Linux und Ich

Single-Window Gimp with GimpBox

Christoph — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 00:32:04 +0000

When people speak about the Pros and Cons of Gimp you often hear that the “multi window mode” is the most annoying point. Personally I’m used to the way Gimp handles it’s windows, especially when you work on a dual monitor setup or a big screen. But I’ve got to admit, that working with gimp on a small screen is not a fun thing to do. Gimp will get a redesign in the near future, but until then you can you GimpBox to integrate all Gimp windows into a single frame.

GimpBox is not a “new” Gimp, it’s also not a Fork like the outdated and abandoned GIMPshop. GimpBox is just a little Python script which acts as a wrapper for Gimp. I tested the script successfully with Ubuntu Lucid and Maverick. Unfortunately it looks like that it needs GNOME, users with Kubuntu told me that the script crashes…

Single-Window Gimp with GimpBox

The installation of GimpBox is easy. The authors don’t offer packages nor a PPA. But that’s not necessary, just download the script, copy it to /usr/local/bin and set the necessary right.s

$ sudo apt-get install python-wnck (Usually this package is installed)
$ sudo wget http://gimpbox.googlecode.com/hg/gimpbox.py -O /usr/local/bin/gimpbox
$ sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/gimpbox

After this you can start GimpBox via the command.

$ gimpbox

Additionally you could adjust the start menu entry inside the menus. Just change the start command from “gimp %U” to “gimpbox %U”.

Are there drawbacks? Unfortunately there are. After I changed the menu entry, I noticed that I can’t load a images from within Nautilus into Gimp anymore. GimpBox opens, but without the requested image. Another issue is that keyboard shortcuts don’t work inside GimpBox any more.

I hope that the author is able to fix those issues, because this Wrapper is a blessing for everyone who uses Gimp on a small screen.

Single-Window Gimp with GimpBox ist ein Beitrag von Linux und Ich. Der Beitrag ist lizenziert unter CC BY-SA 3.0 (German). Weitere Informationen und News: Twitter || Identi.ca || Flattr

Record Skype calls with Linux

Christoph — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 14:42:18 +0000

Sometimes you need to record a telephone call, e.g. when you do a interview via phone and create an audio-blog afterwards. The Skype Call Recorder is a simple program to do this, it is a little tool to record the audio of your Skype calls. It’s licensed under the GPL and the author created packages for all mayor Linux distributions. He offers package sources for Ubuntu/Debian too, but the packages are not signed, so better stick to the .deb files.

After you installed Skype Call Recorder you’ll find an entry inside “Applications -> Accessories” to start the program. When you start Skype Call Recorder the first time while Skype is running, Skype will ask if you permit Skype Call Recorder to access the Skype-API. Of course you have to allow this.

Allow access to the Skype-API

The recorder doesn’t have a “full” GUI. After you started the tool, it will show up inside the GNOME panel as an icon. When you start or receive a call within Skype, the Recorder will ask you if you like to record the call. If you do this, you will find the recording as .mp3-file inside the directory “~/Skype Calls”.

You can reach the settings when you click with the right mouse button on the panel icon of the Skype Call Recorder. Here you can set rules for your contacts, so that the recording starts automatically when you call this contact, you can change the location where the program stores the recordings or adjust the file format to your need. I prefer Ogg Vorbis with “Quality 3″ and Mono.

Adjust Skype Call Recorders to your need.

Record Skype calls with Linux ist ein Beitrag von Linux und Ich. Der Beitrag ist lizenziert unter CC BY-SA 3.0 (German). Weitere Informationen und News: Twitter || Identi.ca || Flattr

Secure and unique passwords with PwdHash for Chromium

Christoph — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 03:37:33 +0000

I really like Google Chrome or Chromium when it comes to get the best performance out of a outdated computer. With Firefox the fan of my notebook gets pretty fast pretty noisy. With Chromium pages load faster and without much strain on the cpu.

But I dearly miss my beloved Firefox extensions. One of them ist PwdHash. With PwdHash you can give every website a secure and unique password. You don’t need a password manager or tricks to remember your complicated password. PwdHash creates a hashed password out of a master password and the URL of the webpage. This way you have unique and save passwords for every site you login. The extension makes the transition from master password plus URL to the hashed password smooth and easy.

I didn’t bother to find a PwdHash-extension for Chromium, but by pure luck I stumbled upon the site of the pwdhash Extension for Google Chrome. It’s easy to install that extension, but Chromium looses the plugin every time you restart the browser.

To install it permanently you’ve got to download the archive, extract the .tar.gz file [1] and start Google Chrome or Chromium. After the browser showed up you enter the line…

chrome://extensions/

as URL [2]. Inside the extension manager click on “Pack extension” [3] and choose the folder you just extracted from the downloaded archive [4]…

Install PwdHash inside Chromium

You should get a message, that a file called pwdhash-chrome.crx has been created. This is your packaged extension. Go again into Chromium and enter “\” on Linux or “C:” on Windows to get into the file browser mode of Chromium. Navigate to the pwdhash-chrome.crx and click on the file to install the extension permanently.

A short note to all the fans of Microsoft Windows… The current version of Google Chrome doesn’t support extensions yet. You need the development version called Chromium. To update Google Chrome go to dev.chromium.org and click under “Subscribing to a channel” on the “Dev channel”. This way you will update Chrome to the current developer edition.

Well, if you read until this point and if you’re to lasy to build PwdHash for Chromium by yourself, you can download my pwdhash-chrome.crx. Just fire up Chromium, go to my blog and click on the link. Chromium will download the extension and install PwdHash for Chromium.

Secure and unique passwords with PwdHash for Chromium ist ein Beitrag von Linux und Ich. Der Beitrag ist lizenziert unter CC BY-SA 3.0 (German). Weitere Informationen und News: Twitter || Identi.ca || Flattr

Time to boot of Ubuntu Karmic Alpha 2 and Windows 7

Christoph — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 11:53:46 +0000

For many people the time to boot up their system is quite essential. Every second counts. Especially when it comes to comparisons of operation systems, 5 seconds less waiting seems to proof that one system is better that another… Well Mark Shuttleworth announced for Karmic further improvement on the boot time, and it looks like the Ubuntu developers did a good job.

On YouTube there’s a video which shows two (nearly) identical laptops. One runs Ubuntu Ubuntu Karmic Koala Alpha 2 and the other one uses Windows 7 RC. The windows system uses a Intel Core2 Duo Mobile T7250 which runs at 2Ghz where as the Ubuntu system only has a T7100 with 1.8Ghz.

[youtube=ymbB8RT6Aas]

Ubuntu Karmic is fully up and running after only 29 seconds, where as Win7 takes up more than 44 seconds. Good job Ubuntu devs!… The next step would be rock solid suspend and resume in Ubuntu.

Time to boot of Ubuntu Karmic Alpha 2 and Windows 7 ist ein Beitrag von Linux und Ich. Der Beitrag ist lizenziert unter CC BY-SA 3.0 (German). Weitere Informationen und News: Twitter || Identi.ca || Flattr

Evince 2.28 for Windows

Christoph — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 19:31:28 +0000

The world of free PDF-Readers for Microsoft Windows just got a little bit larger. With the release of GNOME 2.28 Evince, the PDF-Reader of the GNOME desktop enviroment, has been ported to windows…

It’s pretty simple to install Evince on windows. Go to live.gnome.org, download the .msi file and run the installer by double clicking on the file.

The installer itself has a few edges. On my system it didn’t create a entry inside the start menu, and the evince icon on the desktop doesn’t have a picture. But Evince runs fine.

Evince on Microsoft Windows

Finally there’s new alternative to Adobe Reader, let’s hope that Evince can establish a little bit more open source on the windows desktop.

Evince 2.28 for Windows ist ein Beitrag von Linux und Ich. Der Beitrag ist lizenziert unter CC BY-SA 3.0 (German). Weitere Informationen und News: Twitter || Identi.ca || Flattr

New Artwork for Ubuntu Karmic 9.10?

Christoph — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:37:01 +0000

Version after version Canonical promised a new look for Ubuntu, but since Ubuntu Dapper Drake 6.06 the desktop appearance didn’t change much. A couple of polished icons here and there, a new slightly different wallpaper with every release, but nothing special. The main color stayed a bright orange for more than three years.

With the latest updates of Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10 things changed. It looks like that the Artwork team takes up the “old” bronze tone from Ubuntu Breezy Bager 5.04…

Das neue Ubuntu Human Theme mit Humanity Icons

Together with the new Humanity Icons and the flat mac-like icons on the panel this makes quite a decent impression. Except the wallpaper this might be the final design, since – according to the release schedule – today is the artwork deadline.

New Artwork for Ubuntu Karmic 9.10? ist ein Beitrag von Linux und Ich. Der Beitrag ist lizenziert unter CC BY-SA 3.0 (German). Weitere Informationen und News: Twitter || Identi.ca || Flattr

Paint Mono… Paint.NET for Linux

Christoph — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 20:56:36 +0000

Paint.NET is a popular graphics editing program for Microsoft Windows. It’s easier to use than Adobe Photoshop/GIMP but far more powerful than MS Paint. The program is build on the .NET Framework, so that it can be ported to Linux thanks to Mono. Two years ago Miguel de Icaza announced that he ported Paint.NET to Linux, but only now I can confirm that his port works…

There’s no official Ubuntu or Debian package for Paint Mono yet, so you have to compile Paint Mono by your own. You need a couple of packages to be able to do so. So please install the following packages.

$ sudo apt-get install mono-devel monodevelop mono-tools-gui mono-tools-devel subversion

Afters this you should be able to download the latest source via subversion, compile and install Paint Mono via…

$ svn co http://paint-mono.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/src paint-mono
$ cd paint-mono
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

There won’t be a icon inside your application menu for Paint Mono, the only way to start the program is by executing the following command.

$ paintdotnet

On your desktop Paint Mono should now look like this.

Paint Mono on Ubuntu 9.04

To sum this up… Is it worth the work? Absolutely not, don’t think “hey, the screenshot looks great, i’ll give it a chance”… Paint Mono is VERY slow, even on a Athlon X2 with 3Ghz dualcore cpu it way to slow to be able to paint. Besides that it looks pretty ugly on your desktop, especially with other themes like Shiki Colors. You’ll have with text on white backgrounds inside the menubar. I also noticed a couple of crashes, so stay with The GIMP or Krita, Paint Mono is not ready for your Desktop.

Paint Mono… Paint.NET for Linux ist ein Beitrag von Linux und Ich. Der Beitrag ist lizenziert unter CC BY-SA 3.0 (German). Weitere Informationen und News: Twitter || Identi.ca || Flattr

Dropbox-Beta syncs data inside lan via P2P

Christoph — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 21:38:56 +0000

Dropbox evolves slowly step by step. Until now Dropbox clients could either up- or download data to/from dropbox. But they couldn’t sync files between computers inside a LAN. This will change with future releases and if you’re interested you can test the new LAN Sync feature already with the latest public beta of the new Dropbox 0.7.x .

Until now Dropbox synced files only over the Internet. If you moved a file into your Dropbox folder on computer A, the file was uploaded to Dropbox and downloaded from Dropbox via the Internet on computer B. Imagine you have 2GB data inside you Dropbox folder and you attach a new computer to your account. Even though both computer are inside the same LAN, you have to download 2GB data from the internet. Now – with the latest beta – computers which share the same Dropbox account sync their data P2P inside the same LAN, so you save time and bandwith.

You can download the new version for Linux, Apple and of course Windos form the Dropbox forums. But please watch out: Dropbox declares this beta as “Highly Experimental Build”, so keep that in mind…

I you didn’t install Dropbox yet, get the current version first and install the stable build. Those “unstable” archives contain only the dropbox client. You have to install the nautilus plugin first. If you already run Dropbox stop the client…

Stop Dropox out of the dropdown menu.

Now you can delete the old version and download the new beta as a .tar.gz archive to e.g. your desktop. Delete the folder ~/.dropbox-dist/ and extract the downloaded archive. To do this execute e.g. these commands…

$ rm -rf ~/.dropbox-dist/
$ tar -xzf ~/Desktop/dropbox-lnx.*.tar.gz -C ~/

After this you can start Dropbox via “Applications -> Internet -> Dropbox” from the applications menu. Dropbox didn’t change much. the P2P sync doesn’t change the GUI. You can test the LAN sync e.g. by copying a large file into your Dropbox folder while there is a second computer inside your LAN which uses your Dropbox account too. If this computer receives the file with a couple of MB/s the LAN sync works (or you’ve got a pretty good internet connection

Dropbox LAN sync...

Dropbox-Beta syncs data inside lan via P2P ist ein Beitrag von Linux und Ich. Der Beitrag ist lizenziert unter CC BY-SA 3.0 (German). Weitere Informationen und News: Twitter || Identi.ca || Flattr

Windows 7 Fail and Congrats at KDE

Christoph — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 10:44:13 +0000

Since the first public screenshots of Microsoft’s Windows 7 the KDE Community noticed the remarkable similarity between Windows 7 and KDE 4. Could it be possible that Microsoft’s design team took a good look at the brand news KDE 4? Well, we don’t know. But what we know is that people can’t see the difference.

The German newspaper Berliner Morgenpost published today an article about Windows 7 and illustrated it with a computer showing KDE4. Mika1860 from the German ubuntuusers.de Community stumbled upon this article and made a quick scan…

Windows 7 und KDE4...

The good old time, when there was only Windows and Apple in the public interest, and mass media had to cover only both systems are over. Poor IT journalists, the days get harder and harder

Btw, when I’m already talking about KDE. Congratulations to the KDE Community for the Release of KDE 4.3. I know you had hard times after the Release of KDE 4.0 and had to bear a lot of criticism. But now everything comes together. KDE 4.3 looks GREAT and i’m looking forward to give it a chance on my desktop! This screencast…

[bliptv=hIsigZW3agI]

…and the release notes are spectacular! Could it be possible that you guys convince an old GNOME-guy like me to switch to KDE?

Windows 7 Fail and Congrats at KDE ist ein Beitrag von Linux und Ich. Der Beitrag ist lizenziert unter CC BY-SA 3.0 (German). Weitere Informationen und News: Twitter || Identi.ca || Flattr

Improve your Screencasts with Key Status Monitor

Christoph — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 11:28:41 +0000

On the internet you stumble quite often upon screencasts which try to explain software tools or guide you through applications. The most popular site are probably ShowMeDo, who offer screencasts about FOSS software, Screencasters at heathenx.org who do videos on Inkscape or e.g. Ubuntu Screencasts with screencasts on Ubuntu linux.

When you watch such a video and the Author follows his usual work flow you’ve got a little problem. Imagine you want to learn how you delete all files inside a directory. The author hits “Ctrl+A” and after that “Del” and all the files are gone. When you see this inside a video, you magically see the files disappear, but not how! You can solve this problem with the little tool Key Status Monitor…

Key Status Monitor is a GTK+ application which shows which keys or mouse buttons are currently pressed. This way it’s very easy to give the user all the information he needs, even when you don’t add sound to your video.

You don’t have to install Key Status Monitor to run the tool. Just download the current version, extract the archive and start the included “key-status” script. On Ubuntu it should run out-of-the-box…

sudo ./key-status

If you want to save space, you can add the option “-d” bzw. “–no-decorations”, so that Key Status Monitor doesn’t use window decorations.

sudo ./key-status --no-decorations

To give you a small demonstation of Key Status Monitor I made a little screencast. If you don’t use Flash on your computer, you can use this link to get to a .ogv version of this video.

[bliptv=ga81gY_WLQA]

One small issue. I noticed that Key Status Monitor works fine on my desktop system, but it can’t find the mouse on my notebook. So it might not work on your system.

Improve your Screencasts with Key Status Monitor ist ein Beitrag von Linux und Ich. Der Beitrag ist lizenziert unter CC BY-SA 3.0 (German). Weitere Informationen und News: Twitter || Identi.ca || Flattr