The last time I had tried Ubuntu, it was a rather bitter experience. My graphics card wasn’t fully supported and Ubuntu refused to show anything but a blank screen!! This time round though it was delightful experience.

Like I said earlier, Linux has come a long, long way and I was completely bowled over by the ease of installation. I had thought openSuse represented the zenith of “easy” Linux installs. Ubuntu is way up there and even does openSuse one better. The pain free install is further complimented with a beautifully integrated system and some serious gorgeous eyecandy effects !!

Here are my impressions after playing round with the Meerkat for a few days:

• Boot times are extremely quick. Definitely several times faster than my creaky old Vista Install and also my previous OpenSuse install. Ditto for shutdown
• Hardware support is better by leaps and bounds over what I had seen with previous versions. My graphics card seems to be well supported with no need for any additional driver installation. In addition to this all the other hardware bits and pieces (wi-fi, bluetooth etc) work properly. Even the custom volume controls on my old Dell Inspiron were supported, to my delight.
• Software installation is several shades better than the older “apt-get” systems that I was used to in older versions of Ubuntu. Though for the normal user, you might not even need to install any additional software. The default install comes fully loaded with Open Office, Firefox, Shotwell Picture Manager, Empathy IM, Evolution Mail, Transmission BitTorrent client, Gwibber Social, Rhythmbox and Movie Player to name a few. Adding more software is quite simple using the Software Center and its possible to find replacements for most Windows programs.
• Ubuntu has a very slick and refined UI (see above screenshot). Gone are the orangish shades of previous versions, replaced with new slick black theme. I particularly like the window transitions and the switching between desktops. The manner in which all the elements are integrated together is just awesome !!!
• Ubuntu is also social and resides in the cloud. I love the way they have integrated social networking and email right into the OS. Its very usable and gets the user going almost immediately. In addition to that, Ubuntu One, Ubuntu’s “cloud” service is supposed to bring dropbox like capabilities to the OS. An very intriguing concept, albeit one I am yet to try out.

Overall my take is that Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat is a fairly mature, stable and user friendly operating system. One that should find favor with both novices and old hands. (Also my primary OS for all intents and purposes going forward)

And I haven’t come to the best part as yet – Thanks to the “live” CD provided, you don’t need to install it to use it, just boot from the CD ROM drive and run along with the Meerkat. Go on, what are you waiting for? Run with the Meerkat today !!!

So here is a list of software that just does this on Linux:

1. FSpot
   This is a full featured photo management software for the gnome desktop environment. It supports JPEG, RAW, TIFF, GIF among 16 other formats. You can transfer your photographs from a storage device like a hard disk, memory card, USB stick or your camera. F-SPot lets you tag the images, organize them and even provides a time line for images added. F-Spot also doubles up as quick editor for those small fixes. It features a versioning system so that your original photos are always untouched. And you can even export the images directly on to Flickr, Picasa Web, Gallery, or Original
2. GPhoto
   gPhoto2 is a free, redistributable, ready to use set of digital camera software applications for Unix-like systems, written by a whole team of dedicated volunteers around the world. It supports more than 900 cameras. You can use this to transfer photos from your camera to the Linux box using this.
3. Gimp
   GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. The latest version, Gimp 2.4 has a lot of specialized tools for correcting barrel distortion, doing perspective transformations etc. The application has come a long way from its humble beginnings and is by far the most preferred open source alternative to Photoshop. Most of the features that you would need in normal photo adjustments like contrast corrections, tones and levels etc. are present.
4. Exposure Blend
   This plugin for Gimp lets you combine two or more exposures to get an HDR image. Its a pretty handy plugin to have around. For a detailed tutorial on how to use this plugin click here.
5. UFRaw
   Gimp does not have out of the box RAW support, and so you will need additional plugins to process RAW images.The Unidentified Flying Raw (UFRaw) is a utility to read and manipulate RAW images from digital cameras. It can be used on its own or as a Gimp plug-in. It reads RAW images using Dave Coffin’s raw conversion utility – DCRaw. UFRaw supports color management workflow based on Little CMS, allowing the user to apply ICC color profiles.
6. Rawstudio
   An alternative to using a plugin is to use a stand alone application like Rawstudio. Rawstudio is an open-source program to read and manipulate RAW images from most digital cameras. It has a graphical user interface, so you can simply open a RAW file and experiment with the controls to see how they effect the image. The interface is quite intuitive to use and has simple controls.

This pretty much covers everything that I think is needed to get up and running on Linux. If I have missed anything please feel free to comment and add to the list.

Technorati Tags: Photography, Linux, Gimp, UFRAW, Rawstudio, FSPot, digital, digital darkroom

I’ve been wanting to catalog my entire book collection for quite some time now. I wanted to use something more than a spreadsheet for keeping track of my books. Somewhere down the line I had the grandiose idea of actually writing my own little catalog software, but all that went out of the window once I saw Delicious Library, the library cataloging software of the mac. Unfortunately, no amount of searching found me a good enough clone for the windows desktop (yes I still run a windows desktop). Sometime back, once I got openSUSE up and running, I began hunting for similar applications for openSUSE. After much hunting, I narrowed down on Tellico.Tellico is a fabulous application, however for some reason I couldn’t manage to get it running behind a proxy server. ( I suspect that my limited intelligence and the fact that I am running a gnome desktop had something to do with it.) Anyway, while searching I came across this application called GCstar, and thats when the search ended .

In the words of the GCStar site:

GCstar is a free open source application for managing your collections. Detailed information on each item can be automatically retrieved from the internet and you can store additional data, such as the location or who you’ve lent it to. You may also search and filter your collection by many criteria.

It’s actually much more than that. It’s got a neat skinnable look. The application lets manage Movies,Video games, Books, Music, Numismatic, Wines, Board games and User defined collections. The book collection lets you search several online services like Amazon in order to fetch book data. You can either do this or enter the data by hand. It’s also got various export features. In fact apparently some user has also rigged up a script that lets you scan your books bar code using a web cam and fetch book information based on that (just like delicious). On the negative side the search and fetch seems a tad slow (maybe coz I’m behind a proxy and firewall) and some of the book covers fetched are inconsistent with their titles. Besides these minor teething problems, GCstar seems to be a great application to have. So if you like collecting stuff and want to be an organized pack rat, I suggest you give this application a try. (Did I mention that it works on windows too ? )

Technorati Tags: GCstar, book collection, catalog, , Linux, openSUSE 10.2

Well to help other Linux newbies wanting to get widgets on to the desktop, here is how I went about getting gDesklets:

First up, you need to fetch the RPM for the gDesklet package. I found the package in Guru’s RPM repository. For information on how to add a repository and on how to add Guru’s RPM repository you can refer to the official openSUSE site. Once the package is installed, you can find the gDesklet application under Utilities.

Next, you would need to get some widgets. Head over to the official site for some of the more stable widgets or if you are comfortable with you can try your luck at the unofficial widget repository.

Once you have downloaded a widget you can install it through the widget manager. You can access the widget manager by right clicking on the system tray icon and choosing manage widgets. After this installing is as simple as using the File -> Install Package option and navigating to place where you downloaded the widget package. Running the widget is again accomplished by the File menu.

Once a widget is running, you can position it by dragging it around on the desktop. To move a desklet, right click on it and choose the Move Desklet option. Most desklets can be similarly configured through the Configure Desklet option.

With this you should be up and running with geDesklets on openSUSE 10.2. Hope this post is helpful for those wanting to get gDesklets working with openSUSE.

Technorati tags : Linux, openSUSE 10.2, gdesklets, howto

After much deliberation, lots of coffee and trawling through forums, I settled on openSUSE as the distro of choice. While most things ran right out of the box, I did do some tweaking to get things working as I wanted. Since I did have a decent amount of trouble figuring out things, I thought a small handy How To would help other people installing openSUSE on this family of Dell computers.

First up is my laptop configuration (which should give you a fair idea of the differences between my system and yours):

• Intel Core 2 Duo 1.6 GHz
• 15″ Widescreen Display
• 256 MB ATI mobility Radeon(R) X1400
• 1 GB RAM
• 80 GB HDD
• DVD+/- RW Drive
• Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 3945 chipset
• Dell(TM) Wireless 355 Bluetooth Module

Here is what I did:

Getting openSUSE
The most obvious thing was to get the appropriate ISO image for installation. You can either download this from the web or buy a disk from the site. For those planning to buy the disk, Novell apparently does not retail it in India. I have had extensive (and somewhat interesting) conversations with Novell in India regarding this. Since it was a dual core processor, I got the X86_64 Iso’s from the official site.

PreInstall
Next I needed to prepare the hard drive to install openSUSE. Vista ships with a new NTFS file structure. As per various forums online, it isn’t recommended to resize this partition using the partitioner that openSUSE ships with. So I got one that did handle the new NTFS file structure properly. Using it I shrunk my windows partition and freed up about 60 GB in FAT32 formatted space for openSUSE.

Installation
Installation was dirt simple, nothing more than a little glorified point and click on a wizard. This is one area that openSUSE really scores over other distros, it’s installation is ultra user friendly ! Initially you need to set some standard things like language, time zone and desktop (KDE or Gnome). After this you come to a screen where you can choose the how openSUSE should partition your hard drive as well as what software should be installed.The only changes I needed to make was to point the installer to use the 60GB partion for openSUSE. This can be done in the expert mode. Here I accepted the defaults for dividing the 60 GB partition I had created previously and left the rest of the settings as it was. Once the installation was done, the system rebooted and bought me to screens for setting up the root user. After this you need to configure various settings for the network, hostname, firewall etc. were set up. Since I intended to use the internet through a proxy server on my windows desktop machine, I set the network card with the appropriate IP address and gateway. After this (and this part is the worst part) openSUSE checks for updates online, and this one slow process. Expect this to take quite some time. Once updates (if any) are installed, the last step was to set up a user. The system then rebooted after saving the configuration and I got a nice grub menu.

Post-Install
A couple of things here:

Vista : First of all the Vista partition was correctly recognized and shown as an option in the GRUB menu to boot from. Prior to installing, I had read a couple of posts that involved editing the GRUB menu to make a dual boot system with Vista. However I had to do no such thing, which was a very pleasant surprise.

Wi-Fi: While the Wi-Fi card was correctly recognized, I wasn’t very sure that it would work properly. A couple of weeks later I got a chance to test out wi-fi on my college campus. Initially I had some difficulty in the security settings for the card, however after sitting for about an hour I managed to get it connected to the wi-fi hot spots on campus.

Bluetooth: The bluetooth card also seems to have been detected correctly,haven’t got a chance to test it out yet.

Display: The display initially was quite bad, as the default drivers don’t seem to offer the best resolution. In order to get the best possible display you need to get the latest ATI drivers for Linux. You would need to build a RPM for the drivers using the utility on the site. The openSUSE site has a detailed HOW TO for doing this and installing the drivers and configuring ATI cards. By following those instructions I was able to set up the graphics card properly on my laptop.

Software: Software can be installed from the various openSUSE repositories. In addition you can use popular repos like PackMan and Guru. A word of caution though, be prepared to wait for quite long while setting up new repositories etc. as YAST is very slow.

Video and Sound: Both these work quite well. The only problem I faced was that video playback was extremely distorted. Turning off direct rendering in MPlayer seemed to fix this.

I’ve been working on this system for about 2 odd months now, and haven’t faced any problems as such. It hasn’t crashed as such and been quite stable. Linux has really come of age as an mature and user friendly OS. The only obstacle standing in it’s way for wider acceptance is possibly the old urban legend of it being a real pain to setup and use. Once that little step is overcome I guess a lot of people will take the giant leap of faith and fall in love with the cute little penguin. So be a brave-heart, and fall in love today.

Technorati Tags:Linux, openSUSE 10.2, howto, dell, inspiron 6400