We are going to take a quick look to all those important news that were published during this week:

• OpenOffice.org 3.0 RC3 was published. Even though it was supposed to be published at the end of September, it seems that they want to fix some issues by this time. So we have to wait until…
• Yesterday was also published Ubuntu 8.10 beta (there is nothing important to say, except the horrible wallpaper that they set as default, download it). Novell released the second beta of OpenSUSE 11.1 as well (download it).
• Gentoo team decided to cancel 2008.1 release, so until 2009 we won’t see another big release.
• A courious new: a hackers kernel team achieve to boot a linux on an EeePC in only 5 seconds!
• There is a new KDE release, the 4.1.2, that fix a problem removing files (now is faster).
• And The Gimp 2.6 was also released, and it came with a lot of changes: now the menu bar is not on the drawing tools window, developers changed it to a new window. The result is: Gimp is approaching its aspect to Photoshop (on Mac). It is possible to have it on Ubuntu Hardy using the getdeb repository.

When we want to obtain the code (or just the color) that is in our desktop (can be on firefox, or simply on other application) we can try different ways to obtain it:

1. Calling Homer Simpson and ask him which color he think that the color in question is.

2. Opening The Gimp, double click to the color, and there is an option to catch whichever color on the screen.

3. Using Gcolor2. Gcolor2 is a small application that allows us to catch whichever color on the screen. It is basically the same as The Gimp do, but gcolor2 is faster. Also, gcolor2 remember all colors that we caught.

Gcolor2 can be found in almost all repositories of all the GNU/Linux distributions.

It’s been three years since the free web operating system EyeOS was released. Now, more than 200,000 users are using it. It was developed by Catalan programmers in Olesa de Montserrat (Catalonia) and they are going to open up new centers in France and in the U.S.

EyeOS is basically a free desktop environment that works through the web navigator. We can try (and normally use it) from the official web because they offer us the necessary space and tools to do it. On the other hand, we can choose download and install it in our own server.

In the basic package, we can find some office programs, games, feeds reader, etc. Also, there are some extensions or other applications developed by third parties that can be downloaded and installed from eyeApps.org and from the public server.

After three years, EyeOS has became the most popular web operating system and it is improved each release. Each day, 300 or 400 people sign up on the free server and every week more than 1,000,000 people visit the web.

Don’t know EyeOS?… Try it!!

• Link | EyeOS is 3!

Two days ago, a friend of mine who discovered GNU/Linux more or less some days before, tried to install Ubuntu on his father’s computer. The problem was that it wasn’t only his father’s computer, it was property of the school where he works.

He started Ubuntu on the graphical mode and when the installation program was reducing the windows partition something went wrong and the system blocked itself. My friend was scared, so he rebooted the computer, started the text installation and installed Ubuntu on the “new partition” (yes, even though the partitioning tool seemed to fail, after in the text installation there was a new partition like if the process had finished well).

After the installation, there was no Windows option in the Grub menu, so the windows partition was broken after all. We tried using testdisk to recover the partition table, but it didn’t work. Therefore, we had to look for another solution: recover files from the disk.

Foremost

Foremost is the tool we used to recover the files. It usually can be installed using the distribution repositories. Also, there are so many live distributions such as RipLinux prepared for all these recovering tasks.

One thing else that we need to recover our files is an usb disk where the recovered files will be saved. It is important to note that you should not write to the failed disk, because it can overwrite existant data in case of lost files.

To use foremost is really easy. It works searching by extension, so we have to specify the extension we want to look for and where we want to save the recovered data. When we connect an usb disk, the system usually mounts it at /media/disk (or similar), so that’s the place where we are saving our recovered data. Note that the usb disk have to be empty.

With all this, here is the command we have to execute in the terminal (as a root or using sudo if you can):

sudo foremost -t extension -i /dev/sdx -o /media/disk

As you can see, the extension have to be that one that we need (doc, ppt, pdf, wmv, avi, mpg, jpg, png, etc.). /dev/sdx represents the hard disk where we want to search to recover the files and /media/disk represents the place where the recovered data will be saved.

You will see that the recovered files have no name, just numbers (for example 123532423.doc). That means that we will have to open each one of them to see what is inside.

More information about recovering data in the Ubuntu Wiki.

Free Software can also help us writing novels. StorYBook is a tool created in order to make easier the hard task that writing novels is: it is complicated to safe in our memory every thing that happen in the story, all the elements, etc.

StoryBook helps us to make it easy. When we open the program, we can choose among 3 views:

• The Chronological View shows the scenes sorted by date.
• The Manage Chapters and Scenes view shows all chapters and their assigned scenes. Scenes can be moved and renumbered by Drag-and-Drop.
• The Book View shows all chapters and their assigned scenes sorted by chapter and scene numbers, as you would read it in the final book.

Also, we can organize strands and strand links, characters, locations, chapters, parts, information related with the scenes, etc. The program allows us to adjust the view we need among those we commented before, and saves automatically (instant save) our story (we don’t have to do anything).

The 2.1.2 version has been published some days ago. One of the most interesting new features is the possibility to export to PDF. StorYBook works under GNU/Linux, Windows and Mac (programmed on java) and is GPL.

Despite the considerable advances that the free software has made in the last years in its «market share» in different fields in informatics, only in a few of this fields free software has the supremacy. One of these is the field of web servers.

Sure enough, Apache, a free web server, is one of the most used and, probably, free software alternatives in conjoint are more used than its privative equivalences. Free software has proved that is the best alternative to manage the software that servers needed, but free software also provides good tools to compose them.

In fact, it is possible to build almost any kind of website using free software. Those people who were accustomed to use visual publishers to build webpages, such as Dreamweaver, will be happy to know the existence of kompoZer. Mozilla created an application to create webs as easily as write a rich text document. This application was named Mozilla Composer and was integrated in the Internet suite that now is known as Mozilla Seamonkey. This software package is no longer maintained by Mozilla, but for a community of developers that forked it, and so Mozilla Composer is not currently being updated at all.

Then, Linspire, a free software company, sponsored a sort of continuation of the Mozilla Composer, that was named NVU. NVU neither has been updated since September of 2006, so a group of programmers has made kompoZer, that basically is a new version made from the last published version of NVU with the correction of all the bugs that they found. In spite of all the problems in the long development progress, kompoZer is a very useful tool to create simple websites without HTML knowledge, and is good to edit them without complications.

Nowadays, however, many users are looking for something a bit more complex. Such as a blog software. There are several alternatives that allow to make blogs easily, some of them were created many years ago, are very mature and have a lot of support in forums because a lot of people are using them (such as Wordpress); other just begin its development (such as Gesbit); others were privative and have switched to free software (such as MovableType). Between all these, we will focus the comment in Wordpress, cause it is perhaps the most used.

Once installed, Wordpress allows you to manage a blog and it is simple and comfortable. It Includes an intuitive administration dashboard to such effect. Any detail has been covered by the programmers: there is an option to upload and manage images easily, to include links to other blogs, to order categories for posts, etc. Also it is possible to write «Pages», that is to say, entries that are not in chronological order, for example the legal warning, the prvacity policy or other texts that have to be permanent visible.

You can also use free software if you look for even more complete solutions. For example, if we want to create a website for an association, probably we will need to include a forum, a place to upload documents, a space for news, etc. It’s not necessary to say that developing all this from the very beginning would be outrageous. We can use free software alternatives that already exists, for example PHP-Nuke, PostNuke, Drupal or Joomla.

PHP-Nuke Is free software that allows the creation of «portals» or «spaces for communities» very easily. Once installed, it has got an internal searcher, news, documents and articles module, a forum and a basic stats service (among another things). All his functionalities are expansible thanks to its modular structure and to the  quantity of free modules that can be found on the internet.

From PHP-Nuke was developed PostNuke, a software with strength similitudes and some differences, such as a more complex system of permission management to users (the systems of permission management is used to specify who can see each content). So the security is improved.

Besides these alternatives commented, Drupal and Joomla are programs that also can be used for this same task, very mature and with a big community, which has allowed them grow in popularity recently. As of today, when Drupal and Joomla are probably more used than PHP-Nuke and PostNuke.

However, maybe you need only a complement for your web, such as a forum (no a complete solution for communities like those that we already have commented) or any tool that allow you to edit texts collaboratively, such as happens in Wikipedia. The software will allow you to do this, respectively, phpBB and MediaWiki.

phpBB is the ideal tool to made a forum. The administrator can choose if it is necessary that the visitors register to take part in discussions and, in general, can select the options that believes most convenient from a very extensive list of options. The participants can attach to their contributions a small text or photos as a footer, that helps to identify them.

MediaWiki is the software that is used by the Wikipedia and, therefore, one of the best alternatives to write texts collaboratively. It includes control tools to ensure that amongst the people who take part in the writing process, there is always good faith and no malicious user damages the work.

You will need neither privative software to edit your graphics for your web: with GIMP or Krita free image editors you will do a good job. To sum up: they are many high-quality free tools that can serve to make websites.

Automatix was one of the tools that made our life easier during the first Ubuntu versions (more or less until the Feisty release). But each new Ubuntu release, all those tasks that Automatix did, were completed by default. So Automatix became useless.

Later, Automatix team wanted Canonical to include it inside Ubuntu. That should have been the solution for all… but Canonical said no to Automatix explaining that Automatix is, in itself, a poor quality package which fails to conform to Debian or Ubuntu policy.

But it seems that the Automatix team went on developing tools and some days ago the released a new tool, similar to Automatix, but its name is Ultamatix. Ultamatix can be installed on Ubuntu Ultimate Edition, Ubuntu Hardy and Debian systems (including unstable branch). This is the software list that Automatix can install:

The only thing that is more or less interesting of Ultamatix are the games that can be installed. Some of them can be installed by Add/Remove, but not others like Vegastrice or Warzone 2100. So in that case Ultamatix is useful. Even though all this, there are no really new things. Actually, the look is not different in comparison with the old Automatix. So you decide.

• Source | Softpedia
• Download | Ultamatix

Something happened in the aMSN forums one month ago. A group of programmers from aMSN, emesene and pymsn started a discussion about how to develop aMSN2.

First of all, the main change in aMSN2 will be that from now, they won’t use tcl/tk anymore. They are now using python and EFL libraries (Enlightenment Foundation Libraries) with which the gui will be much nicer than the current one (that’s not really complicated).

aMSN2 will be a multi-front-end program. This means that there will be different gui depending on the desktop or operating system we use. For example, on Mac they will use cocoa as a front-end, on KDE4 QT and XUL and GTK on GNOME.

Emesene programmers will focus on the GNOME version while pymsn programmers will work on the MSN protocol. The rest of the programmers will work in other general purposes.

All this still in development, there is one interesting screencast about what the current state of the program is. We hope to try in a few months this new internet messenger.

• Source | SomGNU.cat
• Link | aMSN forums

One of the most important tools that linux users need to use almost everyday is the terminal. Even though you are a new user, you have to use the terminal.

When you get used, the terminal became an indispensable friend that allows us to control everything and reports much more better the information about our system than all gui applications can do together.

For that reason exist Yakuake (on KDE) or Tilda (on GNOME), two programs that run a terminal just pushing one of the function keys. Even though Yakuake is a good solution for KDE, tilda is not really good for GNOME. The integration and functionality is limited in comparison with Yakuake.

But there is other solution on GNOME: Guake!. Guake is basically Yakuake for GNOME and is more or less exactly the same, with the same functions and appeareance. At this moment there are only precompiled versions for Ubuntu. The rest, we have to compile it from the source.

• Source | SomGNU.cat
• Download | Guake! 0.3.0

In less than three hours we will be able to download the latest Firefox (from the link above). Mozilla wants Firefox 3 to get in the Guinness World Records, so they set up this page and you can join and help us to be successful!!