It is official. Official Google weblog puts it this way:
“Today, we’re rolling out a search feature that does just that by enabling you to search and more easily discover millions of songs, all via a simple Google web search.”
Here is a movie
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Only 1 day is left until the release of the new version of Ubuntu, Karmic Koala. Wanna know how to upgrade to Koala? Give this link or this link a shot.
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NY Times reports that Google has announced the release of a “free navigation system for mobile phones that offers turn-by-turn directions”.
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Nokia recently announced the release of a premium netbook which costs a lot more than the ordinary ones. It is supposed to hit the shleves this week at least in Europe. The main question is: does the premium features of the laptop justify its high price tag? If you want my short answer, I must say YES, it indeed does. Wanna know why? let’s have a look. Here is a list of the features of the Nokia laptop:
Body
Memory and hard drive
Wireless
Audio and video
CPU and chipset
Display and keyboard
Battery
I/O ports and slots
GPS
Other
Here are two relevant videos that can give some idea of how it look like:
So what is so special about this little guy which makes it worth several hundred bucks more than the normal ones. In the above feature list, I have made those little differences bold. First of all and most importantly, Nokia 3G laptop comes with a 3G modem. To me, that not only means much better access to internet but also a lot cheaper access. In Holland, you should be able to get an unlimited 3G access to the internet for 10€/month and that is a lot cheaper (but of course slower) than access to Wifi networks. It just sounds more practical to me to buy a 3G internet plan and be always online.
Next to the 3G modem, you will get a really really slim and well designed aluminum body which is only comparable to Apple Macbooks, if you ask me. That makes the device even more mobile, easier to use, and eye candy. And let’s not forget about the much better quality you get from the higher resolution screen. The screen resolution is the best that I have seen in the netbook category so far.
It is not yet over. For your bucks, you also get an impressive mind blowing 12 hours (claimed) battery life, which makes the gadget even better and more practical to carry around. You can practically deduct the weight of the charger from the total weight that you will be carrying around, and believe me that makes a big difference. So, the weight of the Nokia 3G netbook must be considered at least half a pound less than the normal package of netbook plus charger. That is one more big plus.
Not yet satisfied? How about GPS, accelerometer, and Bluetooth? Come on guy! that is gotta convince you that this gadget is really worth the price. OK! you may not like Windows 7, but I guess you can always replace it with a Linux distro.
I think Nokia 3G may actually sell really really well. Are you going to get yours? let me know what you think about Nokia 3G.
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Here is a very good list of 49 Hot New Open Source Applications. I highly recommned you to have a look at it.
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The 2020 FLOSS roadmap v1 is a document that was collectively elaborated by 31 experts and contributors and published last December. It contains a set of predictions on how the free / libre / open source software ecosystem could evolve over the next ten years, a set of recommendations for public and private bodies on how to encourage its growth and leverage the benefits it can provide to the economy, and a set of in-depth studies on topics such as public policies, technological innovation, uses and employment.
In order to prepare the second edition of the roadmap, which will be published this fall, a call for comments and contributions has been sent on the www.2020flossroadmap.org website. A collaborative text annotation and commenting system has been set up in order to make it easy to everyone to make a contribution to the roadmap.
The roadmap is licensed under Creative Commons (BY-SA).
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Suppose you would like to have access to a particular path from within terminal. For example, if you have your executables in a folder called ~/my_program/bin you may want to have access to the executables from everywhere within terminal. One way to achieve this is to add that particular path to your path list in the “.bashrc” file. So, how to do that?
First launch a file browser and go to your home folder. You need then to edit the “.bashrc” file which is a hidden file in your home folder. You would therefore first need to make Ubuntu show your hidden files. In the menu bar on the top of the file browser window, select “View/Show Hidden Files” and check the mark . Here is a graphic for your reference:
Then find the file “.bashrc” file and open it with the text editor. You would then need to append a line or two to the file. For example, if you would like to add the path~/my_program/bin, you would need to add the following line to the file:
PATH=~/my_program/bin:”${PATH}”
Filed under: Linux, Ubuntu | Tagged: Linux, PATH, Ubuntu, Ubuntu tips, Ubuntu tricks | 6 Comments »
In case you have been looking for a good C++ IDE for Linux, I have a very good suggestion:
Geany
Here is the description of Geany from its official website (http://www.geany.org/):
Geany is a text editor using the GTK2 toolkit with basic features of an integrated development environment. It was developed to provide a small and fast IDE, which has only a few dependencies from other packages. It supports many filetypes and has some nice features.
Some basic features of Geany:
* Syntax highlighting
* Code folding
* Symbol name auto-completion
* Construct completion/snippets
* Auto-closing of XML and HTML tags
* Call tips
* Many supported filetypes including C, Java, PHP, HTML, Python, Perl, Pascal (full list)
* Symbol lists
* Code navigation
* Build system to compile and execute your code
* Simple project management
* Plugin interface (see Plugins)
To install Geany in Ubuntu just issue the following command in a terminal:
sudo apt-get install geany
Geany also works under Windows and the Windows binaries can be downloaded from the Geany webiste as well.
Filed under: Linux, Programming, Ubuntu | Tagged: C++, Geany, IDE, Linux, Ubuntu, Ubuntu tipcs, Ubuntu tricks | Leave a Comment »
There is sometimes a problem with the MATLAB in Ubuntu. The problem is that after installing MATLAB, you might get just a blank screen (blank GUI window) without any option menu, command line, etc. To solve this problem, find the file “environment” (the path is: /etc/environment). Add the following line to the file and try again:
export AWT_TOOLKIT=”MToolkit”
The problem should have been solved. If not, try restarting your computer.
Filed under: Linux, Ubuntu | Tagged: installation, Linux, MATLAB, Ubuntu, Ubuntu tips, Ubuntu tricks | 2 Comments »
If you have got a rar file (or other file formats not naively supported by Ubuntu’s archive manager- such as arj, 7zip, etc), you need to install extra packages so that Archive Manager can handle these file formats. For example, if you would like to unrar a file in Ubuntu, you need to install the package unrar. Open a terminal (command window) and simply issue this command:
sudo apt-get install unrar-free
for a non-free option, you can use:
sudo apt-get install unrar
You might be asked to give your password and then the package is downloaded and installed. After the package is installed, you can use the usual Archive Manager to unrar files.
Archive Manager (File Roller)- Taken from Ubuntu documentation- thanks to the contributors to the Ubuntu wiki
In general, following file formats are supported by the Archive Manager by default (from Ubuntu documentation- thanks to the contributors to the Ubuntu documentation wiki):
|
Format |
File extension |
Note |
|
Tar |
.tar |
|
|
gzip |
.tar.gz, .tgz, .gz |
Compressed .tar or compressed single file |
|
bzip |
.tar.bz, .tbz, .bz |
Compressed .tar or compressed single file |
|
bzip2 |
.tar.bz2, .tbz2, .bz2 |
Compressed .tar or compressed single file |
|
LZMA |
.tar.lzma, .lzma |
Compressed .tar or compressed single file |
|
ZIP |
.zip |
|
|
JAR |
.jar, .ear, .war |
|
|
CD images |
.iso |
Read-only |
These file formats are not supported by default and require additional packages to be supported (from Ubuntu documentation again): In the following table, it is mentioned that which package needs to be installed so that the Archie Manager can handle extra file formats.
|
Format |
File extension |
Note |
|
7zip |
.7z |
Needs the p7zip package, which doesn’t provide multi-volume support. To support password-protected archives, needs the p7zip-full package |
|
compress |
.Z, .tar.Z, .taz |
Needs the ncompress package |
|
shar |
.shar |
Needs the sharutils package |
|
lZO |
.lzo, .tar.lzo, .tzo |
Needs the lzop package |
|
LHA |
.lzh, .lha |
Needs the lha package |
|
ARJ |
.arj |
Needs the arj package |
|
ACE |
.ace |
Needs the unace package, providing read-only support |
|
RAR |
.rar |
Needs the unrar (non-free) or unrar-free package to extract .rar archives. |
Filed under: Linux, Ubuntu | Tagged: Files, Linux, Rar, Ubuntu, Ubuntu Tip, Ubuntu Trick, Unrar | 5 Comments »
