Nathive, a simple image editor for Ubuntu

It never ceases to amaze me how Ubuntu has taken off in the Spanish-speaking world. Then again RMS speaks Spanish and Marcos Diaz, who is Spanish born, is the person who initiated the Nathive project. Nathive is a free image editor like Photoshop, Corel or GIMP, but focused on usability. The program runs in GNOME environments, and anyone can participate in it, contributing ideas or code translations. The project is currently in beta, is written in Python using GTK +, and is working hard to get a very complete program without losing  ease of use.  Nathive’s philosophy is to show respect and gratitude towards the community of GIMP, to make it easy and to reach people who do not need to see all the options at the same time

Nathiv is now a growing community which you can join if you wish.

* 32-bit deb: nathive_0.920-1_i386.deb

64-bit deb: nathive_0.920-1_amd64.deb

There are also packages for other Linux distros:

32-bit rpm: nathive-0.920-1.i386.rpm

64-bit rpm: nathive-0.920-1.x86_64.rpm

Nathive Official Website

Check out this awesome video of Nathive in action.

THANKS Novatillasku

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Automatically turn off Compiz when running a program

Phrank deserves an award for coming up with this hack.  NoCompiz uses Compiz-switch, a simple program that turns Compiz off if it is on and vice-versa.
NoCompiz will take one input – the name of a program – Turn off Compiz, run the program, then turn Compiz back on when the program exits.
This is very useful when you’re running Compiz all the time, but want to switch to a full-screen 3D game for awhile and not have to worry about Compiz messing with the game.

Just download noCompiz, unzip, and run the Install.sh installer from within Nautilus.
Download NoCompiz

edit the menu entry of the programme you want to toggle.

eg, nocompiz kdenlive

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Lugaru goes open source

http://www.playdeb.net

add the playdeb mirror  to software sources:

deb http://mirrors.dotsrc.org/getdeb/ubuntu lucid-getdeb games
deb-src http://mirrors.dotsrc.org/getdeb/ubuntu lucid-getdeb games

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install lugaru

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GM-notify

A simple and lightweight highly Ubuntu Lucid  integrated GMail Notifier which takes advantages of  notify-osd and indicator-applet. Because of this it will not run with older Ubuntu versions.

Option  to select a sound when new incoming mail, a must-have for Gmail users.

Installing from a terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gm-notify-maintainers/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gm-notify

GM-Notify on Launchpad

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Limewire for Ubuntu

Limewire, a P2P file sharing application is now available for Linux. Thanks to the Khattam blog, for spotting this.

The deb can be downloaded from Official Limewire Website or Click here for Direct Download.

After downloading it, if you double click it (LimeWireLinux.deb), you may get the following error:

Error: Dependency is not satisfiable: sun-java6-jre|icedtea-java7-jre|sun-java6-jdk|icedtea-java7-jdk

This can be solved by either adding/enabling the Lucid Partner Repository for sun-java6-jre or by modifying LimeWireLinux.deb to be satisfied with openjdk-6-jre.

More instructions from Khattam

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Bridge the Digital Divide with Webhttrack

Here is a good way to copy and share websites in your community. Remember, not everybody has unlimited and uncapped bandwidth, and we not all running the same speed either.

Sharing websites offline helps to bridge the gap.

Don’t wait until you are  so far ahead that you can’t relate to your neighbour.

Ubuntu is more than just a linux distribution, it is a philosophy about humanity.

sudo apt-get install webhttrack

http://www.httrack.com/

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rsget downloader

rsget.pl is a powerful perl application designed to retrieve files from download services (like RapidShare, MegaUpload and many more).
It has a long list of features implemented already and even longer TODO list.

If you already know you want it, grab latest tarball from downloads and read where to start.

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Sip-Communicator – latest Ubuntu sip phone

Sip-communicator promises to be easier, better, and more open than the competition. I’ve only just installed it but it looks like a winner.

Add this PPA:

deb http://download.sip-communicator.org/deb unstable/

Then go to a terminal and type the following commands:-

apt-get update

apt-get install sip-communicator-keyring

apt-get install sip-communicator

Then go into Applications -> Internet -> SIP Communicator

THANKS: John Lewis

(For more instructions and a better tutorial)

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Some extraordinary Ubuntu games

1. Install OpenTTD

Low resolution, but fun

Found this great free gaming site, which nspired me to install the latest OpenTTD. In other words, the FREE version of Transport Tycoon Deluxe.

OpenTTD is the best of both worlds — from previous recollections, LinCity was a poor contender next to the more popular & commercial SimCity and my initial reaction was — you expect me to actually like 4bit colour? OpenTTD seems to have improved on the lot of Unix and Linux freaks who demand better graphics, (retro is only cool if you play Atari) and we can only hope it gets better.

You can either download the new deb from OpenTTD site or use the old one in the Ubuntu repos.

After installing it, you will have to install a few extra files.

You  can also use your original Transport Tycoon Deluxe data files (translation: you need to own a Transport Tycoon Deluxe CD) or use the free alternatives:

download OpenGFX, download OpenSFX and download OpenMSX.

Unstuff and move them into your /usr/share/games/openttd/data folder:

sudo mv <file> /usr/share/games/openttd/data

Now comes the interesting part. Once you start up OpenTTD.

Set the  resolution.

If you have a high end card, you might be a tad disappointed, play around a bit.  (Okay its not exactly  high-res utopia compared to Eternalands and Openlife), but it has its charms.

For starters, the ability to download extra modules ( I downloaded the Netherlands and Swiss Alps) which means you can share landscapes. Being open source, this  feature results in a hackers paradise and great place for kids.

If we can coax the developers to embrace a higher resolution: millions of colours as opposed to thousands, we could be on to something.

Considering its open source, I am sure this will happen soon. Better palettes for instance change the tonality of the resulting image landscape.

I rather like watching the end result of a couple of days of gaming. The  sheer complexity of the finished worlds means there could just be a new fad in sharing virtual real estate. Think about it. Do you really want to waste time building a cybertopia? Get the virtual architects out there to create one for you. Test the results — which are bound to be more like art and less like a geography lesson, for which OpenTTD excels.

2.Install Osmos demo

This is a killer game and the demo has two introductory levels. Wish I had the $10 needed to burn the full version (translates into R80 which for me is two bags of groceries).

Download the latest osmos demo deb

3. Play Wormux

Amazing how some games evolve, from virtually nothing into virtual worlds on their own? Wormux is really looking stunning. Be warned its a 95mb download.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:wormux/ppa

4. World of Goo Demo

When I first heard some geeks raving about World of Goo, I searched around the Net which looked like one giant sales pitch. Trawling through some of my RSS  subscriptions via Google Reader, I found a more sober appraisal,  along with the link to the demo.  A free sample which deploys the physics engine of my NVIDIA 8400GS.

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Google Command interface launched

It had to happen, an official google application that provides access to google services via the command line. In April we showed you how to do this, the unofficial way using surfraw. Now you can do it with the blessing of the worlds most popular search engine company, Google

GoogleCL can be used to google the following services (examples shown):

• Blogger
  $ google blogger post –title “foo” “command line posting”
• Calendar
  $ google calendar add “Lunch with Jim at noon tomorrow”
• Contacts
  $ google contacts list name,email > contacts.csv
• Docs
  $ google docs edit –title “Shopping list”
• Picasa
  $ google picasa create –album “Cat Photos” ~/photos/cats/*.jpg
• Youtube
  $ google youtube post –category Education killer_robots.avi

Unfortunately, the deb which was released yesterday, doesn’t automatically setup the terminal browser. You will have to do this yourself:

gedit /home/user/.googlecl/config

After running one of the services for the first time, the above config was created. I opened it with gedit and added

auth_browser = w3m

Which is the w3m text-based browser. There are a lot more services on the way, and one can only hope this is a sign of things to come. I can think of a number of Net services which could do with a CLI interface.

( Remember to fill in forms with w3m , to log into your google account, you have to hit the enter key.)

Please check the official development page site for the last update.
Please visit the official download page to download GoogleCL (You’ll find a nice deb there waiting for U8UNTU users!)

THANKS Panoet

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