Gespeaker

Description

Gespeaker is a GTK+ frontend for espeak. It allows to play a text in many languages with settings for voice, pitch, volume, speed and word gap. The text played can also be recorded to WAV file.

Since version 0.6 it supports mbrola voices, it will require mbrola package and one or more mbrola voices from Debian repository or Ubuntu Trucchi repository.

Multiple languages are supported, actually English, Italian, Francais and Espanol. It works well with both Gnome, XFCE, LXDE environments.

Installation

Current version is 0.6 with the new added mbrola voices support for a new speech experience. Version changes are available on the Changelog page.

Just download the latest version package and install it with gdebi or dpkg.

Ubuntu users please follow the RepositoryUbuntuUsers instructions.

Enable enhanced voice support

See InstallMbrola page for instructions on enable the enhanced mbrola voice support.

// posted by vikaskurup @ 10:03 PM 0 Comments

Songbird is an open source media player that allows you to play music, watch video and surf the Web at the same time. Built with codes from Firefox and VLC, Songbird inherits the features of the two most powerful open source applications, thus making it one of the best desktop media player around

The most noticeable advantage of Songbird over other desktop media player is that it supports almost all the media formats and devices (including iPod) and it is fully customizable. With the same add-ons capability as Firefox, you can install extensions in Songbird to improve its functionality and change the themes/skins to your liking. Some of the useful extensions include Media Flow, iPod Device Support, Last.fm and CoverFetcher.

Install Songbird on Ubuntu

Before getdeb.net comes out with the latest version of Songbird deb file, the following is so far the easiest way to get Songbird running on Ubuntu.

1) Go to http://www.getsongbird.com and download Songbird to your home folder.

2) Using the Archive Manager, extract the Songbird folder to your home folder.

3) Open the Songbird folder and double click on the songbird file to execute the application.

That’s it.

If you want to create a shortcut on your Application menu, right-click on the Applications menu and select ‘Edit Menus‘

On the left pane, select Sound & Video.

On the right pane, click on the ‘New Item‘.

Fill in the field with as the same as the images below (remember to change the damien to your own username)

Click on the icon button and navigate to the path /home/yourusername/Songbird/chrome/icons/default. You should see the icon of Songbird. Select it and press OK twice.

You should now see the Songbird entry on your Application -> Sound & Video -> Songbird.

A much easier method of installing Songbird

If you find that the above method is not simple enough and you don’t mind using an older version of Songbird, you can:

Go to http://www.getdeb.net/search.php?keywords=songbird

Download Songbird 0.6.1 to your home folder.

Double click the downloaded .deb file to install the Songbird.

Once installed, you can open Songbird via Applications->Sound & Video -> Songbird.

Some Screenshots

Songbird playlist view

Songbird with MediaFlow extension

installing Songbird extension

Dark Super Feather

KMSM4 Feather and Web browsing on a new tab

// posted by vikaskurup @ 11:36 AM 0 Comments

What Wubi Is

• An easy way to install Ubuntu
• A full dual-booting environment
• Partitioning-free (it stores it’s data into a virtual disk file)
• Officially supported by Canonical, the commercial sponsor behind Ubuntu

What Wubi Isn’t

• A method of running Linux programs in Windows (like Cygwin-ish)
• A method of running Linux programs at the same time as Windows programs (like CoLinux)
• A virtual machine which puts Ubuntu into a window (like VirtualBox)

Installing Wubi

Wubi is really easy to install:

1. Go to the Wubi website, and click the big “Download Now” button. (Direct link)
   • At the time of writing, the latest release was 9.04, “Jaunty Jackalope”
2. Run the file you downloaded
   • You will be presented with a screen like this:
   • 

     Wubi Main Window

3. Enter a new username and password, click Install, and that’s it!
4. You’ll get a progress screen while it installs
   • 

     Wubi Install Progress

5. Reboot your computer when asked
   • 

     Wubi Reboot Window

How Wubi Works

Getting the CD Image

Of course, you could have gathered all that from their website. The really interesting part is how it actually works.

Wubi requires an [K/X]Ubuntu Live CD to install. It searches like this:

• The current directory, for an ISO image
• The physical CD drives on your machine for a burnt copy, not an image

It needs:

• The correct version (in this case, 9.04),
• The correct architecture (ie, 32-bit on a 32-bit machine, 32- or 64-bit on a 64-bit machine)
• The correct edition (desktop LiveCD, not server or alternate)
• The correct distribution (ie, Ubuntu, Kubuntu or Xubuntu)
• The image to be of the CD version of Ubuntu
  • As far as I am aware, the CD version burnt to a DVD should work

If it can’t find that, it’ll download the correct version from the Ubuntu servers.

It won’t burn it to CD or anything like that.

Actual Installation

Once it has the CD image, it doesn’t actually do that much. It does, first of all, make a directory on the root of the drive on which you chose to install it.
For example, if I chose “C:” as my installation drive, it would make a
“C:\ubuntu” folder.

The basic tree it would create is this:

ubuntu/
disks/
    root.disk
install/
    ubuntu-9.04-desktop-amd64.iso
wubildr

The file root.disk will contain all the Ubuntu data - the user data,

the configuration, the programs. At this stage it’s empty.
The method Wubi uses to actually create the virtual disk
is actually quite neat, and almost instant.

Next, it’ll add an entry to the Windows boot.ini or the
BCD menu file pointing to that “wubildr” file, which,
like “ntldr”, is responsible for starting off the boot process.

Finally, it’ll eject the Ubuntu CD (if present), and ask you to reboot the system.

Post-Reboot

Once you reboot the machine, you will get a menu like this:

Vista Boot Menu showing Ubuntu

When you select “Ubuntu”, the Jaunty loading screen will come up:

Jaunty "usplash" Booting Screen

Wait a couple of minutes, and a little window with
a progress bar will pop up. This is the actual install
procedure. It starts by mounting a few disks:

• Using Wubi’s homegrown “LVPM” tool,
  
• it mounts the real host drive - not the “root.disk”
  • This makes it the riskiest bit of the install,
    
  • so be careful not to switch of the power or anything like that
  • As a side point, it mounts this under “/host”
• It then mounts the Ubuntu ISO image from the install directory (”/host/ubuntu/install/ubuntu-9.04-desktop-amd64.iso”)
  
• with so-called loopback mounting built-in to Linux
  • You can do this too! Open up a Linux shell, and type:

  • mount -t iso9660   -o loop,ro

  • This will mount the contents of iso_file to target_dir, just as if you ghad mounted a real CD-ROM there
• Wubi now uses another neat trick to create a filesystem on the drive.
  • You can do that, as well! Type:

  • /sbin/mkfs.ext3 

  • You now have a full ext3 filesystem in the image
• The final disk mount is the newly-created ext3 image, which I think gets mounted at /
  • To mount your disk image, use:

  • mount -t ext3  -o loop,rw

After that, it uses a similar technique to the live installer. Traditionally, Linux distributions with package managers created their blank file system, and executed their package managers with some flags to tell it where to install the packages to. It did this with every package. Now, LiveCD installers don’t do this†, they basically just ‘extract’ an image over to the hard disk.

†Technically, this is done when producing the Live CD, but anyway…

Finally, it reads the installation parameters and uses that to set up your user, time zone (obtained from the host), and any accessibility options specified on the Windows side.

Exploring The Wubi Source Tree

This is almost getting to short essay length! So I’ll split this off into a separate article, which should be here soon!

// posted by vikaskurup @ 11:23 AM 0 Comments

1. First off, install the ia32-libs package if it's not already installed.
   
   Code:

   sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

   The ia32-libs package must be >= 2.2ubuntu18.
   
   
2. Download the Avast debian package here and save it to your desktop. The instructions below assume that the avast package can be found on your desktop so it's important that you choose your desktop as the download location.
3. After it's downloaded change to your desktop folder.
   
   Code:

   cd /home/YourUserName/Desktop

4. You need to make sure that all of the required libraries can be found in your /usr/lib32 folder. To help simplify this task I've created a libs package for avast and attached it to this post. Simply download the attachment and then type the following:
   
   Code:

   sudo dpkg --force-architecture -i ia32-avast-libs.deb

5. After the Avast package is installed make sure that all of the required libraries are installed. Type the following:
   
   Code:

   ldd /usr/lib/avast4workstation/bin/avastgui
   ldd /usr/lib/avast4workstation/bin/avast

6. Scroll through both lists and make sure that none of them say 'Not found'. As long as you didn't find any libraries listed as 'not found' then you should now be able to run Avast from your Applications menu.
7. and then put the serial key as shown in the 32bit post
   

// posted by vikaskurup @ 1:28 AM 0 Comments

First you need to download the .deb package from here

wget http://files.avast.com/files/linux/avast4workstation_1.0.6-2_i386.deb

Now you have avast4workstation_1.0.6-2_i386.deb package.Install .deb package using the following command

sudo dpkg -i avast4workstation_1.0.6-2_i386.deb

This will complete the installation now you need to get the registration key for this you need to fill the on-line form available here and they will send registration key to your mail address

Applications Menu Setup

or this you need to run a script from the following location

cd /usr/lib/avast4workstation/share/avast/desktop

sudo ./install-desktop-entries.sh install

This will complete the application menu setup.

If you want to access you need to go to Applications—>Accessories—>avast!Antivirus

First time it will prompt for license key enter your license key you have got in our previous steps

Avast Antivirus Interface

Avast Antivirus database is updating.If you want to update click on update database

You can select the virus scan here and click on start scan

Avast antivirus version details

// posted by vikaskurup @ 1:25 AM 0 Comments

It is one of the most platform-independent players available,

with versions for Linux, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X,

BeOS, BSD, Windows CE, and Solaris.

Install VLC Media player in Ubuntu

You need to make sure that you have a “universe” mirror in your /etc/apt/sources.list

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install vlc vlc-plugin-esd

This will complete the installation

If you want to open VLC You need to go to Applications—>Sound&Video—>VLC Media Player

Once it open you should see the following screen

VLC Media Player Version Details

VLC Media Player Skins 2 interface

VLC Media Player Skins

Install VLC Plugin for Mozilla Firefox

sudo apt-get install mozilla-plugin-vlc

// posted by vikaskurup @ 12:06 AM 0 Comments

Type the following command to install flash player:

$ sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree

Now flash player should be working. Visit youtube or any other site to view flash content.

Troubleshooting tip

Update: This issue only relevant to older Ubuntu Linux version such as 6.04.

Some people may find voice is not working with newly installed flash player. Type following commands to solve this problem
$ sudo apt-get install alsa-oss
$ gksudo gedit /etc/firefox/firefoxrc

Find line that read as FIREFOX_DSP and set to:
FIREFOX_DSP="aoss"

Save and close the file.

Close Firefox and restart it again.

// posted by vikaskurup @ 11:45 PM 0 Comments

Installing has to be done in an earlier wine version, 1.1.17
 (or perhaps 1.1.16).
The procedure is exactly like this test :
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=
version&iId=14318&iTestingId=39823.
The exceptions being that one more thing is needed for the install to work properly,
winetricks ie6 and that I used the 1.1.17 version.

Here follows the installation guide:

1. If you have used wine before, please start of with a clean .wine folder.
Or bottle you Photoshop by doing every action with a specific wineprefix.

2. Install Wine 1.1.17 from
 http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/archive/index.html

3. Download winetricks and install necessary libraries.
Also make sure you have a decent driver for your graphics card installed.

wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks
sh winetricks msxml6 gdiplus gecko vcrun2005 ie6
sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts

3. LANG=C before the following command like this:

LANG=C wine Setup.exe

4. To fix the text-layer bug, put atmlib.dll in
“~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system 32″.
You can download it from several places if you search it on google.

5. Install Wine 1.1.20 from
 http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/archive/index.html
(or your package manager), to fix the menu bar bug.

6. Try running.

You can delete
/home/[USER]/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/
Common Files/Adobe/Updater6/Adobe_Updater.exe
to stop adobe updater (or unselect it during installation way down in the unexpanded list)

// posted by vikaskurup @ 10:25 PM 0 Comments

Download the Mac4Lin themes and extract it to your Home folder. You should see a Mac4Lin_v1.0_RC1 folder that contains all the configuration files in your Home directory.

Preparing the installation path

Next, in your Home directory, press Ctrl + H to reveal all the hidden files. Check if any of the three folders .themes, .fonts, .emerald exist. If not, create three folders and name them .themes, .fonts, .emerald. Create another folder within .emerald folder and name it themes.

Installing the Mac4Lin themes

Open a terminal, type in:

cd Mac4Lin_v1.0_RC1
sh Mac4Lin_Install_v1.0_RC.sh

This will install the Gnome themes (window border and icons), change the wallpaper and the panel background.

During the installation process, the installer will ask you for root access in order to install certain components (refer to the image below). Type y to continue.

After the installation, your desktop should look something like this:

Installing the AWN dock

(The AWN dock may/may not work in all machine. If you find that it does not work after following the instructions below, you may want to try out Cairo dock that is less demanding on the machine.)

The AWN dock requires a compositing manager to work. If your system supports Compiz, it will be able to run AWN as well. if not, we have to install the X compositing manager.

Go to System -> Preferences -> Appearance, click on the Visual Effects tab. Click on the Extra radio button. If you see the following image, then your computer does not support Compiz. (If you don’t see the image below, proceed directly to install AWN.)

You have to install the alternative X composition manager

sudo apt-get install xcompmgr

Add it to your auto-start list. Go to System -> Preferences -> Session. Add the following:

Install AWN

The AWN dock is already included in the Intrepid repository, so you can easily install it by clicking this link. Alternatively, you can also type the following command in the terminal:

sudo apt-get install avant-window-navigator

Once the installation is done, go to Preferences -> AWN Manager. On the left pane, click on the Themes. On the right, click Add. Navigate to the Mac4Lin_v1.0_RC1 folder. Open up the AWN folder and select Mac4Lin_AWN_v1.0_RC.tar.gz. Click Open. The AWN theme should be installed now. Check the radio button beside the theme and click Apply. Click Close.

Before we launch the AWN, we need to remove the bottom panel so that there won’t be an overlap. At the bottom panel, right-click the mouse and select Delete This Panel. Activate AWN by going to Applications -> Accessories -> Avant Window Navigator. You should see the AWN loading up in the bottom of the screen. To add applications to the dock, click on the Applications at the top panel and navigate to the particular application you want to add. Drag the application icon to the dock. That’s it. You should see something like the image below:

To start AWN everytime you log in, go to System -> Preferences -> Sessions. Click Add. Fill up the following:

Click Add, follow by Close. AWN will now automatically load when you login to your computer.

Installing OSX font

Go to System -> Preferences -> Appearance. Click on the Fonts tab Change the following field to the same as the image below:

Make sure the Subpixel smoothing (LCDs) button is checked. Click Close.

Installing Global menu

There is a repository for Ubuntu Intrepid that you can add to the sources.list, but it is not the updated version (0.6) and it is buggy. Instead, we will download the latest version (0.7.1) from the code homepage. In the future when the repository is updated to the newer and more stable version, I will update this post again.

For 32-bit machine

Download gnome-globalmenu-0.7.1-1.fc10.i386.rpm to your Home folder from the Globalmenu Google code site.

Note that the file is of rpm format. We need to use alien to convert it to deb format.

In the terminal, type:

sudo apt-get install alien
sudo alien --scripts gnome-globalmenu-0.7.1-1.fc10.i386.rpm

This will create a gnome-globalmenu-0.7.1-1.fc10.i386.deb file in your Home folder. Double-click on the deb file to activate the installer. Click Install Package to install Globalmenu.

For 64-bit machine

Open your text-editor (Applications -> Accessories -> Text Editor).

Copy and paste the following:

# Uncomment to load the GTK module
export GTK_MODULES=globalmenu-gnome
# Uncomment to tell the GTK module to open a Gtk
# TreeView for all menus in the application you start.
# export GNOMENU_FUN=1
# Uncomment to disable global menu.
# export GNOMENU_DISABLED=1
# Uncomment to print a lot of debugging messages
# export GNOMENU_VERBOSE=1
# Uncomment to save the debugging messages to the given file.
# export GNOMENU_LOG_FILE=/tmp/gnomenu.log
# uncomment to disable the plugin for specific programs.
# export GTK_MENUBAR_NO_MAC="fast-user-switch-applet"

Save the file as .gnomerc in the Home folder.

In your terminal,

gksu gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

Add the following line to the end of the file. Save and close.

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/globalmenu-team/ubuntu intrepid main

Back in your terminal,

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gnome2-globalmenu

On the right of the top panel, remove the logout icon. Still on the right hand side of the top panel, right click and select ‘Add to panel‘. Scroll down the list and add ‘Search for files‘. This will add the spotlight icon to the panel.

On the left of the top panel, right click and select ‘Add to panel‘. Scroll down the list and add Main Menu and Global Menu Panel Applet.

The Globalmenu might not appear or work well after you have added it. Logout and login again and you should see the globalmenu working perfectly on the top panel.

Right click on the globalmenu and select Preferences. Check “Enable Global Menu” and unchecked “Icon”.

The globalmenu is compatible with most of the GTK application. However, some programs, such as Firefox will not work with it.

Creating Dashboard effect

We will use a combination of screenlets and Compiz widget plugin to achieve the dashboard effect.

If you have not installed Screenlets, click here to install.

If you have not installed Compiz Configuration Settings Manager, click here to install.

Alternatively, you can also type the following command in terminal to install:

sudo apt-get install screenlets compizconfig-settings-manager

Go to System->Preferences->CompizConfig Settings Manager. On the Left, click on Desktop. On the right, put a check beside ‘Widget layer’

Go to Applications –>Accessories->Screenlets. Activate the widgets that you want to display. Right click on the widget and select ‘Properties’. Go to Options tab and select ‘Treat as widget’. Do this for all the widgets that you have activated.

You can now see your dashboard in action by pressing F9.

Fixing up some small detail

Until now, your desktop should be very close to a Mac desktop, but there are still some small details such as the Gnome icon at the top panel, mouse cursor etc. Let’s fix them up now.

Replace the apple logo

1. Download the apple icon (Right-click and select “save link as”).

2. Go to Places –> Home Folder. Press Ctrl + H to reveal the hidden files.

3. Navigate to /.icons/Mac4Lin_Icons_v1.0_RC/scalable/places. Scroll down to find the images distributor-logo.png, gnome-main-menu.png, main-menu.png and start-here.png. Note that all of them are the same image. Rename them to distributor-logo.png.old, gnome-main-menu.png.old, main-menu.png.old and start-here.png.old respectively.

4. Now, with the apple icon that you have downloaded, make four copies and rename them to distributor-logo.png, gnome-main-menu.png, main-menu.png and start-here.png. Copy and paste all of them to the folder.

5. Logout and login again. The logo at the top panel should change to the apple icon now.

Changing mouse cursor

Go to System –> Preferences –> Appearance. Select Customize. Click on the Pointer tab. Select Mac4Lin_Cursors_v1.0_RC. Click Close.

Configuring usplash screen

Until now, you have done up the interior, it’s time to fix the exterior: usplash screen and grub screen.

Install startupmanager by clicking here or type the following command in the terminal:

sudo apt-get install startupmanager

Go to System -> Administration -> Startup-Manager. Click on the Appearance tab.

Press the Manage bootloader themes button. This will pop up a window allowing you to select the background image for the GRUB.

Click on the Add button and navigate to File System –> Home –> Username –> Mac4Lin_v1.0_RC1 –> GRUB. You should see three files. Refer to the below screenshots on how each file looks like. Pick the one that you like best.

Back to the main window, select the image from the drop down bar. Remember to check the box “Use background image for bootloader menu”.

There is a bug in Ubuntu Intrepid that prevent the user from changing the usplash screen. We have to do a workaround using splashy. Here’s the hack for it:

Remove the default usplash

sudo apt-get autoremove usplash

Download these two files to your desktop:

libsplashy1_0.3.10-1_i386.deb
splashy_0.3.10-1_i386.deb

Double-click the downloaded files to install.

Download the osx-splash splashy theme file to your Home folder.

In your terminal,

sudo splashy_config –i ~/osx-splash.tar.gz
sudo mv /etc/splashy/config.xml /etc/splashy/config.xml.old
sudo cp /etc/splashy/themes/osx-splash/config.xml /etc/splashy/config.xml

Now, we need to edit the GRUB file

gksu gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

Scroll down till you find the kernel entry. Append the term vga=792 to the end of the kernel line (see screenshot below). Save and close.

That’s it.

Complete Screenshots

Grub screen

Login screen

Intrepid Mac OSX desktop

Intrepid Mac OSX desktop with dashboard effect

Uninstallation

If you want to change the theme back to the original setting, here is what you need to do:

1. Remove the globalmenu from the top panel

2. Remove all the installed files:

sudo apt-get autoremove splashy libsplashy1 gnome-globalmenu

3. Restore the usplash theme and remove the vga=792 from the GRUB file.

sudo apt-get install usplash

4. Uninstall the Mac4Lin themes

cd Mac4Lin_v1.0_RC
sh Mac4Lin_Uninstall_v1.0_RC.sh

// posted by vikaskurup @ 10:13 PM 0 Comments