Techno

I have been using Gnome 2.14 with Fedora core 5 for some time but recently felt the need to edit menus. At that point I realized that a simple menu editor was missing for Gnome. I tired to look in the menus but could find nothing. At last i googled for the info and found some piece of info which made me laugh at myself. The editor was sitting right in front of me but i couldn’t notice it. Actually it was not fully my fault . The editor is only accessible if u ‘Right Click’ on the Feodra Logo sitting usually on the top left corner of u r screen (unless u have changed it) . The logo can be seen in the following image.

The Menu editor looks as follows

This is a basic Menu editor but is sufficient for the job most of the times.

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program.It is a software similar to Photoshop and has many features which makes it a strong competitor.
Many people and even those in the world of graphic designing have not heard about these tool. This tool is freely available on all major Linux distributions and other operating systems such as Windows. So u might already be having it on u r system.

The official website is at http://www.gimp.org/

I found a tutorial while googling for some gimp help at http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/gimp/

Will post it here as i find some more….

Meanwhile Happy Gimping!!!!

In my previous post I had written about IE specific websites. Though u may have started using Linux and are really loving u r Firefox browser there are many more who use Windows and Internet Explorer on their systems and such users are the dominant force. Many web developers therefore create IE specific websites and don’t care about the rest non IE users.

This doesn’t mean that u have to throw away u r Linux and go for Windows where IE is available. ies4linux comes to the rescue. It uses WINE and runs IE on top of it. The application comes with a script which does all the job right from downloading the required dlls to installation . No extra configuration needed.

Till the time IE specific websites are created software such as ies4linux would be saving non Windows users from considerable pain.

The only thing almost all non windows users may miss from time to time is Internet Explorer on their systems. Though with Firefox now on the rise this need has gone to a drastically low level but there are some instances when u need IE coz the website which u r visiting may provide some service which simply refuses to work on non IE browsers.

I have found 2 categories where IE is forced on u. One being the use of ActiveX controls on the webpage which simply cannot work on non Windows OS such as Linux. I hope all such service providers provide a desktop version for everybody for their respective OS.

The other category of websites come under lame coder websites who prefer to use VBScript in their webpages instead of Javascript . I simply cannot understand their logic behind this. Just because the developer knows only VBScript is really a pathetic excuse for any body to give. Even Microsoft the inventor of VBScript themselves don’t use Vbscript everywhere and instead use Javascript in many places.

Infact such websites reduce their coverage (in this case non Windows users) and they are the ones to lose finally.

Sorry to disappoint a lot of my friends but WINE in this case is simply another piece of software present in Linux.

The official definition states the following “Wine Is Not a (CPU) Emulator.”

Wine just provides the windows API for u r windows software to run under Linux , It comes as a blessing when u r stuck with the Windows only version of u r favorite software in Linux.

Head on to WINE home at http://www.winehq.org/ for all the info u would ever need about it.

Although its a good attempt but i must say that its still not perfect . Since it tries to emulate Windows API, where there are many undocumented features there are times when not all u r favorite software may run under it as it may be using those undocumented features.

During such times its best to pray that there exists a similar or better version or clone of the software u are suck with. A little bit of Googling helps in almost all such cases though.

Many recent distributions come with the latest stable version of WINE and are also configured to execute Windows executable’s with WINE.

So just click and see u r Windows program’s come alive in Linux with some WINE 🙂 .

This is a common scenario….u have installed Linux. u r really excited about it and immediately start checking out the software, games and other cool things already present in the package. After a certain amount of time (which is directly proportional to the level of u r excitement) u realise that u r not able to find u r games , pictures, documents etc which was present on u r Windows system. You start looking for the panic button.

Relax! U r data is most probably safe , depending upon which options u chose on the partition screen during install time.

For accessing other filesystems u need to “mount” that filesystem in Linux.

Windows uses 2 types of file systems FAT32 and NTFS . If ur Windows data is on a FAT32 partition u needn’t worry much as almost all of the popular Linux distributions have FAT32 support enabled. If u Windows system uses NTFS as its file system then a little bit of extra work is needed.

Read the following info on http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/mounting.html for some information regarding mounting.

For those with NTFS system ,head on to http://www.linux-ntfs.org/and download the required packages for u r system.

Follow the documentation and if everything goes well , u will be having access to u r documents,pictures etc in Linux also.

Linux is known to be as a programmer’s OS i.e that the OS had been built by programmers for programmers. It is really a good system to learn programming on. The OS design is really neat and best of all its open. Everything is well documented . You know how and why a particular thing works and that’s what every programmer wants , coz programmers are inquistive by nature.

The best thing i like about is everything is file based. What this means is that almost everything on the OS is configurable by changing the right settings. If u know what exactly u are doing u can write u r own shell script for small tasks or write a full fledged program in u r favorite language to perform the function u need instead of depending on some external tools which will some other bells and whistles attached to it.

I have been a Visual basic programmer myself and i must say that i enjoy programming in Linux much greater than in Windows.

Its not necessary for u to be C or a C++ programmer to program under Linux. C or C++ is best suited for system level programming. There are lot of applications which can be written in a language such as Java. Many also prefer Python which is also a popular OO language.

So don’t worry, be Happy….Start Programming under Linux.

Nopes! that’s not the case. Live CD is an interesting concept in which the whole operating system runs from the CD without installing anything on the hard disk. Its a great way to test any new OS without the fear of messing things up. Just pop in the CD and the magic starts!. Also when u have messed up u r system real bad then the Live CD can be of great help in performing system rescue. The only negative point which i feel is at times the OS can feel a but sluggish due to the drive speed. Also valuable RAM is consumed by the OS since the whole OS runs from RAM and not from hard disk.
The most popular and one of the very first Live CD distribution was that of KNOPPIX.

Nowadays almost all the popular distribution have their Live CD versions . Ubuntu, Debian are also the popular ones.

If u need more info on Live Cd’s the following wikipedia link can be of gr8 help . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCD

One of the really good resources available in the web for Linux is the Linux Documentation Project available at http://tldp.org/. This site is really a treasure in itself and a must for every Linux user. Be it connection to internet or burning a CD its all available in tldp . The documents are constantly being updated and can also be downloaded.

If u need to find just information on Linux , Google can help u a lot. Use the following url http://www.google.com/linux for all u r Linux related queries.