Linuxlandit & The Conqueror Penguin: 06/01/2012

Saturday, June 30, 2012

ClassicMenu Indicator Brings Ubuntu’s Classic Menu to Unity.

Love Ubuntu, but find yourself infuriated by the lack of a traditional menu? Don’t panic: simply install ClassicMenu Indicator. This simple program brings the simple menu of Gnome 2 to the indicator area. Sure: it’s not the perfect location for a menu, but it’s there when you need it.

It’s perhaps the most consistent – and, honestly, the most appropriate – criticism leveled at Ubuntu’s Unity: not only is the traditional menu structure basically gone, there’s also no setting that can bring it back.

No official setting, anyway. We’ve shown you how to re-add functionality to Ubuntu’s tray using indicator applets; today we teach you another: bringing back the traditional menu. The screenshot at right basically says it all – it’s your software the way you’re used to finding it.
A Traditional Menu
Does this look familiar?

It’s supposed to look familar; that’s the point. It’s the menu you remember from Gnome 2 – all the familiar categories are there, from Accessories to System tools to Internet:

Click a program and it will launch, exactly as you’d expect it too.
If you’re a Wine user, you’ll be happy to note that the Wine menu is also intact. This gives you access to the entire virtual “Start Menu”, allowing you to really make use of your Windows software in Ubuntu.

You can also browse the various system settings, which are broken down into three categories:

Before you ask: I can not find a way to move this menu to the top-left of the screen. I know: that would make this program perfect, but it’s apparently not possible for now. I’d love to be wrong about this: if you know how to move this to left side of the panel let me know in the comments below.

Installing ClassicMenu Indicator.
Are you ready to install this? It’s developed for Ubuntu 12.04 and tested with Ubuntu 11.10. Ubuntu 11.04 isn’t supported.

You can head to the ClassicMenu Indicator page on Florian Disch’s website for a .deb file, or you can add his PPA and install the program with the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:diesch/testing
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install classicmenu-indicator

The first command will add the PPA; the second command updates your package manager; the third installs ClassicMenu Indicator.

Disch warns on his website that this is beta software, and may not be stable: “ClassicMenu Indicator is beta software. It works for me and a lot of other users but may still have some bugs,” he says. I’d like to add that the software was very stable for me while testing as well.

Conclusion.
I started using Linux in 2005, and remember the menu structure being one of the features that impressed me most. Coming from Windows, I was used to a menu arranged in folders named for the company making the software instead, which is far from ideal. Seeing things sorted into categories like Office, Games and Media was a big step forward.
Ubuntu’s Unity seems to be ditching this structure for search. Sure: there are ways you can bring the categories up, but it’s a far cry from the original menu.
So I’m glad I found a way to browse programs quickly. Are you? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below. I’ll be around for the discussion.

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Thursday, June 28, 2012

Panorama Tools provides a powerful framework for re-projecting and blending multiple source images into immersive panoramics of many types.

Panorama Tools (also known as PanoTools) are a suite of programs and libraries originally written by the German physics and mathematics professor Helmut Dersch.
Panorama Tools provides a powerful framework for re-projecting and blending multiple source images into immersive panoramics of many types. An updated version of the Panorama Tools library serves as the underlying core engine for many software panorama GUI front-ends.
Dersch started development on Panorama Tools in 1998, producing software available for creating panoramas and more, but had to stop development in 2001 due to legal harassment and claims of patent infringement by the company IPIX.[1] Dersch released the core library (pano12) and some of the programs of Panorama Tools under the terms of the GNU General Public License. The rest of the applications were made available as binary executables only and for free without a copyleft license.

The development of the source code of Panorama Tools was continued by some members of the original Panorama Tools mailing list. In December 2003 they initiated a free software project which is currently hosted by SourceForge. SourceForge requires that all hosted software is released under an open source license. For this reason Dersch's unlicensed binaries are not hosted there, although they can can still be found on mirror websites.
On 5 August, 2007, Dersch announced his intention to relicense the Panorama Tools source code.[2] On 9 August, 2007, Dersch changed the license to a GNU Lesser General Public License.[3]
Sub-components

An example of Panorama Tools' ability to remap images shot with a fisheye lens into rectilinear perspective.

PanoTools consists of the following components:
PTEditor
    Java interactive panorama editor.
PTPicker
    Java front end to panorama stitcher and other tools. It provides a graphical interface for feature point selection and position optimization.
PTCrypt
    Java tool for scrambling pictures intended to be viewed on-line with PTViewer.
PTStitcher
    Panorama stitching tool which remaps, adjusts and combines arbitrary images to panoramic views.
PTOptimizer†
    Optimizes positions and sizes of images using control-point data.
PTStereo
    Creates 3-dimensional objects from 2 or more stereoscopic images.
PTInterpolate
    Physically valid true view interpolator. Given two images of the same scene taken from different positions, this tool creates views from any intermediate position.
PTMorpher
    Morphing tool.
PTAverage
    Averages images to reduce noise and enhance density.
PTStripe
    Combines images into movie-stripes for viewing in object-viewers (PTMovie extension to PTViewer).
PanoTools Plugins
    Photoshop, GraphicConverter and GIMP plug-ins for image correction and remapping. Also compatible to many other programs that can use Photoshop plug-ins.
pano12 library
    The underlying panorama library, currently used by several different panorama front-ends and command line programs.
pano13 library
    Current version of the library. No longer compatible with programs for which no source code is available.

Further developments.
In 2006 the functionality o.f PTstitcher was reproduced by the developers of Panorama Tools. Its functionality was broken into several program, in an attempt to modularize it:
PTmender
    Remaps one image at a time
PTblender
    Implements the rudimentary colour correction algorithm found in later versions of PTstitcher
PTmasker
    Computes stitching masks. It implements the ability to increase depth-of-field by stacking images
PTroller
    Takes a set of images and merges them into a single one
PTcrop
    Crops an image to its outer rectangle.
PTuncrop
    Opposite of PTcrop: takes a cropped file and creates an uncropped one.
PTtiff2psd
    Takes a series of input images and creates a Photoshop PSD file where each input file is a layer.

Front-ends and applications.

To make working with Panorama Tools easier and to add functionality, many interactive, graphical front-ends to Panorama Tools have been developed, both open source (e.g. hugin) and commercial (e.g. PTgui and PTMac), along with a variety of other companion applications (e.g. smartblend and enblend), which in many cases make interacting directly with the programs in the original Panorama Tools toolset unnecessary.

Download.

Screenshots.

panottols_LevelingTutorialLeveledPreview

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Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Xcfa is a tool to extract the contens of audio-cds and convert musical audio.

XCFA is oofers an extraction tool for Audio-CD and musical file conversion to flac, wav, mp3, ogg, m4a, mpc, ape, wavpack formats.

Decompression of wma and shorten formats to flac, wav, mp3, ogg, m4a, mpc, ape, and wavpack.

Here are some key features of "XCFA":

· Extraction of Audio-CD and musical file conversion to flac, wav, mp3, ogg, m4a, mpc, ape, wavpack formats.
· Decompression of wma and shorten formats to flac, wav, mp3, ogg, m4a, mpc, ape, and wavpack.
· Handling of frequency, track and bits.
· Handling of files shared volume before a recording.
· Web retrieval of Audio-CD informations during treatment.
· Small cover creation for your CDs.

Converting WMA to MP3 (LAME and XCFA).

First you have to be able to play MP3s and WMAs (or DVDs for that matter). Since this article is about conversion not making them work I will just give you a link to Ubuntu itself which will tell you how to get them working.

Once they're working, it's easy to get them converted. There are probably several ways to do this and a lot of TERMINAL methods but I wanted a mouse point and click solution. So go to APPLICATIONS-->UBUNTU SOFTWARE CENTER and search for LAME. Install LAME by clicking on the INSTALL button. Note this search will return several packages. The one you want is LAME AN MP3 ENCODING LIBRARY (front end). Now search for XCFA. This stands for X Convert File Audio. This search will just return one result. Install XCFA by clicking on the INSTALL button. Close the Software Center your done installing.

To use XCFA to convert from WMA to MP3; first select the FILES TAB (yellow 1 in the pic) then CLICK the IMPORT button (yellow 2) and select your files you wish to convert (use shift and ctrl to select multiple files). CLICK in the FILE DESTINATION box to pick where you want your new MP3 files to go (yellow 3). Next CLICK the RED BOX's under the MP3 column on all the wma files you want to convert (yellow 4). Last, CLICK the APPLY THE CHANGES button at the bottom left (not pictured).

Your now done. The conversion will take some time to complete but you'll see a progression bar to keep you informed.

NOTE: You can install other CODEXs that will allow you to convert to other formats. You can see on mine that I can do WAV, FLAC, WavP, OGG, MPC, and MP3. I can not covert to APE,M4A, or AAC because I do not have those codexs installed.

Screenshots.

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Saturday, June 23, 2012

imgSeek is a photo collection manager and viewer with content-based search and many other features.

imgSeek is a photo collection manager and viewer with content-based search and many other features.

The query is expressed either as a rough sketch painted by the user or as another image.

The searching algorithm makes use of multi-resolution Haar wavelet decomposition of the query and database images.
An open source server-side version of the same image similarity engine found on imgSeek is also available.

The isk-daemon database server capable of adding content-based (visual) image searching to any image related website or software through a XML-RPC or SOAP HTTP-based API.

Projects:

Desktop version, a photo collection manager and viewer with content-based search and many other features;
Server version: for integrating a content-based image database into your own software or image-related web site.

Download.

F.A.Q.

The first time you run imgSeek, an empty database is created, and later saved to the file "~/.imgseek/img-db.iqd". You can populate it on the "Add images" tab.

Before clicking on the "Add" button, you should choose type (or click on the "..." button) the full path of the directory you wish to add. Then click the "Add" button and wait. A progress dialog will appear so you can see how the process is going or Abort it.

This process is extremely slow for large photo collections, so please be patient. On a next version I'll try hard to make it faster.

Sometimes it is useful to filter the files you add, for example, to exclude any thumbnails dirs and files, you could enter "tn" on the string restriction and "50" for the size.

See more detailed instructions.

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Friday, June 22, 2012

The Eye of GNOME image viewer is the official image viewer for the GNOME Desktop environment.

The Eye of GNOME image viewer is the official image viewer for the GNOME Desktop environment. With it, you can view single image files, as well as large image collections.

The Eye of GNOME supports a variety of image file formats.
The GdkPixbuf library determines which file formats Eye of GNOME can load and save. If the appropriate plugins are installed on your system, Image Viewer will be able to open more image formats than those listed below. The following list is the default supported file formats for reading:

    ANI - Animation
    BMP - Windows Bitmap
    GIF - Graphics Interchange Format
    ICO - Windows Icon
    JPEG - Joint Photographic Experts Group
    PCX - PC Paintbrush
    PNG - Portable Network Graphics
    PNM - Portable Anymap from the PPM Toolkit
    RAS - Sun Raster
    SVG - Scalable Vector Graphics
    TGA - Targa
    TIFF - Tagged Image File Format
    WBMP - Wireless Bitmap
    XBM - X Bitmap
    XPM - X Pixmap
The Image Viewer supports the following formats for saving by default:
    BMP - Windows Bitmap
    ICO - Windows Icon
    JPEG - Joint Photographic Experts Group
    PNG - Portable Network Graphics
Eye of GNOME is released under the GNU General Public Licence.

Screenshots.

Eye of GNOME's main window, showing a lovely hen.

The collection view, which allows you to browse your images.

The properties dialog allows you to check the details of your image.

...And also the EXIF/XMP metadata of your images.

With the print dialog, you can set the size and position of your image for printing.

Downloads.

The latest releases can always be found at the GNOME ftp site.

The latest stable release is 3.2.0 (release notes).

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Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Ubuntu apps: IMDrops Image Tools is a screen capture and file sharing tool.

Image Tools is a screen capture and file sharing tool.

It features multi-threaded batch image resizing, conversion, cropping, flipping/rotating, watermarks, decolorizing (grayscale, negative, sepia), and optimizing.

The BMP, GIF, TIFF, JPEG and PNG image types are supported.

It is compatible with MONO (only for GNOME).

Multicore processing is supported to increase performance.

The quality for output when optimizing is variable.

Color channels can be filtered.

An internal benchmarking tool is available. Indexed pixel format images can be processed.