July 25, 2010

How to install latest Firefox and Chromium browsers

For those with the need for speed, browser speed that is....If you cannot wait weeks until the latest Firefox and Chromium browsers hit the Ubuntu repositories, you have to install them yourself manually. After some searching and frustration, I found out how to upgrade my linux Firefox browser to the latest v3.6.8 build, and finding the latest Chromium browser  v6.0.477 build, below are the steps and commands. This should work as new builds are released. So this is a great tip to save and enjoy.


How to install Firefox v3.6.8 or newer - 4 Steps
=================================================


1) Add the latest Mozilla Firefox respository-


If you are using Ubuntu Jaunty (9.04) or later:
The repository to add, if you're adding it manually to your sources.list, is


deb http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/ubuntuzilla/mozilla/apt all main


2) Add the public key-


Then add the package signing key to your keyring, by running the following command:


sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com C1289A29


3) Update your package database:


sudo apt-get update


4) Request to install the latest Mozilla product-


Install your desired package, with one of the following commands:


sudo apt-get install firefox-mozilla-build


sudo apt-get install thunderbird-mozilla-build
sudo apt-get install seamonkey-mozilla-build




Source: http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/ubuntuzilla/index.php?title=Main_Page




How to install the latest Chromium browser- 3 Steps
====================================================


Run this command as ROOT:


1) Add the latest Chromium browser respository-


add-apt-repository ppa:chromium-daily/ppa


2) Update your package database-


sudo apt-get update


3) Request to install the latest Chromium browser-


apt-get install chromium-browser

July 10, 2010

Clementine Music Player

For many users (me included), Amarok is the music player of choice. However, the Amarok 2 series introduced a radical change in Amarok for the earlier series and has found many haters. As a result many people still refuse to upgrade to Amarok 2 series and are sticking with Amarok 1.4. For those people who want to have Amarok 1.4 along with the new technologies that Qt4 brings, there is a new music player called Clementine made for the Gnome desktop. Clementine is my new favorite linux music player !




Clementine is basically a port of Amarok 1.4 to Qt4. Techie Buzz author, Sathya Bhat, has already covered Clementine when it was at a very early stage of development. Now, it has matured a bit more. Some of the features have been rewritten to take advantage of new features provided by Qt4. Now with the new release, some new features/improvemnts have been added:
  • Album cover art is now automatically loaded from disk for your library.
  • Cover manager downloads missing covers from Last.fm.
  • Covers for Last.fm radio tracks are shown in notifications.
  • Much better “Various Artists” detection.
  • Shuffle and Repeat modes for the playlist.
  • 10-band equalizer.
  • Playlist columns for album, artist, composer, file type, date
  • Support for Media keys (play, stop, etc.) in Linux.


    Clementine provides a very simple and no-frills interface which is extremely easy to use, just like the one you get with Amarok 1.4. In fact, I think it is the exactly the same interface that Amarok 1.4 had. For software at such an early stage of development, it is extremely stable. I have been using it since yesterday and yet it has not crashed or hung or done anything of that sort.


    Clementine has a dead simple configuration editor, where even newbies will feel quite at home. Like Amarok 2.3, it uses Knotify to notify when a new song starts which is much better than the OSD that Amarok 1.4 uses.

    Feature-wise, Clementine provides most of the features that you would expect from Amarok 1.4. Of course, it does not have stuffs like the applet supports that you get with Amarok 2 series, but users of Amarok 1.4 should be quite satified with the features that it provides. However, it still does not have some very basic things like iPod and MP3 player support. This can however be overlooked for the time being as it is in early development stage.

    A feature missing in Clementine that can however cause problems is that there is no option to use an external database instead of the default SQLite. With a large music library
    SQLite tends to be slow, so with Amarok, I use an external MySQL database to maintain my library. With Clementine I am forced to have SQLite handling the entire library. However, if you have a relatively small collection (from my experience I would say less than 10k songs), this will not be a problem.

    If you would like to try it out you can download the .deb file and install it. It is available for both 32-bit and 64-bit systems. For Ubuntu, Karmic Koala is the only supported version. Since it is Qt based you will also need some KDE libraries to run it.
    [via Digitizor]

    .

    Clementine Music Player gets a PPA, Many New features



    Clementine music player – which we previously dubbed the Ghost of Amarok 1.4 – slipped out a new release a few days back, adding a veritable punnet of new features, bug fixes and translations.
    New features in this .3 release include: -
    • Clementine now uses GStreamer to play music
    • There is now an equalizer in the Tools menu
    • Cross-fading between tracks, and gapless playback
    • Better tag editing
    • Undo and redo in the playlist
    • Minor addition of play/pause icon to tray icon
    • New options to sign out of Last.fm and to hide the Last.fm buttons
    •  
    [Clementine_0063.png]
    Full change-log can be read @ code.google.com/p/clementine-player/source/browse/trunk/Changelog

    Juiciest selection yet

    In testing out the latest release there is one thing I can say I've noticed: speed.
    The previous versions of Clementine had an annoying habit of scanning my music collection on start-up which, given my music collection is quite large, sometimes slowed proceedings down. This “bug” has been resolved in this latest release and I for one appreciate the difference. Also worth noting is that the initial ‘scan’ of your library should now be much faster, too.
    Clementine 0.3 also feels much more stable and robust – the previous version suffered from a few annoying bugs that resulted in a slightly crash-tastic personality. Not so with 0.3 I'm pleased to say – it hasn’t crashed once in over an hour of use.
    Last.FM is working just as flawlessly as in the previous version.

    image[5]

    Installation/download

    You can install Clementine from the Clementine PPA: -
    • sudo add-apt-repository ppa:riccetn/clementine
    • sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install clementine
    Alternatively you can install Clementine using the following .deb files: -
    Clementine project page: http://code.google.com/p/clementine-player/

    Source: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/05/clementine-music-player-gets-ppa-many.html
    .

    July 9, 2010

    Get Firefox to look like Safari with Foxdie Theme

    Let's face it Apple and its Safari browser are the cool look that everyone likes. Well the folks at Foxdie recognize this and offer a great collection of themes for Firefox 3.6.6 at their website. Below is a screen shot of their brushed Safari theme. Below is a link where it can be found. Happy browsing...


    The Foxdie website is at: http://www.foxdie.us/
    .

    July 4, 2010

    Automate Your Podcast Downloads with gPodder


    gpodder-small

    If you’re a fan of podcasts, you’ve probably at some point become fed up with manually finding and downloading your favorites. This can be a real pain for people who count on fresh daily podcasts to make it through the work day, so multiple solutions have been attempted to make this process simpler. One such project is gPodder, a Python/Linux application that can help you find, download, and transfer new podcasts automatically. Today we’ll show you how to use gPodder to automate downloads for multiple unique podcasts.

    How to get gPodder


    Ubuntu, and likely several other popular distributions, has gPodder available for download in the standard repositories. Like just about any package, it can be fetched with the Ubuntu Software Center, or by the command line with

    sudo apt-get install gpodder


    Getting Started

    When launched, gPodder will first ask how you’d like to proceed. You have the option of browsing a list of popular podcasts or, if you already have a login, pulling your favorites from the gPodder website.


    gpodder-firstrun


    If you choose to browse the list, you’ll be given a fairly wide assortment to choose from. As gPodder is a Linux program written by geeks, the choices presented are slanted toward that crowd. After choosing Add, gPodder will check for the most recent podcast and add it to the download queue.



    gpodder-downloading



    Adding Subscriptions Manually

    If gPodder was limited to just the built-in list, it probably wouldn’t be much use to anyone’s who’s not in to Linux or NPR. Fortunately, that’s not the case, and you can add just about any podcast feed. If you’ve got the URL of the feed you’d like to add to gPodder (RSS, Atom,YouTube and Soundcloud) you can add it by clicking Subscriptions -> Add Podcast via URL.


    gpodder-addURL



    Finding New Podcasts
     

    In order to use the previous step, you’d need to know how and where to get the podcast URLs. We couldn’t possibly cover all the available podcasts on the Internet, but here are a few favorites from MTE authors and friends. Many of these sites have multiple feed types, so the links will take you to the main page for each site where the podcast URLs are available.


    Transferring to Devices

    gPodder wouldn’t be much use if you couldn’t easily use it to transfer your podcasts to your iPod/MP3 Player/Phone, so it’s good for us that it’s got device support built in. gPodder supports iPod, MSC (USB storage) and MTP devices for easy transfer. Before it can sync, however, you’ll need to tell gPodder exactly which device you’re using. To do this, openPodcasts > Preferences > Device. From there you can choose not only device settings, but how gPodder will handle synchronization.


    gpodder-device


    Conclusion

     

    Whether you’re new to podcasting, or spend every day walking down server isles listening to Leo Laporte, gPodder can be an extremely simple and useful way to keep track of old and new podcasts. gPodder will take care of much of the work of finding, downloading, and transferring your files, giving you that much more time to finish your trivia and Reader before heading to work.