October 1st, 2008
Image of Tux from Nissie Chupeco, 2008.
Ta-dah! It’s no other than Tux the Linux mascot. :D I have asked a friend, Nissie (who runs a shop at Etsy called Deadcraft) to make a Tux keychain which I’d be giving away to one lucky winner of this month’s contest.
The mechanics:
1. Post a comment on this post with a screenshot of your Linux desktop and tell a little something about it. Please make it a worksafe screenshot. :) All those with NSFW screenshots will not be posted on this blog as images but will still be accessible as links only. Make sure that you put your name and email address in your comment. You should put the thumbnail of your screenshot in an IMG tag and the URL of the full resolution of the screenshot must be linked to the thumbnail. Thumbnails must be at most 200 pixels high. (I am not sure how wide it will be at the minimum. Some have dual monitor setups and it depends on your screen resolution anyway.)
OR
If you don’t have a blog, send the screenshot to me and I’d post it on the blog. Please don’t forget the description, your name and email address.
OR
If you have a blog you could choose to not write a post here. Instead, you could trackback to this post. :) I think that trackbacks appear immediately so it’s ok. It would be ok either way. It would be good if you have your contact information on your blog so I could do number 3 of the mechanics.
Deadline of entries is October 31, 2008 @ 12 midnight, Philippine time.
2. Each person can only join this contest once. You will be assigned a number.
3. The moment I receive the contest entry, I will email you that I have indeed received your entry.
4. On October 31, 2008 @ 12 midnight, Philippine time, I will stop considering entries. If you were able to submit your entry by then but haven’t received your confirmation email yet, don’t fret. :) I just might haven’t checked my comments yet or something. There’s a timestamp, so I’d know. :)
5. Out of the numbers assigned to the contestants, I will be picking out one. I will pick a winner through a random number generator. Once done, I will post the name of the winner, and the newbie experience he/she submitted.
Thanks and I hope to see your screenshots soon!
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By Clair -- 7 comments
October 1st, 2008
This month’s poll result gives us Pidgin as the favorite messaging client for us Linux users. Hrmm. Maybe we’d wait in several months time and see if this will change, right? :) Will any of the others come close to the status of Pidgin? What do you think?
* Pidgin
51 - 60% of all votes
* Kopete
16 - 19% of all votes
* aMSN1
8 - 9% of all votes
* emesene1
4 - 5% of all votes
* gaim1
2 - 2% of all votes
* Gajim1
2 - 2% of all votes
* GyachI
1 - 1% of all votes
* kmess1
1 - 1% of all votes
* Empathy
0 - 0% of all votes
I think I am looking forward to seeing Empathy get a higher number votes the next time I run this poll question. Thanks for joining this month’s poll!
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By Clair -- 0 comments
September 28th, 2008
It’s not exactly the end of the month yet but here’s a recap of some of the posts that I think are more or less.
I hope that you have all learned a thing or two from this month’s posts!
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By Clair -- 0 comments
September 28th, 2008
image by Clair Ching, 2008
Already tried using Deluge last night. I was curious as to how it was because there were people like Benjamin and Karin who said she was liking Deluge. I’ve only used the one in the Ubuntu repositories not the latest one so I am not quite sure how different it is.
In any case, I think that Deluge is more appropriate for users who are looking for a counterpart of uTorrent. The layout looks closer to the look and feel of uTorrent, for one thing.
The screenshot above is the default screen when you view your list of torrents. You’d see the state of completion on the bar below the list of torrents.
Here are a couple of more screenshots:
image by Clair Ching, 2008.
image by Clair Ching, 2008.
Managing your torrents is easy enough with this and this is going to be more familiar looking compared to Transmission. With Transmission there are different views of the torrents you are managing so you might feel weird about it or confused.
Because there is a new release of Deluge, here’s a list of what to expect, as lifted from the application’s website:
What’s new:
* Core/ui split allowing Deluge to run headless as a daemon
* A redesigned GTK interface
* Migration to the upcoming libtorrent 0.14 release
* Stability improvements across the board
* New codebase which will allow for growth and less bugs
* A much improved queuing system
* New bugs for you to find
* And so much more.. Try it and see for yourself!
Caveats:
* Your preferences will not be migrated, but your torrent list should be.
* Not all plugins have been ported yet and some have been integrated into the client.
If you need support for RSS or Scheduler, then please stick with the 0.5.x branch until these plugins can be properly ported to 1.x
* Deluge will start in ‘Classic Mode’ where daemon functionality will be hidden in the gtkui. You can disable this in the Preferences->Interface page, but it does require a restart of Deluge.
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By Clair -- 3 comments
September 28th, 2008
- I heard about Deluge from the other people who have commented on this blog. If not for them I wouldn’t be able to find something that my sister will probably love to use on Linux. I’ve said Transmission is a nifty app. I still stand by it. But it doesn’t mean I couldn’t call Deluge a good app right?
- There’s this blog entry talking about “even when Linux fans win, they lose.” There’s something about the attitude towards Linux users and which distros they are using. It mentions something about how *nix fans complain about Ubuntu even if it is seriously a distro worthy on its own.
- Another article, on the other hand, points out there is a group of people who would rather read (and imply to be putting pressure) about the good things about Linux. But, as the author of the article says FOSS advocates should stop navel-gazing.
- I already saw the prize for the first contest which I will hold next month.
How about you? How was your week?
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By Clair -- 0 comments
September 24th, 2008
sitt.com.sg is giving away some “Powered by Ubuntu” stickers to people who send self-addressed stamped envelopes to them. These are where you could send your envelopes to:
SINGAPORE
Ubuntu Stickers
VBox 881781
SINGAPORE
AUSTRALIA
Ubuntu Stickers
Unit 2 117 Walpole St,
Bentley 6102
Western Australia
AUSTRALIA
SOUTH KOREA
302-502 Sungwon 3 Cha APT
Daebanddong Changwonsi
South Korea 641-761
It’s a cute and nifty little thing to state what Linux distro you’re using, that you are actually using something else. Newbies and not so new users will find this nifty and for those who are issuing machines in the offices with Ubuntu installed you can now mark them as such. It’s a discreet looking sticker just like the ones we get with our laptops by default, right?
I have yet to send my own envelope. Maybe the one in Singapore is closest to me so I’d send it there.
Much thanks to the people behind sitt.com.sg!
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By Clair -- 1 comment
September 23rd, 2008
I used to have gnome-btdownload as my torrent client. However useful it was, I envied my sister who was using uTorrent on Windows. I found its user interface better than the overly simple looking one used by gnome-btdownload.
Once you have a torrent file, you could already open it with Transmission. Then you could see its progress. From nothing to something, as long as it could download from the connected peers.
The nice thing about Transmission is that when you select a particular torrent, you could view its details so you see how long it would still take to download the file/s as well as how much has been downloaded already. If you have 10 files in your torrent, you’d be able to see their status when you check them out by right-clicking on them and selecting details to be viewed.
There are also separate tabs depending on the state of the torrent: Downloading, Seeding, etc. It gives you a summary of what’s going on with your torrent.
If you haven’t tried this one yet, please feel free to do so :)
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By Clair -- 6 comments
September 22nd, 2008
I tried using Chromium and it’s just too slow…
The pain of using CrossOver Chromium doesn’t make me feel attracted towards it. Maybe we should all just wait for the versions of Linux. At least experiencing it recently makes me hope that the worth should be worth it.
I couldn’t even take screenshots for this post :( Chromium was crashing. Has anyone been able to try Code Weavers’ Chromium with success?
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By Clair -- 0 comments
September 21st, 2008
It seems that I might have something to give away to you readers of the New Linux User. :D I am not saying what it is yet though. I’d like to ask you how you feel about a contest here. Just for you readers, of course :D
And if ever, what kinds of contests would you like to see here?
I can’t say I’d have them regularly but maybe from time to time it would be fun to do so. I’d love to draw you into conversations and maybe contests would help you in overcoming shyness. ;) I’ve never had a contest on my blog before so I hope you guys could help me out here by letting me know what you feel like seeing here, what kind of prizes you’d appreciate and let’s see if I could arrange something.
Contests are fun and that’s one thing I’d like us all to have aside from learning more about Linux :D It’s your time to speak up, folks!
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By Clair -- 1 comment
September 19th, 2008
I was reading “Why GNU/Linux needs slick marketing” and it pointed out the need for slick marketing. It mentioned that slick marketing still has its benefits for Linux. And I was thinking that in our own way, word of mouth marketing for Linux is still good and that we can do it well.
Maybe if some of us who are professionals in marketing, we could help build up Linux so that it will have slicker image. Through word of mouth, the materials will spread but if they look professionally done more people will be more impressed. :)
Some day maybe I’d try to come up with a better set of blog posts so that it will be more useful even for companies who want to use my posts in the future as references. Or even in schools.
Maybe you have some ideas and you think you could pitch Linux more professionally then you might be more effective in being a Linux ambassador! And if you love Linux you could contribute something in your own way so that others might appreciate it better. :)
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By Clair -- 0 comments
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