My first Webrunner app! Iscrybe

I love internet applications which is why you sometimes get website reviews on this Linux blog. So naturally I have been following the webrunner project. This is a project to open up internet applications as separate programs. So I tried my first shot of making a webrunner application for Iscrybe my favorite online calendar so I could easily and quickly launch it from my Awn bar.

So I am very happy to announce I did it(click picture to see larger):




Anywho if you want to grab my webrunner app to use iscrybe in webrunner, download it here. Once downloaded to get it on my Awn bar I first put the iscrybe.webapp into my home directory. Then created a new launcher called "Iscrybe". The command to use to launch the webrunner iscrybe app is:

webrunner -webapp iscrybe.webapp

Once the launcher was created I dragged it onto awn and yes, I have a nice desktop calendar now! Just a note you need to have webrunner installed to use my webapp obviously.

Cairo-Dock

Another cool dock, cairo-dock. I used it when it first came out and someone on the awn forum brought it up and reminded me about it, and although it still inst fully great it is much better and easier to use then it used to be when it first came out. It has made a ton of progress.

So here is a little video I found to show it off:



I think the video speaks for itself. You can grabs a deb to install it our the source from here.

One problem with mine is it inst in English.... did I do something wrong...

Streamy Re-done

If you have been following streamy news on my website, I just want to let you all know they just recently went through a major re haul, and since I do not like re-inventing the wheel I found a great write up on all the new features at stream which you can read here.

Wesnoth

Wesnoth is a pretty slick game for Linux. I have tried it on and off and have been slowly becoming addicted to it. Anywho I decided to install it on my gutsy install and noticed for the first time there was online play! This could have been available for awhile but I just noticed it and tried it out. The online play was super fun, and team battles were great fun! Just a note, I won my first online Wesnoth game :-) It was 2 v 2 and my teammate was just knocked out, but I hung in and defeated my two enemies! Anyway I was excited about winning my first online game. If you haven't tried Wesnoth give it ago, its very fun, and the online team battles are great.

Just a note if you download and try and play online and you get an error when someone starts the online game, its because you are playing with players who are probably running the unstable version of Wesnoth and have certain characters you game doesn't. So to be able to play in any online game, I recommend compiling the latest source.

The Wesnoth website can be found here.

Lastly watch the Wesnoth trailer if you wish:

Awn youtube applet

Don't actually Hve time to try it myself but here is a video of an Awn youtube applet:



The forum post about this applet is here.

Plasma

If you have been reading recently you would know that I have been on an adventure to try KDE 4. Well KDE 4 beta 3 came out the other day and I decided to try again. This time I actually got Plasma to start!!

Unfortunately it wasn't that exciting totally yet. It seems like it will be but a lot of the plasmoids didn't work or weren't found....I forget the error.

I will try and get some screen shot sup next time I try it out, but it looked pretty slick what I had going.

KDE 4 beta trial update

So in my last post I stated I was goign to try out the KDE 4 beta after installing a kde session. Well so far it hasnt been going so well, and I am having troubles....Anywho word on the net has it that kde 4 beta 3 is to come out this week so I may wait a few days and try that one out.

Will keep you posted.

KDE 4 trial

So I have always been a Gnoem user, I have tried KDE but could never stick with it. I just felt strange and akward to me, which is probably just because my first linux desktop was Gnome, and I am just used to it. AS most of my readers probbaly know, I love eye candy on the desktop, so naturally I have been keeping my eye KDE 4 which looks amazing!

So I have installed a KDE desktop enviroment and am startign to try and get KDE 4 beta 2 working, and will let you all know how things go as thigns happen so stay tuned!

Weather radar on weather applet

The cool weather applet I posted about before now has a cool radar feature. If you right click on the applet the context menu come up and you can select, "view weather map":



Once you get it open it looks like this:




To downnload the new version you can grab it from here.

Automatic Codes detection!

This is another super cool feature in Ubuntu Gutsy that just happened to occur today. I was trying to play a video file I had just downloaded and this message came up(click the picture to make it larger):


It asks if I want it to find the right codec so I could watch the movie! No more trying to Google around if you can't play certain media on your linux computer, because Gutsy does the looking for you and will install it easily for you.

How do you get your Ubuntu?

I am sure most people who run Linux downloaded there .iso and burned it to a cd. Then I bet there are a few of you who maybe bought a cd or got a free cd mailed to your house. Well what if you saw one of these in your local mall:
I would probably say something like, "what the hell is that?" Well if thats what your asking, its called the freedom toaster....according to its website, its a:

Freedom Toasters are conveniently located, self-contained, computer-based, 'Bring 'n Burn' facilities.

Sounds to me like you bring em a disc and they will speed burn things for you....sounds kind of interesting. Apparently its a new way of thinking By Shuttleworth to distribute Ubuntu. I was referred to that website for the freedom toaster by this article.

New Awn CLock and Date Applet

Another clock applet that displays the current time and date. This applet is extremely simple, no pop outs or anything but it does what its supposed to do well. It simply displays the time and date in a nice way on your awn dock. Currently you can change the font of the text and text color and shadow color changing are coming soon.


How bout we zoom in there on this applet:



Now for a link to download I do not want to link to the direct download because it is contently changing as the creator updates his code. So here is a link to the forum post it is being discussed, the download link is in the first post.

To install just open up your awn manager and go to applets and drag this downloaded file into the right column then place it on your dock.

Awn 0.2 Official release

Awn has officially released a stable version 0.2!!!! If you have been reading my blog for news on Awn I will recommend njpatels blog, because he is the great man who started awn, so go read what he has to say about this release.

I can't wait to see where Awn will be going next, and Neil said he may be spending some time on Arena which I would be looking forward to see!

Almost have desktop effects workign in Gutsy...

So I have been tryign to get them to work, and I have done kind of a work around, but it seems to allow me to turn on compiz fusion. But I am not getting any window boarders or animations for that matter, its like only composite is working. Heres my output while using the fusion-icon to start it:

mike@mike-desktop:~$ fusion-icon
* Detected Session: gnome
* Searching for installed applications...
Backend : ini
Integration : true
Profile : default
Adding plugin decoration (decoration)
Initializing decoration options...done
* NVIDIA on Xorg detected, exporting: __GL_YIELD=NOTHING
* Using the GTK Interface
* Starting Compiz
... executing: compiz --replace --sm-disable --ignore-desktop-hints ccp --loose-binding --indirect-rendering
compiz (core) - Error: Couldn't load plugin 'ccp'

Gutsy bug reporting

So I could have sworn this was a feature in edgy but it never happened when something crashed. But I was happing something in Firefox and it crashed!!! But anywho my disappointment quickly vanished when I saw something come up about reporting the crash to Ubuntu. Gutsy automatically gathered all the right log files that would help people figure out why Firefox crashed for me, then I click like report and it automatically uploaded everything onto launchpad!

This will be great in getting more bugs and more information on the bugs onto launchpad for people to fix. This I believe will help get bugs fixed faster. Never have I been happy about something crashing....

Latest trial on desktop effects in gutsy

If you have been reading my previous posts on my new gutsy install I can not get the desktop effects to work that come with gutsy.

My latest try as suggested in the Ubuntu forums was to install nvidia legacy driver for my graphics card. So I installed it, then restarted my computer and x crashed and I couldn't get in. So I used nano and edited my /etc/X11/xorg.conf and changed the driver to "nv" then restarted and computer started smoothly.

I then tried again to enable desktop effects but nope, it asked me to enable the nvidia driver and when I do it removed the legacy driver and installed the regular nvidia driver.

So now I am back to where I was and still no desktop effects on gutsy....

About the readers, You guys!

So this blog was started just for fun, and has gained a little more attention then I thought. I am a bit of a statistics junkie so I figured I would share some statistics with you guys about all of you who read this blog. I will display some top 3 list of user statistics, with number 1 on each list being the highest.

Where You all Live:

1. United States
   
2. United Kingdom
3. Canada

Top 3 states in the United States:

1. California
2. New York
3. Texas

Browsers:

1. Firefox
2. Opera
3. Internet Explorer

Searches that bring you all to my blog:

1. awn applets
2. compiz fusion plugins
3. ubuntu screensaver
   

Best Referring websites:

1. Google
2. tuxmachines.org
3. Direct visit/bookmarks
   

Thats it for now, hope you enjoyed. Hopefully I will have some more nice Linux post for you all tomorrow, just thought this could be a fun little post.

Just a little Reminder......

New Main Menu Applet

How has a main menu applet which was pretty cool. I posted about an update the main applet had here. But now tehkain from the awn forums has created another main menu applet which works a little bit differently. Personally I find this approach better for me. You can read more about the applet in this post from the forum, but I got a little video of it below, which is so much cooler then screen shots.



If your looking to download it, you can grab it from here.

To install it just open up your awn-manager and go to the applets section, and if you didn't already know it you can drag applets into the right column of applets and it installs them, then just add it to your bar!

Awn Weather Applet

This is one of the more useful awn applets out there. It has been being developed fairly quickly for the past few days, and now works very well. While on the dock it displays the current weather conditions and temperatures, and then once clicked it displays a pop out with the 5-day weather forecast for your area that you choose in its preferences.

Awn 0.2 Release soon

Neil over at the Awn forums has made a post saying Awn will officially release version 0.2 soon. Here is an excerpt from his post:

Things seems to be going well/better after the recent merges of the main and effects branch. There don't seem to be any regressions/mem leaks and basically 'it's all good'! So, thats means that we should really make a release, and I have set the date for that as this Saturday morning/afternoon (GMT).

To read the whole post and or to participate in the post read here.