Spotify the free music application for Windows and Mac has finally been officially ported to Linux, while this is only a preview build and currently unsupported it’s at least a step in the right direction and no more running the Windows version through Wine and all the trouble I had with that.

The main differences in this version is the lack of local music and that it’s only available to Premium subscribers while they are looking in to ways of “reliably” displaying ads for Free and Open users of it’s services.

With simple installation instructions for Ubuntu 10.04 and Debian Squeeze other Linux distribution users may be out in the cold for a while but I’m sure hacks and development with come quickly. Below are the instrutions given on Spotifys secret labs page:

More information can be found on their blog and secret labs pages.

After installing an update to WordPress I received the error:

“Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.”

I was unsure if this was down to my hosts servers being temporarily down, going down during the update or if WordPress had simply failed to update whatever it was updating. Turns out it was the latter and it’s really easy to fix, first log on to your ftp, file manager or whatever for your hosting and browse to your wordpress install, in the root of this there should be a .maintenance file, just delete this and everything should be back to normal. Once back in the WordPress dashboard you may be asked to reinstall whatever failed however sometimes it will have completed the install and just not managed to delete this file.

:~$ gimp
gimp: fatal error: Failed to register GObject with DBusConnection

(script-fu:3100): LibGimpBase-WARNING **: script-fu: gimp_wire_read(): error

I fixed this error by removing opening Synaptic Package Manager and searching for appmenu-gtk, right click and mark for removal, once this has been done it should begin to work again.

Remember this Photoshop CS5 sneak peak showing off it’s latest and greatest feature Content-Aware Fill a couple months ago, well it turns out a reasonably old plug-in for GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) named Resynthesizer seems to work just as great and because it is what it is, it’s free and open-source.

Installing on Ubuntu 9.10/10.04 install:

or for the Source/Windows/Fedora Core 4 versions see the download section.

Once you have it installed, it’s simple to use really just select something on your image that shouldn’t be there and right click on the selection Filters -> Map -> Resynthesize.. and up should pop an options box, these settings are pretty standard and will get rid of most things given that they aren’t too big. It’s best if you’re not getting the results you want to play around with the settings yourself to get to know them better.

Click after the break for an example with step by step guide.

Example:

Let’s see, we start out with this nice photo of a house but wait.. what are those smelly students doing there? Well, let’s sort that out..

First thing you’ll want to do is grab your best selection tool and cut around the edge of those waste of time students..

Now all you have to do is right click Filters -> Map -> Resynthesize..

Next here, you can just hit the Ok button and watch as they magically disappear (probably back to their germ infested student flat).

Now you can just do that for anything, however while doing the edges some strange things happen with the default settings:

To counteract this, I found unchecking “Make vertically tileable” seemed to fix this and I would assume (without trying) that if you are doing a vertical edge you might want to take off the horizontally tileable option.

This brings the end result to a pretty reasonable (student free) image only after a couple of minutes, much better than could be expected from using the clone tool and whatever other means you would go through.

One of my most used commands in Linux is the history command, it lists all your recent commands. The problem with this is you might have to scroll through hundreds before you get to one of any interest, so adding grep to search through these and bring back only relative one’s is great.

Give it a try (just change searchcriteria for what you want like apt-get or tar):

history | grep searchcriteria

Manual pages:

• history
• grep

The new WordPress default theme, Twenty Ten, is awesome but one thing that annoys me about it was the fact it’s single column template isn’t full width but instead just removing the sidebar and centering the content. It’s really easy to change that though so here’s how I did it:

1. Under Appearance click Editor to open the theme editor
2. If it isn’t already click on “Stylesheet (style.css)” on the right hand side (somewhere near the bottom)
3. Now look for the following section of code (Ctrl+F will come in helpful here to find it) and change the width here from 640px to 900px then hit the Update File button:

Now when you view pages which use the one column template they should fill the same amount of space that both the content and sidebar usually do.

There is a pretty quick fix for not being able to click flash on websites such as YouTube, just simply add the line below into the following file and restart your web browser and all should be fine:

sudo gedit /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper/i386/linux/npviewer

Add in the line (above the last line):

export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1

BURG if you didn’t notice is GRUB backwards and actually stands for “Brand-new Universal loadeR from GRUB” which was probably decided a while after picking the letters.. Basically though it’s a much nicer looking alternative to the very dated looking GRUB bootloader.

Installation

Until only recently it’s seemed far too much hassle of installing something which only gets displayed for a couple of seconds at boot and isn’t seen again unless something goes wrong, but now that a PPA has been created for it (for Lucid anyway) it seems like its worth the very little bother.

First add the PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bean123ch/burg

Now type the following to install the loader, emulator and some themes:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install burg-pc burg-themes burg-emu

You’ll be prompted to do some configuration settings in order for it to install, for these I just hit enter for each with the default to options however make sure to double check!

Now that’s done try rebooting and you should now see a slightly different screen? If so you can get on to tweaking it to get it to look even nicer

Tweaking

Themes:

When on the new shiny bootloader hit the ‘T’ button to load a new popup menu which allows you to toggle between themes without the need to restart so pick a favourite (mine are Radiance and Sora Clean.)

Clean Up The Boot List:

If you’re like me and have a bunch of old kernels still cramming up your boot screen you might want to get rid of them, it’s easy enough just make sure to note down your current version and the older versions which you can see on the loader (the newest version will have the highest number). My versions were 2.6.32-22 and 2.6.32-21, so I wanted to remove the later and here’s how to do that:

Open Synaptic Package Manager (System-> Administration->Synaptic Package Manager)

search for the version you want to remove (eg mine was 2.6.32-21) right click on the checked ones and “Mark for Complete Removal”, if you are at all unsure about which version to remove it’s probably best you just leave it or ask someone to check.

Now in order to update BURG to notify changes have been made, run:

sudo update-burg

Set the BURG Screen Resolution:

Very simple to do, note down your screen resolution (you should be able to find that under System->Preferences->Monitors under Resolution) now you want to edit the following file and change the default size to the one that matches your screens.

sudo gedit /boot/burg/burg.cfg

Find the following line and replace the 640×480 with your resolution (for example I had to change mine to 1440×900)

set gfxmode=640×480

Save and close this file and you should be done.

If you want to try customising BURG more or if you’re having some problems you should check out their very useful help page:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Burg

Update:
Over at OMG! Ubuntu! they have found an even nice looking theme, so make sure to check that out: link

BURG if you didn’t notice is GRUB backwards and actually stands for “Brand-new Universal loadeR from GRUB” which was probably decided a while after picking the letters.. Basically though it’s a much nicer looking alternative to the very dated looking GRUB bootloader.
Installation
Until only recently it’s seemed far too much hassle of installing something which only gets displayed for a couple of seconds at boot and isn’t seen again unless something goes wrong, but now that a PPA has been created for it (for Lucid anyway) it seems like its worth the very little bother.
First add the PPA:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bean123ch/burg
Now type the following to install the loader, emulator and some themes:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install burg-pc burg-themes burg-emu
You’ll be prompted to do some configuration settings in order for it to install, for these I just hit enter for each with the default to options however make sure to double check!

Now that’s done try rebooting and you should now see a slightly different screen? If so you can get on to tweaking it to get it to look even nicer
Tweaking
Themes:
When on the new shiny bootloader hit the ‘T’ button to load a new popup menu which allows you to toggle between themes without the need to restart so pick a favourite (mine are Radiance and Sora Clean.)
Clean Up The Boot List:
If you’re like me and have a bunch of old kernels still cramming up your boot screen you might want to get rid of them, it’s easy enough just make sure to note down your current version and the older versions which you can see on the loader (the newest version will have the highest number). My versions were 2.6.32-22 and 2.6.32-21, so I wanted to remove the later and here’s how to do that:
Open Synaptic Package Manager (System-> Administration->Synaptic Package Manager)
search for the version you want to remove (eg mine was 2.6.32-21) right click on the checked ones and “Mark for Complete Removal”, if you are at all unsure about which version to remove it’s probably best you just leave it or ask someone to check.
Now in order to update BURG to notify changes have been made, run:
sudo update-burg
Set the BURG Screen Resolution:
Very simple to do, note down your screen resolution (you should be able to find that under System->Preferences->Monitors under Resolution) now you want to edit the following file and change the default size to the one that matches your screens.
sudo gedit /boot/burg/burg.cfg
Find the following line and replace the 640×480 with your resolution (for example I had to change mine to 1440×900)
set gfxmode=640×480
Save and close this file and you should be done.
If you want to try customising BURG more or if you’re having some problems you should check out their very useful help page:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Burg

To run a JAR file from the command line in ubuntu using the following command:

java -jar filename.jar

Otherwise it is also possible to enable double clicking to run jar files too by the following simple steps:

1. Find the .jar file in the File Browser (a.k.a Nautilus)
2. Right click the .jar file > Properties
3. Click on the “Open With” tab along the top
4. Change the bullet to be Sun Java 6 Runtime
5. Click Close and you’re done.

Now you should be able to just double click the file and it will run just like most other files!