Fresh Ubuntu

Welcome back, You can download the podcast here, Episode 26. Before I get started, i just want to say due to the Holiday Weekend (aka, the SuperBowl) I will not be putting out a podcast for the week of February 4th 2007. I hope you understand and may the best team win!

This week I talk a little about "The GIMP". I consider it a viable alternative to Photoshop for my needs. I must stress that it is for "my needs". In other words, for the casual (and I mean rare) user. Yes, I understand that GIMP does not support CMYK colors (or Pantone, I think) but, it can probably handle most anything just short a retouching photos for Architectural Digest and it might be able to do that as well only the final post printing colors will probably not look right so I've read. Here is an interesting article I came upon talking just about this very topic and if you are curious about the GIMP you can reach it here.

Whoops! Sorry I forgot this link to Gnome Hacks, click here.

The Command line of the command of the week was: netstat -tup


This specific command lists all the internet connections both incoming and outgoing. So if you are wondering about what programs are using internet access this would be a good command to use to find exactly that!


In the main segment, I talk about another package manager that I generically call the add/remove packet manager. I really like the user interface of the packet manager. First of all there are only packages in there! Unlike Synaptic which lists packages, dependencies, libraries and whatever else that packages need. As an end user, I am only interested in a couple of things. What applications are available to me and what applications are the hottest/latest/best. The add/remove package manager addresses both very easily as it does rate (at least) the most popular application from 1 star (the least) to 4 stars (you guessed it, the most). All of the packages are categorized in the left frame and the packages are contained in the upper right frame with the lower right frame reserved for a description. One esoteric addition albeit (IMO) an important one is the addition of the packages' Logo icon to the left of the package name. I know, I am a bit shallow, but really folks, in all honesty, it adds the sizzle to the steak! The only downfall is that it is heavily dependent on Synpatic Package Manager to handle removal of closely related packages and utilities of the user interface, but, it handles adding packages with the same ease and grace that Synpatic does. Overall, I give it a 7 out 10, but what would be nice is if Synaptic Package manager used elements of the add/remove manager and we would have an even better package management system.


Music from the Podshow, Podsafe Music Network (PMN)

One Tribe - Saskia Nation theme

HatHead

Download it-Dance edit

Clea

Music From IODA PROMONET

Download "Take The "A" Train" (mp3)
from "Artistry In Swing"
by Tony Evans & His Orchestra
Tema International

• Buy at iTunes Music Store
• Buy at eMusic
• Buy at RealNetworks / Rhapsody

More On This Album

Yes, you herd it here first (haha)! Well, maybe 53rd, Download the podcast episode 25 and find out what I had to say about it. Herd 2 is released and ready for testing by the general public. Get your hands on it and see what it is all about. There are a lot of interesting things on FFH2 that are intrigueing like a new Gnome and GTK+ and updated kernal and lots of new Debian packages. I might try it myself! below are the links to the ISO's.

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/feisty/herd-2/ (Ubuntu)

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/feisty/herd-2/ (Kubuntu)

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/edubuntu/releases/feisty/herd-2/ (Edubuntu)

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/feisty/herd-2/ (Xubuntu)

Command Line Command of the week - free

This command gives you anything you want for free!! Wow, Linux is soo....what's that you say? Oh, I see....This just gives you the amount of free memory in your physical memory and swap drive? Oh, buffers too? The -b switch displays the amount of memory in bytes; the -k switch (set by default) displays it in kilobytes; the -m switch displays it in megabytes; the -g switch displays it in gigabytes. How nice:[



And, finally thanks to Art for providing a possible solution for getting FreeNAS and Ubuntu to work together. Art was unable to listen to mp3's or watch DVD's from content stored on a FreeNAS server. So he wrote a post on a Sourceforge forum and there might be an answer to his post by now. I haven't checked yet but it is worth a try if you are experiencing problems with the same setup. Here is the link.


http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=1650139&forum_id=507590


Well, that does it for me! Thanks for visiting, have a good one!


Music was provided courtesy of the Ioda Promonet and the Podshow Music Network

Download "Natty Dread Time" (mp3)
from "Hidden Treasures 2"
by Various Artists
Easy Star Records

• Buy at iTunes Music Store
• Buy at eMusic

FLY FLY FLY

Adrina Thorpe

Jan. 19 2007

Ticking Timebomb

Demerit 7

Jan. 19 2007

Oh and by the way if you are on another VoIP network that supports SIP you can reach me by this SIP Number. This will only work with networks that are SIP compliant. I am not sure if this will work with Skype, but give it a try. Visit this link first- then try this number 17470454941. Also, check out Gizmo and see if it fits your needs. I don't make any money on this, the service just appeals to me. Bye.

Hi everyone!!

Sorry for the short podcast, just too many things going on this past week. This week I introduce you to the Gizmo Project which is another Voip product similar to Skype. The reason why I like it is the free voicemail feature that they offer you. Also, it gives you and option to record your conversations easily for free!!! For a podcaster that is valuable. This was supposed to be the first installment of the linux equivalent segment, but I was just too excited to tell you about this to offer a real "equivalent". Yes I know Skype is available for linux but I think gizmo is a good alternative to Skype. I am astounded by its feature set that they offer for free. I'll try harder next time to get out a better windows equivalent package.

I also explore wildcards. You may be already familiar with the asterisk (*) which can represent any number of characters. Below is a list of wildcards and proper syntax. Enjoy!!

The asterisk (*) - used for any number of characters. It can be used like this:

ls *.txt

This will list all the text files in the current directory.

The question mark (?) - used to denote a single character. It can be used like this:

ls p12000??.png

This will list all png files (it's a graphics file good for websites) that start with p12000 as shown before the question marks, but the question marks are a place holder for any character at the position where the wildcard is placed.

If you wanted to find a file which contains a letter or number form a specific subset you could use the square brackets, []. For example:

rm fresh[k,x]ubuntu.txt

This will, of course, remove any text file freshkubuntu or freshxubuntu. But why would you want to do that??

You can also use the brackets for contigiuous sets of letters or numeral, such as, a-b, or 1-9. This is shown below:

copy vacation[a-c]200[0-6].* /home/harlem

As you can see, wildcards can be mixed to give even greater flexability to your commands. Now don't fall asleep on me, I just have a couple more to go!

You can also use the brackets to limit your search by eliminating letters that a file does not contain by introducing an exclamation point after the first bracket and before the first letter, like:

ls [!fresh].pdf

This command will only show files that do not contain the LETTERS f, r, e, s, h, and inadvertently the word fresh. You can do the same to a range of letters, such as, a-w.

What if you wanted to search for a file that has a specific word in it? Well, you would use curly brackets, {}. Its not apparently intuitive, what with all the square ones dominantly in use. For example:

mv {fresh,ubuntu,is,the,best,podcast,ever} /home/toptenondigg

This finds files with the words in the given subset and moves it to the appropraite directory.

Note - These wildcards can be used with a number of commands, not just the ones listed here. Remember, use caution when moving things around with wildcards. Just be safe and if you are at all unsure about what you are doing stop and think about it. That's it for now, see you next week.

Download Episode 23

Hi, I am back!! This week I talk a little bit about root and sudo and how that is used in Ubuntu. Just a couple of things about it, firstly, that the root account and hence the ability to use a root terminal is turned off by default. You can however turn this feature on at your leisure, though not recommended. In any case, root as you may have heard on the podcast is like an administrator account in Windows. This account can do just about everything to your computer that you would want it to do and some things that you might not want it to do. Again, it is powerful, but, alas not idiot-proof. This is where sudo comes in. Sudo is a command line command that begs for a little more attention than the usual command line command of the week. What sudo does is allows the user with your regular run of the mill permissions to do administrative tasks. Things like edit configuration files, setup file permissions, and download..um...packages, yes, to install on your system. The way I see it as explained in the podcast root is to sudo as Superman is to Clark Kent. Either way, both have the same weaknesses and that is kryptonite, or incorrect command line input. See, Superman isn't so BAD after all. For the regular user, you might never have to access a root account. I'll be honest with you I haven't even tried. But, one never knows when I have to rip off my button down shirt to reveal my Superman footie pajamas (don't be jealous, I got them for Christmas!) Well, there you go, just a couple things about root and sudo and pajamas, hmmm. Here is a link to more informatioin about root and sudo:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RootSudo

This weeks CLCOTW: wc - Counts word (among other things, check the man pages) in various files.


Pretty handy to have around if you are the obsessive/compulsive type that has to know how many word you type...97..98..99...excuse me. You can also find out how many characters and bytes if you want. From the screenshot, I wrote 1721 words in my preparation for this episode, wow, not bad!! I hope this helps someone!!!


H
ere is a great tip from Steve B., he recommends a package called Yakuake for all you command line geeks. I downloaded it and it does run on gnome as well as kde. Knock yourself out. See screenshot below.



See you all next week!!