Posts filed under 'Ubuntu'
Adobe is the standard in the digital design, and illustration industry. They are also moving into the audio and video sector with Adobe Premiere, and Soundbooth. One problem, they are very expensive. A struggling artist will have a lot of trouble affording it- luckily there are some great alternatives out there for free. Here are my favorites:
Photoshop Alternatives:
Gimp
Gimp is a very popular alternative to Photoshop. It has a very different interface when compared to Photoshop, but is able to perform pretty much the same tasks. It is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows. http://www.gimp.org/
Paint.Net
An amazing photo editing software for Windows (XP, Vista). It has won many awards such as PC World Best Freebies 2007, the Webuser Gold Award, Cnet 5 Star review, and more.
I’ll let the following quotes review it for you:
“Impressive.” – PC World, #19 on “Top 100 Products of 2007″
“It raises the quality bar,” - Jeff Atwood, Coding Horror
Download: http://www.getpaint.net/index.html
Dreamweaver Alternatives:
Kompozer
This is an open source WYSIWYG HTML editor for Linux, Mac, and Windows. It does the job.
Download: http://kompozer.net/
Adobe Premiere Alternatives:
Avidemux
Avidemux is a free video editor perfect for simple cutting, encoding, and filtering jobs. It supports AVI, MPEG, MP4, and ASF using different codecs.
Download: http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/
VirtualDub
VirtualDub is a video caputure application for Windows. It is geared towards the processing of AVI files, and can read MPEG-1 (not write).
Download: http://www.virtualdub.org/
Adobe Reader Alternatives:
PDFCreator
PDFCreator allows you to create PDF documents from any Windows application that support printing. After installed, it will get added to your set of installed printers as a virtual printer. When the virtual printer is selected, for example in Word, it will output the document as a PDF file, and allow you to save it anywhere you want. Very handy for professionals.
Download: http://www.pdfforge.org/products/pdfcreator
Foxit PDF Reader
A true light weight champion. This application is so light, yet so feature rick, you will never go back to Adobe Reader again!
Download: http://www.foxitsoftware.com/downloads/
June 23rd, 2009
We’ve all bookmarked an interesting site while surfing around. But, we usually forget to go back to the bookmark, and end up cluttering our Bookmarks with sites we’ve forgotten about. Now there is a nifty little app available by the name of “Read It Later”.
It’s a Firefox add-on that provides users with a solution to the issue of forgotten bookmarking. Once you install it, just right click on a cool website, and select “Read this Page Later”. The page will be saved to the app, which will prepare a queue of sites you can come back to when you have a chance. All you have to do is click on the top-corner of Firefox, where it says “Read it Later”. Once done reading, just check it off!
The current version (0.9945) includes offline reading, synchronization of reading list between multiple computers, and more.
Donwload it here.
June 16th, 2009
If you’ve been using your computer for a long period of time without re-formatting it, you have probably built up duplicate files due to copying and moving all over the place.
In my case, it is a large number of media files such as videos, music, and images. I may lose track, and copy the sames file more than once to any given directory. Windows does not provide you with a duplicate file checking solution, but there is freeware that does the trick.
Duplicate Files Searcher checks and removes duplicate files. It is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. You can preview files before deleting, or set DFS to automatically delete duplicate files.
Features:
- Searching results can be saved and loaded in future
- Checks any files, folders and drives
- Works with removable drives
- Decide on automatic deletion or preview
- Works on all OSes
Download here – requires Java Runtime Environment, so please install JRE first if you haven’t already
June 16th, 2009
Anomos is a free torrent client that lets you share files anonymously. It is currently in beta, but works like a charm. It’s a very plain BitTorrent client –which doesn’t even show the number of seeds & peers. Only the tracker will know who’s downloading what.
Now that’s what I call an anonymous torrent client, and Anomos does it well.
Anomos is currently available for Windows and Linux – Download it here.
June 16th, 2009
Picture this…you set up Ubuntu, and forgot the password you had set for it. Or, someone gave you a computer running Ubuntu, but not the password. The password is an essential part of the Ubuntu experience. To make any changes in the system, you need to log in as root through the Terminal, and guess what it requires…a password.
This guide will explain how you can reset Ubuntu’s password:
1- Boot into ‘Recovery Mode’
If you have a single-boot (Ubuntu is the only operating system on your computer), you may have to press the Escape key during bootup in order to see the boot menu. If you have a dual-boot (Ubuntu is installed next to Windows, another Linux operating system, or Mac OS X; and you choose at boot time which operating system to boot into), the boot menu should appear without the need to press the Escape key. -thanks www.psychocats.net
2- Select the ‘recovery mode’ kernel
3- After the recovery boot-up process has completed- go down to the ‘Drop to root shell prompt’ option, and press Enter
The ‘Root’ account is the highest level of administrator in Linux, so be very careful what commands you enter into the root terminal
4- Once you’re at the root shell prompt, if you have also forgotten your user name, type:
ls /home
That’s a lowercase L, and not a capital i, in ls.
5- You should see a list of the users on your Ubuntu installation. In this case, I’m going to reset Linda Williams’s password.
To reset the password, type:
passwd username
where username is the username you want to reset. In this case, I want to reset Linda’s password, so I type:
passwd linda
6- You will be asked for a new password. When you type the password you will get no visual response acknowledging you’re typing. Your password is still being accepted.
Type the password and hit Enter when you’re done. You’ll be asked to retype the password. Do so and hit Enter again.
7- Now the password should be reset. Type:
exit to return to the recovery menu.
From the recovery menu- select ‘resume normal boot’ – you should now know the new password 
June 11th, 2009
“How do I download a torrent?” This is a question that gets asked quite frequently- Torrents are the new form of P2P downloading these days. It is the new Napster, and just like Napster- you need to be careful with what you download. A lot of the files that are available through torrents are copyrighted, such as music, movies, and applications, so you are responsible for what you choose to download. Let’s get started shall we..
Step 1:
Download the Torrent client-
The best for Windows is: uTorrent
The best for Mac is: Transmission
The best for Ubuntu is: Transmission (search for it under Applications > Add/Remove)
Step 2:
Once installed, we look for a torrent-
Go http://www.thepiratebay.com (you have probably heard of these guys)
-We are going to search for “Ubuntu”, and specify the search by check-marking “Applications” below the search bar.
-You will be presented with the results of your search. Here is the important part- you need to know how to pick the torrents. These files are not hosted on 1 central server. They are spread out across a whole network of torrent users.
We need to pay close attention to “SE” (seeders), and “LE” (leechers). SE is the number of people hosting the file, LE is the number of people downloading the file.
- Click “SE” to sort by the highest number of seeders.
A good ratio of seeders, and leechers is one that has far more SE’s than LE’s. In my example, I found a copy of Ubuntu 9.04 with 98 SE’s, and 9 LE’s. We like this ratio- this means that the download will be pretty fast.
Step 3:
So we decided to go with the torrent mentioned above. Click the file name, and you will be taken to download page.
Click “Download This Torrent” > save the torrent file to your desktop.
Step 4:
Fire up the torrent client you downloaded during step 1.
Go to File > Open > and browse for the torrent file on your desktop (in uTorrent it will be called ‘Add Torrent’ and not ‘Open’)
This will start your download- once it is at 100%, go to the directory you downloaded the file to (you can find this under the program’s preferences menu), and move the file wherever you want.
Done!
May 28th, 2009
If you’ve ever used Quicksilver for the Mac, then you know what I’m talking about. Gnome-do allows you to simply type the name of the application or file that you want to open, and just hit Enter to launch it. A lot of us Linux users used to do this with the Terminal, I know- but this is so much faster. It’s incredible how intuitive it is.
One of the best parts of Gnome-do is how it learns from your previous queries. Let’s say you constantly launch Firefox from it- after a while, it knows to display Firefox first, right when you type ‘F’.
You can easily install Gnome-do by going to: Applications > Add/Remove > search: Gnome-do.
May 27th, 2009
These are awesome. You can receive 4 of each sticker by mail for FREE from system76.com.
All you have to do is send a self addressed stamped envelope to:
System76, Inc. (Free Stickers)
1582 S. Parker Rd. Ste. 310
Denver, Colorado 80231
May 27th, 2009
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