Installation is quite simple in Ubuntu 9.10

sudo apt-get install nautilus-image-converter

This will install the Image Converter extension to the Nautilus file manager. You will need restart GNOME in order for the changes to apply. If you are using a different distro, I’m sure you will be able to do a Google Search to find out how to install it.

After the installation its all a matter of browsing the folder where you have the photos through Nautilus.

• Select the photo(s) you want to resize.
• Right-click on the photos you selected. You will see the options to “Resize Images” and “Rotate Images”.
• Upon clicking them you will get options on how you would want to perform the operations.

Its one of those coolest apps I came across which does the simple things in a simple way. Love it..!!!

CHMOD directories only

find . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;

CHMOD files only

find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

I loaded my OS of choice Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron on this and everything went very smoothly except that I couldn't get the wireless working. By running lspci the wireless card was shown as Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter which is an Atheros AR5007EG wireless card. The proprietary driver for Atheros was installed by Hardy but when I ran iwconfig this is what I got.

lo        no wireless extensions.
 
eth0      no wireless extensions.

Few google searches resulted me about madwifi. Madwifi is a team of volunteer developers working on Linux kernel drivers for Wireless LAN devices with Atheros chipsets. I got madwifi installed and got my wireless card working. Here is how I did it.

First I disabled both proprietary drivers in System -> Administration -> Hardware drivers.

Then in the command prompt I did the following

Get this version of madwifi

wget -c <a href="http://snapshots.madwifi.org/special/madwifi-ng-r2756+ar5007.tar.gz" target="_blank">http://snapshots.madwifi.org/special/madwifi-ng-r2756+ar5007.tar.gz</a>

Untar the file

tar xvf madwifi-ng-r2756+ar5007.tar.gz

Move inside the directory

cd madwifi-ng-r2756+ar5007

You might need build-essential if you haven't compiled anything before

sudo apt-get update && sudo aptitude install build-essential

Building madwifi and installing the modules

make
sudo make install
sudo modprobe ath_pci
sudo modprobe wlan_scan_sta

Loading module at boot

sudo gedit /etc/modules

Enter the line below in the last line of the file and save.

ath_pci

Thats it. I restarted the machine and ran iwconfig again to check

lo        no wireless extensions.
 
eth0      no wireless extensions.
 
wifi0     no wireless extensions.
 
ath0      IEEE 802.11g  ESSID:""  Nickname:""
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.437 GHz  Access Point: Not-Associated   
          Bit Rate:0 kb/s   Tx-Power:17 dBm   Sensitivity=1/1  
          Retry:off   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality=0/70  Signal level=0 dBm  Noise level=0 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

As you can see its now showing that the wireless card is working properly. Thanks to madwifi.

When it came to my graphic card I had to use the ATI propriety driver to make full use of it. Since Hardy comes with compiz out of the box I managed to get the 3D desktop working without much hassle.

To get compiz working in Hardy there are two things to be done.

1. Goto System -> Preferences – Appearance and click Visual Effects tab. Then tick Extra to get the effects working.

2. Install the Compiz Settings Manager.

sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager

After installing you can goto System -> Preferences – Advanced Desktop Effects Settings to add/configure/remove effects related to compiz.

I also enabled Emerald themes to get out of the standard Gnome look. Here is how got emerald working.

sudo apt-get install emerald

Now if you goto System -> Preferences – Emerald Theme Manager you can configure an Emerald theme of your choice. By default it doesn't come with any themes so you need to download themes from Gnome-Look.

However you need to tell compiz to use Emerald as its Window Decorator. To do that goto System -> Preferences – Advanced Desktop Effects Settings and under Effects category click on the Window Decoration icon which will take you to its settings. In the 'Command' field delete whatever is in there and add this value to that field

emerald --replace.

Have fun..

I found a nice Emerald theme which kinda reflects the one used by Matt Farrell in the movie Die Hard 4.0. Here are few screeshots of my desktop.

3D desktop with compiz on Hardy

Desktop with new look theme

UNIX Toolbox

This document is a collection of Unix/Linux/BSD commands and tasks which are useful for IT work or for advanced users. This is a practical guide with concise explanations, however the reader is supposed to know what s/he is doing.

Now when we got to the stage of launching the site, I had to repeat all the installation on a live server as they don't come with ffmpeg or ffmpeg-php pre installed. Hosting Companies seem to charge big bucks to get these installed in their servers. So we went for a Virtual Dedicated Server which had root access. It was a Cent OS 4 box and this is how I was able to get ffmpeg and ffmpeg-php installed on it.

Switch to working directory

cd /usr/local/src

Download the source files needed

wget <a href="http://www3.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/essential-20061022.tar.bz2" target="_blank">http://www3.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/essential-20061022.tar.bz2</a>
wget <a href="http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/9225/flvtool2_1.0.5_rc6.tgz" target="_blank">http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/9225/flvtool2_1.0.5_rc6.tgz</a>
wget <a href="http://easynews.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/lame/lame-3.97.tar.gz" target="_blank">http://easynews.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/lame/lame-3.97.tar.gz</a>
wget <a href="http://superb-west.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/ffmpeg-php/ffmpeg-php-0.5.0.tbz2" target="_blank">http://superb-west.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/ffmpeg-php/ffmpeg-php-0.5.0.tbz2</a>
wget <a href="http://downloads.xiph.org/releases/ogg/libogg-1.1.3.tar.gz" target="_blank">http://downloads.xiph.org/releases/ogg/libogg-1.1.3.tar.gz</a>
wget <a href="http://downloads.xiph.org/releases/vorbis/libvorbis-1.1.2.tar.gz" target="_blank">http://downloads.xiph.org/releases/vorbis/libvorbis-1.1.2.tar.gz</a>

Extract the Source files

bunzip2 essential-20061022.tar.bz2; tar xvf essential-20061022.tar
tar zxvf flvtool2_1.0.5_rc6.tgz
tar zxvf lame-3.97.tar.gz
bunzip2 ffmpeg-php-0.5.0.tbz2; tar xvf ffmpeg-php-0.5.0.tar
tar zxvf libogg-1.1.3.tar.gz
tar zxvf libvorbis-1.1.2.tar.gz

Create a directory for codecs & import them

mkdir /usr/local/lib/codecs/
mv essential-20061022/* /usr/local/lib/codecs/
chmod -R 755 /usr/local/lib/codecs/

Install SVN/Ruby

yum install subversion
yum install ruby
yum install ncurses-devel

Get the latest FFMPEG/MPlayer from the subversion

svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg
svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk mplayer

Fix few Lib issues for next steps

Add this line in /etc/ld.so.conf

/usr/local/lib

then run

ldconfig -v

Compile LAME

cd /usr/local/src/lame-3.97
./configure
make
make install

Compile libOGG

cd /usr/local/src/libogg-1.1.3
./configure
make
make install

Compile libVorbis

cd /usr/local/src/libvorbis-1.1.2
./configure
make
make install

Compile flvtool2

cd /usr/local/src/flvtool2_1.0.5_rc6
ruby setup.rb config
ruby setup.rb setup
ruby setup.rb install

Compile MPlayer

cd /usr/local/src/mplayer
./configure
make
make install

Compile FFMPEG

cd /usr/local/src/ffmpeg
./configure --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libogg --enable-libvorbis --disable-mmx --enable-shared
echo '#define HAVE_LRINTF 1' >> config.h
make
make install

Finalize the codec setups

ln -s /usr/local/lib/libavformat.so.50 /usr/lib/libavformat.so.50
ln -s /usr/local/lib/libavcodec.so.51 /usr/lib/libavcodec.so.51
ln -s /usr/local/lib/libavutil.so.49 /usr/lib/libavutil.so.49
ln -s /usr/local/lib/libmp3lame.so.0 /usr/lib/libmp3lame.so.0
ln -s /usr/local/lib/libavformat.so.51 /usr/lib/libavformat.so.51

Few tasks before compiling FFMPEG-PHP

yum install automake
yum install autoconf
yum install libtool

Compile FFMPEG-PHP

cd /usr/local/src/ffmpeg-php-0.5.0
phpize
./configure
make
make install

Add FFMPEG-PHP as an extension of PHP

Add this line to your php.ini file (Check the correct path of php.ini)

extension=ffmpeg.so

Restart Apache to load FFMPEG-PHP

service httpd restart

Check if FFMPEG-PHP is loaded correctly

Create a file called phpinfo.php in your webroot and add the following code

1
2
3

<?php
phpinfo();
?>

Run this page using your browser and if you see a section on ffmpeg then everything is installed and working.

Ubuntu is my first experience for a Debian based distro. I have used Redhat since 6.3 and then upto 9 and after that have tried out Fedora Core 1 to Fedora Core 3. But not that much on the Desktop. I never got settled with it. But as a Server I found it very effective.

So Why picked Ubuntu for Desktop?

There was this buzz about Ubuntu being a great Desktop. There was lot of hype around it. After most of my friends suggested that its really suited for desktop I got it installed. I'm amazed..

I love the way it handles users. By default the root account is locked. Using sudo the user will be able to run administrative commands. The thing I like about this is that I don't need to su and it also prevents from crazy things happening when logged in as root. The root account can be enabled but not advisable. Read More about it.

Package Management. Its Debian based so uses apt. Synaptic Package Manager ,the GUI for apt is very handy. And Automatix installed all the stuff I need for a perfect desktop.

How perfect was the switch?

I had concerns for switching to a Linux desktop. I'm mainly a PHP/MySQL developer. So it is the platform I need to be in. Infact I was in the wrong place earlier. Now I perfectly fit in to the LAMP. I was using Macromedia Dreamweaver as my editor earlier coz I also have to work a lot on the HTML/XHTML pages. Quanta Plus is a perfect alternate. I did try out Screem and Nvu. Seems to fit in perfectly. Currently using gedit as the phpeditor. Lately being playing around with jEdit and it seems a perfect editor.

I was using Mozilla Thunderbird as my Email client. So I was able to restore all my mails without any difficulty. I'm not really a newbie to Linux so the switch didn't effect me that much. Infact I'm having fun.

Few issues I came across

It was bundled with Mozilla Firefox 1.0.7. This is how I installed the new version of Mozilla Firefox 1.5.2.

Using the Synaptic Package Manager I got installed Apache2-PHP4-MySQL and with that installed phpMyAdmin as well just to try out. But for some reason PHP scripts were not parsed. I really didn't try to dig into it and felt comfortable compiling them to my needs. When I tried to remove them phpMyAdmin couldn't remove itself and on the Synaptic Package Manager it showed phpMyAdmin as a broken package. And due to this the rest of the packages I wanted to removed were not removed. And after doing some googling this is how I was able to get rid of it by modifying the installation script of phpMyAdmin.

Created a backup of the script

 
nazly@ubuntu:~$ cd /var/lib/dpkg/info/
 
nazly@ubuntu:/var/lib/dpkg/info$ sudo cp phpmyadmin.prerm phpmyadmin.prerm.orig

Edit the script file

 
nazly@ubuntu:/var/lib/dpkg/info$ sudo gedit phpmyadmin.prerm

And commented line 12 by adding a # infront of it and saved the file.

Then used apt-get to remove phpMyAdmin

 
nazly@ubuntu:/var/lib/dpkg/info$ sudo apt-get remove phpmyadmin

After that Synaptic Package Manager didn't show the phpMyAdmin package as broken and I was able to remove the rest of the packages.

I'm able to connect to my PC with my Nokia 6230i via Bluetooth as I didn't have to install any driver as such.

So as far as I'm concerned I'm not missing anything at all.. I'm very much satisfied with myself that I'm doing the right thing as I always had this passion for Free & OpenSource software.

"free" as in "free speech," not as in "free beer."

The new graphical installer will be a great addition to Ubuntu. There is also seem to be great improvement in the UI. Gotta try it out.

Atlast I got to this point where I got the courage to walk the talk. And my pick was Ubuntu. I had a couple of test runs with the Ubuntu Live CD and then installed it. I was using Mozilla Thunderbird in my 'M$ Desktop' so it was a piece of cake restoring all my mails which is simply awesome. I loved the way this Debian apt-get works. This is the first time I'm using a Debian based distro. And the GUI available in Ubuntu for apt-get known as Synaptic Package Manager makes life lot easier. Its a great way for the users who are new to Linux to get things up and running soon. And then installed Automatix, an automated GUI installation script that will install a bunch of applications which converts Ubuntu to a perfect Desktop solution. It has been about two weeks playing around it and I'm lovin' it. I came across few issues and did sort them out as well thanks to the community. I will post them as soon as I can.