SSHMenu is a GNOME panel applet that keeps all your regular SSH connections within a single mouse click. But why use an applet for SHH connections? Well, SSHMenu has a really interesting feature which I for one find it extremely useful: it uses terminal profiles to add something distinct to a SSH terminal so that you don't mix commands between machines:

Yasst is a cross-platform Twitter client which does not run on Adobe Air, this being the reason I first started using it as I really don't like Adobe Air applications.

If you are used to Twitter clients such as Tweetdeck, you will find Yasst to look pretty similar, with multiple column view, but Yasst has something extra: tabs!


Let's take a look at some important features in Yasst:

Starting with version 1.1, VideoLan Media Player (VLC) will get extensions support, and anyone will be able to write their own - like it is with Firefox extensions:

Jean-Philippe André, one of the VLC developers explains on it's blog:

The difference with other VLC modules consists in the language used to write these Extensions: Lua, a simple a lightweight scripting language, embbeded inside VLC media player.

I must say this is great news but a somewhat expected move since VLC has all the features a media player needs so it's time to give power to the users. Also, just like it is with Firefox extensions: if you would incorporate all the extensions in the default installation, VLC would be bloated, but if you allow users to use extensions, everyone will have the features he wants, without bloating this great app.


There are already some VLC extensions you can try (you will need VLC 1.1 but if you use Ubuntu, fear not: the latest VLC 1.1 from GIT is available in the Web Upd8 PPA, build as of today - read on for installation instructions):

DoThisNow is a Linux (w/ Gnome) application which allows you to run tasks at a certain time, like very 5 minutes, on a week day, on a given date, etc. The tasks include: setting a wallpaper, setting the Pidgin status, taking a screenshot, launch application or file, open URL in browser, display a message, run a shell command or play a sound.

Like you noticed if you are following the development of Opera 10.50, the Opera Browser is undertaking some massive changes to the platform integration that will give significant improvements for all three desktop platforms, but because of this, Windows users will have a beta version a lot earlier than the other 2 platforms (Windows and Mac).

ATI (AMD) released a new version of it's ATI Catalyst proprietary display driver for Linux. Version 10.1 finally brings support for the new Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala, a bit late considering there are only 3 months till Ubuntu Lucid will be released, but it's still good news for a lot of Ubuntu 9.10 users.


Thew new Ati Catalyst 10.1 also brings a few fixes which you can view @ Softpedia.

Download ATI/AMD Linux Display Drivers 10.1

Mozilla has finally released Weave 1.0, the Firefox extension that provides Firefox user data synchronization which includes complete syncing of bookmarks, passwords, preferences, history, and even open tabs on multiple computers (or multiple operating systems) and even mobile devices.

If you're not new to Web Upd8, I'm sure you already know the beautiful Gnome themes from the Bisigi Project which come with an Ubuntu PPA for a one-command installation. Well, today a new theme has been released, called AirLines.

The new theme comes with:

I've always considered these themes as beautiful, new and fresh, but I find AirLines to be a masterpiece. It looks astonishing. My screenshots don't reveal how nice this theme looks so it's something you must try for yourself. Of course, it's also a matter of taste so please do share your opinion on this new Gnome theme.

AutoDeb is an experimental script which completely automates compiling and installing software created using autoconf (most programs). It can either directly use the archived source code (.tar.gz or .tar.bz2), or a folder where the application was unpacked or downloaded from svn, bzr, etc. Once the software is compiled, a .deb file is automatically created and installed using checkinstall.


This script is very interesting because it automates the configure process by automatically installing the dependencies needed to build software. That works by running "./configure" and tracking all of configure's attempts to access files. When configure fails, AutoDeb uses AutoApt (more info on AutoAPT) to find out what package needs to be installed and then it runs configure again.

Gstyle is a new full Gnome theme manager with some really great features which I am sure you will love if you like to customize your Desktop look constantly. Gstyle can automatically download and install wallpapers, Xsplash, GTK themes, icon themes, full themes, mouse pointers and more from gnome-look, deviantart, customize.org and others, or directly from the software source. But not only that, Gstyle can show you how a theme (any kind of theme: icons, Emerald, Metacity, etc.) actually looks, not just a preview. You will see what I mean in the screenshots below (3rd screenshot).

Gstyle can also apply different Compiz cube (well, actually Sphere) styles called Cubemodels. I'm sure you're going to love them. Of course, there is still work to do, but Gstyle is still in its infancy, this being the first version ever released. I think we'll see more of Gstyle soon.


A few Gstyle screenshots:

Gstyle Gnome Full Theme Manager also comes with a script to install some applications such as AWN, Cairo-Dock and others, but something required by Gstyle too: Compiz GIT, including the latest plugins (many many new plugins!) (required for Cubemodels only). There is a downside to this script which worked flawlessly for me: it's in French. Yes, even though Gstyle is in English, the script to install Compiz from GIT and the latest plugins (among others) is in French so you can either install Compiz from GIT yourself, or learn French or... use Google Translate. But everything is pretty easy to understand even if you don't know French (or so it seems to me).

Before you proceed with the installation, here is a video with Gstyle in action:

Nautilus Image Converter adds a "Resize Image" and "Rotate image" menu items in Nautilus for easy image manipulation. You can use it for a single image or multiple images and while it doesn't have many options, Nautilus Image Converter does what its supposed to... and fast!

It uses ImageMagick convert tool and the difference between this package and the other Nautilus scripts out there is that you get more options, like scaling the image(s) to percentage of the initial image, append ".resized" (or "rotated", depending on your action) to the new image or simply replace it, different predefined image sizes and so on:

There are lots of Gmail notifiers for Linux (a few examples: CheckGmail, gmnotify, GoogSysTray) but I really like the Gmail notifier about which I'm going to talk in this post. Read on!

Finestly Ying and Yang are 2 new proposed Ubuntu Lucid themes which are available @ Ubuntu wiki.

Ying is a very dark theme and Yang - a very bright one, both using the Murrine engine and adjusted for the Humanity icons:

Music Player Minion is a client for MPD (Music Player Daemon) which comes as a Firefox extension. Think of it as something like Theory (web based MPD client) but which looks a lot better.

Music Player Minion is a client for the Music Player Daemon network music player. The purpose of MPD and it's clients is to allow music playback on one PC (such as a home media server) to be controlled from another over the network.

Music Player Minion has 3 possible "views":

If you've been reading Web Upd8 in a while, you must have noticed that we like to hand out licenses and other useful things to our readers. Here is another giveaway in which we'll send 10 IP Privacy licenses (6 months free) your way. All you have to do is post a comment using a valid email address (email, not logging in with Twitter and such) requesting a license, and on Monday (February 1st) we'll make a draw and send the licenses to the lucky winners.

Why would you want an IP Privacy license? IP Privacy normally costs $39.95 and it's an Windows application which you can use to hide your IP address and stay anonymous. Using IP Privacy, not only your IP will be hidden, but it will also "unblock" websites for you (if your ISP has blocked websites and such), will bypass firewall and block invasive code. Even more, IP Privacy will clean your online tracks.

This post is for those of you which have a blog and run Disqus comment system on it.

Firstly, let me tell you the exact story: I haven't noticed this before, but if you look at the source code of a post (post, not main page) of probably all blogs using Disqus (except Web Upd8 and Mashable), and search for some words in the post, you will see them displayed twice: once in the actual post and once in a div with the "disqus_post_message" id, which is not visible on the actual page because it's hidden. This basically means all your posts text exists twice on your blog which is of course not very good in terms of SEO. Even worse, the "disqus_post_message" has the style "display:none", which Google interprets as trying to hide content.

We've just got an email which points out that there is going work for a new operating system called RevLin OS. This is more of an announcement, because there are no downloads available for now, so I couldn't test it. But I really liked the concept - I must say that it sounds much better than Chrome OS, so I decided to share this news with you. Why better than Chrome OS? Read on!

That's right, Web Upd8 gets its PPA. But don't get too excited about this, there won't be anything big in it, just small packages which don't have a PPA and I can easily pack. This means that in some of the new posts on Web Upd8, when no .deb file is available, I will try to package it and upload it to the PPA to make things easier for our readers.

I'm not an expert (in fact I'm still a noob at this) packaging so I might not be able to upload everything I want, but it's a nice start anyway.

Google Reader, probably the most used feed reader finally adds a feature that was missing for many of it's users: the option to subscribe to websites which do not provide a feed. Basically, you can now subscribe to any website using Google Reader:

I still recommend using Swiftfox over Firefox, but if you really want to use Firefox, there is a PPA (many people might prefer this over the Mozilla Daily PPA which has daily Firefox builds).

Add the Firefox 4 Ubuntu PPA by using the following command:

We've talked about Gnome Gmail a long time ago, and in case you don't remember what it can be used for, here it is: Gnome Gmail is an app which adds support for Gmail to the Linux Gnome Desktop. It allows Gmail to be selected as the default mail application for the desktop. Unlike other solutions on the net, Gnome Gmail supports "To:", "Subject:", "body", "CC:", and "BCC: fields, and is available in deb and rpm format.

The second alpha of Lubuntu Lucid Lynx has been released. Based on Ubuntu Lucid alpha, it is of course not stable, but everyone willing to test it can download the new Lubuntu Alpha 2 .iso (download link at the end of the post):

Pre-releases of Lucid are *not* encouraged for anyone needing a stable system or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional, even frequent breakage. They are, however, recommended for Ubuntu developers and those who want to help in testing, reporting, and fixing bugs.

In case you don't know, Lubuntu uses LXDE, a very lightweight and minimal desktop environment using the openbox window manager, the PcManFM file manager, and a very select list of default applications. It is compatible with basic freedesktop standards and all needed parts are already packaged in Ubuntu today.

We are fans of Swiftfox here, at Web Upd8; here is why: Swiftfox is an optimized Mozilla Firefox which has different builds for different processors which makes it much faster than the normal Firefox because that's compiled to work for everybody, but not optimized for a specific processor architecture. For a lot more info on Swiftfox, see our initial article on Swiftfox.

Another reason to go for Swiftfox would be if you are having issues getting Firefox 3.6 to work (like this error). Also, Swiftfox comes with an Ubuntu repository so you can easily get updates (but only stable updates so you won't get pre or alpha builds like from Ubuntu Mozila Daily PPA - which is another great reason to use Swiftfox).

You can download Swiftfox from HERE. Ubuntu installation instructions (with a repository) can be found HERE.

XSplash Background Settings provides a background settings dialog for XSplash and the login screen (GDM) so you can use it to change your XSplash or GDM image and optionally (my favourite): change the XSplash and GDM backgrounds to match your current desktop wallpaper.

Like WebUpd8 reader StoneCut said in a comment on it's previous tip, he wrote yet another post for iPhone owners which use Linux. So here it is:

In our previous tutorial we showed how you to access the iPhone OS 3.x filesystem and read/write to its music database using iFuse and by compiling our own libgpod4. Then we had to create a file on the iPhone, manually mount the phone each time and so on. Maybe a bit complicated for an average user.

However, there is now a lot easier way using GVFS which will automount your iPhone for syncing with Rhythmbox, for example. And you don't need to compile anything anymore. It works for Ubuntu Karmic and Lucid (only Karmic tested). The required PPA does not carry any packages for Jaunty, sorry.

Anton, the developer of the New Wave Gnome theme has been working on a "lighter" version of his amazing theme. For now it's not known if this will be a separate theme or will replace the New Wave theme.

Thanks to StoneCut, here is yet another iPhone tip for Web Upd8 readers. After StoneCut's absolutely amazing post on Mounting Your iPhone On A Fresh Ubuntu Karmic Koala Installation (The Complete Guide), today he sent us another great tip: a Nautilus script for SCP transfers that he uses to quickly copy files to his iPhone and might be very useful for some Web Upd8 readers.

Here is the script:

GDM2 Setup is a GUI configuration tool for the new GDM (2) something that was missed by a lot of people. It doesn't have as many options as the old GDM setup tool, but that's because the new GDM2 doesn't support too many customizations.

Yes, yet another post on Firefox, but I had to write it, as there are probably quite a few people having issues with this.

If you used the Ubuntu Mozilla Daily PPA, and recently did an upgrade on Firefox 3.6 (which is now just "firefox" as a package), it probably fails to start on your computer. This is probably due to AppArmor (more info here).

This is the error you get when trying to run Firefox from /usr/bin:

/usr/lib/firefox-3.6pre/firefox: 59: dirname: Permission denied
/usr/lib/firefox-3.6pre/firefox: 88: /bin/pwd: Permission denied
/usr/lib/firefox-3.6pre/run-mozilla.sh: 39: dirname: Permission denied
/usr/lib/firefox-3.6pre/firefox-bin: error while loading shared libraries: libxul.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Here is how I managed to fix this (thanks to jimmyfergus):

There are now 2 repositories available for Tor (application which enables users to communicate anonymously on the Internet): stable and experimental, for both Ubuntu and Debian. Until now there was only a stable repository.

Some time ago we wrote about how to make Firefox Add-on compatible with the latest Firefox version. The first method in that post doesn't seem to work, however using Nightly Tester Tools still does. But since then, an even better and lighter extension for this was released, which allows you to make any Firefox add-on compatible with any FF version, and also give back to the community by reporting if the extensions actually work with the Firefox version you are currently using (this is done with a simple click into the extensions dialog).

Blogger users were only able to create posts, not pages. That's until today, because Blogger in Draft finally allows Blogger users to create pages.

To create a page for your Blogger Blog, log in to Blogger in Draft, go to Posting > Edit Pages > New Page. After creating your page, when you click the "Publish" button, you'll have an option to create a widget to display a link for this page, or you can link it manually:

Martin Owens has created a really nice python script which generates a calendar based on the images you choose and the evens you add to a simple text file.

To use it, head over to Martin Owens' blog an download it, extract the archive contents and navigate to "flips" folder and place 12 png images numbered "01.png ... 12.png" (from 01 to 12) and a title.png which is the title.

Like we told you yesterday, Mozilla will release Firefox 3.6 today. The official release time is 9:30am Pacific Standard Time.

But if you can't wait, you can already download the new Firefox 3.6, with a little tweaking on the standard download URL. So here you go:

HTML5 support finally comes to YouTube, but unfortunately using the proprietary h264 video codec, not the free Theora:

Right now we support browsers that support both the <video> tag in HTML5 and the h.264 video codec. These include:

* Google Chrome
* Apple Safari (version 4+)
* Microsoft Internet Explorer with Chrome Frame installed

If 2 days ago we were announcing that Gnome Activity Journal (GAJ) (click for more info on GAJ and video) is progressing nicely and and also posted about an easier way to install it, yesterday both GAJ and Zeitgeist were updated and GAJ got it's first development release but what I want to write about is an even easier way to install Gnome Activity Journal and Zeitgeist in Ubuntu: from a Launchpad PPA.

This is just a quick one-line news: according to the Mozilla Wiki (via Lifehacker) release schedule, Firefox 3.6 will officially be released tomorrow, January 21. Hopefully, this time there won't be any delays.

Four months after the first Skype 2.1 beta, a second beta has been released.

Skype 2.1 beta 2 (2.1.0.81) fixes a lot of stability and usability issues, and also brings the Linux Skype client much closer to what the other desktop clients have to offer. Screen sharing has also been finally introduced:

I've finally got Plymouth up and running on Ubuntu Lucid. Well, up and partially running - I only get to see the new Plymouth at shutdown, but considering I have an Nvidia graphics card and only installed Ubuntu Lucid in VirtualBox so far, I'll take what I can get.


Let's take a look at the Ubuntu Lucid Plymouth themes (already included in Lucid). I should have made this post about the "Solar" theme only, as it's the only one which is nice, the others are either static or just a "glow".

Here is a screenshot of the Solar Plymouth theme:

And also a Solar Plymouth short video (updated video, I've fixed Plymouth and it now works for both shutdown and power-up):

Not so long ago, qBittorrent 2.0 was released and yesterday, the application very similar to uTorrent releases another version with lots of new features and improvements.

New features include categorizing/labeling to better organize big torrent lists (uTorrent style), headless running for people who want to run qBittorrent on a server without X server and control it remotely, new search engine plugins, better proxy support, a more secure and complete Web UI.

Terminator 0.90 (branch named Epic Refactor) work is still in progress, but I've tried the latest bzr today (alpha 1) and except some limitations (see below), everything seems to be working fine.

Here is what's not working for now:

In case you don't know, Terminator is a project to produce an efficient way of filling a large area of screen space with terminals. The user can have multiple terminals in one window and use keybindings to switch between them.

I haven't posted about Blogger in a while, but there was a certain bug in almost all the "related posts" widgets for Blogger I know, and today I finally decided to fix it for Web Upd8 and hopefully, this will also help other Blogger blogs out there.

In case you don't know, Gnome Activity Journal is a GUI for Zeitgeist, a tool for easily browsing and finding files on your computer. It keeps a chronological journal of all file activity and supports tagging and establishing relationships between groups of files. 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.

Gnome Activity Journal (Zeitgeist) progresses day by day, and a video posted today on the GAJ blog shows a more polished Gnome Activity Journal in action:

Opera has released another pre-alpha build (3199) of it's brand new 10.50 version, which brings a slightly upgraded core rending engine, some more work on video support, improved performance and Windows 7 integration, fixed some crashes and others.

For up to date screenshots, see Ubuntu 10.10 Nautilus Elementary PPA Updated, Comes With ClutterView, Embedded Terminal By Default. And here's a video too.

Remember the Simplified Nautilus? At some point, it used to be maintained in the Gloobus PPA. This was because some people used either Simplified Nautilus or Dual Pane Nautilus, and since Gloobus Preview needs to patch Nautilus to work (thus overwriting another modified Nautilus version), they've also maintained 2 modified Nautilus versions for which they've applied the Gloobus patch for the people using those.

The Gloobus PPA no longer maintains this simplified Nautilus (for quite some time), but a recent post on the Gloobus blog points out to a new "simplified" Nautilus called Nautilus Elementary which looks like this:

Nautilus Elementary version in the PPA:

Ailurus is an application which aims at making Linux easier to use and is especially great for beginners, but not only. Think of it as an Ubuntu Tweak focused more on tweaking and less on installing applications using PPAs.

At least that's what it was initially, because lately they've also focused on installing applications, with the latest version (10.01.4) adding a "Quick setup" feature which should come really handy for beginners. This new feature chooses the fastest repository mirror, and then allows you to install full language support, hardware drivers, input method, multimedia codecs, Adobe Flash, decompression software (7zip, rar, ace, etc.). This is somewhat similar to THIS Ubuntu Karmic initial setup script.


Other new features in version 10.01.4:

Firefox users have Better GReader extension, but there is now something similar for Google Chrome users too: Google Reader Plus.

Google Reader Plus extension for Google Chrome brings a lot of enhancements, such as themes (skins), missing favicons, fixing missing images in enclosures, better unread counter, better viewing on wider screens, fullscreen, preview, colored list view, filtering, column display, jump top bottom, close entry, read by mouse, share news on Facebook or Twitter, shortcuts for mark as read, simple advertising remover and more.

I especially like it for the easy theme switching and that it includes Mac OS X Snow Leopard Black theme, which I've always used in Firefox.

Google Reader Plus

[via bitelia]

Window List is a Gnome Panel applet - the default way to view the list of all windows that are currently running in Gnome. Normally, the opened windows are displayed like this:

Picture Wall is Qt based Linux application (but it can be compiled on Windows too) to view local images as well as search queried images on google.com with with a really nice user interface.

Among PictureWall features are: animated image zoom in and zoom out on mouse pressed, entire images zoom in and zoom out on mouse wheel, horizontal scrolling of images on mouse drag in respective horizontal direction.

Kin has been around for a couple of Ubuntu releases in the community-themes package and has recently been updated:

The goal of the refresh has been to tone down some of the colouring and bring the GTK component of the theme in-line with the most recent release of the Human GTK theme which it is based on.

Download the updated Kin Gnome theme

Syntensity is a relatively new FOSS (and cross-platform - runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X) platform for 3D games, currently in open-beta, which has amazing graphics and already includes a few games: One Weapon CTF, Mutli-Weapon CTF, a FPS called Razanak, a racing game and drawing - all online. You can also use it to create your own game!

Among the main features of this platform is that it downloads game content for you automatically. So once you have the Syntensity client installed, you can play any of the games without needing to manually download or install anything (like you can use Firefox to view websites).

Parcellite is a stripped down, basic-features-only Linux clipboard manager with a small memory footprint. Parcellite features include a clipboard history, various options to display items the way you like it, daemon mode, global hotkeys to display clipboard content quickly and perform custom commands using the clipboard contents.

Many though the project was dead since there were no updates for almost a year, but a new version has just been released (0.9.2).

Parole is a simple media player for Linux based on GStreamer, designed specially for Xfce, but of course, you can use it in Gnome too.

With low resource usage and being very simple, Parole really deserves a test-run at least.

After our post on "apt-fast", called Improve 'apt-get install' And 'upgrade' Speed, the script created by Matt Parnell (so all the credits go to him) has got a lot of attention and a new version tweaked by travisn000.

Microdc2 is a command-line based Direct Connect (I will refer to it as DC++ because that's what most people call it even when not using DC++ - the application) client for Linux. What's so great about it is the speed and low system resources required (like for any shell application). Another thing I really like about Microdc2 is that you can basically browse the files like you would on your own computer: once you connect to a user, simply use basic commands like "cd", "ls" and so on.

Microdc2 doesn't have an option to directly download files like the standard DC++ so you must manually browse a user after searching for a file, but I was doing that anyway so I don't find this to be very inconvenient. And since the DC++ clients for Linux constantly freeze my computer, I decided to try a console application for Direct Connect and so I find out about Microdc2.

NameBar 0.5 has been released today and comes with lots of new features, most important being that it now supports themes for the maximize/minimize/close buttons. Three themes have been included to the default installation: New Wave-ish, Human-ish and Dust-ish:

Other features include: a new option to customize the text color if the window is focused or unfocused, you can now bring up the window by simply clicking on NameBar. And besides these new features, a lot of bugs have been fixed.


Install NameBar 0.5:

A recent official post (and I hope this time it really is official) on the Ubuntu Forums asks users to complete a survey with the applications they would like to see in the upcoming versions of Ubuntu:

We are trying to gather preferences for the apps that users would like to see in upcoming version of Ubuntu. While we all believe in the power of open source applications we are also very keen that users should get to choose the software they want to use. There are some great apps that aren't yet available to Ubuntu users and Canonical would like to know the priority that users would like to see them. This list is indicative not definitive and we would love to also read your suggestions in the free text box.

Ubuntu 10.04 codename Lucid Lynx switched to Plymouth for the boot splash screen and the new Lucid Alpha 2 which was released today already has Plymouth installed, but most probably you won't see anything new without any tweaking.

A note: as far as I know, Plymouth only works well (flicker-free) for Intel graphic cards. Also, I for one couldn't get it to work for some reason (might have something to do with the fact that I use an Nvidia graphics card - everybody reporting Plymouth working on the Ubuntu Forums is using an Intel graphics card (but I could be wrong)).

Here is what you can do to try making Plymouth work for your Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2:

Newsbeuter is an open source command line feed reader for Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X and other Unix-like operating systems, which I really like. CenterIM also had a RSS feed reader, but I find Newsbeuter to be much better (although, for a IM client, CenterIM is awesome).

Here are a few of Newsbeuter features:

Here is a small video I've just recorded with Newsbeuter in action:

Yougnome allows you to backup all things relative to Gnome in a single .tar.gz file, then restore them any time you need. It is basically a bash script but also comes with a GUI version, however, the GUI didn't work in my tests (probably because it was released for an older Gnome version).

sckyzo has created a second WallPaper HD WideScreen pack (the first can be found here). This time, the 150 wallpaper archive has only 1920 x 1200 resolution images.

On Linux/Gnome, I suggest using the XML wallpaper changer script which will create an XML automatic changing wallpaper like the "Cosmos" XML wallpaper in Gnome 2.28. You can also use an application (cross-platform) for automatically changing the wallpaper, such as Wally.


Download 150 WallPaper HD WideScreen Pack 2 | Credits for creating the Pack: sckyzo (thanks!)