Carlitos' Contraptions: software

Showing posts with label software. Show all posts

August 17, 2007

Arduino Launcher for the KDE menu

The Arduino software is good and works very well under Linux. Nevertheless, it doesn't create a menu item when installed and it can be tricky to create one for those who are not very used to Linux (like me).

In order to add a KDE menu launcher for the Arduino software, open the KDE Menu Editor, create a new item and put

cd /opt/arduino-0007/; ./arduino

in the Command field. Also, make sure that Run in terminal is checked and replace /opt/arduino-0007/ by your own installation path.

I'm sure there are thousands of other ways of doing this (including many than only require a few commands in the terminal) but at least this ways is pretty simple and and can be done without knowing that much about Linux.

March 18, 2007

Nice Linux Software

Amarok
Forget about iTunes, and even Winamp. Amarok is the best music library organizer there is. I was a big fan of Winamp before now Amarok is my player of choice.

With Amarok, you can download album covers, lyrics, see songs related to the one you're playing, have artist info from Wikipedia, submit player tracks to last.fm, keeps lots of stats about your songs, manage your iPod (and other portable players), subscribe to podcasts, burn CDs (through k3b), and many many other features.

Inkscape
Inkscape is a free vector drawing program. It is full of features, allows to create professional quality vector drawing and is really light. Really, amazing software.

OpenOffice.org
OO.o is the office suite you always wanted. Imagine an office suite where all the features work as they should. Where you can apply styles to your text and be safe to think the program wont mess it up by applying the formatting it thinks is right. Where you can do "advanced" page numbering (e.g. numbering only some pages while leaving other pages unnumbered for instance) without having to spend lots of time getting it right (if you ever manage to get it right). OO.o is all that and more (that I have not discovered yet).

For those wondering about M$ Office compatibility, I can say that Word compatibility is not that good, Powerpoint compatibility seems flawless, and I have not tried the rest.

Beagle
Beagle allows to index and search files on the computer. IMHO it is much better than Google desktop search. It searches inside almost every file type and even in rss feeds very fast.

Automatix
Although installing software on Ubuntu is quite easy (you simply select it in the package manager) some things may be slightly more tricky to install (such as nVidia drivers). Automatix allows you to install all the most popular programs with very few clicks.

VMware
Although you might be thinking that compared to all this, other mainstream OS seem useless and costly, they are sometimes necessary. For instance I need to use Photoshop, OrCad or SolidWorks (they have not released a Linux version for these programs yet) and sometimes (unfortunately) M$ word (if I have to write a text for someone who only uses M$ software).

There are many solutions for this situations: (1) using wine (which allows to natively run win apps on Linux, but compatibility is still poor), (2) dual booting (which is not very good since you have to restart each time you need to change OS), (3) using VMware (the best solution IMHO).

With VMware you can run any OS on top of Linux. The mainstream OS runs as fast (or just slightly slower) than its normal speed on top of Ubuntu on my system. VMware even allows to connect peripherals to the virtual machine so you can print or your an iPod for instance.

Note that many of these programs are cross platform so they work on other OS as well.

March 09, 2007

More Linux

The good thing about Linux is that it is light and manages the hardware well. This means that my computer runs fast nicely. This was not the case when I was running a commercial mainstream OS, my computer was so slow ans sluggish that i thought I needed a newer faster one.

Now I can run heavy applications such as Azureus without any trouble (before, I had to use Bitcomet since Azureus was really really excruciatingly slow). I can even run lots of applications at the same time fast and reliably.

Also, the startup time is pretty fast.

Desktop Environments

I thought Linux did not have any eye candy and that eye candy is heavy and makes your machine slow. Wrong. You can configure pretty much everything of the Gnome appearance. There are skins, wallpapers that support transparencies (PNG SVG), icons of any size you wish (PNG, SVG), nice transparent docks, etc.

For those who have a 3D graphics card (like me), there is Beryl. Beryls is truly beautiful. There are lots of screencasts on the net about it so I'll let the video speak for itself.

Amazingly enough all this beautiful eye candy works on my computer pretty well.
For further and really extensive customization there is KDE. If Gnome is configurable, then KDE is the definition of configuration itself. Pretty much all the parameters can be easily changed through a GUI in order to obtain a desktop experience that fully suits your personal needs and taste.

Here are some extra screenshots of Nautilus (the gnome file manager) and Konqueror (the KDE file manager, FTP/SSH client, internet browser, image viewer and coffee machine). Notice the nice nautilus thumbnails, the function packed Konqueror and the tight integration between the KDE applications (e.g. Konqueror and Akregator).

February 22, 2007

Switching to Ubuntu

I was tired of having a slow computer, I did not want to deal any longer with bugs and annoyances (and these where paid annoyances and bugs). This is why I decided to use Linux, instead of a well known mainstream OS.

At first I thought I'll give it a try since I was not sure it suited my needs. I thought Linux was hard to use, that I'll be using the command line a lot and that I would not have any of the functionality a more standard desktop computer has.

Guess what, I was wrong. Linux is a beautiful piece of software that enables your computer to perform at its maximum capacity. It is stable, slick and fast.

Installation

Installing Linux, Ubuntu more specifically (a Linux distribution) is very fast. It takes about 45 minutes and when you're done you have a full desktop environment with a beautiful user interface, lots of software, including OpenOffice.Org (an office suite), The Gimp (a Photoshop like application), Gaim (instant messaging), Rithmbox (music player/organizer), Evolution (email client), Firefox (no introduction needed), and lots of other nice software out of the box. The best is that it all takes about 1GB.

All you need to install Ubuntu is downloading and burning a free CD, booting the computer with the CD (putting the CD in and restarting it for most users), and following the installation instructions. You can keep your mainstream OS if you wish and have your computer dual boot (you choose which OS you want at startup).

You can also use the CD to run Ubuntu without installing it, if you want too give it a quick try. I think the Ubuntu people have simplified this process even further by now, the CD is not even required any more (quite neat).

FYI a more popular OS takes more than one hour to install, eats up more than 1GB all to itself ad doesn't come with all the wonderfully functionality out of the box.

By the way, all my hardware was recognized flawlessly without the need of installing any driver (except for the video card for which I had to install the driver in order to enable 3D rendering).

Ubuntu also worked without any troubles on my brother's laptop (including the wireless internet connection).

Now that I use a good operating system my computer runs fast (as hell) without any troubles. I also have no worries about viruses, spyware and the like since there is non of it for Linux.

For the record, this is the hardware I use: