Go green with Linux

Last week in Serbia was marked by the green week initiative (SR), and this one is marked by freedom, it’s Creative Commons’ 6th birthday. This gave me an idea for this post. Use Linux to go green.

And how will Linux help you? By cutting your energy bills and lowering your e-waste production.

Few tests concluded that both Linux desktops and servers consume less power than Windows-powered machines.

Desktops: “When the Lenovo ThinkPad T60 was idling with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS “Hardy Heron” it had quite an advantage over Windows Vista Ultimate. Ubuntu was consuming five less Watts, which equates to more than 10% less power, over Microsoft Windows Vista. In our first server power consumption test, Vista Ultimate had consumed less power but it was just two Watts and both of these systems were consuming in excess of 170 Watts.”

Servers: “In most cases when sitting idle, Windows Server 2008 drew slightly more power than either Linux did on the same server. The exception was when Windows Server 2008 was running in power savings mode on the Dell server, where it drew on average 3% less power.”

Although, these results may be dependant on the actual test hardware, still it’s a good indication. Check out Intel’s LessWatts initiative, which aims to help you to lower your computer’s energy consumption if you use Linux. Also, there are tools that will help you make your Linux-powered computer consume less energy.

Another way it can help is by reducing your e-waste production. UK government conducted a study which showed that the typical hardware refresh period for Linux systems was 6-8 years, while Windows systems’ hardware refresh period was 3-4 years. Why is that? Consider that minimum requirements for Ubuntu, which is a fairly modern Linux distribution, are 64 MB of RAM, 4GB of HDD space and 300 MHz x86 processor. That configuration wouldn’t be able to run all the nice graphic effects, but you would have a ready-to-use system. For nice graphic effects, consider installing it on at least 700 MHz CPU with 256 or 384 MB of RAM. And there are also distributions which can work on even older configurations, like DSL or Puppy Linux. If you have an old computer which you don’t use, install one of those on it. It will serve nicely to surf the Internet, or to work on your documents.

So, go ahead and try it, if you’re not using it already. Go green .

How to create rotating wallpapers in Gnome

Few days ago I found artwork suggestions for Fedora 10. I really like the wallpapers in Solar theme. They should change based on the time of the day. As I don’t think that is supported in Gnome, I wrote this little script that does the job.

To run it, a directory with wallpapers needs to be passed.

./rotate-wallpapers /path/to/wallpaper/directory/

If you want it to run in the background, you can press Alt+F2 in Gnome, and run it.

/path/to/rotate-wallpapers /path/to/wallpaper/directory/

Once it’s run, it will count the number of wallpapers in the directory (files ending in jpg, jpeg, gif, png or svg), divide 1440 by that number and use the result as a period of time on which wallpapers will be rotated. It will set the first wallpaper, and sleep until the wallpaper needs to be changed.

So, this script is pretty much specific. It will work best with the series of wallpapers that have subtle changes, such as the Solar wallpapers. But, you’re free to use it in every way you want. Good luck …

If you find any bugs, please post it in the comments. Thanks.

Mozilla team and Ubuntu Hardy Heron

This is the first post on the new domain, so I would like to make it a bit special .

Hardy Heron will be released in five days, and Ubuntu’s Mozilla team has been quite busy preparing all the goodies. So, what has Mozilla team done?

Firefox 3 beta 5 is in the official repositories. It replaces the old Firefox 2, which can still be installed from the repositories. It is a pity that Firefox 3 release candidate is coming out few days after Hardy, but Firefox 3 beta 5 is very useful and pretty stable for day-to-day use. Just look at the reviews. And I’m sure we’ll be able to install Firefox 3 as soon as it comes out from Fabien Tassin’s Personal Package Archive.

Also, many members have been testing, editing and packaging Firefox 3 (and upgraded some of Firefox2) extensions for Ubuntu, so this release brings more of them than before. Currently, around 30 extensions are in the repositories. The work is still in progress, so expect more. If you would like to see your favourite extensions, feel free to suggest them at Firefox 3 extensions wiki. Ubufox extension makes it easy to install other extensions. Start it from Tools -> Add-ons -> Get Ubuntu extensions.

Prism, which allows to users to move webapps to their desktop, is also in the repositories. Be sure to check it out.

And, if you feel like living on the wild side, you can test Thunderbird 3 alpha from Fabien’s Personal Package Archive. No links, since this can be very dangerous. You have been warned .

Congrats to the whole Mozilla team, and to the Ubuntu community .

Are we a bit hypocritical?

I’m a regular on Serbian’s Ubuntu LoCo forum. Today I stumbled upon one post that got me into thinking “Are we a bit hypocritical?”. Here’s what happened…

There is one guy who messed up his system a bit with Windows and Linux installations and removals. He wanted to have both operating systems on his computer and he asked for a solution. Another guy tried to help him. The problematic part of his message was the comment “If you need help with removing Linux because you want to stay on that other OS, you’re not gonna find it here.” But why?

We, the FOSS community (or Ubuntu community in this particular case), are supposed to fight for freedom. In my opinion, that includes the freedom of choice, to let the user use whatever he or she wants. Including that other OS, which may have a lot of restrictions.

Sure, it wouldn’t be wise to just say “Remove Linux”. I’m not for that in the first place. But if there was no fix, why wouldn’t we help someone to switch back? That is what freedom of choice is all about, right? Someone might say that by not helping others to switch back to that other OS, we will make them adapt to Linux. Someone might say that it’s against its principles to help someone switch back to that other OS. But, if the only fix is the switch back, wouldn’t it be helpful to explain how to switch back.

What is my way of fight for freedom? Education. I think that is the best way to do that. Show people what freedom gives. The rest will follow.

Flocking…

Flock 1.0 is out. For those who haven’t heard about it, it is “a social web browser” that integrates services from the social sites, making them easier to use. So far, it is going well. Last time I checked it out it was in some alpha or beta phase. Also, I wasn’t a big user of social sites, so it was not attractive to me. This morning I read on TechCrunch that Flock 1.0 is out, so I decided to give it a try. Here’s my report .

Right after the first start it asked me if I want it to import bookmarks, passwords and settings from Firefox. It went fine – just select what you want to import and move on.

You are greeted with My World – a portal which presents your Favorite Pages, Feeds and Media. It is nice and clean, but I think there are some other sites that gives much better experience. In my opinion, My World is not planned as a big feature in Flock. Ok, let’s move on…

I like how they put the buttons for sidebars next to the Bookmarks toolbar. And they don’t take up much space, which is a plus. The People sidebar will give you updates from your accounts: Twitter, Facebook… The Media bar is a nice feature. You can search and then view the results from various media sites (obviously) inside the bar. I also like the Favorites bar. You can choose where you want to save your bookmarks – on your computer, online favorites site, or both. The thing that I like the most is the blog writer. Just start it, setup your account and write a post. There are links all around Flock that say “Blog this”, so it is easy to blog about something immediately. I still haven’t checked out the Web clipboard, so I don’t know how useful is it.

If you want to use Flock to its max, you should allow it to remember your accounts. It will do that automatically when you log in on those sites. Though, I have encountered one problem – it wasn’t able to remember my WordPress account. This is a known bug and there is a workaround: launch blog writer, skip the setup part and then do it manually (Edit -> Configure blog accounts).

So far, I have to say that I like it. I would like to see support for Google’s Picasa and Last.fm. Also, it would be nice if the Flock dev team could support upload and management of files to WordPress accounts.
In conclusion: if you are a social sites user, you will like it. Otherwise, I think that you won’t find too much use for its features.

*update* Great… I have just found out that it didn’t set the tags for this post, even though I wrote them.
*update#2* Oh, it did set the tags, but not the WordPress’.

*update after few days* Well, I have looked a bit and found out that everything I needed from Flock is already there for Firefox. The only thing that is missing is the Media bar.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: flock, internet, social, browser, software, review

Wallpaper clock screenlet

I’m a regular visitor of VladStudio’s website, run by Vlad Gerasimov, a digital artist. It is a spot to find a lot of beautiful wallpapers. Recently, he began making wallpaper clocks – dynamic wallpapers that show date, hour, minute and stuff… I liked the idea, but I wasn’t able to use them on my system, as there was a Windows-only program for it.

I checked out his site last night and was surprised when I saw that there is a Wallpaper clock screenlet for Linux (download).

This screenlet requires Screenlets software to be installed. Once that is done, the screenlet needs to be unpacked to ~/.screenlets/ directory, or /usr/local/share/screenlets/ (this way it will be accessible to every user on the system). New wallpaper clocks are added by unpacking .wcz archive to ~/.screenlets/WallpaperClock/wallpapers/, or /usr/local/share/screenlets/WallpaperClock/wallpapers/ (depending on the place where the screenlet is located).

Well, I hope this will be useful . Enjoy…

Edit: This screenlet depends on python-imaging package.

Skype for Linux 1.4 beta

The new beta version of Skype for Linux is out and it brings us the new interface. In my opinion it is simpler and less cluttered than the old one.

• The username and password fields are now part of the main window.
• The “File, View, …” menu is gone. The menu is located under the gear icon in the lower left corner.
• The tabs are removed, which resulted in dial pad and call status to open in separate windows. This seems as a more elegant solution. Call history is located under the clock icon in the upper right corner. The new events are accessed by clicking the same icon.

And it seems a bit more stable then the 1.3 series . On the other hand, it seems there is still no video support. Though, I did get a notification of users that have a webcam set up.

The release notes are available at https://developer.skype.com/LinuxSkype/ReleaseNotes.