Try "One Laptop Per Child" in Ubuntu.....

Yes you read the title right, you can try the "One Laptop per child" operating system in Ubuntu. If your like me and you read Linux news a lot you probably hear of One laptop per child. Now I am interested in it but don't have the money or want to spend the moeny if I had it on that type of laptop.

But while lokoing into over the course of its development I was interested in its interface because its a bit different to what I would be used to while using a computer so I really wanted to try it out, so I did inside of Ubuntu:


Now its kind of an interesting Interface, I still don't totally understand it. But from what I figured out from fooling around with it shortly is those icons around the circle in the middle are like "minimized" application. Then you see this black bar around the outskirts of the screen, that will only appear if you move your mouse to the screen edges. Its this black bar that allows you to open other applications or to go back to this "home" screen if in another application.

So now your probably just wanting me to tell you how you can try this out yourself, so with out further delay just check out this blog post I found. It has very straightforward instructions on how to get this working, but as always if you have questions post em in the comments and I will see if I can help. And if I can't I bet one of the readers can, It seems my readers know more about Linux then myself...

KDE 4 preview

I have mostly only posted about eye candy for gnome, as it is what I normally use. But the KDE 4 things have been catching my eyes. A little while back I tried to get KDE 4 working but failed...Since then I have become a little more knowledgeable in Linux and have gotten the latest release of KDE 4 to work. Well mostly to work, I seem to be missing some icons.....So instead of me showing you my screen shots and videos, I found a nice one via youtube. I will eventually dazzle you with my cinematography once I get KDE 4 working perfectly. Until then here you go:

Autumn Leaves

Falling Autumn leaves plugin for compiz fusion:

Awn-Terminal Applet

This is a supper cool new applet which brings the terminal to the dock! I usually like to start off with a nice screen shot:


This is just a nice easy way to have your terminal on the dock. I don't really see any advantages of using it other then it looks cool. The forum post about this applet is here. Also you can find the download link via that forum post too. I wont link directly to the download link because it will probably change if updates come out.

Also just to note, you can't drag this tar into the applets to have awn-manager install it. You need to extract the download and cd into the directory and run:

./autogen.sh

make

sudo make install

Then you will have it installed and be able to add it to the dock via your awn-manager.

Awn Stacks Update

My last post speaks about how Awn stacks will get the blingness of the Mac stacks. Just wanted to let you all know you can now use it after you update your awn-extras bzr!!!!

Its quite fun!

Snaek Peek at Stacks for Awn

Stacks on Awn will get some more bling soon, as being discussed in this forum post(see pages 3+ of the post).

Also a video is posted here.

Feed the Hungry

I was just watching the news and saw a news special on this website called freerice, this website is used to help donate rice to poor countries. I figured I would post about it, and you can do with it what you would like.

Basically this is how it works, you go to the website, play a game that helps build your vocabulary. Every question you get right will donate 10 grains of rice to the hungry. AS of today they have donated this many grains rice: 2,098,280,280!!!!!

That is a lot, so go play the game and help some one get a meal.

Also if you noticed I have removed my adds and added a banner the links to this website just in case you loose the link.

Dark GTK theme issues

If you have ever tried a dark gtk theme you probably know the issues that can occur. They look really nice but then in some programs they just ruin everything like, Firefox and Open Office.

I found a nice dark theme which I enjoyed and almost fixed all the Firefox problems, I at least made it tolerable to use.

My big annoyance was with Open Office, the document was black and I typed with white text. I just couldn't adjust to this. Then I found a nice how to fix this problem post some where. All I had to do was Open, Open Office and go to tools>options>appearance and change document color to white.

This would seem easy but in Gutsy Open office has this funky bug where it liked to freeze with certain gtk themes, that bug can be read about here. THe bug has been reported and talked about bug for some odd reason Ubuntu still hasn't put the fix into there repos yet.....bummmer.

Anywho if you don't feel like waiting for Ubuntu and you don't feel like compiling a new Open Office from source with a patch applied, and you still want to use your black gtk theme then I have a simple solution.

For some reason Open Office likes the Human theme so switch back to it temporarily then open, Open Office and go to tools>options>appearance and change document color to white. Then go back and change your theme to your dark theme and now Open Office will have its white document:

First Look at Prism

So a little while ago I made my first webrunner app. Webrunner was a program used to bring web applications to the desktop. It was very confusing and not all that easy for the average user. Recently Webrunner has now become Prism. The initila code for Prism is being taken from webrunner. So I decide to use webrunner again and noticed they update the code a bit, and now the files are actually called Prism and its extremely easy to use.

You can grab the files for Linux here. Just download them and extract the, and you will have a directory called Prism. In that directory just run ./prism and you will get something like this(click image to see bigger):


And right from there its super easy to create your own prism application; just add in the Url of the web application choose some options and even have it create a desktop launcher. This is much much easier to use then the old webrunner.

I have just come across one problem. I used this to access or try and access my iscrybe calendar. But for some reason Prism inst using my Firefox add ons such as flash, because it says i need flash 8 or high to use iscrybe, yet in normal Firefox my iscrybe works fine. So if you happen to figure out how to get flash working in this let me know in the comments, thanks!

Finally A Fun Desktop

If you have been reading you would know I had some java problems and also I couldn't get compiz fusion to work on gutsy. Well after a lot of help last night, I still couldn't get Compiz fusion to work, you can read what we tried here.

So after trying all that and having both those annoying problems (I really needed java to work) I had an unusual amount of free time today so I just re-installed Gutsy. And now java works, yay! Also before I tried getting Compiz Fusion to work on my own, I decided to ask for help so I didn't mess anything else up, and this help was nice and easy.

Feels good to have my 3d Desktop back

Kernel Panic....

So it didn't take long for my Gos installation to fail. It looked liek it wa sgoing well, I had a nice green screen with a nice looking Gos graphic, then it went black for a little bit, then a bunch of code came up and the last line says this:

Kernel Panic - not syncing: Fatal exception in interrupt

So thats a bummer.....

Installing Gos

So maybe last week it was I made this post about Gos. I said I would try to install it and tell you guys what I think. But then I never did it cause it was downloading extremely slow. So I was a bit bored and had some free time so I started the download again and downloaded then burned it to a disc and now I am trying to install it on an old IBM think pad. I will keep you posted and let you know how things go.

Explore your file system in space

Ever wanted a cool way to explore your file system? No not really me either, but you can do it, in a snazzy way. To navigate your filesystem in a space like environment check out xcruiser:



Its a nifty thing to try out if your bored, but I didn't really find much use for it. If you want to try it out you can download it from here.

Time Machien for linux

A while back I made a post about a project which claimed to be time machine for Linux. If you read that article you can quickly figure out I really didn't like the project. But now I think I found another one which seems to work. Its called, flyback and is a system back up utility. Its very easy to get running, the directions can be found here on there website. But if you need help just leave a comment and I will see what I can do. When you first start flyback this is what it will look like:


the preferences look like this and is where you can choose where you want to back up your files and choose which directories you want to back up:



Basically its the same idea as Time Machine for mac but without the looks. I would like to see what the developers over at compiz fusion could do with this, and snazz it up and make it actually work like Time Machine.

Java Frustrations!

I have not run into to many problems on Linux that have gotten me really annoyed for long periods of time but this java one is a pain. Recently I have been trying to upload pictures to facebook and fotki but both have java based uploaders which just don't load in Firefox for me in gutsy. What I can't figure out is Firefox says I have java installed when I go to about:plugins I get this(Click picture to see full size image):


Java applications just don't seem to be working at all, if you got any ideas let me know, I would very much appreciate the help.

Update to Awn weather applet

The Awn weather applet already is a nice great applet for awn that is extremely usefully. This latest applet makes it just look cooler, and more blingy. The new pop-out weather forcast looks like this:


To compare this new look to the old one see my previous post here. To grab the new version of this applet with the nice new look you can download it from here.

Google OS

Gos seems to be a new free operating system that tries to bring Google to the desktop. There website is not extremely detailed and I am not getting all the information I would like from it but maybe I will give it a try soon. But here is a pic of the desktop:


Will load it on my laptop and see what it can do. Stay tuned.