Showing posts with label ubuntu 12.10. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ubuntu 12.10. Show all posts

Saturday 9 November 2013

Fix Your Ubuntu

Recently Ubuntu has been known for turning into an advertising company and has been accused of not protecting user's privacy so just came across this site that fixes your ubuntu by applying some patches to turn off some of the invasive features of Ubuntu.

FixUbuntu.com


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Thursday 17 October 2013

How I am Trying To Keep My Eyes Safe On Computer

Lately I've been on computer a lot and with this, the usual problem with most computer users has started to bother me. Going through some of the blogs online for keeping eyes safe while using computer, I came through few suggestions and in this post, I'm writing how I'm trying to keep my eyes safe. Though not tremendously helpful for everybody, I thought I would share this and you could also use my technique.

The problem with computer addicts is not getting their eyes off the computer for much longer period and though I've been trying to remember to keep my eyes off the computer in regular interval, I usually never implement this.

My two principles based on my readings on different websites are:

  • 20-20-20: In the 20 minutes interval, keep your eyes away for 20 seconds (& view other objects which are around 20 feet away)
  • 2 hrs rule: In the 2 hours interval, stay away from computers for at least 2 minutes.

But, you can not really follow the rules so easily and I had to find some other alternative to do so. This is how I am doing it now.

Create two cron jobs for each of the above mentioned methods such that notify-send is triggered in each 20 minutes and each 2 hours informing you to keep yourself safe from computers. So my /etc/crontab looked like this:

*/20 * * * * techgaun export DISPLAY=:0.0 && /usr/bin/notify-send -i /home/techgaun/Samar/scripts/eye_inv.ico "20 - 20 - 20" "Time to take rest. Keep your eye safe :)"
01 */2 * * * techgaun export DISPLAY=:0.0 && /usr/bin/notify-send -i /home/techgaun/Samar/scripts/eye_inv.ico "2 hrs eye rest" "Time to take rest for 2 minutes. Keep your eye safe :)"


You need to replace techgaun with your username and need to give correct path to the ico file if you like to use icon like me. Otherwise, you could just omit the icon in notify-send command. I hope this proves useful for some of you :)


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Tuesday 2 April 2013

Step By Step Turbo C++ IDE In Ubuntu 12.04

Well we are doing our labs based on the traditional Turbo C++ IDE and I decided to write this blog post with the information on how I installed it on my Ubuntu box.

First thing first, download Turbo C from internet. For your ease, I've uploaded it HERE.

We will have to install dosbox to run the windows dos mode applications so lets install it:

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ sudo apt-get install dosbox


Once you install dosbox, unzip the content to somewhere in your $HOME directory. In my example, I unzipped the content of the Turbo C zip file into ~/Tools/TurboC3/. Now launch the dosbox by typing dosbox in the terminal. A dosbox emulation window will appear which will look like your old DOS system.

In the window, type the following (make sure you type appropriate path for your installation):

mount C: ~/Tools/
C:
cd TurboC3
INSTALL.EXE


And, then follow the on-screen information. Refer to the screenshots below:















Once the installation finishes, you can then run the Turbo C by mounting the drive again and then navigation to C:\TC (cd C:\TC\BIN). If you need to use the Turbo C++ IDE frequently, my suggestion would be to add an autoexec entry in your dosbox configuration. The default configuration file resides in ~/.dosbox/dosbox-0.74.conf (My version of dosbox is 0.74 hence the file name, by default). Open up this file and in the section of [autoexec], add the lines below:

[autoexec]
mount C: ~/Tools/
C:
cd TC\BIN
TC.EXE


Adding this entry will run the above commands during the startup of dosbox thus giving you the Turbo C IDE interface directly on running dosbox.

I hope this helps :)


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Saturday 9 March 2013

Check Battery Status From Terminal [How To]

Since I had no graphical interface for some reason, I needed some alternative way to check the battery status. If your system includes acpi command, you can just use this command but I had no luxury of such command and here's how you can do the same thing I did. The /proc/ virtual file system has information of different states among which the ACPI information is one. The ACPI information provides us the details of device configurations and power status of the system. Below is one flavor of the command to check the battery status:

samar@Techgaun:~$ cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state
present: yes
capacity state: ok
charging state: charged
present rate: unknown
remaining capacity: unknown
present voltage: 12276 mV

samar@Techgaun:~$ cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/info
present: yes
design capacity: 4400 mAh
last full capacity: unknown
battery technology: rechargeable
design voltage: 10800 mV
design capacity warning: 250 mAh
design capacity low: 150 mAh
cycle count: 0
capacity granularity 1: 10 mAh
capacity granularity 2: 25 mAh
model number: Primary
serial number:
battery type: LION
OEM info: Hewlett-Packard


The first command provides the general status of the battery and the second command provides the detailed information about battery. The other way is to use the upower command that talks with the upowerd daemon. Upowerd daemon is a default daemon in ubuntu and few others for power statistics. Below is the command to see battery details:

samar@Techgaun:~$ upower -i /org/freedesktop/UPower/devices/battery_BAT0
native-path: /sys/devices/LNXSYSTM:00/LNXSYBUS:00/PNP0C0A:00/power_supply/BAT0
vendor: Hewlett-Packard
model: Primary
power supply: yes
updated: Sat Mar 9 10:12:17 2013 (5 seconds ago)
has history: yes
has statistics: yes
battery
present: yes
rechargeable: yes
state: empty
energy: 0 Wh
energy-empty: 0 Wh
energy-full: 47.52 Wh
energy-full-design: 47.52 Wh
energy-rate: 0 W
voltage: 12.28 V
percentage: 0%
capacity: 100%
technology: lithium-ion


If you wish to install acpi for future uses, you can do so by typing the command below:

samar@Techgaun:~$ sudo apt-get install acpi


Play around with different switches by looking over the help and man pages. You will find this tool quite useful :)


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Thursday 10 January 2013

Create Backup Of List Of Apps Installed In Ubuntu

When my laptop's HDD was near to death, I had created backup of the list of all applications and packages I'd installed in my Ubuntu so that I would be able to install them easily in my new system in new HDD. I had forgotten about it but today suddenly remembered and am sharing this simple technique. Fire up the terminal and type the following:

samar@Techgaun:~$ sudo dpkg --get-selections > installed_apps




Now the list of packages will be saved in the installed_apps file and you can use it for future reference. I hope this is useful ;)


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Friday 23 November 2012

Video Transcoding With HandBrake In Linux

HandBrake is a GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder available for major platforms: linux, mac, and windows. HandBrake converts video from nearly any format to a handful of modern ones.



Handbrake can save output in two containers, MP4 and MKV and I've been using it as a MKV transcoder for a while and I'm quite satisfied with it. Even though the official wiki says its not a ripper, I can see it to be quite useful DVD ripper.



Handbrake is available in CLI (HandBrakeCLI) and GUI (ghb) mode. Hence this offers the flexibility to choose the appropriate version according to your linux personality. As of now, we can install HandBrake from PPA and the latest version is v. 0.9.8 released back in July this year.

HandBrake can be installed from PPA. Issue the following commands in your terminal

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:stebbins/handbrake-releases
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install handbrake-cli


Or if you wish to install the GUI version, type:

$ sudo apt-get install handbrake-gtk




I recommend using the CLI version since you can transcode/convert videos much more efficiently if you use the CLI version. But if you are not comfortable with the command line interfaces, the GUI version of HandBrake is also quite good.



Only problem I have felt is the naming convention of the commands for both the GUI and CLI versions of the tool. In order to run two versions of this tool, you need to type HandBrakeCLI for CLI version and ghb for the GUI version. The problem here is with the naming convention for the binaries. I mean, the names handbrake-cli and handbrake-gtk would be more straightforward than these badly chosen names. Otherwise, the tool does pretty good job of video conversion and can be good alternative if you are not comfortable with ffmpeg. Note that ffmpeg is also capable of video conversions of different formats and is a great tool. :)


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Tuesday 13 November 2012

Linux Mint 14 "Nadia" RC Released

After 6 months of incremental development on top of stable and reliable technologies such as MATE, Cinnamon and MDM, Linux Mint 14 codenamed "Nadia" RC is available for download.



For the first time since Linux Mint 11, the development team was able to capitalize on upstream technology which works and fits its goals. After 6 months of incremental development, Linux Mint 14 features an impressive list of improvements, increased stability and a refined desktop experience. This new release comes with updated software and brings refinements and new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use. Linux Mint 14 "Nadia" is based upon the Ubuntu 12.10 "Quantal Quetzal".



The download links (torrents and direct both) are available at this blog post.

Useful Links

Download Nadia
Nadia release notes
Whats New in Nadia


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Saturday 3 November 2012

Make Your Linux Read Papers For You

Fed up of reading text files and PDF papers? Is you eye power degrading day by day and can't hold even few minutes on screen? Don't worry, you can easily make your linux system speak and read all those papers for you.

There are several text to speech tools available for linux but in this post, I will be using festival, a Text-to-speech (TTS) tool written in C++. Also, Ubuntu and its derivation are most likely to include by default espeak, a multi-lingual software speech synthesizer.

For ubuntu and debian based system, type the following to install festival:
samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ sudo apt-get install festival


Moreover, you can also install a pidgin plugin that uses festival:

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ sudo apt-get install pidgin-festival




For now, you just need to install festival. Once you have installed festival, you can make it read text files for you. If you go through the online manual of festival, it says:
"Festival works in two fundamental modes, command mode and text-to-speech mode (tts-mode). In command mode, information (in files or through standard input) is treated as commands and is interpreted by a Scheme interpreter. In tts-mode, information (in files or through standard input) is treated as text to be rendered as speech. The default mode is command mode, though this may change in later versions."

To read a text file, you can use the command below:

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ festival --tts mypaper.txt




The festival will start in text-to-speech (tts) mode and will read your text files for you. But now, we want to read PDF files and if you try to read PDF files directly (festival --tts paper.pdf), festival is most likely to speak the cryptic terms since it actually reads the content of PDF including its header (You know PDF is different than simple text file). So we will use a pdftotext command to convert our pdf file and then pipe the output to the festival so that festival reads the PDF files for us. You can use the syntax as below to read PDF files.

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ pdftotext paper.pdf - | festival --tts


If you want to skip all those table of contents and prefaces or if you are in the middle of PDF, you can use the switches of pdftotext to change the starting and ending pages. For example, if I wish to read page 10 - 14 of a PDF, I would do:

samar@samar-Techgaun:~$ pdftotext -f 10 -l 14 paper.pdf - | festival --tts


Enjoy learning. I hope this post helps you ;)


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