Category Archives: Software

Vacuum your Firefox 3

This tip will hopefully speed up your Firefox 3 by optimizing it’s database.
Firefox stores your browsing data using SQLite – self contained, small footprint database.
Having database store your browsing data has one drawback, you have to optimize the database from time to time to get rid of old, deleted data, re-index the columns etc.
Otherwise you keep all the junk data mixed in with your real data.
In SQLite is the statement to do this called VACUUM. So here’s how to vacuum your Firefox:

1. Download sqlite command line client for your platform. In Ubuntu, go to yout terminal and issue the following command:

2. Turn off your Firefox
3. Go to your profile folder
4. Issue the command:
* For Linux

* For Windows

Enjoy!

Ubuntu One coming to Windows

At PyCon 2010, Ubuntu One development team will focus on helping Ubuntu users who also use a Windows box. This is great news!
Source.

Skype for Linux 2.1 beta2

Skype just released Skype for Linux 2.1 beta2 aka “Talking Screens”.
Chats are faster, UI supports switching styles on the fly, and audio is a lot better than before. You can download it here.
What’s new in this version:
– Screen sharing
– Quote a message in chat
– Localized time formats
– Support for UI styles
– Report abuse
You can view the detailed changelog here.

TIP: If you use a darker theme (I use Dust), the menus will look ugly.

skype2.png skype1.png


To fix this, go to Options (CTRL+O) and under General, select Desktop Settings or GTK+ for the style.
Restart Skype and enjoy!

Android applications running on Ubuntu

500px-android-logosvg Canonical will develop an environment wich will allow Andoid applications to run on Ubuntu. Source.
Also, HP considers dropping Windows for Android in netbooks. Source.

Songbird: glibc 2.8 detects invalid free() pointer

Sometimes I use Songbird to listen to my music files or internet radio. On some systems running Ubuntu 8.10 it does not run. The error is a known bug reported by some people.
The resolution is simple. Just remove libvisual-0.4-plugins.

Enjoy your music!

Install Django on Ubuntu 8.10

Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.
To install it on your Ubuntu, follow the next steps:

1. Install python (if you have it installed, skip this step)

2. Download the tarball from the Django Project website. You can download this file to your home directory.

3. Now we can just move this entire package to somewhere logical. You can move it anywhere you like, but remember to modify the links accordingly. I use /usr/local/lib/.

4. Link to it from the Python site-packages directory, and create a link to the django-admin.py executable.

5. Test it by changing to your home directory and running django-admin!

You should see this:

6. Happy programming!

Set Drivel to Post to Your WordPress Blog

Drivel is a nice blog editor for Gnome. To install it on Ubuntu, run this in your terminal:
sudo apt-get install drivel
Now you need to configure Drivel to connect to your blog. Go to Applications -> Internet. Select Drivel Journal Editor.
When the dialog box appears, input your username and password into the first two textboxes. For Server Type, select Movable Type from the dropdown. Now the tricky part, for the server address you will need to enter the full path to the xmlrpc.php file on the server (for example http://www.yourdomain.com/yoursubdirectory/xmlrpc.php). Check the Remember password checkbox and the Automatically login checkboxes (if desired) and click the Log In button.

Happy posting!

Nokia 6230 on Ubuntu

Wammu is mobile phone manager running on Linux, Windows and possibly other platforms, where Gammu and wxPython works.

To install it on Ubuntu issue the following command:
sudo apt-get install wammu
Here is a screenshot:
wammu-displaysms

To make your Nokia 6230 connect to Ubuntu using a bluetooth device, edit your ~/.gammurc file to contain:

[gammu]
port = xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
connection = bluerfphonet
name = Nokia 6230
model =

Replace xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx with the MAC address of your phone.
To find out the MAC address of your phone, run:
hcitool scan

You can now launch Wammu and start playing with the phone.

gt5 – a diff-capable ‘du-browser’

gt5 is a console command which provides an easy to understand interface to show a detailed disk usage list. Due to its console nature, i recommend using this tool for remote computers too.

Install it on Ubuntu using the following command:
sudo apt-get install gt5

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