Category: Open Source

Free and Open Source Software Listing

Posted on

Scientist: How to attribute free software contributions in journal article, proceeding and monograph

Scientists, academicians and researchers are a group of users that benefits greatly from Free and Open Source Software (FOSS / FLOSS). Most them would use free software not only to help in preparing graph and documentation, but also as the main tool in their investigation.

Although it is not explicitly required by the software license or by software authors, the role of free software should be appropriately attributed by academicians and scientists who used them in their investigations as it would not only acknowledge the contribution of free software authors (some of them are hardworking academicians or scientists themselves), but this will also done to fulfill the academic accountability on the researchers part.

Examples on how to attribute Free Software use in Academic Paper
1. Researchers/Academician may cite the software URL and the software author in the “Literature Review/Background”, “Methods”or “Acknowledgement section” in the articles.

2. The citation should include the software release number and the URL to download the software in order to help other researchers to replicate the work (publishing paper is all about guiding others to replicate the investigation)

3. If free software being used as the main tool in the investigation, it would be helpful if the academician/researcher could explain why this particular Free Software is chosen for the research, etc in their journal article or academic papers.

For more examples: Visit the Debian Free Software Guideline, there’s a section about attributing free software in scientific and academic papers.

Give credit to Free Software! Please share this post
If you are an academician or researcher, then please share this post because it will increase awareness about the need to properly attribute free software tools, software author and their role in scientific community.

Thanks!

Posted on

Ubuntu One Files client for Android phones

Ubuntu One Files for Android is an application written by Micha? Karnicki as part of Google Summer of Code Project (GSoC) 2010. The client is licensed under the GNU Affero GPL v3 and its source code is available from Launchpad.

Google Android Ubuntu One files

The application lets you synchronize your phone contacts, files and photo gallery on the cloud automatically. Ubuntu One files also offers convenient feature to change the visibility of your files, making it easier for you to share files with the rest of the world.

Ubuntu One Files is also available on the Android Market, free of charge.

Note: Ubuntu One is a service similar to Box.net that enables you to store your files on the cloud. You do not need to be an Ubuntu user to use Ubuntu One. Each registered user are given 2GB space for free.

Posted on

Goodbye 2.6.x – A downloadable archive of all Linux 2.6.x kernel releases

Linus Torvalds has announced Linux kernel 3.0-rc1, this marks the end of 2.6.x series line which has 40 releases since late 2003.

To mark this event, Con Kolivas has made a tarball archive (163MB) of all 2.6.x releases available for download. The archive uses lrzip compression which can be installed from the standard Ubuntu apt-get repository.

Note that the size of of the archive after decompression would reach 10.3 GB!

Happy downloading, and hello Linux 3.0!

Posted on

How to mine Bitcoin in Ubuntu using OpenCL and Bitcoinminer.py

Bitcoin is a form of decentralize digital currency, so unlike other digital currency services (like e-gold), bitcoin is not susceptible to be frozen, seized or invalidated. Bitcoin can be transfered transfered directly from person to person directly without intermediaries.

Bitcoin are generated over the internet by application called bitcoin miners using a set of algorithm to ensure that the number of generated bitcoin is within predictable and limited range. Though with the numbers of bitcoin in circulation today means that it would require significant processing power to generate bitcoins, it doesn’t stop anybody who are willing to try and mine them.

For a brief introduction to Bitcoin, please watch :

Bitcoin Miner on Ubuntu ?
Enter OpenCL and Bitcoinminer.py which allows bitcoin to be mined using a much more efficient GPU power (certain models of Nvidia and ATI graphic cards only, with appropriate drivers).

Step 1: To install the miner, you need to “install python-pyopencl subversion.

Step 2: Then you need to use subversion to obtain python-jsonrpc, by running:

svn checkout http://svn.json-rpc.org/trunk/python-jsonrpc
cd python-jsonrpc/
sudo python setup.py install

Step 3: Then you need to generate bitcoin.conf file:

cd ..
mkdir .bitcoin
echo "rpcuser=username" > .bitcoin/bitcoin.conf
echo "rpcpassword=password" >> .bitcoin/bitcoin.conf

Step 4: After that, download BitcoinMiner files

wget --no-check-certificate https://github.com/m0mchil/poclbm/raw/master/BitcoinMiner.cl
wget --no-check-certificate https://github.com/m0mchil/poclbm/raw/master/BitcoinMiner.py
wget --no-check-certificate https://github.com/m0mchil/poclbm/raw/master/poclbm.py

Step 5: Download bitcoin server for linux

wget http://iweb.dl.sourceforge.net/project/bitcoin/Bitcoin/bitcoin-0.3.19/bitcoin-0.3.19-linux.tar.gz
tar xvf bitcoin-0.3.19-linux.tar.gz
~/bitcoin-0.3.19/bin/64/bitcoin -server&

Step 6: Then finally, running the miner

python poclbm.py -d 0 --user username --pass password

The parameter -d 0 denotes that the miner will use GPU #1 for its bitcoin mining generation, increment it to -d 1 for GPU #2 and so forth. Change the “password” and “username” parameter from Step 3 and Step 6 appropriately to keep people from reaping the fruits (read: steal bitcoins) of your mining operation.

For more information about mining bitcoins and about Bitcoin in general, please visit : WeUseCoins website

Posted on

Enable Hardware Notification on Ubuntu Desktop when plugging devices – udev-notify

udev-notify enables hardware notification on desktop whenever devices are plugged to the computer. It provides a convenient way for users to get visual feedback on whether the devices has been successfully recognized by the computer or otherwise.

udev-notify is known to be compatible with Debian and Ubuntu (to some extend Fedora 15) under GNOME and XFCE. udev-notify display the type,name and model of the device connected and recognized by the computer on the desktop.

Udev
Udev
Udev
Udev

Installing udev-notify

echo "deb http://download.learnfree.eu/repository/skss / #SKSS" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
wget http://download.learnfree.eu/repository/skss/repo.pub.asc -q -O- | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install udev-notify

And you may try plugging in devices to your computer to see if it works!

Posted on

Create Professional Photo Slideshow DVD in Linux with Imagination

Imagination is GTK+ 2 application which enables you to create professional DVD Photo Slideshow. Imagination contains many transition effects that can turn your photo collection into breathtaking multimedia presentation.

Imagination

 

Imagination can output video in various video format and codec supported by FFMPEG including (but not limited to) :
* FLV
* MPEG
* AVI (various codec)
* MKV
* OGG Theora

Imagination is included in Ubuntu repository and can be easily installed using Synaptic or apt-get to install it