Software Free

1. Play youtube videos directly in Totem Movie Player (Hardy):
2. Another tip: i recently find out that by holding the mouse over audio files:
3. To customize most of the colors of your ubuntu:
4. To refresh the gnome panel:
5. To find out the UUID of your partitions:

13 tips& tricks and some useful little software

Before going to the meat of this post, here is a new instance of my mysterious countdown (the bets are still open):

After my last piece about colouring the Gears in an old paper style I got some interesting feedback (not sure if that was because what I did was good and stimulated people or because it was bad and prompted for corrections). Anyway, let's play a bit with the feedback:

Jude reminds me of the sculpting tool, one of the awesome features introduced in Inkscape 0.46, which I could have used instead of node simplification. It should be used in roughenmode:

To get something like this:

In the 2 previous articles, I explained how to set up a serial console on Ubuntu and Debian.

This tutorial will now show how to connect to those serial console using another machine using a software called minicom.

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This tutorial will go over the steps to go through in order to set up a serial console on Debian Linux.

Debian uses sysvinit to handle the booting process, amongst the different task, and as such, there is a few differences between most of the tutorial that you might find on the internet regarding how to set up a serial console.

A Serial Console becomes handy when running a headless server (i.e no keyboard and screen) or if you cannot connect a a server because of a network issue.

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This tutorial will go over the steps to go through in order to set up a serial console on Ubuntu Linux.

Unlike most other distros, Ubuntu uses upstart instead of sysvinit and as such, there is a few differences between most of the tutorial that you might find on the internet regarding how to set up a serial console.

A Serial Console becomes handy when running a headless server (i.e no keyboard and screen) or if you cannot connect a a server because of a network issue.

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After last week I took the initial gears and made them from solid gold, not is time to talk about the completely different approach, old writing on old paper, where we will work on the strokes.

So, back to the black and white gears:

If we set the stroke color and unset the fill color will get something like this, with overlapping contours, he will have to get rid of:

So select the gear (gears if we have more) suffering due to this unwanted overlap and convert the stroke to path:

Last week I talked about drawing gears with Inkscape (for a Fedora 10 theme proposal, but not only), now it's the time for a promised follow-up: let' put some color on the gears.

I want to make the gears golden (or bronze, there is not much difference in the process) to express the value and at the same time match the intended steampunk style. The start is exactly where I left the image, black outlines on a transparent background:

Resynthesizer is a very cool GIMP plugin I have been playing with for a few days. It can be used for some "magic" effects: create seamless backgrounds, transfer textures from one image to another and remove objects from images.

The plugin is not installed by default, but is available on the website, with binaries for various OSes. In Fedora we have it already packaged, only a yum away: yum install gimp-resynthesizer.

I like its "remove objects" feature, which of course is far from perfect and works best on selected images, but is the kind of effect you see on movies: a few clicks and poof! instant coolness (in the same league with SIOX).

So open your photo with GIMP and draw a free selection (with the Lasso tool) around it:

Do you like my Random Content block? I thought it would be nice to show people random selections from previous entries on my website as another way, along with the Popular Content block, to help visitors discover pages that they might be interested in. The way it was done is a little hack-ish, and it would be better to write this up as a module, but it does give an example of a custom content block using the PHP filter. The method I have used us to pick two node ids at random from the database (change the LIMIT statement if you want more) using a MySQL trick (I guess this won't work on Postgres), that is to use a ORDER BY RAND() statement to mix up the rows in our SELECT query and a LIMIT statement to select how many we want. After that it is a case of using the node_load() function in the Drupal API to load up the details. The code for all of this is shown below.

While I am still thinking about putting back some blue on the Gears theme proposal for Fedora 10 (and, of course, while counting down the few days remaining until the upcoming Fedora 9 release) here is a short howto about drawing gears, so anyone can learn to make them.

In fact drawing gears is not hard at all, I cheat and use an effect included in the recently released Inkscape 0.46 (available both in F8 and F9) Effects > Render > Gears:

A few parameters to adjust (with Live Preview enabled to see their effect in real time) and we get a toothed wheel:

Now add a circle:

And use the Align and Distribute dialog to align it to the center:

This tutorial will show how you can export and import a set of GPG keys from one computer to another.
This way, you can sign/encrypt the same way one different computer.

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GIMP 2.5 came out and it has some interesting features. Since it is not available in Ubuntu's repos i thought it would be nice to make a detailed tutorial on how to install GIMP 2.5 on Ubuntu Hardy for evaluation purpose.

1. Install the packages needed to compile programs:
$ sudo apt-get install build-essential

2. Install gimp dependencies:
$ sudo apt-get build-dep gimp

3. Install latest BABL and GEGL libs from source (these libs were not installed in step 2 as the gimp package in the repo is not depending on them)
3.1 Grab latest versions from SVN:

$ svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/babl/trunk/ babl
$ svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/gegl/trunk/ gegl

3.2 Install BABL:
$ cd babl
$ ./autogen.sh --prefix=/opt/gimp-2.5
$ make
$ sudo make install
$ cd ..

3.3 Install GEGL:

$ cd gegl
$ ./autogen.sh --prefix=/opt/gimp-2.5
$ make
$ sudo make install
$ cd ..

4. Make binaries, includes, libraries in /opt/gimp-2.5 available for use:

I was surprised today while on Facebook to notice an advert on the left of the page with the face of a friend of mine promoting a certain local radio station. It looks like this may be due to the SocialAds system in Facebook, which seems to be a way to persuade people to but products on the basis that their friends are a fan of it so you should too. Unlike celebrities though, your apparent endorsement of a product won't earn you a penny, in fact you may not even be aware that this is happening. The products concerned don't seem to be completely random but may be products that you are a "fan" of.

Fortunately though, there is a way to opt out of this system. By default people on your friends list might see such adverts, but you can make sure nobody sees them, the setting is a little hidden away, but this is how you find it:

SSH is great. There is so many thing you can do with it other than just a remote secure shell like X forwarding, port forwarding, authenticate using a private/public key, compress the transmitted stream....

If you have different account that you use on an every day basis, it becomes quickly cumbersome to type those lengthly command lines.

One could work around this by using aliases, the right way would be to use ~/.ssh/config

This tutorial will show some customization examples that should cover most ssh use cases.

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When configuring a Windows machine for use by the Evolution™ payroll service-bureau system, a common step is installing the open-source Firebird database software; this Evo Tip details the process.