Adobe has released the new version 10 of Flash Player. What’s notable is that the Linux version is out at the same time as the Windows version. Thanks VERY much to Adobe for making this happen. Linux users missed out on version 8 of Flash player entirely and version 9 was about 6 months later for Linux than for Windows.
Category: Linux Software
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OpenOffice 3 officially released
Good linux format review of the new features and the overall feel (if you can get to it this morning. The main openoffice.org site is down at the moment. New features include a plugin for pdf import, support for the new Microsoft XML docx style file formats (read only). Writer can show several pages at once in the zoomed out view (with editor notes in the margin). Calc can support 4 times the number of columns and has new collaboration features.
Sounds as though it’s a good all around improvement. The speed is about the same as the last version in the 2.x series in their comparison.
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Converting rm to mp3
Recently I’ve run across a realmedia stream that I really want to convert to mp3 (mainly because my portable player can’t read rm files. I’ll talk about capturing rm streams in another post, but this one is going to talk about converting from rm to mp3.
For starters, it’s possible to use mencoder for this as follows:
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Hard drive testing utilities
Windows users know chkdsk, linux users know fsck… users of each MIGHT have heard of SMART. These are different ways of TESTING hard drives. Well, there’s also a utility called TestDisk that looks promising for recovering data… Here’s the clip from their site. “free data recovery software! It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting a Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy.” It runs under a variety of OS’s and recognizes several different disk formats.
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Home Asterisk system VOIP adding phone lines
I’m tempted many times to setup an asterisk system at the house – and use VOIP for additional lines. Here’s an article on asterisk the easy way., telaisp has good deals on residential voip service.
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X-Plane and linux
I’ve mentioned X-Plane before – it’s a flight simulator that strives to be as accurate flight modeling -wise as possible. Realism is one of their goals and it’s also unique in that it’s available for Mac/Windows and Linux (version 8 that is). (There is flightgear also, but X-Plane has still felt like better competition for Microsoft’s Flight Simulator line.) Anyway… Version 8 had linux support. Version 9 has beta’s out now for Windows and Mac, but there are rumors in the forums that version 9 may not see linux support. (Apparently the person in charge of the linux port has been hired by Google and was working on the linux port in his free time gratis…) I hope we’ll see a version 9 of X-Plane for linux. I wish I could lend help, but bash scripting is pretty much the zenith of my coding skills. (BTW – version 9 LOOKS nice from the screenshots I’ve seen. Here come a few more x-plane related thoughts….
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Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon coming
The release date for the 7.10 Ubuntu release is coming soon. I’ve installed a beta into a virtual machine to see what’s what and so far haven’t had much time to play around. I seem to recall the localization question being new in the installer, but then it’s been a while since I used the ubiquity installer (used the alternative install to setup software raid based systems.) But… other than that I haven’t poked around with it much. However, I have read that the 8.04 (April 2008) release will be codenamed Hardy Heron and will be a long term service (LTS) version. I’m MORE interested in that given that I have one server running the previous LTS release 6.06 dapper drake. I’ll be interested in upgrading it to a newer LTS EVENTUALLY, but I don’t know if I’ll jump for the upcoming April release or wait… but I did find some promising instructions for upgrading to Fiesty (7.04). It’s good to see that kind of detailed how-to as opposed to just an upgrade option on the cd so you can do it from within the OS.
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Offline wikipedia revisited – fast offline wikipedia reader
I’ve mentioned offline wikipedia access before mainly because for all it’s flaws, wikipedia is probably the single largest, most comprehensive and best information resource out there. There may be other encyclopedias that are more accurate, but require subscription access… anyway for all the warts it’s a great resource. To many people though it comes as a great shock that we’re not plugged into the internet all the time.. (so many people say “why offline, that’s what makes wikipedia so good is that it’s current and if it’s not current it’s worthless.” When I was growing up we had an encyclopedia set from 1965, I grow up through the 70’s and 80’s and it was still VERY useful and there was very good information, now it may not have been “up to date” in many areas, but it was still informative and was right on a GREAT many things. I think if I manage to download wikipedia once a year I’ll get by on the “currency” of the information. Anyway… the main point is that many times internet access is 1)not reliable 2)not practical 3)not there….. For instance I do have wireless for the laptop, but don’t always hook up to wireless networks there are places here and there “bubbles” of access around town, but many of the places I go there just isn’t wireless internet available. Now I guess if I wanted to pay verizon another $60 a month that would increase I would have MORE pervasive access, but frankly…..
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Graphviz and dot
I’ve been puzzled a bit by the graphing output of gramps – it leaves me with a file with a .dot extension that I didn’t know quite what to do with. It opened in text editors as just markup, no image viewers I used seemed to like it, so I researched graphviz (as that is what is used to make the dot file…) and found that there are ways to get an image out of a dot file… (the easiest is a command-line $dot -Tsvg strangedotfile.dot>strangedotfile.svg ) which should give you a scalable vector image with the same information as the .dot output (of course you can use -Tpng to specify png as well.) (BTW, the default settings with gramps give you a single page maximum so things may be VERY scrunched to fit in.)