop.

You can change the filename by clicking on Save As and then settign the location and the file name to your choice. Now all you have to do is click on record and it will record anything that happens on your desktop to the file. Once you are done recording then you can start recording by clicking on the record button. You can end the recording by clicking the little button which is now in your system tray (or whatever it is called in Ubuntu ). You can see the button in the below image.

Once you do that you should get the screen shown below.

You do not want to close this screen. If you do close this screen out you will lose the video that you were just recording and the encoding stops. Once the encoding is done you should find the file at the place where it was set to be saved at or in your home folder. You will see that if you were recording your whole desktop the size will be quite big. you can convert the video to a smaller size by using the command ffmpeg. For my video I used the following command.

ffmpeg -i compiz.ogg -s 4cif to.mpg
You can check the man pages for detailed help about the ffmpeg command.

The effects in the Video I have used above are given below.
Compiz Fusion Effects
Splash
Compiz Benchmark
Desktop Cube
Rotate Cube
Cube Reflection
Cube Caps
Expo
Scale
Animations
3D Windows
Water Effect
Wobbly Windows
Snow
Window Preview
Scale
Ring Switcher
Shift Switcher

I’ve been using the 64 bit version of Ubuntu for about 3-4 months now. Considering that it has been satisfying my needs I’m pretty happy with it. I’ve also managed tog et quite a few people to try out Ubuntu as well. Recently one of my friends said that he would try out Ubuntu if I could get is favorite game to work on it which happens to be Call of Duty 4 : Modern Warfare. So I set out to see if Wine could be used to play COD4 (Call of Duty 4) on Ubuntu 64 bit Gutsy Gibbon.

I must say that although the process was kind of scary I managed to pull it off and finally get it to work. In fact here is a screenshot of it in game.

Before continuing I must say that the process is kind of scary for a person new to Linux and that you wont be able to get the best of graphic quality. As you can see the above is set to Low on my machine and it has a 8600 GT as a display card with 2 GB of RAM and a AMD x2 4400 Processor. I found that at low settings it was definitely playable. I would post a movie but unfortunately I haven’t exactly found out how glc works as of yet, which is a Fraps alternative for Linux. Anyway for the process to do this on your 64 bit machine read on.

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Well recently I was getting bored with Gnome so I decided to try my luck at installing KDE. Amazingly the process seemed much more easier than I thought it would be. I’ve given the process as shown below and heres a picture of my desktop in KDE.

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Recently I’ve noticed quite a few asking for methods changing the looks of the Ubuntu Desktop to make it a bit more appealing. Personally I don’t like the brown theme Ubuntu has going on at the moment But its really not hard to change anyway . Well I’m going to show you how you can customize your desktop to get it to look a bit better ot at least give you shove in the right direction.Heres two of my desktops that I customized.

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There a quite a few ways to view system stats in Linux like CPU or Hard Disk temperature. The usual ways include using gdesklets and screenlets to get the same. Although the benefit of the above is that you get rather neat looking little applets which you can place all over your desktop, they come with the disadvantage of using quite a bit more memory. With the decreasing prices of Memory this shouldn’t be an issue for most. However for those resource conscious folks who would like to view all those system stats at a low memory usage overhead then Conky is definitely the way to go.

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If you recently installed flash on an Ubuntu system the chances are most likely that it is broken. You can confirm this by opening a Website which uses Flash extensively. Like Youtube , IBNLive etc. Although an Update isn’t available there is a way you can fis this problem pretty easily.

Please note that this is is a temporary fix only and it is recommended that you wait for an update rather than install the temporary fix if possible. Thanks to Daradib for the post on ubuntuforums.org which solved my problem. You can find the post here. Please make sure you do install the right file from the page if you are using the temporary fix.

There are sometimes that you need to get help from a live person or those Google searches aren’t doing you any good at all. In such a case your best bet is to try the Ubuntu IRC community for help. If you remember my first post about Ubuntu I mentioned about the community being a huge plus. Well if you enter the Ubuntu channel you can see that theres quite a few folks always there. To be frank, I’ve never seen the channel have any lesser than 1000 people in the channel . Now lets see on how we can use IRC to get some help.

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In the previous article we fixed gdesklets so that it would work on a 64 bit install. However most of the better eye candy widgets in my honest opinion are screenlets. Although installation of screenlets are pretty easy getting them to run on your machine might not be as easy. The usual error that many get is “Unable to connect or launch daemon. Some values may be displayed incorrectly.” Let try some methods of correcting this.

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Well I couldn’t post anything yesterday cause I was rather busy reinstalling Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon after running a package called startup manager on it to fix my usplash. I should have known better not to try to fix something that didn’t work with the LiveCD anyway. Nonetheless after the reinstall I wanted to use gDesklets but I couldn’t get it to run after installing it. For some reason it wouldn’t connect to the daemon. Anyway with the help of some posts on the forum I found out what you could do to get them to work again.

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