Make Your Personal Operating System(OS)

Your software, everywhere!

Everywhere? Yes, everywhere. In the cloud, on a server, on a live CD. With SUSE Studio you can build it from your browser in just a few clicks at http://susestudio.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovAzMgP8RCo

Auto Shutdown the System

A simple command can be entered in the Terminal to schedule a time for the system to shut down.

1. Go to Applications (or Main Menu) > Accessories > Terminal.
2. Enter sudo shutdown -h +m (replace m with the number of minutes, e.g. +60).
   OR: enter sudo shutdown -h hh:mm (replace hh:mm with the time on the 24hr clock, e.g. 23:15).
3. Enter password and minimize the Terminal window.

The system will then shut down within the minutes or at the time specified. To cancel a scheduled time, entersudo shutdown -c in the Terminal.

   Alternatively, you might want to download and install GShutdown, which is a GUI program for scheduling a time to shutdown the system.

Move Window Control Buttons to the Right

If your Ubuntu system sets the Minimize, Maximize and Close buttons to the left in a window and you prefer to change them to the right, then follow these simple steps:

1. Press Alt+F2 to bring up "Run Application" window.
2. Type gconf-editor into the box, click "Run" to bring up Configuration Editor.
3. Browse to apps > metacity > general, look for "button_layout" on the right panel.
4. Change the value in the "button_layout" from close,minimize,maximize: tomenu:minimize,maximize,close and press the Enter key.

Set Fully Transparent Panel

Set Fully Transparent Panel

When you set the panel to be transparent in the default Ambiance theme in Ubuntu, you will find that some panel items' backgrounds are not transparent, but you can make them transparent and consistent with others, following these steps:

1. Go to Applications (or Main Menu) > Accessories > Terminal.
2. Enter cp -R /usr/share/themes/Ambiance ~/.themes/
3. Enter gedit ~/.themes/Ambiance/gtk-2.0/apps/gnome-panel.rc (for Ubuntu 11.04 or 10.10) OR gedit ~/.themes/Ambiance/gtk-2.0/gtkrc(for Ubuntu 10.04), to open the file with gedit.
4. Search for this line bg_pixmap[NORMAL] = "img/panel.png" (for Ubuntu 11.04 or 10.10) ORbg_pixmap[NORMAL] = "panel_bg.png" (for Ubuntu 10.04)
5. Comment out the line by placing a # at the beginning of the line, like this: #   bg_pixmap[NORMAL] = ...
6. Save the file.
7. Go to System > Preferences > Appearance, switch to the other theme and then back to the Ambiance theme.

   If you'd to change to the New Wave theme, then enter cp -R /usr/share/themes/"New Wave" ~/.themes/in step 2, enter gedit ~/.themes/"New Wave"/gtk-2.0/gtkrc in step 3, search for and comment out this linebg_pixmap[NORMAL] = "Images/Panel/PanelBarLong.png" in steps 4 and 5 respectively.

Slow Grey Monster

8 august,one of finest day of ideal monsoons.it's been raining for last 3 hours and i was drenched in it.while coming back to home i was caught by a SLOW GREY MONSTER.*before i proceed i would like to tell that why i called it the slow grey monster.Slow:because it was griping me very-very slowly Grey:because atmosphere was grey and more appropriate it was driving me to the grey old memories. Monster:bcoz what it was doing to me was nothing less than a monster could do me,it was making me sad..

i dictate the scene:i am driving and suddenly i realise that i have slowed to speed of 15 and no-more want to rush home.I look at the passing by trees and i slip to my past with some similar day.I see a young boy(approx14-15yrs old), immediately i realize that i see me.I look so happy and funny there,full of joy, WORRY-LESS.I am looking at sky as if i will hold the next lightening.It looks like i own the world and i need nothing else.so happy that if i could have smiled a little more all 28 would pop out off my mouth.Looking at this one seriously makes me ENVY of me.But suddenly a i rode into a pit and i was jerked out of the ghost's grip.

I don't wish to live this day again.Because to wish is to waste.I will live this day again ASAP

-Gaurav Vasishth
(tired,lonely,confused AND going to a short sleep after a proteinX milk drink)

GIMP v/s Photoshop

13 Rock-Hard reasons to select gimp than photoshop.

Photoshop is one of the most popular image editing proprietary software, with extensive capabilities and a rather un-affordable price! It will be interesting for you to note that most of the Photoshop copies running on thousands of computers are illegal, that seems to be obvious as even professionals cannot afford to buy such an expensive piece of software. On the other hand, GIMP, photo manipulation software is a free counterpart that is fairly popular in the Linux circle. GIMP is preinstalled on some Linux

distributions or it can be installed with great ease. In this post we will draw a comparison between the two softwares! The debate is old yet it interests many. In this post we will compare the two softwares, according to current standards.

Both GIMP and PS are aimed at raster image editing and are also capable to use vector drawn paths and shapes.

1- Basic editing is the same for both the softwares: Photoshop and GIMP, both provide basic set of tools for image editing. Equivalent quality image editing can be accomplished in both the softwares. Also, if you are to create images for the web than both softwares will do a similar job.

2- Advanced Features, do you need them? Photoshop is loaded with excessive features as compared to GIMP. But here it must be noted that an average user does not require sophisticated editing capabilities and only handful of people use these advanced features. Trivial jobs do not need such cumbersome and expensive software. On this other hand, Gimp comes with essential ones and capabilities can be extended as required. Additional features can be added via plugins and extensions and hence you can tailor the software according to your requirements of image manipulation. If you are inclined to explore with GIMP, then it will let you accomplish any job that you can do with PS. You can experiment with advanced filters and the Python-scripted filter stacks that are surely great.

Additionally, you may have to pay for extra set of filters and plugins when working with PS while they are completely freely available on GIMP. GIMP is far more freinldy to plugins. On the contrary, Ps is likely to crash if you load many fonts, burshes or plugins.

The bit-depth issue:

Photoshop supports 16 and 32 bit images while GIMP only supports 8 bit. However the functionality of GIMP can be extended via GEGL (The Generic Graphics Library or GEGL is a programming library under development for image processing applications). With GEGL, GIMP can be supports 16-bit image depth at most. However, most users have reported that they rarely feel the absence of this feature.

Most of digital camera images use a maximum of 16.7 million colors. According to an estimate there are only 3% of advanced users that use high bit-depth images of 16 or more bits per channel. Hence, we can say that only 3% of the crowd actually needs Photoshop.

The CMYK?

CMYK is a subtractive color (four color) model used in color printing. You particularly need this color model to be supported in image editing software if you require your graphics to be printed, when color is critical for the images you produce. Photoshop has an advance support for CMYK. Earlier, many literatures have said that GIMP lacks this feature. However this is not the case. GIMP has some CMYK support that can be downloaded separately.  But, yes we can say that the support is not as advance as in Photoshop, yet GIMP seems to accomplish the job. GIMP also does just with graphics produced for printing on your inkjet at home or at a kiosk (or any printers that use RGB drivers)

3- PS is Large in size to download, as compared to GIMP: GIMP set-up is just about 20 MB, while Photoshop is large, extra large disk-space. As recommended, you must have 1GB of available hard-disk space for installation; additional free space required during installation (cannot install on removable flash storage devices) for Photoshop!

4- System Requirements, GIMP wins again: Photoshop is heavy software that might make it slow on your system. GIMP, in contrast is very fast and does not require much of system resources.

5- Size on disk, minimal with GIMP: You will require just some free space (usually as low as 20 MB) on your disk to download and install GIMP. While to download and install Photoshop you need space in Gbs.

6-System Resources, GIMP is lighter: Photoshop is very heavy on system resources.  The minimum recommended RAM to run GIMP is only 128 Mb. While Photoshop CS 5 requires 1 GB of RAM!!

7- Platform support, GIMP wins again: GIMP is integrated in most Linux distros. It can be downloaded on Windows or Mac while Photoshop is available only for Mac and Windows. However you download and run the application on Linux as well.

8- Portability: GIMP being perfectly compact software and small in size and therefore it is portable. You can run it from USB stick or devices such as MS Xbox with ease. This is not possible with giant software like Photoshop.

9- With GIMP you can read and edit the PSD files of Photoshop. But Photoshop does not support GIMP’s native file format i.e. XCF files.

10- Customization: As stated earlier, the software can be tailored according to the requirements of user. The GUI is completely customizable and can be minimal. If you like the Photoshop UI then you can make your GIMp look like that too!

11- Support: Like all open source softwares, GIMP has a tremendous support. That you won’t find with Photoshop. General techniques for image editing, applies to both the softwares. And therefore most Ps tutorials can be used as reference for GIMP.

12- Continually evolving: Like another OS, GIMP is continuously evolving i.e. even if you find a feature that is not in GIMP and present in Photoshop it is very much possible that it will be there in the upcoming releases as the software is continuously developing and adding features to it.

13- Finally the Price! Price plays a decisive role in evaluating the capabilities of the two softwares. GIMP is completely free while Ps is as expensive as 700 USD. The point being, why pay so much for excessive features that you don’t actually need! And when the functionalities can be downloaded freely when ever required! Specially for the people who are amateur and are embarking their journey on image editing Ps is highly priced. Moreover, if you are starting a small advertising business you might not want to invest as much only for the software in the business.

To conclude, instead of pirating Photoshop, its better to use open-source software i.e. GIMP, for image editing yielding comparable results. Photoshop has some tremendous capabilities, this fact cannot be denied however these capabilities are hardly needed for average to advance users. Photoshop, is only aimed at a very specific bunch of people who really are experts. Nevertheless, GIMP too can be used by experts the difference being that Photoshop might be able to accomplish some tasks easily while with GIMP you will have to take a long route!