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Make your Ubuntu desktop more beautiful

Vinod Ponmanadiyil — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 20:09:42 +0000

The default Ubuntu Human Theme has turned more ‘lighter’ after the Hoary days – much to my dislike. Nimbus is a Sun Microsystem’s Look & Feel which looks very professional and complete. The theme has been available for many Linux distributions and is very fast and agile.

I wanted Nimbus for my Ubuntu Feisty Fawn and out of luck as most of the mirrors were down. But Sandino Flores Moreno was kind enough to provide me with the following script to install Nimbus. Execute this script, and you will have your own packages in a few minutes.

#############################

sudo apt-get install fakeroot dpkg-dev devscripts debhelper libgtk2.0-dev icon-naming-utils intltool

wget -c http://dlc.sun.com/osol/jds/downloads/extras/nimbus-0.0.8.tar.bz2

wget -c http://zap.tartarus.org/~ds/debian/dists/sid/main/source/nimbus_0.0.6-1.diff.gz

tar xf nimbus-0.0.8.tar.bz2

cd nimbus-0.0.8

zcat ../nimbus_0.0.6-1.diff.gz | patch -p1

chmod +x debian/rules

debchange -v 0.0.8-1

sudo apt-get build-dep

fakeroot dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc

#####################

Install “gtk2-engines-nimbus_0.0.6-1_i386.deb” and “nimbus-icon-theme_0.0.6-1_all.deb” further. Finally go to System->Preferences->Theme and select ‘Nimbus’.
Enjoy your new Ubuntu Look!

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Amazon S3 Storage Tools and Clients

Vinod Ponmanadiyil — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 19:00:23 +0000

I have had a quota overflow at my FlickR account recently. They would only allow me to see the recent 200 photos. That means very less as I have got used to taking frequent snaps on my mobile phone and Shozu -ing it over . Personal Media is one hell of a thing to manage. Call me a storage paranoid, I have duplicates of personal media thrown all over USB storage, FlickR, PicasaWeb, you name it!. After researching for quite some time I have finally signed-up for an Amazon S3 based Grid Storage Service. It works out cheap and reliable.

New bandwidth price (effective June 1, 2007)
$0.10 per GB – all data uploaded

$0.18 per GB – first 10 TB / month data downloaded
$0.16 per GB – next 40 TB / month data downloaded
$0.13 per GB – data downloaded / month over 50 TB
Data transferred between Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 will remain free of charge

New request-based price (effective June 1, 2007)
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*
* No charge for delete requests

But Amazon S3 is designed NOT to be consumer facing service. You need to talk in terms of APIs with Amazon S3. Many have found this to be a great business opportunity and created many Amazon S3 Storage Tools. Jeremy Zawodny have done a good job of listing them, but I found a few more tools during my research and here they are – categorized.

Command Line Tools

S3Sync – S3 Sync is a cross platform Ruby Program that easily transfers directories between a local directory and an S3 bucket:prefix. It behaves somewhat, but not precisely, like the rsync program. John Eberly has an efficient way of using S3Sync with Jets3t. [OpenSource]

Quillen S3 Backup – Provides a very efficient chunking system which minimizes the amount of data that has to be transferred between successive versions of a file. Great bandwidth-aware solution for your Amazon S3 account. [OpenSource]

S3cmd – is a command line tool to upload, retrieve and manage data in Amazon S3. [OpenSource]

Drive Letter Integration / Virtual File System

S3Fuse – helps mount S3 buckets as local resource on most Unix/Linux systems. Looks complicated to setup. [OpenSource]

JungleDisk – An excellent, rock-solid solution which works well on Linux and Windows platforms. The Virtual File System is realized atop a cache which makes life lot easier on slower bandwidth connections. Too bad that they don’t offer any other purchase option other than Amazon payments , which does not allow non US customers [Commercial]

S3WebDAV – This java based solution Provides a read+Write WebDAV interface on Unix/Linux systems for your S3 account. This WebDAV URL can be mapped to a drive letter for easier file operations. [OpenSource]

S3Drive - S3Drive is a Windows application that lets you access the Amazon web space as a local network drive. Apart from the ease of use, S3Drive is highly bandwidth aware and fault-tolerant. [OpenSource]

Browser Based / Online

S3Fox Firefox browser extension – Works very well just like an FTP client with 2 panes to operate with. Plus, You can setup automatic synchronization between local folder and S3. [Free]

Sync2S3 - is an online service which helps you manage your S3 buckets and resources through the browser. [Commercial]

S3Browse – You can use this website to manage your Amazon S3 account. [Free]

S3 Browser – is a server-side PHP application that lets you manage your S3 storage and data in it using a web browser. [OpenSource]

Cross Platform Tools

Jets3t ( Pronounced ‘jet-set‘ ) - is a Java based Toolkit, which is very actively under development. The toolkit provides Java programmers with a powerful yet simple API for interacting with S3 and managing data stored there, while the applications like Jets3t CockPit and Uploader allow anyone to easily manage and interact with their S3 accounts. [OpenSource]

S3Backup – S3 Backup is a fail-safe, encrypted online backup solution. [Commercial]

BucketExplorer – A very well designed Java based Application with extensive auditing options for your S3 buckets. [Commercial]

Service Related

Amazon S3 plugin for WordPress – Allows you to easily use Amazon S3 with your WordPress blog. S3 Bucket can be easily accessed from the WordPress admin screen. [OpenSource]

FlickR to S3 backup Tool – This is a minimal Python script to backup your FlickR photos to your Amazon S3 account. [OpenSource]

Conclusion

One thing to consider before you select your Amazon S3 Tool is the Integrity and Format of your data. S3 allows http-based access and encryption. Choose a tool or setup a mechanism yourself to encrypt your private data before you store them on S3. Your data should be retrievable even without any dependency on the tool. I chose Jets3t over everything else because I found it to be highly customizable and programmable, not to forget the excellent Cockpit.[

[Update]

A beautiful Amazon S3 Client for Mac OS X : S3Hub

Another useful freeware Amazon S3 Client for Windows : Cloudberry S3 Explorer

Google Desktop Search for Linux available

Vinod Ponmanadiyil — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 05:09:46 +0000

Google has released the long awaited desktop search option for Linux platform. It officially supports Red Hat,Fedora, Suse, Mandriva and more popular Debian/Ubuntu x86 versions.
The configuration Guide for Ubuntu 7.04(Feisty) is very detailed yet simple.
I will post later if this is better than the Beagle.

Google Desktop Search for Linux supports the following features:-
* Gmail
* Text files and source code
* PDF and PS files
* HTML files
* Email from Thunderbird
* OpenOffice.org documents
* Image and music files
* Man pages and Info pages
* File and folder names

Linux don’t have a decent Blog Editor?

Vinod Ponmanadiyil — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 07:58:54 +0000

Firefox is slow as a snail on my Windows XP laptop these days. I take the blame partly because of the number of plugins I might have fed it. The system is freezing every now and then.

I’ve got around 500+ Feeds to track everyday through Netvibes. That excellent ajaxed’ web application is crawling to death within Firefox. I was excited to see the Safari for windows, but it is not so stable and secure as of now.

I have been using Ubuntu from the Hoary days to last years Dapper. Switched partly due to organizational policies of using Windows. But these system freezes are tempting me to go back to the Ubuntu times.

I got the Feisty Fawn CD from a colleague and booted off. The primary concern for me was to find a decent blogging client for WordPress on Ubuntu. Searched around and did not find any good ones. I am finally giving a try with the ScribeFire. The Firefox plugin which helps you blog on many platforms.

So now, I have booted off the Feisty CD, Fired up the Firefox, installed the ScribeFire plugin and is writing this post inside ScribeFire. This is no comparison the cozy world of Microsoft Windows Live Writer. Still there is live previews and Technorati inline-tags support. Let me see how it goes. Wish someone found a way to get Windows Live Writer Working with Wine. I guess it is not easy, as WLW uses the latest .NET runtime features.

Does anyone have any Ubuntu Blogging Stories to share?!

[tags] blogging tools, Ubuntu, Windows Live Writer, ScribeFire [/tags]