Post a Day - World of Goo

Its the weekend, so its time for fun, right? Todays post is a game called World of Goo. While its not open source or free, it is a pretty awesome game available on the Linux platform. As the lack of quality games is a sticking point for some, the advent of developers building games for Linux is great.

World of Goo Trailer 2 Director's Cut
Uploaded by 2dboy

World of Goo is kind of like the old dos game Lemmings in reverse. The object is to move different goo-balls in such a manor as to have the remaining unused goo-balls sucked up by a tube.

I think the thing I love best about it is the original soundtrack, which the Author has made available free here.

The World of Goo Linux demo can be downloaded here.
World of Goo project page.

Post a Day - GNOME-Do

Today's post is GNOME-Do. I have to say, the first time I tried GNOME-Do I didnt like it. I just saw it as another awn dock, and I dont like awn to begin with. awn is just too buggy for me.
The real power though of GNOME-Do is that it acts as a keyboard based interface for doing anything on your computer. You can do any number of tasks without even touching your mouse. There is no need to set up keyboard shortcuts, all you have to do is hit the Windows(aka Super) key and the Space bar. This brings up an auto-suggest box based on whatever you type. Say you want to open terminal, just hit (Super+Space bar) and then begin to type terminal. As you type, it will slowly give suggestions, until what you want is at the top of the list. Hit enter to do that task.
Its not simply limited to being a launcher though. With plugins, you can navigate the web, make tiny-urls, make skype calls, email contacts thru gmail, the list goes on. There are probably about 75 plugins currently available.
You probably wont like it at first, but it sort of grows on you.
It is possible to download via apt, but I suggest downloading from the project page. The current version available via apt is .6, however there were major improvements with the latest version .8, which is currently available only via the project page. There have been complications when installing on x64 bit systems. I used the deb file from the project page though and it worked fine. Getting the plugins package to compile was another story entirely...

GNOME-Do Project page:
https://launchpad.net/do

Jaunty Jackalope Alpha 5 | Ubuntu

Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope Alpha 5 is hot off the presses, only a few hours old.
You can download it here.

Post a Day - Gwibber

Gwibber is an open source twitter client, that also integrates well with RSS and a number of other online services, including digg, flickr, and facebook.
Personally it's my favorite twitter client, and I also use it for light-weight news RSS feeds (I use google reader for my main RSS reader). While it might not have the functions of TweetDeck, Gwibber does what it does well, and has the benefit of being open source.
I have it set up to notify me with Popup bubbles so I can run minimized, and with the new notify-osd notifications coming in Jaunty, the results are both useful and stunning.
The main window is highly customizable with themes.

Gwibber can be installed via apt
$sudo apt-get install gwibber
or click here:apt://gwibber

or the source can be downloaded from the project page.
https://launchpad.net/gwibber

I recommend downloading from source, as the project is very active, with modifications and improvements daily.

Feel free to follow me on twitter @alexrybicki

Post a Day - Meld

So for my first Post a Day, Ive decided to feature Meld. Meld is a very useful tool for comparing to text files, much like the $compare command in bash, only it presents the files in a GTK Gui.
It highlights changes between 2 or 3 files or directories, and adds dynamic bubbles, showing just where that tiny modification was. The bigger the file, the more useful it becomes. See the screenshot for an example or simply install and try it out.

To install meld, just run $sudo apt-get install meld
or click here:apt://meld

note: you will need to enable the "Community-maintained Open Source software (universe)" for the above command to work. This can be done by selecting System>Administration>Software Sources - Then clicking the "Community-maintained Open Source software (universe)" check box.

The project page for Meld is
http://meld.sourceforge.net

Post a Day

I've decided that I know of enough Ubuntu/Linux/GNOME/GTK applications to make a post a day for quite awhile. Each day ill post a quick summary of my favorite apps, after all, an OS only as useful as the tools that can run on it. Stay tuned, my 1st post: A very useful tool called Meld.
I may even stray from just posting apps, and I might just post simple instructions for getting certian tasks done in ubuntu.

Macropinna microstoma: A fish with a transparent head [WTF]

I have nothing more to add. Other than WTF?

Wordle.net

I just recently discovered Wordle.net, and I must say its pretty awesome. I plugged in the url of this website and it created this:

How to install the new Jaunty notify-osd in Ubuntu Intrepid

So the next release of Ubuntu, 9.04 A.K.A. Jaunty has a new Popup notifier. If you want to try it out in Intrepid, follow these simple steps. I have to warn you its a lot of Terminal use, but don't get too intimidated, its really pretty easy. (screenshot from markshuttleworth.com)


A Flash example of the notifier mock-up can be seen here.


Here is an example I recorded of the notify-osd running in Intrepid. My desktop is heavily personalized, but don't let that get in the way of the example. youtube seems to hate my ogv video, theres a bunch of artifacts and the video jumps. in actuality my desktop is smooth as silk. Ive had a lot of requests as to my theme/background/icons etc. Find out more here in a previous post.


First step is to get the code. To do this, you're going to have to install bazaar. Bazaar (AKA bzr) can then fetch the code from launchpad. Bazaar is like git, svn, or cvs. If you want to find out more, visit this 5 minute introduction to bazaar.

$sudo apt-get install bzr

Next we need to actually get the notify-osd code from launchpad:

$bzr branch lp:notify-osd

Dont be alarmed if it reports that you need to log in to launchpad. The code should still be saved in the correct location. Its just reporting that if you used bzr to upload code there would be an error.


Now you should have the code saved on your drive, in your home folder. Specifically ~/notify-osd.
Next step is to compile the code. There is a script included, so its much easier then it sounds.
To compile the code, were going to have to get some dependencies.

$ sudo apt-get install gnome-common automake

Now that we have what we need, we can compile.

$sudo ./autogen.sh

That launches the script, which automatically configures the code for your kernel.
Next step- we make.

$sudo make

Edit: A big thanks to Derek in the comments. He ran $ apt-cache depends notify-osd within Jaunty for me to discover that the following dependencies are required:
libc6 libcairo2 libdbus-1-3 libdbus-glib-1-2 libgconf2-4 libglib2.0-0 libgtk2.0-0 libpango1.0-0 libpixman-1-0 libx11-6
If you get any dependency errors, then run this:
$ sudo apt-get install libc6 libcairo2 libdbus-1-3 libdbus-glib-1-2 libgconf2-4 libglib2.0-0 libgtk2.0-0 libpango1.0-0 libpixman-1-0 libx11-6


If you haven't had any errors yet, everything should be just about done.

To make use of the new notifier, first kill the old notifier (I used System monitor, but the command line can be used as well) Select notification-daemon and right-click, select kill process, or..

$killall notification-daemon

Next, we need to actually launch the new notifier:
Navigate to your ~/notify-osd/src directory.

$notify-osd

Thats it! Were done!

If you want to test out the new notifier, you can launch the send-test-notification.sh script by clicking it and clicking run, or by navigating to the ~/notify-osd/src directory and typing:

$ ./send-test-notification.sh

The example script above may look weird because there are a few errors in the script code. The call to the icon files is not properly linked. I dont know if thats just because someone changed something on launchpad and forgot to update it or what. Dont be alarmed though if it looks funky. Everything is working properly, its just the script thats messed up.

Don't worry about messing up your Intrepid install. We haven't made any permanent changes to your system, and when you restart your computer the old notifier will be back.
If you want to keep the changes every time you restart, you can just remove the old notification-daemon on startup, and replace it with the new notify-osd.

Script to make notify-osd run on restart:

$ gedit ~/.config/autostart/notify-osd.sh

...paste this in the file:

#!/bin/bash
killall notification-daemon
sleep 1
~/notify-osd/src/notify-osd

...then in terminal:

$ chmod +x ~/.config/autostart/notify-osd.sh

...then:

$ gedit ~/.config/autostart/notify-osd.desktop

...and paste this in the file: user name is the name of the session

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=notify-osd
Exec=/home/user name/.config/autostart/notify-osd.sh
Icon=system-run
Comment=
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true

Now, every time you restart xorg, (aka reboot, start new session, etc) you will have the new notify-osd run.


A few notes: You will need a proper Display Driver running, and Compiz enabled to make proper use of the new features such as transparencies. If you see something that Ive done wrong or that could be done better, don't hesitate to tell me in the comments. Also, when you end the old notifications-daemon it may break other daemons which are using it (i.e. cGmail). Simply restart the the cGmail daemon and it should work fine.