How to Convert Videos with Transmageddon in Ubuntu Linux

Whether you want to listen to music on your smartphone or watch movies on your iPad, you may need to convert you media files from one format to another depending on what your devices support.

Transmageddon Video Transcoder is a great media converter for Ubuntu. It converts audio and video files, it has a simple interface, and it’s free. Installation is easy. Just type this command in the terminal:

sudo apt-get install transmageddon

Or use the Software Center:

Transmageddon is now installed, so let’s start converting videos. Launch it from the applications menu. The application looks like this:

At the top you choose the input file which you want to convert. Click the button and navigate to the file you want it converted then click “Open”.

You can see the input video properties just below the “Choose Input File” button. If you have a specific device you want to play the video on, then select your device from the “Preset” drop-down menu so the program adjusts the conversion settings appropriately otherwise leave it blank. Now select the target format you want from the “Output Format” menu. Right below that are the settings for audio and video codec.

Choose the settings you desire. You can choose different audio/video codecs with different qualities and formats.  At the bottom of the window you can choose whether to rotate the video image or not. This might come in handy if you were shooting a video then found out later that you were holding that you were holding the camera upside down (or if you like to watch videos upside down which would be weird).

After you finish choosing the settings you want, hit “Transcode” to start the conversion process. It may take a while depending on the length of the video and the setting you choose. You will find the output file in under Videos in your Home directory. Easy, isn’t it?

Mozilla Firefox 6 Final Now Available For Download

It’s not been so long that Mozilla released Firefox 5 final version for public, but today we have great news for Firefox lovers as Firefox 6 final is now available for Download on Mac, Windows and Linux via Mozilla FTP servers. It’s not available officially now but will be available anytime soon this week.

Firefox 6 Final does not bring any new changes to UI (User Interface). But though the new version bring alot of speed improvement while using the browser almost 20% faster than the previous Firefox 5.

Keep in mind that there’s a small chance that this allegedly “final” build is updated before it’s released to the public this week, yet that’s very unlikely unless major issues are found. While the welcome page still mentions “Firefox 6 Beta”, don’t be fooled, Mozilla just hasn’t updated said page yet. This latest stable Final version offers more stability and improvements than the former test builds. So, Download it and upgrade your current version of Firefox.

Forgotten Ubuntu Password – Reset within minutes

Forgotten Ubuntu Password – Reset within minutes

If you’ve ever forgotten your password, you aren’t alone… it’s probably one of the most common tech support problems I’ve encountered over the years. Luckily if you are using Ubuntu they made it incredibly easy to reset your password.

All it takes is adjusting the boot parameters slightly and typing a command or two, but we’ll walk you through it.

Reset Your Ubuntu Password

Reboot your computer, and then as soon as you see the GRUB Loading screen, make sure to hit the ESC key so that you can get to the menu.

Root Shell – Easy Method

If you have the option, you can choose the “recovery mode” item on the menu, usually found right below your default kernel option.

Then choose “Drop to root shell prompt” from this menu.

This should give you a root shell prompt.

Alternate Root Shell Method

If you don’t have the recovery mode option, this is the alternate way to manually edit the grub options to allow for a root shell.

First you’ll want to make sure to choose the regular boot kernel that you use (typically just the default one), and then use the “e” key to choose to edit that boot option.

Now just hit the down arrow key over to the “kernel” option, and then use the “e” key to switch to edit mode for the kernel option.

You’ll first be presented with a screen where you can find this written “ro single”

You’ll want to remove the “ro single” part with the backspace key, and then add this onto the end:

rw init=/bin/bash

Once you hit enter after adjusting the kernel line, you’ll need to use the B key to choose to boot with that option.

At this point the system should boot up very quickly to a command prompt.

Changing the Actual Password

You can use the following command to reset your password:

passwd

After changing your password, use the following commands to reboot your system. (The sync command makes sure to write out data to the disk before rebooting)

sync
reboot –f

I found that the –f parameter was necessary to get the reboot command to work for some reason. You could always hardware reset instead, but make sure to use the sync command first.
And now you should be able to login without any issues.

How to Install SQUID Proxy Server@Linux....

Certainly Squid server is a favourite open source GPLd proxy and web cache. It’s a variety of functions, from accelerating a web server by caching repeated requests, to caching web, name server query , and other network lookups for a group of people sharing network resources. It is mainly designed to run on Linux / Unix-like systems. Squid is a high-performance proxy caching server for Web clients, supporting FTP, gopher, and HTTP data objects. Unlike traditional caching software, Squid handles all requests in a single, non-blocking, I/O-driven technique. Squid maintains meta data and specially hot objects cached in RAM, caches DNS lookups, supports non-blocking DNS lookups, and implements negative caching of failed requests. Squid comprises of a main server program squid, a Domain Name System lookup program (dnsserver), a program for retrieving FTP data (ftpget), and a lot of management and client tools.


Here is the instruction on how to install Squid proxy server:
1. Download Squid Cache
You can download Squid at http://www.squid-cache.org/Versions/ . There, you can see a lot of version of Squid. I prefer you to download the latest version. Here is the link for the latest version:
http://www.squid-cache.org/Versions/v3/3.0/squid-3.0.STABLE8.tar.gz
Note: If you want to download it directly from your server. Please use the following command:
wget http://www.squid-cache.org/Versions/v3/3.0/squid-3.0.STABLE8.tar.gz
2. Squid Cache Installation
To extract the downloaded compressed file, please use the following command:
tar -zxvf squid-3.0.STABLE8.tar.gz
this will create a directory named squid-3.0.STABLE8 at the current directory. Next, go into the directory:
cd squid-3.0.STABLE8
To build and install the Squid Cache, type:
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/squid
make all
make install

The command above will install squid in directory /usr/local/squid
3. Customize and Run Squid Cache
1. customize the squid.conf configuration file:
vi /usr/local/squid/etc/squid.conf
2. Initalise the cache:
/usr/local/squid/sbin/squid -z
3. start the cache:
/usr/local/squid/sbin/squid
Note: If you have problem to initialize the cache, please give the write permission (preferably chmod 777) for the specified directory.
Verify Squid Cache Installation
netstat -tulpn | grep 3128
Output:

tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:3128                0.0.0.0:*

If you get the output above, you have successfully install Squid proxy server.
4. Client Configuration
Open a web browser > Tools > Internet option > Network settings > and setup Squid server IP address and port # 3128.
Good Luck!

How To Enable System Tray Notification For All Applications In Ubuntu 11.04

System tray notifications were just recently enabled in Ubuntu Unity. Unfortunately, the system tray option is not available for many applications and merely works with a few apps such as Mumble, java applications and Wine. In this post we will tell you how to enable system tray for all applications.

Open a Terminal window and enter the below command:

gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Panel systray-whitelist "['all']"

After that, you can whitelist a certain application if you want, by using the command below. In the given command, make sure you replace “YOUR_APPLICATION”, with the applications name which you wish to add to the whitelist.

gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Panel systray-whitelist "['JavaEmbeddedFrame', 'Mumble', 'Wine', 'Skype', 'hp-systray', 'YOUR_APPLICATION']"

Log out and login back for the changes to take effect.

Following the method above, you can add a number of applications to the whitelist to make sure that you are not deprived of the system tray notifications of your favorite apps.

[via addictivetip]

How to Make Your Own Chrome OS Chromebook

On June 15, Samsung and Acer will release the first consumer-oriented Chrome OS laptops, or Chromebooks as Google likes to call them. Both hardware- and software-wise, these netbooks are nothing special: You can download Chrome OS's open source brother, Chromium OS, for free -- and at around $400 for a Chromebook, you would certainly expect some better hardware than what Samsung and Acer are offering.In fact, for around $300 you can get a cheaper and more powerful netbook with Windows 7 pre-installed -- and it only takes about 30 minutes to wipe Windows and install Chrome OS yourself. You'll end up with a better and cheaper Chromebook.

For the most part, any x86-powered laptop or Atom netbook should run Chrome OS without difficulties. Almost every x86 computer will at least boot Chrome OS -- but in some cases, you might need to do a little hacking to get your WiFi adaptor and other peripherals to work.

As far as specific models go, the Samsung NC10 is a good bet, as is the Acer Eee PC, Acer Aspire, Toshiba Mini, and Fujitsu Lifebook. For more info on what does and doesn't work, check theChromium Developer Hardware list, and Hexxeh's netbook andlaptop compatibility lists. There's no reason you can't install (or dual-boot!) Chrome OS on a desktop PC, incidentally.

To perform the Chromium OS install process, you'll need a 2GB USB memory stick. Any plain, not-weirdly-partitioned USB storage device should be fine -- you'll only need it for the install, so don't worry about performance or reliability.

You now need to grab a copy of Chromium OS. The only real option, unless you want to build Chromium OS yourself, is to download an image from Hexxeh. Because Hexxeh's nightly builds are automatically generated from the latest Chromium source code, they are not guaranteed to work -- but on the flip side, Hexxeh's builds always represent the latest bleeding edge version of Chrome OS.

Upload Photos & Videos To Facebook From Ubuntu Desktop

Linux has often suffered from periodic changes of cloud based website environments, such as Facebook, which has caused conflicts with Linux based operating systems. For example, Facebook native photo uploader often fails to upload images with Ubuntu. Facebook’s ever-changing API creates even more problems, as it renders Ubuntu based uploading tools obsolete and dysfunctional. A solution to this problem can be to use Starry Hope Uploader. However, despite being a good app for uploading photos to Facebook, it does not provide the option to upload videos. Nautilus Facebook Uploader is a desktop application which allows uploading both photos and videos to Facebook, creating albums and enables setting an auto-upload time. Before you can upload photos or videos to Facebook, you will require authorizing the Nautilus Facebook Uploader application to access your Facebook profile.