Nathive 0.810

Nathive is a new image editor for Linux, announced today. From their site:

Nathive is a free software image editor, similar to Adobe Photoshop, Corel Photo-Paint or The GIMP, but focusing on usability, logic and provide a smooth learning curve for everyone. The project run over gnome desktop and everyone can colaborate in it with code, translations or ideas.

Here are some screenshots:

I’m impressed that they’ve made an image editor that’s both powerful and usable. Personally, I’d be just as impressed with a version of gpaint with an “Undo” button. 😛

You can check it out at http://www.nathive.org/; however, the download links aren’t up yet. Keep an eye out for it though; it looks promising!

Howto: really get more than one sound playing at once

This hasn’t worked for me since 2006!

This is what I did:

1) Open up a terminal and enter in the following:

gedit ~/.asoundrc

2) Copy and paste the following into the file:

pcm.dsp0 {
type plug
slave.pcm “dmix”
}
ctl.mixer0 {
type hw
card 0
}

Save and exit.

2) Restart the sound server:

sudo /etc/init.d/alsa-utils restart

Now I can play sound in Amarok and Audacity at the same time. Not that I ever need to…but I’m tired of opening Audacity while Amarok closes and not being able to play any sound!

To all Openbox users

I’m currently setting up a PPA for the most commonly used packages for Openbox users. It’s going to have the latest versions of Openbox, Nitrogen, and if I can get it to compile, sakura.

The PPA is here:

https://launchpad.net/~k-belding/+archive

Got any suggestions? Let me know! 🙂

Synaptic 0.62 for Hardy

The main new feature in this version is “Quick Search”, a search bar that allows you to start searching right away, rather than clicking the Search button and waiting.

Here’s a screenshot:

I’ve built it for 8.04 Hardy Heron here:

http://www.mediafire.com/?0fz0j4awhxl

You may need to install apt-xapian-index for it to work:

sudo apt-get install apt-xapian-index

Enjoy!

Katie Couric Diggs the Conventions

http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Katie_Couric_Diggs_the_Conventions

So Katie Couric is asking Digg to provide questions to ask Obama and McCain at the Democratic and Republican conventions. If only she knew what she was getting herself into! Let’s hope they can push biases aside and ask the questions the people really want to hear. There are some very good ones!

Even though I’m not American, I still asked one:

To both:

what is your stand on bringing the average Internet connection in America up to par with those of Japan and parts of Europe? Are there plans to use the $200 billion put in in 2006 to bring the US’ connection up to standards? Or will education and technological advances be pushed aside once more?

Ich bein ein German!

Dear Google, I’m not German. I appreciate the thought though. Really.

My Openbox menu

Since I’ve lost this once before, I decided to post it here: this is my Openbox menu, which is essentially the same as my Gnome menu, but with a few changes here and there. Very useful. I’ve attached it here:

http://www.mediafire.com/?5mjgypbn9zl

Place it under ~/.config/openbox/. Note that doing so will overwrite your current menu!

Another month, another desktop

Wallpaper is a picture I took of my T-shirt, tweaked in the Gimp. Details in the second screenshot.

The harmful command

Since I was bored, and curiosity killed me, I decided to take a hand at setting up my own server. To do it I used the guide at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ApacheMySQLPHP. To install, the guide specified to run:

sudo tasksel install lamp-server

After this, however, I remembered that I had such a bad upload connection that any hit would create a noticeable lag on my Internet. Not being familiar with tasksel, I assumed it worked in the same vein as apt-get and that running the opposite would remove lamp-server and nothing more. It made sense, right?

How wrong I was.

It wasn’t before long until I caught it removing some of my most used programs, without my consent! So far, this is what I’ve found it remove:

audacity gnome-games exfalso update-notifier ubuntu-tweak brasero bluefish tomboy gnome-utils thunar conky hal network-manager policykit

Most of these programs aren’t a crucial loss. But some, like network-manager, disabled my Internet connection! Luckily, I had a plan: I would download these programs from the Windows laptop, save them on my flash drive and install them from there. Or so I thought. Without hal, my flash drive wasn’t detected on the computer. (I also wasn’t able to burn the contents of the flash drive onto a CD, since the other computers don’t have a CD burner. That and I don’t think the CD would’ve been detected without hal either.)

Eventually, I decided to boot from a Live CD (TinyMe, since I couldn’t find Ubuntu), plug in the flash drive, copy the contents onto my hard drive, reboot, and install them from there. Had I not thought of that, I may have been willing to reinstall, and lose over 20GB of *cough*legal*cough* music (with no external hard drive at the moment to back it up).

Anyway, long story short: don’t take commands for granted!!

Script to get the aMSN SVN on Ubuntu

With the release of 0.97.2, everyone is rushing to find a .deb for Ubuntu. I’d just like to direct everyone to this script: with it, you can get a perfect working version of the SVN version of aMSN everytime. (note: SVN is newer than 0.97.2!)

Try it out here:

http://www.amsn-project.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3242

It also comes with Farsight support. It’s a good deal!