Cool Awn Applets to adorn your Ubuntu Linux Desktop

In the previous article, I explained how to install Avant Window Navigator in Ubuntu Linux (Gutsy Gibbon). By default, it doesn't install any applets. But a dock without any applets is as boring as a desktop without a dock right ?

So here are a couple of AWN applets which I found really interesting. But first the installation ...

Installation of Awn applets

To install these applets you have to enable an additional repository from reacocard. For that open the /etc/apt/sources.list file in your favorite editor and append the following line to it.

#FILE: /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/reacocard-awn/ubuntu gutsy main

Now update the repository and install the following package. NOTE: It is assumed that you have already installed the Avant Window Navigator.

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install awn-core-applets-bzr

That is it. Now you can find all the applets in the awn manager which is accessed from GNOME Menu System>Preferences>Awn manager .

Fig: Awn manager GNOME menu

To run an applet, open the "Awn manager" dialog box and in its left pane, click the "Applets" icon. In the right pane, you will find all the applets installed on your system. Select an applet and click the "Activate button". The applet starts running on your Awn dock.

Fig: Awn manager GUI

A few cool AWN applets
Here are a couple of very nice applets which caught my fancy.

Dilbert Cartoon Applet - This applet displays comic strips of popular cartoon characters. At present you have a choice of 5 different strips namely - Dilbert, Peanuts, The born loser, Wizard of ID and Xkcd.com.

Fig: Dilbert applet displaying a comic strip

Main menu applet - This applet provides an alternate menu containing all the applications you will find in the menus on the GNOME panel.

Fig: Main menu applet - I find it more functional

Stack applet - I like this applet very much. It has three layouts namely "Default dialog", "Curved GUI" and "Trasher GUI". The "Trasher GUI" is the same as the "Default dialog" with the exception that in the former, there is a delete button embedded. The "Curved GUI" is what has picked my fancy and makes me think of the dock found in Mac OSX Leopard.

Fig: Click on the stack applet to open a stack of objects.

Terminal applet - What better way to use the dock than embedding a terminal into an applet ? The terminal supports transparency which makes it ultra cool. And you can even choose the terminal you want to embed such as gnome-terminal, konsole, xfce terminal, xterm and so on.

Fig: gnome-terminal embedded in the terminal applet

Weather applet - Would you like to know the weather forecasts for today ? Even better how about the predictions for the next 4 days? Well, you have got your wish in the Weather applet. This applet pulls relevant data from the weather.com website and displays it in a nice pictorial view on your desktop. I was really surprised to find my city covered. Also the weather predictions seem pretty accurate.

Fig: I am always interested in the weather :-)

Fig: The weather map of India

Interview with Linus Torvalds

Linus Torvalds the self confessed benevolent dictator and father of Linux recently gave a frank interview to the Linux Foundation. In it he holds a conversation with Jim Zemlin and talks about the future of Linux, patents, internal and external competition,Microsoft and so on.

The interview is in the form of a podcast and is split into two parts [ Part I and Part II ]. Linux Foundation has also made available transcripts of the interview which you can read if you have a low bandwidth link. Transcripts of part I and part II .

Install Avant Window Navigator (AWN) in Ubuntu Linux

AWN - short for Avant Window Navigator is a dock like bar which sits at the bottom of the screen. It provides similar effects as the Dock in Mac OSX Leopard. The AWN project consists of three main parts namely

1. The Dock
2. AWN window navigator and
3. The shared library 'libawn' which is used to develop applets which enhance the functionality of AWN. The applets can be coded in either 'C' or 'Python' language.
   

Pre-requisites for installing AWN
To install AWN on your Linux machine, it has to meet certain conditions. Them being -

• Xgl or AIGLX installed - in short your computer should be capable of compositing support. This mostly means if you have an Nvidia or ATI video card, you should download and install the proprietary drivers.
• A compositing manager installed. A few examples of compositing managers are Beryl/Compiz/Compiz Fusion, Cairo, Xfce, Metacity, xcompmgr and so on.
  In Ubuntu you can enable compositing manager by clicking System>Preferences> Appearance and then enabling Visual effects from the 'Visual Effects' tab in the Appearance dialog.
  

Fig: Enable Visual effects

Installation

In Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon, the installation of AWN is a two step process. First you have to enable the backports repository which contain the necessary binaries of avant window navigator and related files.

This is done by clicking System>Administration>Software sources on the GNOME panel.

Fig: Click on the Software Sources Menu

It opens the "Software sources" dialog box.

In that click the 'Updates' tab and enable the gutsy-backports option as shown in the figure below :

Fig: Enable gutsy-backports in the Updates tab

Next fire up a terminal and update and install the AWN packages as follows :

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install avant-window-navigator awn-manager 

awn-manager is a GUI tool which allows you to make changes to the look and feel of the AWN dock as well as install and manage applets and themes.

Fig: Avant Window Navigator close-up view

Now that you have installed Avant Window Manager, it is time to take it for a test drive. To start AWN, click GNOME menu Applications>Accessories>Avant Window Navigator.

Fig: Avant Window Manager menu

Fig: Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon desktop running AWN

A few AWN tips

• To add applications to the AWN dock, just drag and drop icons from the Applications menu or from Nautilus (/usr/share/applications).
• You can right click on the AWN dock and select properties to open the 'Avant Window Manager' dialog where you can change the look and feel of the dock and add additional applets.
  

Conclusion

Finally we Linux users have our very own dock similar to the dock seen in Mac OSX Leopard. While the AWN project is still a work in progress, there are a lot of applets available from the ubiquitous clock to the GMail checker which brings visual joy to the user's desktop. To know about these applets, read the following article.

The art of disk partitioning explained

Now a days, most computers include hard drives with 100s of gigabytes of space. In such a scenario, it is inevitable that you partition the hard drive to optimize the use of space. Dividing your hard drive into individual partitions for your operating system, programs, data files, music, and images provides better organization and, most important, much better data safety in the event of a drive crash.

This article explains why it is prudent to partition your hard drive to more manageable chunks.

On the other hand, if you already have a well partitioned hard disk and you wish to combine two or more chunks of disk partitions to save your data, instead of deleting a partition, you can always use logical volumes which form a layer above the physical partitions and which can span multiple partitions. Read more about how you can create logical volumes and resize them in Linux. The article - how to manage disk space with LVM also makes an interesting read.

Sun Microsystems acquires Innotek - the makers of Virtualbox

Innotek are the makers of the popular open source virtualization software called Virtualbox which is an excellent alternative to the closed source Vmware product. Virtualbox is a general-purpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware. Sun has revealed that it has acquired Innotek. It was only a few weeks ago that Sun anounced its acquisition of MySQL for a cool billion dollars.

Sun asserts that Virtualbox will remain open source and will compliment Sun's xVM Server products which addresses both desktop and server virtualization. xVM integrates both virtualization software and data center automation tools thus providing the technologies to operate data centers at radically reduced costs.

Virtualbox has seen over 4 million downloads from January 2007 till date.

Fig: Virtualbox user interface

I have personally found Virtualbox to use less memory resources than Vmware server. It comes with an intuitive GUI And with some point and clicking you can set up any operating system to run as a client OS on your machine.

Read the official press release to know more.

Python scripts vs Bash scripts in Linux

Almost all Linux users who are at least familiar with bash shell commands will be at home in writing simple bash scripts to automate tasks. For those who do not know how to write a bash script, here is how you do it.

Open a new file in your favorite text editor and save it in any name of your choice but with the extension .sh. For example, let us name it 'myfirstscript.sh' . The 'sh' file extension is not mandatory but is a nice way for us to later remember that this file is a script.

Now in this file (myfirstscript.sh), enter the following line.

#!/usr/bin/bash

This line should always be entered the first thing in any bash script you create. It lets the shell know where to find the bash program. In some Linux distributions the bash command is located at /bin/bash. When in doubt, use the 'which' command to find the location as follows :

$ which bash
/usr/bin/bash

# Continuation of the above script ...
# Now lets enter a few commands in this script ...
ls -l
sleep 2
who
sleep 2
w

Nothing spectacular here. Note that 'sleep' is used to pause the execution process for certain time in seconds. Next fire up a console (xterm, gnome-terminal ...) and set the executable bit for the script myfirstscript.sh as follows :

$ chmod u+x myfirstscript.sh

This lets you execute the script by its name as follows :

$ ./myfirstscript.sh

All this may seem easy. But you can get added benefits if you substitute 'bash' with Python language to write your scripts. Noah Gift provides compelling reasons to pick up Python programming language skills and start writing your scripts in this language. If you do not know Python language and is looking for some direction then you should look at the two books Core Python programming and Python phrasebook which will give you a head start in mastering this powerful but easy to learn language.

Fedora 9 (Sulphur) Alpha released

The first alpha release of Fedora 9 (codenamed Sulphur) has been announced. An alpha release is similar to what Debian calls testing. An alpha release represents a sanitized snapshot of Fedora's development branch, which sees rapid changes and will become the next major release. Having said that, alpha releases should boot normally on most systems. By trying out an alpha release, the Linux users provide developers the much needed feedback on the changes and any bugs they encounter.

Fedora 9 Alpha release provides a peek into what to expect in the next major release of Fedora which is tentatively scheduled for late April. Some of the features and improvements in Fedora 9 are as follows :

• GNOME 2.21
• KDE 4.0 as the default KDE desktop
• Firefox 3 Beta 2
• Anaconda installer improvements - Now you can resize the Ext2, Ext3 and NTFS partitions among other things.
• PackageKit - This is to Fedora what Synaptic is to Debian based Linux distribution. PackageKit acts as a front end to Yum.
• Decrease the startup time of X window system.
• Linux kernel 2.6.24
• Ext4 filesystem support - Ext4 is more scalable and better performing than Ext3.
  

You can download the alpha 1 release from the Fedora web site. For more details, see the Fedora release notes, planned schedule and feature list.

Red Hat 11th fastest growing company in America

Forbes magazine recently compiled a list of the top 25 fastest growing companies in America. And guess what, Red Hat is placed 11th in the list (See Fig. below). The criteria for Forbes’ list mainly focused on sales growth , profitability (at least $25 million in sales over the past four quarters), growth outlook and the lack of legal, accounting or corporate governance issues. Google which generated nearly $15 billion in revenues in the last 12 months topped the list.

Fig: Red Hat placed 11th in the list of top 25 fast growing companies in USA

Way to go Red Hat....