blog.ashkool.com

In Jaunty, one of the new features of GNOME desktop is the smooth fading effect when changing the background wallpapers. It’s a nice feature, but I have a small panel applet Webilder, which changes the wallpaper randomly at equal intervals of time. I’ve kept the time to be 1 Minute, and there are some high resolution wallpapers in my collection.

My integrated graphics (Intel chipset) wasn’t able to handle that kind of animation and every minute when the wallpaper changes, the system becomes slow and sluggish. After googling for disabling this particular fading effect, I wasn’t able to find the exact solution, but a work around: Disabling the GTK Animations.

Create a file .gtkrc-2.0 in the home directory, and add

gtk-enable-animations = 0

to that file. Logout/Restart, and all the GTK Animations are disabled, including the fading effect. I don’t know at this point of time what are the other animations that are disabled, but right now, the system is much better in responsiveness than before!

The default document viewer in Ubuntu, eVince, is a nice application with fast loading times. It’s pdf rendering is pretty good too, and supports Full Screen as well as automatic scrolling. But eVince is not all that steady with all types of pdf documents. For the documents involving high resolution graphics, Images, forms etc, eVince tends to become sluggish and some times taking ages to load the document. For documents like these, we need to use an alternate pdf reader, and that’s where FoxitReader comes to play.

FoxitReader is a famous pdf viewer, most popular with Windows users. But it also has a linux native version (Not a ported version using Wine or something else), which is as fast as it’s windows version and contains all the basic features. The download page has links to .bz2, .deb and .rpm packages.

Go to here, and click on the “More Download” link in the Learn more column of the linux download table, and you can see the links for downloading the packages.

It’s all over the news! Google released an official developer build of it’s browser, Google Chrome for Linux. Pre-compiled .deb packages are available for download from here.

Even though Google cries foul about the instability of the package and says “Don’t Download Them”, I’ve been running chrome from past one hour without any glitches. The dev version lags many features including flash support, but it’s working great with normal sites. I’m able to use the google apps like GMail, GCal, GReader and other sites like Twitter, Orkut etc.

It’s a good thing Google isn’t porting the browser to linux… They are taking time and rebuilding the Chrome browser for linux. This helps in living up to the spirit of Chrome browser: Faster, Safer and Easier. If the application has been ported, it would’ve badly effected the speed as well as safety. Hope we would get an alpha version soon…

Google came out with a new search tool called Google Squared. It “helps you quickly build a collection of facts from the Web for any topic you specify”, says the website.

This app is really cool and is innovative. From the website:

“For example, say you’re curious about which roller coasters are thefastest, tallest, and longest in the world. Until now, you would havehad to comb through dozens of webpages to compile the informationyou’re looking for. With Google Squared, all you have to do is type [
roller coasters ] into the search box to see an automatically generated table of roller coasters and their attributes.”

The home page is of Google brand (White background, No heavy graphics) very similar to the Google Search homepage, except for the suggestions of the latest/popular searches performed.

As you can see the ‘x’ marks on the columns already being displayed, clicking on them removes unwanted columns from your search results, giving you screen space to add more relevant columns. And more over, it improvises.. “Google Squared can learn from edits and corrections you make to your Square to gradually improve its quality for all users”.

And that’s just not the end of it.. You can save your sqaures, as well as you can share them with your friends… That’s really a nice feature! For example, Let’s say someone asks you suggestion for a Digital Camera, you sqaure the results, edit them according to your view points and send them the square for their pick. Nice!

And it crowdsources! You can participate in building it. If the app isn’t able to sqare about something, It will ask your help to build a square about the thing so that it can be of help to others. See the screenshot below:

The app is pretty basic and is in it’s infancy, making mistakes…

But hey, it’s capable of learning…

So, how’s google doing this? From TechCrunch,

“Google is looking for data structures on the web that imply facts, and then grabbing it for Squared results. It takes an incredible amount of compute power to create one of those squares”

More about this way of presenting date, From TechCrunch:

“One of the next frontiers of search is taking all of the unstructured data spread helter-skelter across the Web and treat it like it is sitting in a nice, structured database. It is easier to get answers out of a database where everything is neatly labeled, stamped, and categorized.”

This is a new way of organizing information, and Google is open for thoughts and suggestions from public. Send them to labs+squared@google.com.

With the latest version of Virtual Box comes a surprise, an option to install WineD3D, which enables the user to replace the Direct3D in the virtual installation of Windows. WineD3D is supposed to increase/improve your graphics acceleration and 3D rendering of the virtual system.

If you are on Ubuntu Jaunty, the Virtual Box installation from Add/Remove programs doesn’t include WinD3D and VBOXGuestAdditions by default. You can follow my previous post on installing VBoxGuestAdditions if you’re looking for that. To install WineD3D,

Go to http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases-noredirect/wined3d/latest/ and download the ISO file.

Go to /usr/share/virtualbox and copy the downloaded file wined3d.iso into this directory.

Give read permission to the wined3d.iso file for users other than root.

Boot your virtual machine into safe mode (Press F8 during startup)

Now upon clicking “Install WineD3D” from Devices menu will begin the installation of WineD3D.

To further enhance the 3D acceleration, Go to the Settings of your virtual machine, Go to General and in the Basic tab, Check the “Enable 3D Accelaration” option. That’s it, you’re all set. Enjoy superior 3D rendering!

In Ubuntu Intrepid, Atheros wifi chip on my Compaq C770TU (C700 Series) didn’t work out of the box. I had to use the ndiswrapper, a wrapper for windows drivers. When I upgraded to Jaunty and saw that the wi-fi is working out of the box, Boy, I was so glad.

Today, I suspended my laptop for the first time after installing Jaunty. To my surprise, after the resume, my wi-fi stopped working. It cannot detect the wireless networks. The output of lspci still lists Atheors, indicating that the card is still being recognized by Ubuntu. I disabled and reenabled wireless, disabled and reenabled networking from the Network Manager, restarted the system a number of times but to no avail.

So I try to get help from my old friend Google, and all it gives me is a number of links where people are complaining about disabled wireless, but with no proper resolved posts. I followed most of them in vain (Loaded ndiswrapper, Installed linux-backport-modules-jaunty, Loaded MadWiFi etc) but still no result. During this process, I’ve stumbled upon a post in Ubuntu forums related to Intrepid and is about the Wi-Fi button not turning to blue when in operation.

In that post, I’ve read that in Ubuntu, we have to keep the wi-fi hotkey pressed for 5 seconds for Ubuntu to recognize the on/off routine. I wasn’t used to this because in Windows, the change was instantaneous. And when I switched to linux, I never had the need to use the Wireless button. So, I pressed the button for 5 seconds, and still no response. Another 5 seconds passed after I released the button, and my network applet showed the swirling animation of connecting to a wireless network and Voila! My wireless is working again!

I’ve spent almost two hours searching for a clear answer, and now that I found out, I can’t help feeling stupid for all those hours wasted for such a simple answer. Posting this experience here so that it may be of some help to someone!

@Ubuntu team - till Intrepid, after a resume the wi-fi worked seamlessly without any action from me. It’s great, Why did you change it to disabling the wi-fi after resume? I can’t guess what could be your reason.

To change the file permissions, find the line
# Umask 022 is a good standard umask to prevent new dirs and files
# from being group and world writable.
Umask                022

Umask is the method used by proftpd, which is like an opposite to chmod. CHMOD 777 adds all permissions to files and directories (adds read, write capabilities) where as UMASK 777 removes all permissions from the files and directories. So, if you want the uploaded/created files to be accessed by everyone else, you have to use umask 000. More info about these permissions at: link

Apart from the “System>Preferences>Keyboard Shortcuts”, there is no other tool with which we can edit the default keyboard shortcuts in GNOME applications like Nautilus. If the options covered under Keyboard Shortcuts are not enough for you and you’re looking for editing shortcuts in the menus, Here’s the trick:

Right click on the desktop and select “Change desktop background”, select the “Interface” tab and check the “Editable shortcut keys”.

Now go to nautilus and highlight the option you want in the menu with your mouse pointer. At this point, hitting <Delete> will delete the existing shortcut assigned, hitting the key combination you want will be assigned as the new shortcut.

Be sure to uncheck the “Editable shortcut keys” after you’ve finished your customization since there is no way of restoring default keyboard shortcuts. If you accidentally delete a keybinding, you won’t be able to get it back automatically.. You’ll have to assign manually.

These customizations are saved in the home directory, so different users can have different setups of keyboard shortcuts.