posted by admin
filed under How to,
software,
ubuntu
Inspired by two popular Mac applications; Spotlight and Quicksilver, David Siegel has developed GNOME Do as a part of his university course which afterward became a popular application for Linux.

With GNOME Do, you can quickly launch an application just by typing the application’s name. It’s not just restricted to applications. You also can search and open webpage, Firefox bookmarks, files, album in Rhythmbox and etc. Everything is just on your finger tips. Type the things you one in GNOME Do and launch it. You can extend the functionality of GNOME Do by installing extra plugins such as Banshee, Pidgin, Google Calculator and Tomboy.
Install GNOME Do in Ubuntu 8.04:
…click here to read more
posted by admin
filed under banshee,
software,
ubuntu
About two weeks after the release of the first beta version, here comes Banshee 1.0 Beta 2. Same as before,three new features has been added in this released and over 28 bugs have been fixed since beta 1.
New Features:
Podcast Support
With Banshee 1.0 Beta 2, you can subscribe to your favorite audio and video podcasts, and search and browse your podcasts the same way you do your Music Library.Banshee will stream the audio or video so you don’t have to wait for it to download first.
…click here to read more
About a week ago, Fedora 9, codename Sulphur was released to the public. Fedora 9 comes with a lot of new features and updated softwares such as the latest Gnome 2.22, KDE 4.0.3, Xfce 4.4.2, Mozilla Firefox Beta 5, Open Office 2.4 and a 2.6.25 based kernel. Here are some of reviews about Fedora 9 that I have found over the internet.
Linux.com conclude that:
Aside from the problems with PackageKit — and, to a lesser extent, the inclusion of KDE 4.0.3 — Fedora 9 manages to balance innovation with a high degree of usability. Over the last few months, Fedora has been increasingly compared favorably with Ubuntu on both accounts, and, to a large extent, it deserves this praise. If anything, it has probably exceeded Ubuntu in innovation, with at least a dozen major new ideas in every release. It is a rare release, too, in which Fedora’s menus and dialog do not show minor tinkering to fine-tune the user experience.
Yet the problems in Fedora 9 emphasize how difficult a balance the Fedora project tries to maintain. The fact that improvements are coming for both KDE and PackageKit, and that, meanwhile, workarounds exist, is beside the point — these facts are lucky accidents, and nothing that Fedora has done.
Although Fedora’s innovations make it one of the more interesting distributions to use and watch these days, the project needs to temper its creativity with more consideration of how changes affect users. Perhaps these relatively minor problems will help the distribution correct its release policies before a major disaster happens in a future release.
Source: Fedora 9: Leading edge or bleeding edge?
…click here to read more
Ubuntu system doesn’t come with something like Mac OSX widgets or Windows Vista gadgets by default. However, you can get this feature by installing software called Screenlets.Screenlets are small applications written in python which can be put anywhere on your desktop. With the released of Screenlets 0.1.1, support for web widgets (widgets which are written in HTML, JavaScript and CSS, similar to Mac OSX widgetst) and Google Gadgets were added. With the widget plugin for Compiz Fusion, you can show and hide the Screenlets the same way you can with Mac OSX widgets. Screenlets include a bunch of preferences like keep above, keep below, lock a screenlet, make it sticky and set it as widget.

…click here to read more
Before this, I have talked about installing the greatest Linux distribution Ubuntu 8.04, Hardy Heron using Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 here. Alternatively, you can use VirtualBox to install Ubuntu 8.04 under your windows environment.
VirtualBox
VirtualBox is a X86 virtualization software package developed by Sun Microsystems Inc. You can get VirtualBox for free since it is released under GPL license. Click here to go to the download page.
Requirements
- Intel or AMD processor.
- 1 GB of Memory. 512 MB will work but you might experience bad performance.
- Enough free hard disk space.
- A supported host operating system. Windows (primarily XP) or Linux distributions on 32-bit hosts and on 64-bit hosts. (Support for Mac OS X is currently in development)
- A supported guest operating system. Click here to check the list.
You can check the tutorial on how to install Ubuntu 8.04 using VirtualBox here. This graphical tutorial will show you steps that you need to follow to get Ubuntu 8.04 works under Windows Vista.
On May 6, 2007 first beta version of Banshee 1.0 has been released to the public. In this released, three new features has been added and over 30 bugs has been fixed.
New Features:
- MTP and iPod device support: Now you can drag and drop the music and video files from your library to your device and it will be synced immediately. Album art will also be synced. Banshee also will convert the files to format which your player supports automatically. Alternatively, you can set what format and quality of the files you want.
- Smart by Default: The default smart playlist and other predefined smart playlist can be edited and created from the New Smart Playlist dialog.
- Minimode: Minimode is a view extension which enable Banshee to be displayed in a smaller windows. Minimode can be enable using the extension manager .
- Fullscreen video is now supported.
Installation
Ubuntu: For Ubuntu user, please read my previous post.
Fedora: Install via yum: yum install banshee
Foresight 2.0: Install banshee-1 from PackageKit, or in a terminal type, sudo conary update banshee-1
OpenSUSE 10.3:
