The fifteenth version of the Ubuntu OS family known as Ubuntu 11.10 or Oneiric Ocelot has arrived. The first beta version of Ubuntu 11.10 was recently released with the stable version coming out in near future. Ubuntu has come a long way since version 11.04. In this post we will explore the new features and changes which have come with Ubuntu 11.10. For starters, we like to mention that Oneiric is much faster than its predecessor and some of the Unity hangs seem to have been resolved. Having said that, some hiccups still need to be sorted out as some legacy hardware users may experience compatibility issues with the new GUI interface. Check out new features and changes after the jump.
By farshad on September 12, 2011
Wally is a cross-platform wallpaper rotator which allows automatically downloading and switching your desktop wallpaper from multiple sources. Other than changing the current wallpaper from a local folder, it also grabs photos from FTP server, remote folders, as well as, online sources such as Google, Flickr, Yahoo, Panoramio, Pikeo, Ipernity, Photobucket, Buzznet, Picasa, Smugmug, and Bing. The wallpapers are downloaded according to a user specified keyword and online source. For example, if you were to select deviantArt as your source and enter the keyword as Ocean, Wally would fetch ocean images from deviantArt and rotate them periodically. Wally includes an option to define the precise criteria for setting and downloading desktop background images including everything from the wallpaper size, desktop area, image rotation settings, allocated disk space for downloaded pictures, from image storage history, etc. These features are quite similar to formerly reviewed, FlickrEdit and Pulse. However, Wally is more feature-rich than both of these applications. Wally is a Qt4 based application, available for Windows, Mac and Linux based operating systems.
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By farshad on September 12, 2011
Zeitgeist service comes pre-installed in Ubuntu and logs all activity such as files accessed, visited websites, etc. Activity Log Manager Zeitgeist is a GUI based application which lets you gain control of the information that Zeitgeist logs. It allows creating blacklists according to file or application type to disable logging for specified applications and user activities. This ensures that your personal information can be controlled from showing up in Zeitgeist logs. For example, you can use Activity log Manager to disabled logging for visited websites, certain file types (e.g. Libre Office files) and so on.
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By farshad on September 10, 2011
Totem is a GStreamer based media player for the Gnome desktop and comes pre-installed with Ubuntu. One of the features that Totem has lacked since the inception of the Unity launcher is a quicklist. As we all know quicklists provide easy access to major features of an application which is integrated with the Unity launcher. Not having a Unity quicklist has been bit of a short coming for Totem. However, that has now changed. A third-part developer has created a Unity quicklist for Totem which provides Play/Pause, Next, Previous, Volume Up, Volume Down and Mute options. This option makes it handy to run Totem functions right from the Unity Launcher by right-clicking on the Totem icon.
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By farshad on September 10, 2011
Sometimes you may require sharing a wireless internet connection with a computer which has no Wi-Fi adapter. Doing so can become quite tricky as the computer without a Wi-Fi card cannot be connected to a wireless router. In this post we will provide you with a quick tip to explain the procedure to share a wireless internet connection from one Ubuntu system with a Wi-Fi card (e.g. Laptop) to another Ubuntu computer which has no Wi-Fi card (e.g. a desktop PC).
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By farshad on September 7, 2011
PlexyDesk is an open source desktop extension for Windows, Mac and Linux based operating systems which transforms the look of the desktop and allows adding QML based widgets. It is not to be mistaken for a desktop environment like KDE or Gnome. Instead, it renders the desktop workspace and allows you to organize it. Currently, it provides a clock widget, photo frame, and file browser on the main sand allows adding extra widgets via drag and drop, which can further change the look and feel of your desktop.
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By farshad on September 6, 2011
A few weeks back we covered Google Music Manager for Linux, which helps users upload songs to the Google Music web service. Unfortunately, Google Music does not currently provide a desktop application to stream music from Google Music. Having said that, 3rd party efforts have already begun to integrate Google Music features with the desktop environment for different operating systems. Google Music Frame is an Ubuntu application which adds Google Music options within the Ubuntu Sound Menu to control your music collection. So far it looks like a perfect Google Music integration in Ubuntu. It also provides NotifyOSD (bubble messages) notifications for currently playing album or song.
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By farshad on August 31, 2011
Scribes is an open source text editor for Linux based operating systems which has been designed to streamline the workflow of developers. It automates common and repetitive operations by providing hotkey support for indentation, paragraph management, line, word/paragraph selection, option to toggle letter cases, etc. Scribes supports more than 70 programming languages, inlcuding, HTML, Java XML, PHP, SQL, VB.Net, SH, RPM Spec, Python, Prolog, Perl,Pascal, Ruby, gtk-dic, FCL, Open GL Shading Language, C, C# and so on. Other features include, support for remote editing via FTP, SFTP, SSH, Samba, WebDav, automatic word correction, completion and pairing, document switcher, automatic indentation and a skinable interface.
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By farshad on August 26, 2011
Gnome Subtitles is a subtitle editing application for Ubuntu Linux which makes subtitles file editing, splitting and merging processes a lot easier. It provides the option to add a reaction delay for the start and end time of the subtitles while you can also increase or decrease the subtitle duration. Gnome Subtitiles supports most commonly used formats including SRT, MacSUB, ViPlay Subtitle File, SubViewer, SubCreator, Panimator, MPSub, AQ Title and lot more. Gnome Subtitles is great for adding, removing and merging subtitle lines, increasing or reducing the time duration of specific subtitles file and manually translating subtitles in other languages.
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By farshad on August 26, 2011
Disk usage is one of the primary concerns for Linux users as many Linux distributions come with a large amount of applications, many of which you might never use. Moreover, many directories and subfolders can end up consuming a large chunk of your disk space and it becoms difficult to identify folders consuming the most disk usage. Boabab Disk Usage Analyzer is a GUI based application which comes with Ubuntu distributions to analyze disk space utilization. It is designed for the Gnome based desktop environment and for this reason is also available for a number of other Linux distributions. It can scan the whole file system tree and selected folders to display information about the disk used by specific directories. The disk usage analysis can be performed for both local and remote computers. The disk usage information can be viewed in the colored ring or tree charts. Since some users may find the subfolder structure display and disk analysis a bit confusing to understand using Baobab, for this reason, we are providing you with a complete overview of Baobab (Disk Usage Analyzer) to help you identify unwanted folders which may be eating up your disk space.
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By farshad on August 25, 2011
dupe Guru is a cross-platform application which efficiently finds duplicate files on a computer according to file name and file’s content. The developers behind dupeGuru have recently launched a new application called dupeGuru ME (Music Edition), which is designed to specifically identify duplicate music files from a very large collection of songs. It scans for not just duplicate songs but can also be configured to locate songs having duplicate tags or meta information within your music directories. Like the standard dupeGuru application, dupeGuru ME also has versions available for Windows, Mac and Linux based operating systems. dupeGuru ME identifies duplicate content using similar words, regular expressions, file content, etc and supports MP3, WMA, AAC (iTunes format), OGG, FLAC, loss-less AAC and loss-less WMA formats.
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By farshad on August 23, 2011
eMount is an open source Linux application to create, mount, encrypt and manage disk images and to create encrypted system partitions. The plain or encrpyted disk images can be created from the following supported formats, ext2, ext3, ext4, FAT-16, FAT-32, HFS, HFS+, NTFS, ReiserFS and XFS. When creating an encrypted volume, you can password protect it by entering a pass phrase or by importing a text file. Disk images (plain or encrypted) can be mounted using eMount to access your data. eMount also supports enlarging disk images from ext2, ext3, ext4, ReiserFS and XFS formats. Other than physical disk images, you can also mount ISO images to view and manage the content.
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By farshad on August 23, 2011
Comparing two folders with all underlying files and sub-folders require opening them side by side to tally items found in both folders but when you’re dealing with, apparently, identical folders, finding out differences becomes not only mind numbing but time wasting as well. Similarly, data and source code files with small differences can’t be identified manually. If you’re looking for a powerful file and folder comparison tool which offers comprehensive list of file/folder tools to differentiate updates, changes and differences, try out DiffMerge. It’s a cross-platform application, available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux based operating systems.
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By Usman on August 22, 2011
PeaZip is an open source application for Windows and Linux to create and extract multiple compressed archives simultaneously. Once you have installed PeaZip, you will no longer require installing another standalone compression program to extract or compress archives. It is not just a cross-platform application, but also supports compression across formats which are normally associated with operating system (e.g. .GZ for Linux). PeaZip provides full support for the following formats: 7Z, ARC, BZ2, GZ, *PAQ, PEA, QUAD/BALZ, TAR, UPX, and ZIP, whereas, “extraction only” support is available for ACE, ARJ, CAB, CHM, Java (JAR, EAR, WAR), Linux (DEB, PET/PUP, RPM, SLP), Mac (DMG/HFS), PAK/PK3/PK4, RAR, UDF, WIM and lot more.
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By farshad on August 19, 2011
We have previously covered a few Windows 7 style wallpaper changers for Ubuntu, which are, DesktopNova and Desktop Drapes. Just recently, I came across another wallpaper rotator for Ubuntu which has even better options. Wallch is a Wallpaper Changer for Linux based operating system of the Gnome desktop, which provides the additional option to take screenshots and to quickly grab a webcam image for keeping it as a desktop wallpaper.
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By farshad on August 17, 2011
