OSDisc may I have some more?

OSDisc is a website that sells you free operating systems...

That's right, they sell you FREE operating systems, but their is a purpose.

OSDisc is perfect for those of us who have limited bandwidth, or are still stuck on super slow dial up.

I personally have purchased about 20 os's from them in my time.

I have 3 on the way, right now.

If you are like me, give OSDisc a try:
http://www.osdisc.com/

Watchtower Library 2010 in Ubuntu under Wine

I am a Jehovah's Witness, and one of my interests is always in getting a digital publication offered by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania to run under Ubuntu, it is called the Watchtower Library.

As of the 2010 edition, the normal wine offered in the repositories of Ubuntu 10.10 (and earlier versions) is no longer sufficient to run the program.

In particular, it will always report an error, and then close, being non functional.

I figured out how to solve this problem, and thought it a good idea to help any other brothers and sisters out there that are a linux user and also like to use the Watchtower Library.

Here are the steps I took:

Open the Software Sources menu by going to Applications->Ubuntu Software Center, then selecting Edit->Software Sources. Choose the Other Software tab and click Add.
System->Administration->Software Sources->Other Software

* Some of you may not have the menu item "Software Sources", to gain access to the area I mention here, you can find the same area for entry under System-Administration-Synaptic Package Manager. Once in Synaptic, click on settings, then repositories, and you will have the same menu mentioned above.

Then, copy and paste the line below into the APT Line: area.
ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa

Then click the "add source" button. it is below the APT Line: area on the same window.

Once Ubuntu reloads the new repositories, click this link:
"click this link to install the wine1.3 package."

This link is found on this webpage:
http://www.winehq.org/download/deb

Once this process is complete, if you have already installed Watchtower Library 2010, it should now just work without the error.

I hope my little how to on this problem was helpful.

Most of this information is available at 'Wine HQ' under downloads, and then Ubuntu. I did some small editing in order to be as clear as possible.

Also, this was not intended to in any way encroach upon the rights of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania, this information is released solely as a remedy to a technical issue with Wine 1.2 or earlier releases and the Watchtower Library, edition 2010.

(P.S. Some people might find that once the library is running all the letters are blocks. This can be fixed by pressing F2, or by going to the Library option on the top left, and then under the text tab choosing another font category or type, i.e. browser text, printer text, etc for category, or arial, freesans, comic sans, etc in the font type.)

This fix may be undone by system updates, or upgrades. Just follow the steps again to repair the non functioning Watchtower Library.

INX ...is not X!

I found this Linux distribution while looking for a replacement to the standard graphical X server driven gui desktop.

As INX's website states:

"Briefly, INX is a Live CD currently based on Ubuntu 8.04
It has no GNOME, KDE, XFCE... or any other desktop or window manager for that matter.

It is console-only - the idea is to give you a tool to learn more about the command line, while having some fun. You might be surprised how much can be done with such a system."

It is amazing what a non x distro can do.

I think you will enjoy this intuitive and easy to use operating system, the menu driven "desktop" is very easy to use.

If you are interested in this os, here is the website:

http://inx.maincontent.net/index.html

Sylpheed - lightweight e-mail client

If you are like me and have a pop3 or imap account or like to use the news boards, but you don't want the bloat of a huge program like Microsoft's Outlook or Mozilla's Thunderbird, then you may be interested in Sylpheed, a "lightweight and user-friendly e-mail client."

As the website states:

Sylpheed is a simple, lightweight but featureful, and easy-to-use e-mail client.

Sylpheed provides intuitive user-interface. Sylpheed is also designed for keyboard-oriented operation, so Sylpheed can be widely used from beginners to power users.

Sylpheed runs on many systems such as Windows, Linux, BSD, Mac OS X and other Unix-like systems.

Sylpheed uses GTK+ GUI toolkit. The newest version of Sylpheed works with GTK+ 2.4 or later (2.6 or later is recommended).

Sylpheed is a free software distributed under the GNU GPL (the library part is GNU LGPL). You can freely use, modify and redistribute it under the license.

Sylpheed has the following features. Read more...

* Simple, beautiful, and well-polished user interface
* Comfortable operationality which is built in detail
* Well-organized, easy-to-understand configuration
* Lightweight operation
* High reliability with one-mail-corresponding-to-one-file format
* Extensibility by plug-in faculty
* Powerful filtering and search
* Junk mail control
* Security features (GnuPG, SSL/TLSv1)
* Various protocols support
* Internationalization and Multilingualization support
* High-level Japanese processing
* Flexible cooperation with external commands

My personal reason for the use of Sylpheed is simplicity and speed.

And it works great for my google mail account, which is set up for pop3 via the settings menu.

If you would like to read more about Sylpheed or download it, the address is here:
http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/

Ubuntu Tweak

If you use windows and like to change things that normally are either very hidden or are simply not given as an option to you then you probably use one of the famous tweak tools, such as TweakXP, or Microsoft's Power Toys add on.

Thankfully for those of us who use Ubuntu, their is available an app called Ubuntu Tweak.

As it states on their homepage, in the 'home' tab:

"Ubuntu Tweak is an application to config Ubuntu easier for everyone.

It provides many useful desktop and system options that the default desktop environment doesn't provide.

With its help, you will enjoy with the experience of Ubuntu!"

Here is a list of some of the features available though Ubuntu Tweak:

Features of Ubuntu Tweak

* View of Basic System Information (Distribution, Kernel, CPU, Memory, etc.)
* GNOME Session Control
* Auto Start Program Control
* Quick install popular applications
* A lot of third-party sources to keep applications up-to-date
* Clean unneeded packages or cache to free disk space
* Show/Hide and Change Splash screen
* Show/Hide desktop icons or Mounted Volumes
* Show/Hide/Rename Computer, Home, Trash or Network icon
* Tweak Metacity Window Manager's style and behaviour
* Compiz Fusion settings, Screen Edge Settings, Window Effect Settings, Menu Effect Settings
* Set the Shortcuts to archive quicker access your favourite applications
* GNOME Panel Settings
* Nautilus Settings
* Advanced Power Management Settings
* System Security Settings
* And many other in process...

If you would like this app for yourself, it's available at http://ubuntu-tweak.com/

GIMP is no gimp!

G.I.M.P. (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is an amazing piece of software.

If you are interested in photo editing, artwork, advertisement or any other use you may have for digital images, this program can change them in any way you see fit.

If you are a graphic design student you know Adobe Photoshop and GIMP intimately.

What's special about GIMP?

GIMP can quite literally do everything Photoshop can do, minus the very expensive price.

Adobe's Photoshop runs at about $199.00 for the professional version.

GIMP is free.

It's hard for me to do an decent job describing just how usefull this program is, being I don't personally use this software very often, or for much more than simple tasks, so here is what the programmers have to say about their unique image editor:

"GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.

It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.

GIMP is expandable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything. The advanced scripting interface allows everything from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted."

The feature list: (not complete)

* Painting
o Full suite of painting tools including Brush, Pencil, Airbrush, Clone, etc.
o Sub-pixel sampling for all paint tools for high quality anti-aliasing
o Extremely powerful gradient editor and blend tool
o Supports custom brushes and patterns
* System
o Tile based memory management so image size is limited only by available disk space
o Virtually unlimited number of images open at one time
* Advanced Manipulation
o Full alpha channel support
o Layers and channels
o Multiple Undo/Redo (limited only by diskspace)
o Editable text layers
o Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip
o Selection tools including rectangle, rounded rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy
o Foreground extraction tool
o Advanced path tool doing bezier and polygonal selections.
o Transformable paths, transformable selections.
o Quickmask to paint a selection.
* Extensible
o A Procedural Database for calling internal GIMP functions from external programs as in Script-fu
o Advanced scripting capabilities (Scheme, Python, Perl)
o Plug-ins which allow for the easy addition of new file formats and new effect filters
o Over 100 plug-ins already available
* Animation
o Load and save animations in a convenient frame-as-layer format
o MNG support
o Frame Navigator (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)
o Onion Skin (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)
o Bluebox (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)
* File Handling
o File formats supported include bmp, gif, jpeg, mng, pcx, pdf, png, ps, psd, svg, tiff, tga, xpm, and many others
o Load, display, convert, save to many file formats
o SVG path import/export
* Much, much more!

If you are interested in GIMP the official website is here.

(Thank you for the reminder, Andrew.)

picascii not picasso

In my search for unusual or opensource software, i found a unique website.

If you have ever seen "ascii art" then you know what i mean.

If not here is a small demonstration:



Notice how the picture is made of keyboard characters? (0-9), (a-z)?

That's ASCII art.

As Wikipedia states:

"ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable (from a total of 128) characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters (beyond the 128 characters of standard 7-bit ASCII)."

picascii.com is a website that takes photos and turns them into ascii art.

If you are interested in making a picture of yours ascii'd, here is the website:






-Denny