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While doing Mathematics assignment in my second semester, I had to look up for a lot of graphs/curves of various functions. I always used gplot, which is no doubt the best tool when it comes to graphs. But usually before using it I had to take a quick look at the keywords in its help guide. Until I found GraphMonkey, I always wondered if there was an even simpler application, which hardly expects you to know anything other than the equation.

One of the best things about this application is its simplicity. The first time I ran it, I just knew how to operate it. This app. could prove to be a nice Educational software.

Install GraphMonkey

This GTK# based app. can be downloaded on Debian/Ubuntu based systems either by clicking this link or by running the following command in the terminal.

[shredder12]$ sudo apt-get install graphmonkey

Fedora doesn't seem to have it.

Once installed, you can find it in Applications->Education.

All it needs is the equation and will generate the graph, when you click trace. It also handles some simple calculus functions.

Because of its ability to automatically plot the derivative graphs, its called a graph calculator. You can also set scale and X & Y ranges.

Inspite of these benefits, it also has a few notable disadvantages.

• You can provide only explicit equations(y in terms of some function of x).
• It can't plot more than 3 functions in a graph, excluding the derivative functions.

Gplot is still the God, but this light-weight application could be a nice option for educational purposes.

So, I think my search for a live network bandwidth monitor finally ended with this screenlet, netmonitor. Bmon and vnstat were working fine, but I was looking for something that can be present all the time on the screen without hindering other apps. A Screenlet was indeed the best option to go for. For those who are not aware of screenlets, they are widgets for Gnome-Desktop. As far as appearance goes, they look great on a Desktop and best of all, they are light weight too.

So, while searching for the most appropriate screenlet, I found netmonitor - a bandwidth monitoring tool. You can place it wherever you want and configure it accordingly.

Installation

In order to use netmonitor, you will have to install the screenlets package. If you are running either an Ubuntu/Debian based system then either link or run the following command in a terminal to install screenlets.

[shredder12]$ sudo apt-get install screenlets

Now, go to Applications->Accessories->Screenlets and you will see the following window.

Now, double-click on the icon and it will be activated. Right click on the widget will show you various options to configure it. Modify it however you like and place it wherever you want, thats the benefit of using a screenlet .

After all the sessions at GUADEC¹ about Gnome Shell, I got once again really excited about it as well as the whole future of Gnome itself. I had run Gnome Shell previously, you can just install it from the Fedora repos, but the version that is currently in most distros (including Fedora 13) is months old and the project is obviously making great strides constantly. After a pretty abysmal attempt at installing it from the project’s experimental repo which shot most of my GTK-related packages point blank in the head, leaving me only with the option to delete integral GTK packages from my running machine and reinstalling them via yum downgrade, I decided to build a stand-alone version of Shell from their git repository. Luckily, this turned out to be amazingly easy. So if you have about half an hour (depending on how fast your system is with compiling stuff) and you want to have a look at what’s coming in Gnome 3, you might find the following instructions helpful²:

This will pull the current dev version of Gnome Shell from the git repository and compile a stand-alone version of it in your home directory that you can run at you leasure. To do this, the first thing you want to do is download the install script from the Gnome site to your home directory and run it.

cd ~
curl -O http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-shell/plain/tools/build/gnome-shell-build-setup.sh
/bin/bash gnome-shell-build-setup.sh

You can then start the actual build process. This will take some time as the script has to check out a ton of packages from git and compile them one after the other. You best start this in its own little terminal window and get on with whatever you were doing before or fix yourself a nice cup a coffee and watch the awesome matrix simulator build into gcc (best viewed fullscreen in an old school terminal font and green-on-black text).

jhbuild build

If this completes without errors, you got yourself a standalone version of Gnome Shell that you can now manually run. Change into the specified directory and start up Shell.

cd ~/gnome-shell/source/gnome-shell/src
./gnome-shell --replace

The --replace command will tell it do replace your current window manager so that you get the full experience, if you want to quit out of Shell just issue a Control-C in the terminal you started Shell from. If something major goes wrong, you can always change to a different tty (Control-Alt-F2 for example), log in, and kill X by issuing the command killall Xorg as root. Just be aware that this kills all of your currently running programs. Bear in mind that I have tested this on Fedora 13 and depending on your distribution, some of these details might be slightly different. The actual steps to run and build Shell from git, however, should be pretty universal.

I hope you enjoy tinkering with it as much as I do at the moment. Feel free to file bugs and help the devs out with valid feedback, I think they are quite short on people testing this at the moment. If you want to rebuild a newer version of the packages, you can follow these instructions. You can also follow the development on identi.ca of course.

I recently packaged the Dust GTK+2 theme originally made for Ubuntu.

This theme is now available on current repo of Frugalware Linux, to install it just do:

# pacman-g2 -S gtk+2-theme-dust

Then the theme will be available on Gnome Appearance Properties window.

There is also a package for dust extra themes including:

• Dust Sand – Lighter, Slightly-metallic version

• Dust Burnt – A version of Dust where all apps use dark toolbars

• Dust Borderless – A version of the Dust window borders theme with a thin frame

To install them:

# pacman-g2 -S gtk+2-theme-dust-extras

Remember, few weeks ago I wrote an entry on my blog about Nautilus-Elementary, a rework of Nautilus. I’ve made a new Frugalware package from a more recent snapshot of Nautilus-elementary bazaar repo. As I said, on a previous entry, now on Frugalware, the default GTK theme of GNOME is clearlooks-revamp. This theme was developed with the classic nautilus but also nautilus-elementary:

Yeah, as you can see, with nautilus-elementary, it’s even more beautiful !

To install nautilus-elementary, first remove nautilus:

# pacman -Rd nautilus

with that, your nautilus extensions packages will not be removed, then install my nautilus-elementary package with:

# pacman -U http://frugalware.org/~devil505/nautilus-elementary-2.30.1-1-i686.fpm

By the way, I recently bumped cover-thumbnailer (0.8.1) on current, If you have a big music folder, I suggest you to use it with nautilus-elementary to get something like this:

Smuxi is an irssi-inspired, flexible, user-friendly and cross-platform IRC client for sophisticated users, targeting the GNOME desktop.

Smuxi is based on the client-server model: The core application (engine) can be placed onto a server which is connected to the Internet around-the-clock; one or more frontends then connect to the core. This way, the connection to IRC can be kept up even when all frontends have been closed. The combination of screen and irssi served as example for this architecture.

Smuxi also supports the regular single application mode. This behaves like a typical IRC client; it doesn’t need separate core management and utilizes a local engine that is used by the local frontend client.

Smuxi currently supports the following features

• Detachable Frontend (frontend can be detached from a smuxi-server)
• Multiple Server Support (you can connect to more than one server)
• Unified Nickname Colors (identical color across channels and networks)
• Caret-Mode (keyboard navigation through messages)
• Regular and Bash-Style Nickname Completion
• Full Keyboard Control
• Startup Commands (when Smuxi starts)
• On Connect Commands (when connecting to a server)
• Message / Command History
• Configurable Encoding (ISO-8859-1/15, UTF-8, etc)
• Configurable Command Character
• Auto Connect (automatically connect to defined servers)
• Quick Connect Dialog (simply connect to any server)
• Open / Join Chat Dialog
• Find Group Chat Dialog
• Sorted and Reoderable Tabs
• Colors are checked and adjusted for optimium contrast
• Clickable URLs
• Word Wrapping
• Logging Support
• Fully customizable filters to ignore messages or events
• Configurable Highlight Words
• Markerlines which divide old messages from new messages
• Themeing Support
  • Configurable Font
  • Foreground / Background Color
  • Userlist Position
  • Tab Colors / Position
  • Configurable Timestamps
  • Configurable Tray-Icon Support
• Translations
  • British English
  • Czech
  • Catalan (patial)
  • Danish
  • Finnish (patial)
  • French
  • German
  • Italian
  • Portuguese
  • Spanish (patial)
  • Swedish
• Multiple Network Protocols
  • IRC Support
    • Stripping Colors and/or Formattings from Messages
    • Showing mIRC Colors
    • Splitting oversized messages
    • Channel List / Search
    • CTCP Support including a Menu
    • Invite To Menu
    • Lag Indicator
  • Twitter Support
    • Reading and Posting Tweets
    • Friends Timeline
    • Replies
    • Direct Messages

Themeing & UI

Love the way it handles tabs and userlist. First of all, userlist can show on left side or right side. Tabs can be showed at upper, bottom, right and left side. My pic above has tabs at left side. Colors and fonts are changeable too. background images and tab colours are changeable.

Download

To download Smuxi for Arch, Foresight, Debian, OpenSuse, Gentoo, FreeBSD… Go to: http://www.smuxi.org/page/Download

For anyone running Ubuntu 10.04 the new default positioning of the minimize, maximize and close buttons can be quite annoying.
Previously I have been using `gconf-editor` to edit the settings manually whenever I change themes. But here are two quicker ways.

First of all you can just use `gconf-editor` running it from terminal and specifying the parameter of the key you want to edit. The GUI will then launch with the value you want to edit already selected.

gconf-editor /apps/metacity/general/button_layout

Now Double click on `button_layout`, change it to read ‘:minimize,maximize,close’, click ok and the change should take effect.

The second way is to use the `gconftool` which allows you to directly edit gconf repository values without using a GUI.

In a terminal session run

gconftool -g /apps/metacity/general/button_layout

It will return what the current button layout is set to. Which should read

close,minimize,maximize:

To edit this just do

gconftool -s /apps/metacity/general/button_layout -t string :minimize,maximize,close

Your button layout should now be correct.

Have you ever gone through the items listed in the "add to panel" option? If not, then you are missing one of the finest GNOME features. It has a great number of some really useful applets. I just ran into one of them, Deskbar applet and believe me, when they say its an "all in one" tool they are not kidding. It really does almost everything one frequently needs.

A few words of warning before you start adding Deskbar-applet to the panel. It might take some time to start, took around 10+ seconds on my system. So, be patient. Once done, you know where to find it. Now, click on the icon and you will see a search bar.

This simple looking search bar has tremendous capablities. You can send an email by typing in an emailID, search google, send a tweet, search through your folders, launch an application and a lot more. All these functionalities are managed by plugins. For a whole list, Right click on the icon and go to Preferences.

Now, you can see what all this applet can do. Check the plugin you wish to enable and when highlighted, click "more" to see extra configurations required to run the plugin.

Here is an example of the twitter plugin

• Don't forget to fill your login info by clicking "more"
• Now, write your tweet, move down and hit Enter.

• Here you go ;)

So, its time you start exploring Deskbar. You might find a few things, you do frequently, can be done faster with it.

I like keeping a collection of my favorite TV shows and Movies along with the subtitles. For a single playback, I won't mind fixing the subtitle from the player's settings, even though its frustrating most of the times, but while making a collection, you need perfect subtitles. Finding the correct one is not an easy task and neither is editing it. This is where a subtitle-editor comes in handy. Gnome-subtitles is one such tool and by far my favorite.

Install gnome-subtitles

For Ubuntu/Debian systems, either click this link or run the following command in the terminal.

[shredder12]$ sudo apt-get install gnome-subtitles

For Ubuntu, you can even use the software center to install it.

Fore Fedora/RedHat systems, just run the following command in the terminal

[root]# yum install gnome-subtitles

Once installed, the application can be found in Applications->Sound & Video->gnome-subtitles

Features

Like me, if its the first time you are using a subtitle editor then pretty much every feature looks amazing and a tremendous time saver.

• As a subtitle editor, playing media and editing subtitles simultaneously makes synchronizing really easy.
• There are a lot of pre-defined functions that save you a lot of time while fixing bad subtitles e.g. adjust, shift etc.
• While editing, the app will automatically guess the concerned video from the subtitle's name and loads it. You can ofcourse mention it manually too.
• It supports more subtitle formats than most of you would know.
• Instead of editing, the other major function of this tool is to help create subtitles from scratch. And thanks to its user friendly WYSIWYG interface, even this redundant task becomes easy
• You can find a full list of features here.

I hope this will be useful for some of you. If there is some other subtitle editor you use, do let us know.

There are many applications out there for Linux that can import to your computer. But we will list 3 of them, probably the best 3 open sourced applications out there today.

F-Spot

F-Spot supports 16 common files types, including JPEG, GIF, TIFF, RAW, and others.

Import your photos from your hard drive, camera (including PTP type), or iPod.
Creating a CD of photos is just clicks away. Simply select the photos you wish to have on CD, and choose “Export to CD” from the main menu.

If you have a Flickr, 23, Picasa Web or SmugMug account, F-Spot can export photos to it, while optionally resizing your selection, and preserving tags and metadata.

You can also export to Gallery or O.r.i.g.i.n.a.l. powered websites, or a nicely themed static webpage.

Shotwell

Shotwell Features:
1. Import: Import photos from folders or from any digital camera supported by gPhoto.

2. Organize: Shotwell automatically groups photos taken at the same time. You can also use tags to organize your photo collection.

3. Edit: You can rotate, crop, reduce red-eye, and adjust the exposure, saturation, tint, and temperature of each photo.

4. Publish: Publish photos to Facebook, Flickr and Picasa Web Albums.

Rapid Photo Downloader

This one isn’t like the 2 others, as this application is a pure import application. So if you only plan to import photos/videos, then i would go for this application. No question about it.

Conclusion

If you need a great feature rich application, then F-spot is the one for you. Specially the version 0.71 that was recently released.

If you only need to grab a few photos and easy to upload them to facebook or flickr, then Shotwell is the one to use. It’s more slimmed, but remember it cant handle as much file types that f-spot do.

If you need a pure import application, then go for rapid-photo-downloader.

To install these ones in Foresight, open terminal and write:

sudo conary update f-spot

sudo conary update shotwell

sudo conary update rapid-photo-downloader

The version of the applications we got today is:
f-spot 0.7.1
rapid-photo-downloader 0.3.0
shotwell 0.6.1