Free and Open Source blogger with an attitude
Here’s an easy way to erase CD-RW and DVD-RW from command-line in Ubuntu:
you only need to install ‘wodim’ package:
sudo apt-get install wodim
Then run:
wodim -scanbus
To search for the cdrw device in case if you don’t already know.
To erase the entire disk, run:
wodim dev=/dev/cdrom blank=fast
That’s all!
Though slightly belated, I would like to wish Happy New Year to my readers, I’m still alive btw, altough swamped with work, battling anxiety, more on that later.
I think most of you may have already migrated to Empathy, the default Instant Messenger client for the GNOME desktop environment. But I still use Pidgin IM because I like its functionality and its expandable plugin architecture.
I am a Yahoo Messenger user, and one thing that I miss about when using Pidgin (either on Linux or Windows) is the “shake-effect” whenever I receive “Buzz” or “ding” from my contacts. Back in 2003 (when Pidgin still was called Gaim) I tried replicating that effect, but to no avail. However, just a couple of weeks ago I discovered “pidgin-nudge“, a plugin that shakes conversation window when it receives “Buzz”,”nudge” or “ding” from contacts. Here’s how it looked :
Installing pidgin-nude on Ubuntu linux is easy! First make sure you have Pidgin 2.6.x and above installed. Then you have to install “pidgin-dev” package alongside with “build-essential” to compile the plugin source code, as shown in the example below.
sudo apt-get install subversion pidgin-dev build-essential
svn checkout http://pidgin-nudge.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ pidgin-nudge-read-only
cd pidgin-nudge-read-only
make
sudo make install
Happy Buzzing!
This is a continuation from my post of running Android on my AMD decTOP machine.
Of all Linux distribution that I tried, I found out that only Puppy Linux offered a usable GUI desktop environment on a plain vanilla AMD decTOP out of the box, but that is not without some effort on the installer side.
On the other hand, it is very easy to get Windows XP running on a plain vanilla AMD decTOP, without additional hardware upgrades. Here is my prove.
It seems Windows XP is more tolerant to low end desktops (or in this case, decTOP) than Linux operating system for fully GUI environment. Are we getting bloated?
AMD decTOP specs
RAM: 128MB RAM DDR2
HDD: 10GB IDE
Processor: AMD Geode GX 500, 366 MHz clock rate
To tell you the truth, I’m kind of agree with some points in this video even before it was published.
There are stories of organizations, school computer labs or home users that switch back to Microsoft Office after they have use OpenOffice.org. There is even a local (Malaysian) joke that poke fun at the amount of training and costs required to educate staffs to use OpenOffice.org which eventually exceeds the cost Microsoft Office Suite.
We have used a lot of open source software, libraries and components in our daily lives without realizing, In case of OpenOffice.org, I think the problem is just the process and familiarity with application. Microsoft has spend a lot of money to ensure every schools, university, computer labs used its products to educate our younger and future generations that eventually would be accustom to Microsoft branded products. It is a great business strategy, but the question is, who would benefit the most from this scheme?
Right now I’ve been playing Urban Terror (or UrT), it is a First Person Shooter (FPS) game similar to Counter-Strike. The game was developed using the open source Quake III Arena engine and can be played under GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems.
You can download Urban Terror binaries from Urban Terror Official Website
The game is available for 32bit and 64bit platform and is tested on Fedora 13 and Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) releases