Gimp 2.8 Updated With More Features

The GNU Image Manipulation Program, GIMP, has been released with several new features and fixes. GIMP 2.8 features is equipped with several useful features including single-window mode which is probably one of the highly requested features and the latest v. 2.8.2 provides few more bug fixes and updates.

GIMP developers had released the stable release of GIMP back in May and GIMP release note states that the new release is a result of 3 years of collaborative inputs from the people all around the world.

Among all the improvements, the single window mode feature is one of the most awaited features. You can now toggle between the default multi-window mode and the new single-window mode through the Single-window mode checkbox in the Windows menu. In single-window mode, GIMP will put dockable dialogs and images in a single, tabbed image window.

There are several additions and improvements in user interface, tools and plugins. Likewise, several API has been refactored to ease the script development easier and better. Also, the GIMP license has been changed to (L)GPLv3+ from now onwards.

Similarly, several bugs have been fixed including the most notable ones such as not being able to remember JPEG saving options, slow canvas redraw and not showing page setup options on Windows.

GIMP is available for download from ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.8/. You can also choose any other mirror suitable for you.

The release note provides a information on installation of GIMP 2.8.

You can also install GIMP 2.8 on Ubuntu 12.04 using PPA. Fire up the terminal and just type the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:otto-kesselgulasch/gimp
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gimp

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Install XAMPP 1.8 From PPA In Ubuntu

Since apache friends has released the v. 1.8 of XAMPP for linux and windows, its important you guys upgrade your XAMPP. In this post, you will find the instructions to install XAMPP 1.8 from PPA.

The most important updates of v. 1.8.0 of XAMPP are: Apache 2.4.2, MySQL 5.5.25a, PHP 5.4.4, and phpMyAdmin 3.5.1. Since the software components are updated, I strongly recommend to upgrade your XAMPP.
All you have to do is follow the following steps in order:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:upubuntu-com/xampp
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xampp

Alternatively, you can download the tar file for XAMPP from Apache Friends and follow their instructions to install XAMPP 1.8.0. In case you're looking for upgrading your previous XAMPP installation, be sure to follow this How To.

I hope this helps :)


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How To Manually Install Flash Player 11 In Linux

This post will provide a step by step instructions for installing flash player 11 plugin in ubuntu 11.04 and other different versions and distros. This will be helpful for everybody who are having trouble with the software center like I had.


Make sure no firefox process is running and then fire up the terminal and type the following commands in order:

mkdir -p ~/flash && cd ~/flash

wget http://archive.canonical.com/pool/partner/a/adobe-flashplugin/adobe-flashplugin_11.2.202.238.orig.tar.gz

tar -zxvf adobe-flashplugin_11.2.202.238.orig.tar.gz

sudo cp -r libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/firefox/plugins

sudo cp -r usr/* /usr

Once you have finished copying the shared object and other necessary files in their respective target directories, you can open the firefox and you're good to go. :)


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Screen Recording Software Solutions For Linux

Windows users have several options to choose from when it comes to the desktop recording (and only paid ones are good generally) but Linux users have fewer options but robust, simple, and best of all, free and open source desktop screen recording tools that we can trust on.

Below are some of the screen recording tools you might want to try:

recordMyDesktop

recordMyDesktop is a desktop session recorder for GNU/Linux written in C. recordMyDesktop itself is a command-line tool and few GUI frontends are also available for this tool. There are two frontends, written in python with pyGtk (gtk-recordMyDesktop) and pyQt4 (qt-recordMyDesktop). recordMyDesktop offers also the ability to record audio through ALSA, OSS or the JACK audio server. Also, recordMyDesktop produces files using only open formats. These are theora for video and vorbis for audio, using the ogg container.

Installation under debian and ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install gtk-recordmydesktop

XVidCap

XVidCap is a small tool to capture things going on on an X-Windows display to either individual frames or an MPEG video. It enables you to capture videos off your X-Window desktop for illustration or documentation purposes.It is intended to be a standards-based alternative to tools like Lotus ScreenCam.

sudo apt-get install xvidcap

Istanbul

Istanbul is a desktop session recorder for the Free Desktop. It records your session into an Ogg Theora video file. To start the recording, you click on its icon in the notification area. To stop you click its icon again. It works on GNOME, KDE, XFCE and others. It was named so as a tribute to Liverpool's 5th European Cup triumph in Istanbul on May 25th 2005.

sudo apt-get install istanbul

Vnc2Flv

Vnc2flv is a cross-platform screen recording tool for UNIX, Windows or Mac. It captures a VNC desktop session (either your own screen or a remote computer) and saves as a Flash Video (FLV) file.

Wink

Wink is a Tutorial and Presentation creation software, primarily aimed at creating tutorials on how to use software (like a tutor for MS-Word/Excel etc). Using Wink you can capture screenshots, add explanations boxes, buttons, titles etc and generate a highly effective tutorial for your users. It requires GTK 2.4 or higher and unfortunately is just a freeware(could not find any source code for it).

Screenkast

Screenkast is a screen capturing program that records your screen-activities, supports commentboxes and exports to all video formats.

If you got any more suggestions, please drop the comment. :)


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Determine Your SATA Disk Model And Vendor In Ubuntu

Sometimes you need to determine the model and vendor of your hard disk and here is the small tips on how to find those information.

All you have to do is type one of the following commands for the respective outputs:

cat /sys/class/block/sda/device/model

cat /sys/class/block/sda/device/vendor

I hope this becomes useful sometimes. :)


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Why Alias Command With Itself

Aliasing the command to itself to suppress the original functionality of the command and provide it new added sets of functionality can come quite handy for linux users and administrators.

If you have been using linux shell for a while, I'm pretty sure you are now familiar with the `ls` command, if not I think you have just learnt to use man pages. Probably you've been using `ls -l` command to list files with the files size as well. Too bad, you won't just be able to instantly make the sense of the file size displayed using this command so why not alias `ls` command to always provide human readable file sizes. So here is my alias:

alias ls='ls -lh'

This is what I always want to see as the output with `ls` command. The same kind of alias can be used with `du` and `df` commands. There are number of other cases where aliasing a command with itself is good choice.

Another example is the less command. By default, you need to press q to exit less which can be quite annoying if the entire content can fit in a single screen. However, adding -F flag will gracefully quit after displaying the content if the content fits in a single screen. So I have my alias for less as below:

alias lesss='less -F'

If something shoots in your mind, feel free to share here as a comment :)


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Stack-based Directory Switching For Easy Reversal

So how many times have you used the `cd` command repeatedly to go back and forth of two or more directories. Probably you are already familiar to the `cd -` command which lets you switch between the current and the previous directory. But, many times this current and previous directory switching restriction will not suffice and hence a better option in such case is to use the `pushd` command instead of `cd`.

For example, just use the `pushd somedirA`, `pushd somedirB`, ... and like that. Now if you need to switch back, you can just use `popd` command and you'll be switching back easily. The `pushd` command saves the current directory path and then cds to the supplied path.

If you dig more, you'll come to know about the -n and -N switches you can combine with these commands so I will let you explore on this. Also, you can use the `dirs` command to view the stack of directories. If you are some computer student or enthusiast, you have already gotten an idea from a famous data structure called stack. Anyway, I hope this comes handy sometimes like it does to me :)


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Fix "trying to overwrite '*', which is also in package *"

Today I was updating few stuffs in edubuntu and dpkg was continually throwing me the problem while trying to install kdelibs-data. The error read as "trying to overwrite 'A', which is also in package X" and the fix was pretty straightforward but still I thought it would help someone out there.

Below is the exact error I was getting while trying to install kdelibs5-data from the deb file.

dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/
kdelibs5-data_4%3a4.4.5-0ubuntu1.2_all.deb (--unpack):
trying to overwrite '/usr/share/polkit-1/actions
/org.kde.kcontrol.kcmremotewidgets.policy', which is also in package kdebase-runtime-data 4:4.6.5-0ubuntu1

The fix was pretty simple. Add the --force-overwrite switch in the dpkg command as below:

dpkg -i --force-overwrite kdelibs5-data_4.4.5-0ubuntu1.2_all.deb

I hope this comes useful sometimes.


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