techiehenry

As I am writing this post, I am downloading through BitTorrent the latest release of Ubuntu Linux for the desktop, codenamed Edgy Eft. This became available since October 26.

As stated in the press release, Edgy Eft has some new packages coming with it. Among them are GNOME 2.16, Firefox 2, Tomboy (a note-taking application), Evolution 2.8, Upstart (a startup manager), and F-Spot (a photo management application).

I’m two hours away from burning the ISO image to disc (hoping everything would be fine). I’m raring to try F-Spot and GNOME 2.16. Unlike Picasa (the one I currently use) which is actually a Windows binary being run under WINE, F-Spot is a full Linux application (and, judging from the screen shots, might have a look and feel similar to Adobe Photoshop Album — see this article from Digital Photography Review). The recent developments in GNOME has been gradually convincing me to veer away from KDE as it is getting cleaner and prettier (visually).

An upgrade from Ubuntu 6.06LTS (Dapper Drake) is possible, but I’d rather take the reinstall route to make sure everything runs without a hitch.

Interested? Download it here, or request for a free CD here.

This post may be a day late, but here it is anyway…

Firefox 2 appeared for download in the Firefox website yesterday. There are a lot of enhancements but these are more ‘under the hood’ than cosmetic. I think the one obvious change in the interface would be the close button IN EVERY TAB that you open (as shown below). At last, I don’t have to go to the other side of my screen when I want to close a tab using my mouse (I usually have my browser window opened full screen).

I’m using it right now on my machine. Fasterfox won’t work, but NoScript (not shown above) and VideoDownloader does. This just goes to show that not all of the extensions and plugins are compatible (yet) with the latest and greatest from the Firefox team.

Try it now, and experience the stability and speed that existing Firefox users have been experiencing ever since.

One hurdle that some people face when migrating from other operating systems to Linux is the fact that some devices connected to their machines are not supported. Eventually though, somebody comes up with one that solves this problem. This is the case with the iPod. Someone went out and created support, either a a plugin for an existing Linux-based media player or as a stand-alone application. For years since, iPod users using Linux on their machines have been enjoying the support that only their Mac and Windows-using friends once had.

Then came iTunes on phones. It would have been safe to say that since it uses the same application as the regular iPods, Linux applications for the iPod would work out of the box with the likes of the ROKR, V3i, and the L7. That wasn’t what turned out. It appears that though the phones use the same application, the arrangement of the filesystem on the iPod and the iTunes phones were quite different.

Admittedly, support was slow in coming. It might be that the application developers do not have access to the device itself, or any other reason, but it was about a year before Linux support for iTunes on mobile phones was created.

I was one of those who waited for months for these applications to come by, and I’m glad to spread the word that support has already arrived. Now what application did I use and how?

1. Download the latest release of gtkpod and libgpod. Notice the date on the files? It’s been a month since its release! Pretty new, huh?
2. Extract the files in their own folder, and perform the following commands:

./configure
./make
./make install

These will compile the source codes and install the binaries in the appropriate directories.

3. If all goes well, at this point you can start gtkpod through a terminal window:

gtkpod &

The main gtkpod window would appear.

4. In the playlist column, you can see an entry called ‘iPod’. Right-click on it and select ‘Edit iPod properties’.
5. In the window that will be opened, refer to the entry for ‘iPod mountpoint’. This should be changed to the mountpoint of the mobile phone (the phone MUST be mounted before gtkpod can access it). As for my Ubuntu box, it appeared mounted at /media/<Memory card label>/.
6. At the entry for ‘Model’, select ‘xmobile1′ under ‘Mobile phone’. You may now close the window.
7. Again, right-click on ‘iPod’ and then select ‘Load iPod’. This would connect your mobile phone to gtkpod. You may now transfer music and add playlists.
8. To save your changes, click on ‘Save Changes’ on the toolbar. When the operation’s done, you may close gtkpod, unmount the mobile phone, and enjoy your music.

That’s all there is to it!

First, a little background on things.

There is a project by the name of TOR (The Onion Router) — initially sponsored by the US Naval Research Labs but now by the Electronic Frontier Foundation — whose aim is to provide a means for its users to communicate anonymously over the internet.

The anonymity of the user is preserved by letting the packets sent by a user’s machine go through what the TOR developers call a TOR ‘cloud’ — a private network where the path the data takes is chosen randomly. The end effect is, if somebody tries to read the data as it comes out of the TOR cloud, it would appear to them as something that came from a server from anywhere else in the world.

Quite a feat, considering that a lot of the project is supported by volunteers.

Now, everyone does not need every communication done by their network to go through the TOR cloud, especially since most users would only be doing web surfing every now and then. In addition, using the TOR client in a commodity machine (a low-end machine at home, if I might say) would perform really slow since it consumes a lot of the machine’s resources.

To address this issue, Hacktivismo released a modified version of the Firefox browser, named Torpark.

Every communication done by the user would then go through the TOR cloud, which in effect renders browsing activity anonymous.

The current released versions are Windows applications, though Linux users may still be able to use it, as it works flawlessly under WINE.

I ran Torpark though WINE in my Ubuntu box at home. The only thing I noticed is that browsing activity is slow (For reference purposes, I got an Athlon 2600 with 512Mb of memory). I don’t recommend it for those who wanted to browse media-heavy sites. This may be more suitable for people who post at forums and blogs.

Get it at the Torpark website.

Democracy Player is a media player that quite ‘revolutionizes’ the way media is distributed across the internet.

Unlike Apple’s iTunes or Real’s RealPlayer, Democracy offers video content — ‘Over 700 Channels, All Free’. Delivery of content is done through BitTorrent — which means that data arrives from several sources in a peer-to-peer manner. Bandwidth for a particular source is not hogged, while speed remains high.

Now YouTube — GooTube, some might say — just came to mind. I’m not sure how content is being checked here, but I hope this won’t become a medium for distributing illegal content like home-recorded episodes of TV shows and movies.

On the plus side, other than video bloggers, this may be a good medium for independent film creators to showcase their talent. Cost (distribution-wide) is minimal for them, though it would require viewers to have an internet connection to get their work.

Did I forget to mention that the player is open source? Source code is available on the Democracy website as well.

I’m downloading this at the moment. I listen to the radio through my internet connection and Rhythmbox. Now I can watch TV as well!