Planet

The first IRC meeting of the year will take place on Sunday, 11th January at 9pm.

Please add any agenda items you want to discuss during the meeting on the wiki.

This is simply a list of some useful Ubuntu Linux applications that you mightn’t have heard of. This post has been inspired by the ubuntuforums.org thread: “Cool applications you use that others might not know of”

All applications listed below are available in Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) repositories. Links will bring you to packages information at packages.ubuntu.com where you’ll get all the information you need; link to homepage, source packages, current and original maintainer etc.

These are only a few personal choices of applications that I used to use, use currently, or am planning to use. When writing this post the Cool applications you use that others might not know of thread had 134 pages, so it’s full of suggestions and “unknown to you” software recommendations.

AllTray With AllTray you can dock any application with no native tray icon (like Evolution, Thunderbird, Terminals) into the system tray. A high-light feature is that a click on the “close” button will minimize back to system tray.

Comix is a comic book viewer. It reads zip, rar, tar, tar.gz and tar.bz2 archives (often called .cbz, .cbr and .cbt) as well as normal image files.

Cowbell is an elegant music organizer intended to make keeping your collection tidy both fun and easy. It allows viewing and editing of the tags, guessing of tag information with the help of Amazon Web Services and has an easy-to-use interface.

Devil’s Pie This tool will find windows as they are created and perform actions on them, such as resizing, moving to another workspace, or pinning them to all workspaces.

dvdisaster provides a margin of safety against data loss on CD and DVD media caused by scratches or aging media. It creates error correction data which is used to recover unreadable sectors if the disc becomes damaged at a later time.

ELinks is a feature-rich program for browsing the web in text mode. It is like enhanced Lynx and Links.

EasyTAG is an utility for viewing, editing and writing the ID3 tags of different audio files, using a GTK+ interface.

GCO (Gnome Comic Organizer) is a database for keeping track of your comics collection. It supports titles, publishers, types, writers, pencilers, inkers, cover prices, current prices, comments, and much more.

Gmount-iso is a small tool written using PyGTK and Glade. It allows you to easily mount your cd images. This is a frontend to the 'mount -o loop -t iso9660 foo.iso /mountpoint' command

Griffith Adding items to the movie collection is as quick and easy as typing the film title and selecting a supported source. Griffith will then try to fetch all the related information from the Web.

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.

Htop is an ncursed-based process viewer similar to top, but it allows to scroll the list vertically and horizontally to see all processes and their full command lines.

OnTV is a GNOME Applet written in Python using PyGTK, it uses XMLTV files to monitor current and upcoming TV programs.

PDFedit Complete editing of pdf documents is made possible with PDFedit. You can change either raw pdf objects (for advanced users) or use predefined gui functions.

Picard is the next generation MusicBrainz tagging application. This new tagging concept is album oriented, as opposed to track oriented like the others taggers are.

Planner is a Project Management application that supports Gantt charts, resource allocation and integration with other GNOME applications.

scrot (SCReen shOT) is a simple commandline screen capture utility that uses imlib2 to grab and save images. Multiple image formats are supported through imlib2’s dynamic saver modules.

StarDict is a cross-platform and international dictionary written in GTK+ 2.x. It has powerful features such as “Glob-style pattern matching”, “Scan selection word”, “Fuzzy search”, etc.

WeeChat (Wee Enhanced Environment for Chat) is a fast and light IRC client for many operating systems.

Workrave is a program that assists in the recovery and prevention of Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI). The program frequently alerts you to take micro-pauses, rest breaks and restricts you to your daily limit.

So what applications are you using, that I mightn’t have heard of?

Do you remember what this command does:
dpkg –configure -a ?

Or, what command do you use to reset xorg.conf configuration?

If you don’t remember or you’re not completely sure, you can either search for it on the web or just have a quick look at your printed Ubuntu Cheat Sheet. What? You don’t have one yet?

Get yourself a copy from FOSSwire. It’s also available in Spanish, Russian, Italian, French, German and Greek.

I’ve just sent out an email to ubuntu-ie mailing list:

The Christmas spirit is already in the air, and that means that another year is nearly over.

Many of us will look back on 2008 and start setting new goals for the coming year.

So, let’s look together at what we as the Irish Ubuntu Community have accomplished and where we have failed this year.

Have your say about things to improve, participation and responsibilities within the team or propose a new project. Let it be an open discussion, constructive criticism, let’s plan for 2009!

Join the discussion, let’s start planning for a new, better year!

If you haven’t subscribed yet, please go to Ubuntu-ie Mailing List.

Feast or famine it seems with events here in Ireland. In the same month as Ossbarcamp is taking place FOWA is live here in Dublin. For those of you that don’t know what it is, it’s the Future of Web applications and it’s coming from Dublin, on the 6th March 2009 taking place at Liberty Hall on Eden Quay. It is great to see these types of conferences here in Ireland. It gives us a chance to see and hear from speakers we normally wouldn’t get a chance to meet, and also learn about new projects they are working on.

I myself would love to hear from more from David Heinemeier Hannsson , Blane Cook and Simon Willison, not the type of people you’d find knocking about in the Longstone on a daily basis. There seems to be talks on wide and varying ranges, so hopefully there is something to please everyone. Maybe some of them will come back and take part in ossbarcamp : - )

Drupal is a great solution if you’re looking for a CMS system. In order to sneakily install LAMP with the minimum of fuss, I usually just install mod php and mod mysql (the apache related modules for php and mysql respectively) and that triggers pretty much everything else to be pulled automatically! So, from the command line…

sudo aptitude install libapache2-mod-php5

sudo aptitude install php5-mysql

… should give you Apache, MySQL and PHP in one fell swoop. Just to be sure that all is well run the following install commands

sudo apt-get install mysql-server
sudo apt-get install apache2
sudo apt-get install php5
sudo apt-get install php5-mysql

Then download and install Drupal (version 6.6 at time of writing) at http://drupal.org and follow their install guide.

One final tip, if there’s any problem with your apache installation’s configuration, you can install phpMyAdmin in order to plough through these problems as it will supply its own configuration. For example, I got the database configuration error when I was trying to connect to my database for the first time using Drupal

“Your web server does not appear to support any common database types. Check with your hosting provider to see if they offer any databases that Drupal supports.”

Turns out my apache config was dodge as when I did a ’sudo apache2ctl restart’ I got the following…

“apache2: Could not reliably determine the server’s fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.1.1 for ServerName”

Installing phpMyAdmin and choosing apache2 when prompted during this process did the trick. Now go forth and Drupal!

Quite a lot of new initiatives are kicking off in Dublin recently. We had the SoftwareFreedomDay in September, Intrepid Release Party in October and now we’ll have the OSSBarCamp on the 28th of March 2009 in Dublin.

BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants…

Laura Czajkowski and Jaime Hemmett are the organizers of this upcoming event.

Visit the OSSBarCamp website and sign up for the event, suggest a topic or register your own talk.

You can also follow the latest OSSBarCamp updates on twitter.

Thanks to Jaime and James we now have a site that looks pretty damn good even if I do say so myself. So now it’s up to you to set the pace for the barcamp. There are a number of pages set up for you to chose from, sign up and attend, come along and do a talk, or even suggest a talk topic so speakers can get an idea of what folks want to hear about.

Barcamps are driven by the audience, you are the audience, you decide. I just organised the venue for you to meet and discuss and hopefully learn something new from attending.

Laura

Wiki will be up shortly so folks can sign up for a talk and also for attendance, if you have any suggestions let us know here, or twitter or you can email us.

So I’ve decided to run another event! I was going through some online reading and working on Ubuntu-ie stuff and the topics came up of open source events and the lack of them here in Ireland. It got me thinking, why wasn’t there any, who would organise them, where would they be, and I pondered some more and then went about seeing how I could organise one.

So let me introduce you to ossbarcamp, it will take place here in Dublin, I’m just in the final process of firming up the venue. You are being given advance notice now, Saturday 28th March 2009 in Dublin. Put that in your diary folks!

For those that are not familiar with a barcamp, from my experience it is a less formal type of a conference, where the participants set the talks and tone of the event. In particular I like the fact that in many cases, before hand people suggest talks they would like to hear about, and this helps people either reseach a given topic or they go off and look into it and then present at the event.

All attendees are encouraged to present or facilitate a session. Everyone is also asked to share information and experiences of the event, both live and after the fact, via public web channels including (but not limited to) blogging, photo sharing, twittering, and IRC

Myself and Jamie will be working on putting more information on the site as soon as we have more details. A place for you to sign up for a talk, register your interest in hearing a topic in the hopes someone reads it, yells yes I know about that and does a talk on it for you and in general your thoughts on an oss themed barcamp.

Another exciting event has just been announced for Dublin next year with an Open Source Software Barcamp planned for Dublin March 28th next year. And you could be one of the speakers! The idea behind a barcamp is to have a casual relaxed atmosphere where the attendees can help drive the schedule - like a conference done in the spirit of Digg. For more info check out Laura Czajkowski’s blog post and if you want to keep up to date with further details you can track things on ossbarcamp on twitter.

This could be a pretty obvious one to a lot of people but it’s just so handy. This will download a file from somewhere.com to your local directory

curl -O http://somewhere.com/somefile.tar.gz

Really handy when you’re administering a remote server and need to pull down files.