February 27, 2011

Postler: Slim Mail Client

I got a chance to try the new Postler Mail client today. It is a slim bare bones client which is very Mac-like.

It is shown with the new Elementary Theme. It gets the job done, but not sure if I'm willing to give up my Mozilla Thunderbird mail client. Time will tell...

Most desktop e-mail clients share the same interface layout and feature set making them great for people with lots to manage but not so great for just using e-mail as e-mail.

About a week back we interviewed Elementary project lead and Ubuntu designer Dan Rabbit. We spoke/probed him about a few things – the full interview of which is going up shortly – but we were finally given sanction to talk about an exciting new addition to the roster of Elementary inspired applications:

Meet Postler – e-mail redefined.

The project is the brainchild of the Midori browser’s awesome lead developerChristian Dywan with the solid aim of ditching the needless clutter and useless features that get plague most of the current crop of desktop-based e-mail clients and, instead, giving users what they really want: an e-mail client that does e-mail.

Dan Rabbit on Postler

We interviewed Dan Rabbit for the OMG! Podcast early last week and, specifically, on Postler here’s what he had to say: -

We did have a mock-up get out into the wild a while ago – that I kind of posted haphazardly – it was for an application called ‘Postler’

The lead developer for Midori has decided to take on the task of building a simple no nonsense mail client. Obviously when i found out about it I jumped at the chance cos I’ve never been happy with evolution or Thunderbird, or any of the other offerings that we currently have so with Postler, we just started on it the code is a couple of weeks old so there’s not an insane amount of functionality in it but it’s gonna be a really great lightweight fast simple mail client that you just start up, check your mail and it’s there for you.

The focus of Postler is more of ‘lets communicate’ than a ‘lets try to organize everybody’.

Q: A lot of the desktop e-mail clients are sort of in the same mould; not so much aimed at Granddad and Grandma but for someone who works in an office with a hectic messy life that needs organizing. With the advent of GMail and ilk we’ve kind of moved on from that old method of managing mail.

Definitely. The focus of Postler is more of ‘lets communicate’ than a ‘lets try to organize everybody’.

Postler in action

I’ve made a conscious decision not to put up installation information for Postler as it currently is because, as Dan iterates in the interview above, there isn’t actually much of Postler to see yet. As soon as there is something worth testing you can guarantee install instructions and PPA information will be up on OMG! Ubuntu! faster than you can lick a stamp.

Should the development Postler go smoothly as it has so far you’ll find it as the default mail application in the forthcoming Elementary OS, due for release later this year.

Thanks to Dan Rabbit

To get the Postler Mail Client:

Install Postler in Ubuntu 10.10

Two PPA’s are available for users to install from. Postler stable is available and a daily build PPA for those wanting bleeding edge – thus more temperamental -packages.

Stable PPA: https://launchpad.net/~postler-dev/+archive/ppa

Daily build PPA: https://launchpad.net/~postler-dev/+archive/devel

In Ubuntu v10.10 add the following repositories in Synaptic Manager:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/postler-dev/ppa/ubuntu maverick main 
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/postler-dev/ppa/ubuntu maverick main

Then reload the library for updates.
Scroll down to Email clients and select Postler, then Apply.

Source: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/07/postler-elementary%E2%80%99s-new-mail-client/

February 13, 2011

February Desktop

I returned to the classic Clearlooks Theme which is very OSX ish. It is very clean and crisp with sharp fonts. I've coupled this with an install of the new Firefox 4 Beta 11 browser, and the new GmusicBrowser music player. It offers an iTunes like interface, and EQ not much different than Rythmbox music player. New Ubuntu wood wallpaper is also used.

Firefox 4 beta 11 web browser below. Very fast.

Firefox v3.613 browser

Chromium browser

gmusicbrowser music player

Nautilus file manager

Rythmbox music player with cover art

February 12, 2011

Top 5 DVD Ripping Applications

Top 5 Linux DVD RIP Software

by VIVEK GITE on FEBRUARY 7, 2011 · 19 COMMENTS

ADVD ripper software allows you to copying the content of a DVD to a hard disk drive. You transfer video on DVDs to different formats, or make a backup of DVD content, and to convert DVD video for playback on media players, streaming, and mobile phone. A few DVD rippers software can copy protected disks so that you can make discs unrestricted and region-free.

Please note that most of the following programs can rip encrypted DVDs, as long as you have libdvdcss2 installed as described here. Please check the copyright laws for your country regarding the backup of any copyright-protected DVDs and other media.

#1: AcidRIP

AcidRip is an automated front end for MPlayer/Mencoder (ripping and encoding DVD tool using mplayer and mencoder) written in Perl, using Gtk2::Perl for a graphical interface. Makes encoding a DVD just one button click! You can install it as follows under Debian / Ubuntu Linux:
$ sudo apt-get install acidrip

Fig.01: Linux Ripping And Encoding DVD's With AcidRip Software

On the Preview tab you can choose to watch a bit of a preview of the resulting movie:

Fig.02: Preview your DVD rip

And when you are ready, click the Start button to rip DVDs.

=> Download acidrip

#2: DVD::RIP

dvd::rip is a full featured DVD copy program written in Perl i.e. fron end for transcode and ffmpeg. It provides an easy to use but feature-rich Gtk+ GUI to control almost all aspects of the ripping and transcoding process. It uses the widely known video processing swissknife transcode and many other Open Source tools. dvd::rip itself is licensed under GPL / Perl Artistic License. You can install dvd::rip as follows under Debian / Ubuntu Linux:
$ sudo apt-get install dvdrip

Fig.03: dvd::rip in action

You need to configure dvd::rip before you actually start a project. See the documentation for more information.

=> Download dvd::rip

#3: HandBrake

HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows. It can rip from any DVD or Bluray-like source such as VIDEO_TS folder, DVD image, real DVD or bluray (unencrypted -- removal of copy protection is not supported), and some .VOB, .TS and M2TS files. You can install HandBrake under Debian or Ubuntu Linux as follows:
$ sudo apt-get install handbrake-gtk

Fig.04: HandBrake in action

=> Download HandBrake

#4: k9copy

K9copy is a KDE DVD Backup tool. It allows the copy of a DVD9 to a DVD5. It is also known as a Linux DVD shrink. It supports the following features:

The video stream is compressed to make the video fiton a 4.7GB recordable DVD
DVD Burning
Creation of ISO images
Choosing which audio and subtitle tracks are copied.
Title preview (video only)
The ability to preserve the original menus.

To install k9copy, enter:
$ sudo apt-get install k9copy

Fig.05: k9copy - Linux dvd shrink in action

=> Download k9copy

#5: thoggen

thoggen is a DVD backup utility ('DVD ripper') for Linux, based on GStreamer and Gtk+ toolkit. Thoggen is designed to be easy and straight-forward to use. It attempts to hide the complexity many other transcoding tools expose and tries to offer sensible defaults that work okay for most people most of the time. It support the following features:

Easy to use, with a nice graphical user interface (GUI).
Supports title preview, picture cropping, and picture resizing.
Language Selection for audio track (no subtitle support yet though).
Encodes into Ogg/Theora video.
Can encode from local directory with video DVD files.
Based on the GStreamer multimedia framework, which makes it fairly easy to add additional encoding formats/codecs in future.

You can install thoggen as follows:
$ sudo apt-get install thoggen

Fig.06: Thoggen in action

=> Download thoggen

Other Tools and Back-ends

=> You need to install various libraries to use the above mentioned tools such as (yum or apt-get commands will install them automatically for you):

libdvdcss2 - Simple foundation for reading DVDs - runtime libraries.
libdvdnav4 - DVD navigation library.
libdvdread4 - library for reading DVDs.

=> mencoder - Personally, I use mencoder to rip my DVDs into .avi files as follows:

mencoder dvd://2 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vhq:vbitrate="1200" -vf scale -zoom -xy 640 -oac mp3lame -lameopts br=128 -o /nas/videos/my-movies/example/track2.avi

Please note that AcidRip, is a graphical frontend for mencoder.

=> VLC - Yes, VLC can rip DVDs too.

=> Transcode is a suite of command line utilities for transcoding video and audio codecs, and for converting between different container formats. Transcode can decode and encode many audio and video formats. Both K9Copy and dvd::rip are a graphical frontend for transcode.

=> Wine - It is an open source software for running Windows applications on other operating systems. You can use popular MS-Windows application such as DVDFab to rip encrypted DVD's and DVD Shrink to shrink them to smaller size. I do not *recommend* and encourage this option as it goes against the FOSS philosophy. The following screenshot based on trial version of DVDFab:

Fig.07: Running DVDFab under Wine v1.2.2

Featured Articles:

Source: http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-dvd-ripper-software.html

February 10, 2011

Sn0w L1nux is an attractive Ubuntu fork distro

I had the chance to download and try Sn0w L1nux based on Ubuntu 10.10 and it is a nicely customized distro. It is 1.5 GB ISO image to install. It is designed to look like Apple Snow Leopard . They replaced the standard Ubuntu Gnome menus with a combined Applications menu. In addition, an Applications icon is on the desktop offering one panel to all setup options, which is a nice touch. It also comes with about a dozen high quality Apple Snow Leopard wallpapers. Overall performance is very fast on my dual-core PC. Below are my screen shots and a link to the website. This was so nice I replaced my standard Ubuntu install with this one. Enough said.