Silicon Empire - An Excellent Qt Written Optical Disk Burner for GNU/Linux!

When it comes to optical disk burning in GNU/Linux there are a lot of applications which are written using various GUI toolkits such as GTK+, Qt, etc. The one that comes with the classic Gnome desktop these days is Brasero... it's very useful and easy to use but lacks that professional touch.

For the KDE/Qt desktop we have the powerful k3b, it's full of features and is one of the best without a doubt, but again not the best GUI and can be a bit confusing sometimes as well.

Then I came upon another excellent cross-platform optical burner written in Qt called "Silicon Empire". It's still in its early stage and even though they have Ubuntu/Arch Linux and Fedora, etc in their download page, but at this moment only Ubuntu packages are available.

But the rest assured, I'm already impressed by it!. The reason for me is pretty simple. Silicon Empire has an elegant GUI to the left you'll have the opportunity to choose the type of work that you need it to do such as burning data CD/DVD, image viewer, Video, etc and when you click on the left icons in the middle section it'll display all the options/features.

And to the right, whenever you click on a SE buttons (say eraser), it'll give you a brief description of that. So basically, in my humble opinion, I think the GUI is pretty damn good, this may sound a bit weired, but most of the time, you can tell a lot about the intentions/the "aimed audience" of the developers just by having a look at the application itself.

On the other hand, again, like almost all the other burning applications, Silicon Empire is a GUI front-end which uses various command-line utilities such as Cdrecord, etc. But who likes command-line tools :P.

Main features...

*. Burn CD/DVD and Blue-Ray disks.

*. Optical disk eraser (you can choose different methods such as Force, Lead-Out, automatic disk eject after burning, etc). But the eraser only erases DVD (not sure about Blue-Rays, haven't even seen one for real :/) and does not support CD-rw erasing, which is my only complain at the moment. 

Update:- I can't write (already blanked) CD-rw either and I don't have a blank CD.. so not sure about writing CDs either..., has to be a bug.


*. Photo viewer, although it's at its early stage and you can't load entire folders however you can do so by dragging the desired folder or the files nonetheless (wait!, maybe that's how they've designed it, silly me :P).

*. Image mounter/manager (two applications actually) - This is actually one of the best features of Silicon Empire. If you have a lot of disk images (in various formats) to deal with usually (say that you're a GNU/Linux vendor who usually have to write a lot of CD/DVD images) then you'll love the built in Disk-image-manager.

It's simple but very useful and yet feels like something that other applications such as Brasero for instance seems to think are not "important".

*. Audio player - It uses the well known Minitunes player and based on the Phonon framework and once loaded with audios, it can automatically search for online services such as last.fm to find missing album information and cover arts, etc. It won't play any audios unless you install some of the dependencies (at least in my case)... more later.

*. Video - Well there ain't any video players nor DVD-Video project compiling available at the moment, but I'm pretty sure they'll implement it in the future.

SE also has a preference page by using that you can change a lot of other related options such as - switch between Qt/GTK+ theme engines, change icon themes (although did not work in my Laptop), change background/link/titles... colors, disable/enable search bar, enable Qt-OpenGl rendering, file association, change temporary file path, etc.

It also comes with an excellent little tool which gives you the ability to "kill" the running SE process. You can launch by clicking on the upper right corner and from the menu choose "Applications" which should "reveal" you about the currently running SE related processes. 

How to install Silicon Empire in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal?

Simple. First get the desired package from here-32/bit and here/64bit. Simply double click on it and it'll take you to the Ubuntu software center. Just click on the "install" button and follow the on-screen instructions.

To enable audio playback in Minitunes...

I'm assuming that you've already installed the proprietary codec pack in Ubuntu 11.04. If so, all we gotta do is just install the Phonon (don't need if you use Kubuntu 11.04) and the Gstreamer-phonon backend. To do that, open the Linux Terminal and enter the below command.

sudo apt-get install phonon

That should do it. Oh one more thing, early in the day I was browsing Webupd8... and saw Andrew's post about this app and got "inspired" by it :D.

Read More

Install MP3Splt in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal ( A MP3/Ogg File Splitter for GNU/Linux)

Splitting MP3 or Ogg files can be pretty useful in many occasions. For instance, say that you've found a single track which contains a lot of songs and you just wanted to "extract" a single song from whole audio file, well your only hope is to split that audio file, but how can you do it in GNU/Linux?.

Simple. If you use Ubuntu (I'm using 11.04 for this example) there are few tools that you can use to do that task. The best of the best so far is Audacity, I think. But Audacity is actually more than that and can be a bit hard to use, sometimes.

If you want a more dedicated application with a simple GUI... then MP3Splt is a pretty cool utility. But the default project was actually a command-line one (don't run away now :P) but luckily there is a GTK+ toolkit written GUI for that called MP3Splt-gtk.

Main features...

*. Not the most user friendly actually but pretty decent GUI.

*. Has a built in audio player which can be used several other frameworks/engines such as Gsteramer, etc.

*. Insert "gaps" or sound levels when splitting audio files.

*. Or you can use the "silent" mode which automatically adjusts the split points.

*. Tag-Editing and automatic inserting the source meta-data support.

*. MP3 and Ogg Vorbis supported.

*. Change output directory.

*. Queue support. 

*. CDDB data fetching from online sources.

*. You can either use your mouse or directly enter audio durations to split.

If you use Ubuntu 11.04, 10.10 and 10.04 then you can install MP3Splt-gtk 0.5.6 (current version) by entering the below command in your Terminal.

sudo apt-get install mp3splt-gtk

Although the GUI is simple but it can be confusing (if you're the developer, then this is not a judgment, I just love the GTK front-end apart from all that. Thank you :D). It took my dull brain few minutes to figure it out.

Lets do it in easy three steps.

1. Load the app and then click on the "browse" button and add your mp3/ogg audio file to split.

2. Then play the file and when reached to your desired location (say the start of your song in the main track) you can click on the "Add" button on the "player" tab as shown in below screenshot.

3. Then let the song play and when it reaches the "desired end" again click on "Add" button and pause the playback.

Now you'll see two "marks" on the "player" tab. If you don't want to add any split gaps, etc then simply clicking on the "correction mark" at the top of the MP3Splt (have a look at the below screenshot). That's it!.

(By default it saves your split audio files in your Home directory). Enjoy!.

Read More

How To Install SysPeek System Monitor Indicator in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal?

SysPeek is another small utility (an "applet type") that runs within the notification area of your Ubuntu PC/Laptop and displays updated information about CPU/RAM, etc once you click on its small icon.

Although to be honest the application is at its early stage yet it's quite cool and somewhat useful :/. Like many others, it also has an indicator icon which changes its colors and "levels" according to your CPU usage.

I sometimes find this quite useful. Because unless you have a bit loud Laptop or quite familiar with your PC, it can be quite difficult to notice those buggy applications that consume unnecessary amounts of CPU usages (you know, you can guess these from the noise from your CPU Fan, sometimes).

In those cases, applications such as SysPeek can be very handy since you don't even have to launch or move your mouse over it... just have a quick look at its icon and you know whether you're in trouble or not :P.

Yo!, mayday mayday.... "oh man, not again! :)..."

Main features...

*. When you click on the icon it'll reveal a CPU usage meter at the top (below screenshot).

*. Memory usage/RAM.

*. Swap usage - Virtual memory.

*. Disk usage analyzer.

*. Network receive/sent data and you can even launch the Gnome's built in System Monitor through it... although I'm not entirely sure but SysPeek can be an applet that "extracts" those information from that System Monitor and displays in its own screen as well.

Anyhow, you can install SysPeek in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal by using the below commands.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:vicox/syspeek

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install  syspeek

Once install, press "Alt" + "F2" keys on your Keyboard and enter the below command into the box and it'll appear within your notification area, hopefully (just kidding, it works).

syspeek

Read More

How To Install VLC 1.1.10 in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal?

VLC or VideoLAN is one of the most popular cross-platform media players without a doubt. To be honest, personally I actually don't like it that much. It's written in Qt and comes with the ability to play almost all the audio/video codecs and even has an encoding capability as with MPlayer, still I don't find it that robust like most others.

But when it comes to ease of use and lots of built in features (unlike with the default MPlayer command-line version), well you gotta give some credit to the VLC developers nonetheless. Anyway few days ago they released another version which makes it now the 1.1.10.


Few main features...

*. Play huge list of audio/video codecs (including container formats) - mp3, aac, wma, wmv, flac, mp4, avi, mkv, h.264, xvid, divx... seriously it's BIG.

*. Add advanced audio and video filters using graphical tools.

*. Equalizer.

*. Playlist support. 

*. Change brightness/hue/...

*. Screen capture.

*. Stream video/audios.

*. Encode into different formats.

*. Subtitle font size, color, etc changing.

Although from the beginning VLC was written using the Qt toolkit and these never versions come with the Qt-4 and look pretty cool too :).

You can easily install VLC 1.1.10 in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal by using the below PPA, this might not work on other Ubuntu (10.10 or 10.04) versions. According to Unixmen team, this will also work in LinuxMint 11 as well.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:unixmen-com/vlc

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install vlc mozilla-plugin-vlc vlc-plugin-pulse

Read More

Install the Qt Written k3b CD Kreator in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal?

When it comes writing/compiling CD-DVDs in GNU/Linux I think most will agree to the fact that k3b, well... it just rocks!. I mean no disrespect intended for Gnome's CD/DVD writing utilities but with k3b there was an occasion that I was able to erase a DVD rw (back when I was using the awesome OpenSuse) that both MS Windows and Gnome failed to achieve.

k3b has come a long way since. And with the introductions of the version 2.0 it was released for the KDE4 which was obviously written using the Qt4 toolkit. To be honest with the older k3b with KDE3+ it was a bit of a hassle, you know a bit too much distractions but with the more simplified (still better than Gnome, in some aspects) KED4... k3b is also looks pretty darn good.

Main features...

*. Create Data/Audio and DVD (video).

*. Easy to use startup wizard.

*. Erase your CD/DVDs.

*. Change few advanced options (such as buffer-underrun, etc).

*. Rip Audio CDs (automatic CDDB information fetching from online sources and inserting, etc).

*. Create VCD/SVCD.

*. With k3b you can even encode DVDs into Xvid/Divx! (needs to have installed the encoders first).

*. Create Mixmode CDs.

*. Plug-in support, so we can easily add more features easily by installing the necessary plug-ins.

*. Copy CD in different ways such as - copy multi/single session cds, audio cds, CD cloning, etc.

You can easily install k3b in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal (should work in 10.10 and 10.04 as well) by entering the below command in your Terminal window.

sudo apt-get install k3b

That's it.

Read More

How to Install Thunderbird 5 (beta) in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal?

Apart from the Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird is the other widely used GNU e-mail client/application from the Mozilla foundation. Although you won't get Thunderbird as the default e-mail client in Ubuntu but you can install it nonetheless. If however you install it from the official repositories then you won't be getting the latest beta version (5) which was released few days ago and some of the new features as well.

Although you certainly won't be having a huge list of cool new features and if you don't like to use a beta channel then you should just stick to the stable release. But for some reason they've skipped the version "4" and jumped to the "5" instead and it does bring few improvements nonetheless.

*. New addon and extension manager API (when they release it officially they'll be changing the GUI as well).

*. Easily drag tabs from one window to the other.

*. Enhanced setting up wizard.

Image via: ubuntuforums

*. Attached file sizes are shown alongside them.

*. Better troubleshooting.

*. Load plugins within RSS Feeds.

*. And few other bug fixes and minor improvements.

You can install Thunderbird 5.0 beta in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, 10.10, 10.04 or in the upcoming Ubuntu 11.10 Alpha by entering the below command in your Terminal (we're using the Mozilla's official PPA channel).

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/thunderbird-next

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install thunderbird

That should do it. 

Read More

How To Install Adobe Flash Player 10.3 in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal?

Among many other inventions from Adobe, the propriety Flash player is one of the most widely used applications all over the world. Although for those of you who don't like propriety "philosophy" there is the official GNU reverse engineered Flash player called GNU-Gnash if you like.

But I think it's pretty much safe to say that under most conditions Adobe Flash will run better on your PC hardware since all the GPU (Graphic cards) manufactures make sure to optimize their VGA cards to run Flash under hardware level.

Anyhow, Adobe recently released the latest version of the Flash player which makes it now the version 10.3.181.22 and below are few of the new improvements/features.

*. Media measurement - By using the Adobe's API, now web developers can monitor their videos and their distributions (where and who watched them, etc) with ease... "with as little as two lines of code" according to Adobe's own words.

*. Acoustic Echo Cancellation - Say that you were having a "discussion" with your gaming buddy :) at the other end using Flash player, but his microphone was in such a bad condition that you couldn't bear the noises, etc then with the 10.3 version Flash player now has the ability to give you much smoother sound outputs by removing background noises, voice echoes, etc.

*. Clear the Flash Player Cache with ease - Yep, I always clear by browser cache. But clearing FP cache ain't that easy. But with this version now Flash player will let you clear its cache using almost all the major web browsers such as Firefox4, Google Chrome 11 and Internet Explorer 8.

*. Easily access its settings - Now users with MS Windows/Mac or GNU/Linux users can access FP settings in their "Control" panel section, of their operating systems.

Although these are the major new features according to Adobe but the 10.3 do come with bug fixes, enhanced video playback and security features as well.

If you use Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal then you can install the latest version of the Flash Player (10.3 in this case) by clicking here and follow the instructions on your screen. That's it.

After doing this, whenever Adobe releases a new version/update, all you have to do is enter the below command in your Terminal.

    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install adobe-flashplugin

Read More

Install Truecrypt in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal

When properly used, Truecrypt in Ubuntu can be a very powerful tool for protecting your data. Although encryption in general has few of its disadvantageous. For instance, depending on the algorithm and the method (whether it's software based or hardware based, etc)... the more powerful it is the more CPU or PC resources it'll consume.

And if you forgot the master password for accessing the encrypted volume ... then most of the time it can be almost impossible to access that data as well.

But again, depending on your need and the sensitivity of your data, encryption is pretty darn important nonetheless. In that sense, if you want an easy to use, one of the best data encrypting utilities available for your Ubuntu PC/Laptop... then the open source Truecrypt is one of the best!.

From installing in GNU/Linux to using its features... Truecrypt is truly :P an exceptional utility.

Main features...

*. Encrypt partitions (including USB devices, etc).

*. Create encrypted volumes (portable).

*. Create "hidden" volumes within the encrypted volume/partition.

*. Supports few of one of the most powerful algorithms.

*. Encrypts and decrypts your data on-the-fly (oh yeah, it's fast!).

*. Add passwords to your volumes.

*. Dismount all volumes when logging out. 

Truecrypt is a cross-platform app that can be run on MS Windows, GNU/Linux and Mac OSX... and you can easily create a portable version as well (more below)

1. You can install Truecrypt (7.0a version - which is the latest at this moment) in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, 10.10 or 10.04 by simply downloading the package from here first. And when downloading, make sure to choose "standard - 32 bit" or the "standard - 64 bit", not the "console only" package.

2. Then extract the content into your "Home" folder.

3. Open your Terminal and enter the below command (the name of the file will differer according to your version and 32/64 bit )

./truecrypt-7.0a-setup-x86

or you can double click on the "truecrypt-7.0a-setup-x86" file (the file name, again will differ according to your version) and once asked choose "run in Terminal".

4. Then you should be prompted with a GUI wizard which is pretty easy to understand and simply follow your instructions on screen (as shown below screenshots).

Step -1: Click on "Install TrueCrypt" ..., if you want make it portable, then choose the other option - "Extract .tar Package file".

Step 2: Click on "I accept and agree..." button.

Step 3: Click on the "OK" button.

Step 3: Now press the "Enter" key on your Keyboard to exit the wizard.

Once installed you can access it via: "Accessories" -> "Truecrypt"

or just press "Alt" + "F2" and enter "truecrypt".

That's it!. Oh btw, you should be able to install Truecrypt in Fedora Core 15 or other versions (including most other GNU/Linux distributions) by using the same method. Good luck.

Read More

How To Install Thunar File Manager In Ubuntu?

A file manager or the default file management utility is one of the most important aspects of a modern desktop environment. From things like running your entire desktop screen to managing files/folders... by having a well equipped and a stable file manager is certainly a necessity. Although I'm drifted towards GTK written applications but I certainly am not a huge fan of the default fm in Gnome called Nautilus.

For me it's too simple and I find it hard to "control". But still if you have an old GNU/Linux installed PC/Laptop then you might actually like applications that are "simple" because most of the time they have a tendency of being a bit merciful at your hardware resources (though, not always true). And with start of Gnome3, GNU/Linux distributions such as Fedora Core 15 is now asking for you to have at least 768MB of RAM.

So what I'm trying to say is that, if you love or "okay" (like me) with your Gnome 2+ desktop... but looking for a way to reduce some "weight" from the system as far as possible, then you could give a try another excellent file manager called Thunar!.

Thunar is actually the default fm for another more lightweight (that Gnome) desktop called XFCE. Since the goal of XFCE is try to use as low system resources as possible, the fm Thunar is especially written to help in achieving that. Although it may not make a huge difference concerting Nautilus, still it certainly uses lower amounts of resources nonetheless.

As you can see, Thunar has a very similar GUI to the Nautilus... in fact, they both actually are trying to "emulate" Mac OSX file manager. Anyhow, to be short and precise, almost anything that Nautilus can do, Thunar can do them as well...

... from deleting/creating folders to navigating using different views, expanding features via installing new plugins and generating previews of certain file types, etc ... it certainly is very powerful.

If you want to install Thunar in Ubuntu then open your Terminal and issue the below command.

sudo apt-get install thunar

Although this won't replace your Nautilus file manager and whenever you double click on any folder, it won't be opened using Thunar. If you want to replace Nautilus with it then,

1. Create a text file called = defaultthunar

and enter the below text into it and save it in your "Home" folder.

#!/bin/bash

## Originally written by aysiu from the Ubuntu Forums
## This is GPL'ed code
## So improve it and re-release it

## Define portion to make Thunar the default if that appears to be the appropriate action
makethunardefault()
{
## I went with --no-install-recommends because
## I didn't want to bring in a whole lot of junk,
## and Jaunty installs recommended packages by default.
echo -e "\nMaking sure Thunar is installed\n"
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install thunar --no-install-recommends

## Does it make sense to change to the directory?
## Or should all the individual commands just reference the full path?
echo -e "\nChanging to application launcher directory\n"
cd /usr/share/applications
echo -e "\nMaking backup directory\n"

## Does it make sense to create an entire backup directory?
## Should each file just be backed up in place?
sudo mkdir nonautilusplease
echo -e "\nModifying folder handler launcher\n"
sudo cp nautilus-folder-handler.desktop nonautilusplease/

## Here I'm using two separate sed commands
## Is there a way to string them together to have one
## sed command make two replacements in a single file?
sudo sed -i -n 's/nautilus --no-desktop/thunar/g' nautilus-folder-handler.desktop
sudo sed -i -n 's/TryExec=nautilus/TryExec=thunar/g' nautilus-folder-handler.desktop
echo -e "\nModifying browser launcher\n"
sudo cp nautilus-browser.desktop nonautilusplease/
sudo sed -i -n 's/nautilus --no-desktop --browser/thunar/g' nautilus-browser.desktop
sudo sed -i -n 's/TryExec=nautilus/TryExec=thunar/g' nautilus-browser.desktop
echo -e "\nModifying computer icon launcher\n"
sudo cp nautilus-computer.desktop nonautilusplease/
sudo sed -i -n 's/nautilus --no-desktop/thunar/g' nautilus-computer.desktop
sudo sed -i -n 's/TryExec=nautilus/TryExec=thunar/g' nautilus-computer.desktop
echo -e "\nModifying home icon launcher\n"
sudo cp nautilus-home.desktop nonautilusplease/
sudo sed -i -n 's/nautilus --no-desktop/thunar/g' nautilus-home.desktop
sudo sed -i -n 's/TryExec=nautilus/TryExec=thunar/g' nautilus-home.desktop
echo -e "\nModifying general Nautilus launcher\n"
sudo cp nautilus.desktop nonautilusplease/
sudo sed -i -n 's/Exec=nautilus/Exec=thunar/g' nautilus.desktop

## This last bit I'm not sure should be included
## See, the only thing that doesn't change to the
## new Thunar default is clicking the files on the desktop,
## because Nautilus is managing the desktop (so technically
## it's not launching a new process when you double-click
## an icon there).
## So this kills the desktop management of icons completely
## Making the desktop pretty useless... would it be better
## to keep Nautilus there instead of nothing? Or go so far
## as to have Xfce manage the desktop in Gnome?
echo -e "\nChanging base Nautilus launcher\n"
sudo dpkg-divert --divert /usr/bin/nautilus.old --rename /usr/bin/nautilus && sudo ln -s /usr/bin/thunar /usr/bin/nautilus
echo -e "\nRemoving Nautilus as desktop manager\n"
killall nautilus
echo -e "\nThunar is now the default file manager. To return Nautilus to the default, run this script again.\n"
}

restorenautilusdefault()
{
echo -e "\nChanging to application launcher directory\n"
cd /usr/share/applications
echo -e "\nRestoring backup files\n"
sudo cp nonautilusplease/nautilus-folder-handler.desktop .
sudo cp nonautilusplease/nautilus-browser.desktop .
sudo cp nonautilusplease/nautilus-computer.desktop .
sudo cp nonautilusplease/nautilus-home.desktop .
sudo cp nonautilusplease/nautilus.desktop .
echo -e "\nRemoving backup folder\n"
sudo rm -r nonautilusplease
echo -e "\nRestoring Nautilus launcher\n"
sudo rm /usr/bin/nautilus && sudo dpkg-divert --rename --remove /usr/bin/nautilus
echo -e "\nMaking Nautilus manage the desktop again\n"
nautilus --no-default-window &

## The only change that isn't undone is the installation of Thunar
## Should Thunar be removed? Or just kept in?
## Don't want to load the script with too many questions?
}



## Make sure that we exit if any commands do not complete successfully.
## Thanks to nanotube for this little snippet of code from the early
## versions of UbuntuZilla
set -o errexit
trap 'echo "Previous command did not complete successfully. Exiting."' ERR


## This is the main code
## Is it necessary to put an elseif in here? Or is
## redundant, since the directory pretty much
## either exists or it doesn't?
## Is there a better way to keep track of whether
## the script has been run before?
if [[ -e /usr/share/applications/nonautilusplease ]]; then

restorenautilusdefault

else

makethunardefault

fi;

2. Then open your Terminal and enter the below command.

chmod +x defaultthunar
./defaultthunar

But remember, unlike with Nautilus, you could run into few "issues" while trying to preview/thumbnails on videos for instance (there could be a separate plug for that) in Thunar. In that case, if you want to restore Nautilus back, then use the below command. Good luck.

./defaultthunar 

Read More