January 2012 | Linux Blog

Powerful and Open MediaCenter for Ubuntu Linux - Enna

Enna is a Media Center application. Featuring a simple user interface, Enna allows the user to browse and play music and video files, browse pictures and play photo slideshows, build a database of the available media retrieve information from the Internet (such as covers, fan art, song lyrics, and much more). Enna is based on the powerful Enlightenment Foundations Libraries (EFL) for its graphical user interface and GeeXboX libraries for multimedia playback and information retrieval.

Enna Currently Supported ...
* Read your favorite books from over the Internet. Enna currently support GoComics and OneManga content providers.
* Get information from your system and configure it (as well as Enna) quite easily.
* Listen to your favorite songs. Enna currently can display your music cover, the usual metadata information (song title, artist, album) and lyrics as well.
* Provide a pictures wall representation of your photo collection. Also supports customizable slideshow effects.

E-Book Reader for Ubuntu Linux - FBReader

An electronic book (e-book, ebook, digital book) is a book publication in digital form, consisting of text, images, or both, and produced on, published through, and readable on computers or other electronic devices. Sometimes the equivalent of a conventional printed book, e-books can also be born digital.

FBReader is an e-book reader.
Main features:
* supports several open e-book formats: fb2, html, chm, plucker, palmdoc, ztxt, tcr (psion text), rtf, oeb, openreader, non-DRM'edmobipocket, plain text, epub, eReader
* reads directly from tar, zip, gzip, bzip2 archives (you can have several books in one archive)
* supports a structured view of your e-book collection
* automatically determines encodings
* automatically generates a table of contents
* keeps the last open book and the last read positions for all open books between runs
* automatic hyphenation (patterns for several languages are included)
* searching and downloading books from www.feedbooks.com and www.litres.ru
* partial CSS support for epub files

HTML and XML Manipulation Utilities - HTML-XML-utils

HTML-XML-utils consists of a set of small C programs (filters) that read HTML and XML files and can add a table of contents, an alphabetical index, a bibliography, cross-references, numbered headings, remove elements, count elements, pretty-print them, etc. When it reads HTML, it assumes the code is correct HTML 4.0 or close to it.

Below are the sets of utilities included:
asc2xml      - convert from UTF-8 to &#nnn; entities
xml2asc      - convert from &#nnn; entities to UTF-8
hxaddid      - add IDs to selected elements
hxcite       - replace bibliographic references by hyperlinks
hxcite-mkbib - expand references and create bibliography
hxclean      - apply heuristics to correct an HTML file

Install and Configure Cherokee Web Server Under Ubuntu Linux

Cherokee is a high-performance web server. It is very fast, flexible and easy to configure. In fact, it is the fastest web server there is. It offers support for the widespread technologies nowadays: FastCGI, SCGI, PHP, CGI, SSI, TLS and SSL encrypted connections, Virtual hosts, Authentication, on the fly encoding, Load Balancing, Apache compatible log files, Data Base Ba-lancer, downtime-free updates and upgrades, Reverse HTTP Proxy, and much more.

Unlike many other web servers out there, Cherokee gracefully handles many concurrent connections, has a low memory footprint, and provides load balancing facilities. As such, it is suitable for usage among a wide variety of systems, from tiny embedded devices to huge enterprise grade infrastructures. It is also multi-platform, offering native performance for Unix, Linux and Windows systems.

Convert CHM file to PDF under Linux - chm2pdf

Microsoft Compiled HTML Help (CHM) is a Microsoft proprietary online help format. It was introduced as the successor to Microsoft WinHelp with the release of Windows 98, and is still supported in Windows 7.

Help is delivered as a binary file with the .chm extension. It contains a set of HTML files, a hyperlinked table of contents, and an index file.

The file starts with bytes "ITSF" (in ASCII), for "Info-Tech Storage Format". The format has been reverse-engineered by Matthew Russotto with assistance from Peter Ferrie and Paul Wise. Russotto's documentation is freely available at http://www.russotto.net/chm/chmformat.html.

CHM file is not recognize by Linux and cannot be open using any default application, you can either use chm viewer or convert this chm file to some other format like PDF to view

Web Based Linux Command Line SSH Terminal - Ajaxterm

Ajaxterm is a web based terminal written in python and some AJAX JavaScript for client side. It can use almost any web browser and even works through firewalls.. It was totally inspired and works almost exactly like http://anyterm.org/ except it's much easier to install.

Ajaxterm Installation:
Ubuntu users can use following command to install Ajaxterm:

sudo apt-get install ajaxterm

Other distribution:
Open the terminal and type following command to install Ajaxterm:

wget http://antony.lesuisse.org/ajaxterm/files/Ajaxterm-0.10.tar.gz
tar zxvf Ajaxterm-0.10.tar.gz
cd Ajaxterm-0.10
./ajaxterm.py

Convert HTML pages to WML (WAP) or i-mode pages for Mobile - Html2Wml

Html2Wml converts HTML pages to WML decks, suitable for being viewed on a Wap device. The program can be launched from a shell to statically convert a set of pages, or as a CGI to convert a particular (potentially dynamic) HTML resource.

Although the result is not guarantied to be valid WML, it should be the case for most pages. Good HTML pages will most probably produce valid WML decks. To check and correct your pages, you can use W3C's software: the *HTML Validator*, available online at http://validator.w3.org and *HTML Tidy*, written by Dave Raggett.

Html2Wml provides the following features:
* translation of the links
* limitation of the cards size by splitting the result into several cards
* inclusion of files (similar to the SSI)
* compilation of the result (using the WML Tools, see the section on "LINKS")
* a debug mode to check the result using validation functions

Web File Explorer and Manager - eXtplorer

eXtplorer is a web-based File Manager. You can use it to

* Copy & Move Files and Directories by Drag&Drop
* Dynamic Directory Tree with on-demand loading of sub directories
* Edit Files (with Syntax-Highlighting thanks to EditArea)
* Rename, Delete or Create new Files and Directories
* Access Files through FTP or directly (using PHP) to totally overcome permission and file ownership issues
* Upload or Download files just as you like
* Create and Extract Archives (ZIP, Tar, Tar/GZ, Tar/BZ)
* User Management with different permission levels like "View only" or "Edit" and "Admin"
* installs easily as a component for Joomla!.

All these features are packed into an intuitive Layout which makes working with files very easy. Thanks to the great ExtJS Javascript Library you can drag & drop folders and files, filter directories and sort the file list using various criteria.

You can even use eXtplorer to login to the FTP server (like net2ftp) and work as if you were using an FTP client.

Android App for Linuxpoison Blog

Now, Linuxpoison blog readers can enjoy this blog on their Android phone or tablet using dedicated Android app.

You can download Linuxpoison Android app : LinuxPoison Android App

Soon, will be coming with the Iphone App.

Great Collection of Small Utility - Littleutils

The littleutils include a duplicate file finder (repeats), image optimizers (opt-jpg opt-png opt-gif recomp-jpg), file rename tools (lowercase uppercase), archive re-compressors (to-bzip to-7zip to-lzma), a tempfile utility (tempname), and more ...

littleutils Features
* Includes several basic file property query utilities.
* Includes several file renaming utilities.
* Includes several loss-less image file re-compressors.
* Includes several compressed file re-compressors.
* Includes a duplicate file-finding utility.
* Includes a secure temporary file creation utility.

Batch Image-converter and Resizer - XnConvert

XnConvert is a cross-platform batch image-converter and re-sizer with a powerful and ease of use experience. All common picture and graphics formats are supported (i.e. JPG, PNG, TIFF, GIF, Camera RAW, JPEG2000, WebP, OpenEXR) as well as supporting over 500 other image formats. Also available within the batch operations include rotating, adding of watermarks, adding of text along with many image-adjustment features such as brightness, shadows and more.

XnConvert is free for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Both 32-bit and 64-bit editions are available.

XnConvert features
* Batch adding of files and folders
* Support for drag and drop of files
* Batch rotating, cropping, resizing and more
* Adding of photo masks
* Preserving or removing image metadata in conversions
* Multipage image file support (i.e animated GIF, APNG, TIFF)
* Command line integration via NConvert
* Filters - such as 'Blur', 'Gaussian Blur', 'Emboss', "Sharpen' and much more
* Effects - such as 'Old camera' and much more

UI Application for Alternatives Configuration - Galternatives

update-alternatives creates, removes, maintains and displays information about the symbolic links comprising the Debian/Ubuntu alternatives system.

It is possible for several programs fulfilling the same or similar functions to be installed on a single system at the same time. For example, many systems have several text editors installed at once. This gives choice to the users of a system, allowing each to use a different editor, if desired, but makes it difficult for a program to make a good choice for an editor to invoke if the user has not specified a particular preference.

Debian's alternatives system aims to solve this problem. A generic name in the filesystem is shared by all files providing interchangeable functionality. The alternatives system and the system administrator together determine which actual file is referenced by this generic name.

For example, if the browsers like Chrome, Firefox and Opera are installed on the system, the alternatives system will cause the generic name /usr/bin/x-www-browser to refer to /usr/bin/google-chrome by default. The system administrator can override this and cause it to refer to /usr/bin/firefox instead, and the alternatives system will not alter this setting until explicitly requested to do so.

UI Application for NoteTaking and Sketching - Xournal

Xournal is an application for notetaking, sketching, keeping a journal using a stylus. It is free software (GNU GPL) and runs on Linux (recent distributions) and other GTK+/Gnome platforms. It is similar to Microsoft Windows Journal or to other alternatives such as Jarnal and Gournal.

Xournal supports annotation of PDF files. Xournal uses the Poppler library to render PDF documents. The documents then become immutable background images. Annotation can then proceed using any of Xournal's standard tools: Pen, eraser, text, and highlighter.

Xournal Features:
* gettext internationalization
* Catalan translation, French translation
* use poppler instead of pdftoppm to render PDF backgrounds
* various improvements to UI and to key bindings
* use gtk-print instead of libgnomeprint for printing
* custom color chooser
* option to have tablet buttons toggle the mapping rather than draw
* paper color chooser

How to Install / Configure PostgreSQL Under Ubuntu Linux

PostgreSQL, often simply Postgres, is an object-relational database management system (ORDBMS) available for many platforms including Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, MS Windows and Mac OS X. It is released under the PostgreSQL License, which is an MIT-style license, and is thus free and open source software. PostgreSQL is developed by the PostgreSQL Global Development Group, consisting of a handful of community volunteers employed and supervised by companies such as Red Hat.

It implements the majority of the SQL:2008 standard, is ACID-compliant, is fully transactional (including all DDL statements), has extensible data types, operators, and indexes, and has a large number of extensions written by third parties.

PostgreSQL Installation:
Open the terminal and type following command to install postgresql

sudo apt-get install postgresql

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