I recently stumbled upon an interesting tiny old script which can translate any text you select. After highlighting the text, be it in a web browser, Libreoffice or PDF document and so on, upon using a keyboard shortcut, its translation is displayed in a desktop notification.

Those of you who like writing bash scripts and use Zenity for a GUI should give YAD a try. YAD (Yet Another Dialog) is a fork of Zenity with many improvements, such as custom buttons, additional dialogs, pop-up menu in notification icon and more. I've been using it for Y PPA Manager so if you want to see it in action, give Y PPA Manager a try.

Unfortunately even though Zenity is constantly updated, these updates only bring language updates and fixes. Here is where YAD shines: basically most of the stuff you ever wanted to do in Zenity is available in YAD: you can have as many buttons as you want, each with the text you want, a really nice icons dialog (which I've used as the main Y PPA Manager UI) and many more. Here's an example of a YAD dialog you could never get using Zenity:

2ClickUpdate is a front-end for system updates that checks for and installs updates, removes unnecessary files and cleans up after installing the updates. It works on any Debian/Ubuntu based Linux distribution.

2ClickUpdate is a shell script with a GUI provided by Zenity that uses axel (similar to apt-fast) for handling the downloads (so the downloads are a lot faster then regular updates) and NotifyOSD notifications.

Ubuntu is kind of slow at updating JDK in the official repositories. And not only that but if you've used Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat before the final release, you probably know that Java has only been uploaded to the Ubuntu Partner repository a few days before the final release so you could either use the Ubuntu 10.04 repository or manually install Java.

When you manually install JDK, you have to update the paths to get it to work. For this, you can use a script created by WebUpd8 reader Bruce Ingalls (this is actually a new version as we've already wrote a while back about this script) which uses Zenity and can easily update the Java (JDK) paths - all you have to do is select the folder where you've installed Java and the script will do the rest.

Ricardo Ferreira (who sent us quite a few tips before) wrote a nice Nautilus script which comes with a GUI (Zenity) to compress and optimize PDF files called Compress PDF.

The script currently comes in multiple languages: English, Spanish*, French*, Czech* and Portuguese (but you can translate it into your language if you want - there are only 10 short lines to translate) and you can choose between 5 different compression levels: Screen-view only, Low Quality, Hight Quality, High Quality (Color Preserving) and Default:

Bruce Ingalls sent us a new and much improved version of his Java Update script for Ubuntu. The script uses Zenity for a GUI so it's very easy to use.

Initially the script only updated JDK (which included JRE), but now can also update Java Runtime Environment separately.

WebUpd8 reader Bruce Ingalls sent us script which should make it easy for users to upgrade JDK. The script doesn't download JAVA or install it, but after you do that it updates the the path to the new JDK location.

Why use it?

Well, for instance JDK 1.6.0_19 was recently released and instead of creating symbolic links after installing it (which is not the recommended way to do it), you can use this script.