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I just came across a great tool for transcoding videos in Ubuntu. HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows. They’ve also got Ubuntu installers which make it easy to install this available in a GUI and a commandline version. Using handbrake you can convert your DVDs or most other video formats to the following outputs:

• File format: MP4 and MKV
• Video: MPEG-4, H.264, or Theora
• Audio: AAC, CoreAudio AAC (OS X Only), MP3, or Vorbis. AC-3 pass-through, DTS pass-thorugh (MKV only)

To install Handbrake you can either download the deb installer for Ubuntu from their download page. You can also add this to your apt sources so you get updates to the program automatically. To do this, type in the following into the terminal (works in Karmic)

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:handbrake-ubuntu/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install handbrake-gtk

For more information on Handbrake, head over to their site handbrake.fr.

via WebDevOnLinux

Here is a plugin for Gimp which gives you a “Save for Web” option in GIMP. This plugin gives you the option of preparing your images for the web by optimizing it, adding additional compression, stripping EXIF information from the images to reduce it’s size. You can preview the resultant image before you save your final image.

You can get the deb files for this plugin over at GetDeb.net:
http://www.getdeb.net/app/GIMP+%22Save+for+Web%22+plugin

Just download the deb file for your version of Ubuntu and double click the deb file once downloaded to start the Package Installer.

Here’s a software you’d need to clear the unwanted files hiding around your Ubuntu Installation. BleachBit clears up files from your trash, tmp folders, application specific temporary files from Firefox, Java, Open Office  and more. When I ran this on the system the first time, Bleachbit ended up clearing around  188MB of space, pretty good.

This application’s UI is simplistic, allowing you to preview the files which are going to be deleted before actually deleting them. One crib I have is inability to  select individual files to delete or not to delete. You can only remove an application from the delete option.

Download the current version of  BleachBit for your Ubuntu Version and double-click on the downloaded deb file to install. If you want the command line instructions, here they are for Ubuntu 8.10 (intrepid ibex):

wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/bleachbit/bleachbit_0.3.0-1_all_ubuntu810.deb
sudo dpkg -i bleachbit_0.3.0-1_all_ubuntu810.deb

Once you install it, you can access BleachBit from the Applications>Accessories menu.

Link: BleachBit Project page

There is a small utility in Ubuntu called Gnome Blog which allows you to blog directly from your desktop. If you are running firefox on Ubuntu, click on this link to install the package or enter the following command in your terminal

sudo apt-get install gnome-blog

Once installed, right click on an empty area on your panel and add “Blog Entry Poster”. Once you’ve added this click on it to start the app. First time you run, you’ll be prompted to enter details about your blog.

First select your blog type – Blogger, Wordress, LiveJournal and MovableType are all supported here and a few more. For WordPress blogs, enter your blog’s URL and username and password and you’re all set to go.

Once you’ve set it up properly, you can start your blog post by just clicking on the Blog button on your panel.

Image by Osman S Borutecene via Flickr

If you use a lot of windows apps using wine, here’s a script which may help you getting those elusive fonts and libraries to get the apps working in wine.

“winetricks is a quick and dirty script to download and install various redistributable runtime libraries sometimes needed to run programs in Wine.”

To get winetricks installed in your system, head over to the terminal and run the following command:

wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks

That’s it! Now to use the script to install, let’s say Media Player Classic, you just need to run the following command in the terminal:

sh winetricks mpc

If want to get a list of all the stuff winetricks allows you to install, just run:

sh winetricks

A word of caution, some of the packages may not work with older versions of wine, so make sure you’re running on the latest version of wine on your PC. In Ubuntu, to get to the latest version of wine just run the following

sudo apt-get upgrade wine

Read more on winetricks here.

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I just got one from a new lot of Dell Vostro laptops at office, and spent a day setting up and configuring Ubuntu on it. Hardy Heron seems to have improved on most fronts during the fresh install and the only thing which didn’t work out of the box was the WIFI connection. I wonder why Broadcom doesn’t come with linux drivers yet. I had to get ndiswrapper to install the Windows XP drivers for the chipset. If you’re also stuck with the same problem – here’s the easy way out – install ndisgtk:

sudo apt-get install ndisgtk

Once you install this, head over to System>Administration>Windows Wireless Drivers. Click on “Install New Driver” and choose the location where you’ve extracted your Windows XP drivers. Select on the .inf file in the folder and you should see a screen which looks like this:

If you see that the status shows Hardware present, you’ve successfully got your Wireless working

Another tip to speed up app load times on Ubuntu – try preload. You can install preload using aptitude:

sudo apt-get install preload

preload is an adaptive readahead daemon. It monitors applications that users run, and by analyzing this data, predicts what applications users might run, and fetches those binaries and their dependencies into memory for faster startup times.

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Image by °Florian via Flickr

Ubuntu’s latest and greatest version, Hardy Heron was released last night. Just couldn’t access the Ubuntu site just after the release. Started downloading the new release a few minutes back, all the download mirrors are either slow or crawling – have to switch to torrents to download.

Get your downloads over at: http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download

If you’re not too happy with the download speeds from the mirrors, try the torrents over at : http://mirror.cs.umn.edu/ubuntu-torrents/

Hardy Heron is just hours from getting released. Congratulations to the Ubuntu team in advance on getting this release out.

Can’t wait to get a hold of this release. For those of you who’re planning on upgrading to this new version from your existing 7.10 release, here’s a set of handy instructions from ubuntu-tutorials.com to guide you through the update. This article shows you how to go about the upgrade using the update manager

Link: How To Upgrade Ubuntu 7.10 to Ubuntu 8.04

If you’re looking for the easiest way to install the PHP Java Bridge in Ubuntu, follow these simple steps:

If you don’t have Java Installed on your machine, enable the multiverse option in your Software Sources and run

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-fonts sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-plugin
sudo update-java-alternatives -s java-6-sun

Download the PHP Java bridge deb files from Sourceforge.

Head over to the directory where you’ve downloaded this deb file, and fire the following commands:

sudo apt-get install liblucene-java libitext-java
sudo dpkg -i php-java-bridge_4.3.0-1_i386.deb

Once the php-java-bridge deb file is installed, apache will be automatically restarted. If apache doesn’t restart automatically, you can restart apache with the following command:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

How do you check if the PHP Java bridge is installed?
Run the phpinfo() command in php. This should give you the details of the PHP Java bridge extension under the Java Heading. Now you’re ready to run Java code in PHP

Now head over to the following link and check out the second part of the tutorial to get started on PHP and Java.
http://www.hiveminds.co.uk/node/3172

More on the PHP Java bridge over at: http://php-java-bridge.sourceforge.net/

Updates:

Here’s another Article which shows how to bridge PHP an Java in Windows using Apache Tomcat:
http://www.hiveminds.co.uk/node/3814

Here’s a cool article I came across showing you how to configure gedit in Ubuntu to become a IDE for PHP / web developers. Tips in this article include ways to customize your display optimially for PHP editing, plugins for performing tasks like beautifying PHP code, tidy HTML, check PHP syntax and much more. It’s worth your while if you’re still looking for a good PHP IDE in Ubuntu.

Link to article: Customizing gedit as a Web Developer’s IDE