February 2012 | Linux Blog

Utility to Search Google via your GNOME menu/panel - Googlizer

Googlizer is a panel launcher for the GNOME desktop, although is by no means restricted to use in the panel, or within GNOME. It takes the X selection, sends it to either the Google search engine ( , or local equivalent), or an arbitrary search URL specified on the command line, and then passes the results to the user’s preferred browser in GNOME. This browser then starts up and shows the results of the search.

It is not designed to be invoked from the command line; but is supposed to be added to the user’s panel via the menu system. To place it on a panel, add a launcher and specify the path to the Googlizer binary as the command in the launcher options, or if you have a menu entry on the GNOME menu, you can drag a copy of that launcher onto the panel.

Quick File and Folder Preview for Ubuntu Linux - Globus-Preview

Gloobus-Preview is an extension for the Gnome Desktop Environment designed to enable a full screen preview of any kind of file. It’s based on Apple’s “Quicklook”.

Globus-Preview allows instant access to a variety of file types without the need of opening their default application. It allows you to take a quick look at the content of a file on the fly, saving you valuable time and CPU resources. Video and audio files can be navigated on preview mode by dragging the slider of the progress bar at any given time.

Globus-Preview can currently preview over 40 file formats
Images: jpeg / png / icns / bmp / svg / gif / psd / xcf
Documents: pdf / cbr / cbz / doc / xls / odf / ods / odp / ppt
Source: c++ / c# / java / javascript / php / xml / log / sh / python
Audio: mp3 / ogg / midi / 3gp / wav
Video: mpg /avi / ogg / 3gp / mkv / flv
Other: folders / ttf / srt / plain-text

Text To Speech and Translation Application For Ubuntu Linux - Gespeaker

eSpeak is a compact open source software speech synthesizer for English and other languages, for Linux and Windows. eSpeak uses a "formant synthesis" method. This allows many languages to be provided in a small size. The speech is clear, and can be used at high speeds, but is not as natural or smooth as larger synthesizers which are based on human speech recordings.

eSpeak is available as:
* A command line program (Linux and Windows) to speak text from a file or from stdin.
* A shared library version for use by other programs.

Gespeaker is a GTK+ front-end for espeak. It allows to play a text in many languages with settings for voice, pitch, volume, speed and word gap. The text played can also be recorded to WAV file.

Gespeaker supports multiple languages, currently English, Italian, French and Spanish. It works well with both Gnome, XFCE, LXDE environments.

Embedding Terminal in Nautilus - Nautilus Terminal

Nautilus Terminal is a terminal embedded in Nautilus, the GNOME's file browser. It is always open in the current folder, and follows the navigation (the "cd" command is automatically executed when you move to an other folder).

Nautilus Terminal features:
* It always follows your navigation in your folders.
* It supports Copy/Paste (Ctrl+Shift+C / Ctrl+Shift+V).
* It supports drag & drop of files and folders.
* It can be hidden/shown when you want (with the F4 key).
* It is resizeable.

Tool to Repair Frequent Boot Problems - Boot-Repair

Boot-Repair is an simple tool to recover access to your Operating Systems.

* Easy-to-use (repair in 1 click ! )
* Free (GPL open-source license)
* Safe (automatic backups)
* Can recover access to Windows (XP, Vista, Seven).
* Can recover access to Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint...
* Can recover access to any OS (Windows, MacOS, Linux..) if your PC contains Debian, Ubuntu or derivative.
* Can repair MBR-locked OEM computer boot if the original boot-sector has been saved by Clean-Ubiquity
* Can repair the boot when you have the "GRUB Recovery" error message
* Options to reinstall GRUB2 boot-loader easily (OS by default, purge, unhidden, kernel options..)
* and much more ! (EFI, SATA, filesystem repair...)

Free Video Editing Tool - LiVES

LiVES is a Video Editing System. It is designed to be simple to use, yet powerful. It is small in size, yet it has many advanced features.

LiVES mixes real-time video performance and non-linear editing in one professional quality application. It will let you start editing and making video right away, without having to worry about formats, frame sizes, or frame-rates. It is a very flexible tool which is used by both professional VJ's and video editors - mix and switch clips from the keyboard, use dozens of real-time effects, trim and edit your clips in the clip editor, and bring them together using the multitrack timeline. You can even record your performance in real time, and then edit it further or render it straight away.

For the more technically minded, the application is frame and sample accurate, and it can be controlled remotely or scripted for use as a video server. And it supports all of the latest free standards.

Linux System Information and Benchmark tool - HardInfo

Benchmarking means measuring the speed with which a computer system will execute a computing task, in a way that will allow comparison between different hard/software combinations. It does not involve user-friendliness, aesthetic or ergonomic considerations or any other subjective judgment.

HardInfo is a tool which provides the various hardware and software information about the current system and also got the capability to perform some basic level of benchmark tests on Linux systems. It can also generate the reports about various hardware and software information in HTML format.

HardInfo Installation:
Open the terminal and type following command:

sudo apt-get install hardinfo

Manage Ubuntu Boot Loaders (Plymouth, Burg & Grub) - Super Boot Manager

Super Boot Manager is a boot manager to manage the boot loader for Linux systems, boot-loader in particular is a software that allows us to select and boot different operating system on same computer. Super Boot Manager allows you to manage the three most commonly used Boot loader for Linux (Grub, Burg and Plymouth), allowing you to install and remove them safely. You can also customize the splash screen with a certain theme instead of the usual text interface.

Super Boot Manager can be installed from PPA with the below Terminal commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ingalex/super-boot-manager
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install super-boot-manager

Audio Tag Editor for Linux - Puddletag

Puddletag is an audio tag editor (primarily created) for GNU/Linux similar to the Windows program, Mp3tag. Unlike most taggers for GNU/Linux, it uses a spreadsheet-like layout so that all the tags you want to edit by hand are visible and easily editable.

The usual tag editor features are supported like extracting tag information from file-names, renaming files based on their tags by using patterns and basic tag editing.

Then there’re Functions, which can do things like replace text, trim it, do case conversions, etc. Actions can automate repetitive tasks. You can import your QuodLibet library, look-up tags using Amazon (including cover art), Discogs (does cover art too!), FreeDB and MusicBrainz.

Supported formats: ID3v1, ID3v2 (mp3), MP4 (mp4, m4a, etc.), VorbisComments (ogg, flac), Musepack (mpc), Monkey’s Audio (.ape) and WavPack (wv).

RAW Image Converter for Digital Camera - Rawstudio

To get the best quality out of your digital camera, it is often recommended that you record your pictures in RAW format. This format is mostly specific to a camera and cannot be read by most image editing applications.

Rawstudio will convert your RAW files into JPEG, PNG or TIF images which you can then print or send to friends and clients. You can also upload photos directly to Picasa, Flickr and Facebook galleries. 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 normal workflow would be that you first convert your RAW files and then use an image editing application to further work on your images. Rawstudio itself is a highly specialized application for processing RAW images, not a fully featured image editing application.

Rawstudio Feature List
* Intuitive GTK+ interface
* Full DNG Color Profile support
* Batch processing
* Tethered shooting
* Various post-shot controls (white balance, saturation and exposure compensation among others)
* Easy and flexible copy&paste settings between images

Simple and Fast GTK2 Audio Editor - mhWaveEdit

mhWaveEdit is a graphical program for editing sound files. It is intended to be user-friendly and robust. It does not require a fast computer.

Even if mhWaveEdit was originally built for editing wav files, it's also possible to load and save in a few other formats. mhWaveEdit always supports wav and raw files, but if it's compiled with the libsndfile library, mhWaveEdit supports a couple of other formats as well.

If mplayer is installed, mhwaveedit can open all formats that it supports, for example the soundtrack of a video file. Since mplayer is only a player, these files can not be saved back after editing, you have to save the file into a supported format.

mhWaveEdit Installation:
You can install mhWaveEdit along with additional audio format support using the below command:

sudo apt-get install lame vorbis-tools mhwaveedit

Testing Linux System for Stability and Performance - System Stability Tester

System Stability Tester tries to test the system's stability by calculating up to 128 millions of Pi digits. It supports multiple calculation algorithms. For the moment only two have been implemented. The Quadratic Convergence of Borwein and Gauss-Legendre, the algorithm SuperPi uses.

The testing process includes the creation of two or more threads. After each step of the calculation, the results of all the threads are compared. Any differences between them are reported. There is also the option for single threaded calculation, but in this case there is no stability check. This is useful for benchmarking purposes only. The calculation of Pi itself is multithreaded since version 0.7.2, for the Borwein algorithm only.

What System Stability Tester can do in brief
* Calculate up to 128 million digits of Pi.
* Create up to 32 threads.
* Recognize the CPU model, manufacturer and operational frequency.
* Compare the calculation results of all the threads after each step and issue a warning if something went wrong.
* Run continuously for up to 50 turns and log the results after each step and each turn.
* Record the calculated digits of Pi in a human readable text file.
* Single threaded calculation of Pi for benchmarking, similar to the well know SuperPi benchmark.
* Check-sum validation over the result.
* Provides graphical and command line user interfaces.

All-in-One Performance Monitoring Tool for Linux - Nmon

nmon is a systems administrator, tuner, benchmark tool. It can display the CPU, memory, network, disks (mini graphs or numbers), file systems, NFS, top processes, resources (Linux version & processors) and on Power micro-partition information.

Data is displayed on the screen and updated once every two seconds, using a dumb screen. However, you can easily change this interval to a longer or shorter time period.

The nmon tool can also capture the same data to a text file for later analysis and graphing for reports. The output is in a spreadsheet format (.csv).

Installing nmon:
Open the terminal and type following command

sudo apt-get install nmon

Examines Source Code and Look for Security Weaknesses - Flawfinder

Flawfinder searches through C/C++ source code looking for potential security flaws and produces a report describing the potential flaws found in source code, ranking them by likely severity.

Flawfinder works by using a built-in database of C/C++ functions with well-known problems, such as buffer overflow risks (e.g., strcpy(), strcat(), gets(), sprintf(), and the scanf() family), format string problems ([v][f]printf(), [v]snprintf(), and syslog()), race conditions (such as access(), chown(), chgrp(), chmod(), tmpfile(), tmpnam(), tempnam(), and mktemp()), potential shell metacharacter dangers (most of the exec() family, system(), popen()), and poor random number acquisition (such as random()). The good thing is that you don't have to create this database - it comes with the tool.

Flawfinder then takes the source code text, and matches the source code text against those names, while ignoring text inside comments and strings (except for flawfinder directives). Flawfinder also knows about gettext (a common library for internationalized programs), and will treat constant strings passed through gettext as though they were constant strings; this reduces the number of false hits in internationalized programs.

Flawfinder can also generate differential reports by pointing it to a patch (diff) file describing the code changes. This way it can be used to determine if the potential flaws found in code have increased or decreased after a commit to a source code management system like CVS or Subversion.

Task Automation Tool for Ubuntu - Actionaz

Actionaz is an application that allows you to execute many actions on your computer such as emulating mouse clicks, key presses, showing message boxes, editing text files, etc. Tasks can be created using a simple editor or using the EcmaScript (JavaScript) programming language for more customization.

You don't need to known any programming language to use it: its intuitive interface allows you to create action lists (scripts) using drag & drop. Advanced users can use JavaScript (EcmaScript) to extend its functionality. Actionaz is free software and runs under Windows and Linux. Binaries are available for Windows and Ubuntu for both 32 and 64 bits.

Actionaz is developed in C++ and uses the Qt framework.

Actionaz Installation:
Open the terminal and type following command to install Actionaz:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:adri2000/actionaz
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install actionaz

UI Based Password Manager - Figaro's Password Manager 2

Figaro's Password Manager 2 (FPM2) is a program that allows you to securely store the passwords. Passwords are encrypted with the AES-256 algorithm.

If the password is for a web site, Figaro's Password Manager 2 can keep track of the URLs of your login screens and can automatically launch your browser. In this capacity, Figaro's Password Manager 2 acts as a kind of bookmark manager. You can teach Figaro's Password Manager 2 to launch other applications, and optionally pass host names, usernames or passwords to the command line.

Figaro's Password Manager 2 also has a password generator that can choose passwords for you. It allows you to determine how long the password should be, and what types of characters (lower case, upper case, numbers and symbols) should be used. You can even have it avoid ambiguous characters such as a capital O or the number zero.

Setup and Configure Bandwidth Limiting Module for Apache2

mod-bw is an Apache 2 module provided to solve the problem of limiting users’ and virtual hosts’ bandwidth usage. The current versions can set virtual hosts’ and users’ bandwidth quotas, maximal download speed, requests-per-second speed and the maximal number of simultaneous IP connections.

mod-bw Features:
* Lightweight bandwidth limiting module for Apache2
* per-user bandwidth limiting
* per-virtual host bandwidth limiting
* per-destination bandwidth limiting
Limiting:
   * Bandwidth total usage (bandwidth quota)
   * Maximal download speed (bandwidth throttling)
   * Maximal requests-per-second speed
   * Maximal simultaneous IP connections
* Support for virtual hosts
* Support for defined users

Install Zeitgeist and Zeitgeist Activity Journal Under Ubuntu

Zeitgeist is a service which logs the user's activities and events (files opened, websites visited, conversations held with other people, etc.) and makes relevant information available to other applications. It is able to establish relationships between items based on similarity and usage patterns.

All of the information is stored in one central database for quick access and any application can easily add it’s own data to the mix. There are several user interfaces which show the information stored in the database, sorting it by type, date, or relevance to other files. They let users tag documents, bookmark them, and even attach custom notes to each item in the database.

Zeitgeist Activity Journal is your portal to the world of Zeitgeist. It’s an user interface ideal for easily browsing and finding every kind of user activity (files, webpages, contacts,…) on your computer.

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