Get Free Software Stickers for your computer!

Tired of having Windows XP/Vista logo stickers on your Linux computer ? Now you can tear away those stickers and replace it with one included in the Free Software Stickers book.

Filled with hundreds of creative sticker design, the Free Software Stickers lets you announce to the world that you are using Free Software operated computer.

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The book is a must-have for all Linux and Free Software geeks around the world. It has a collection of distro related stickers including Debian, SUSE, Slackware, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Fedora, kubuntu, Red Hat and various other non-Linux Free Software.

How do I get the sticker book ?

As with the spirit of Free Software, the sticker book is available for free through the internet. What you need to do is to select which sticker you want to put on your computer, and print it out using a self-adhesive photographic paper, which is easily obtainable from computer shops.

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There you go, a great way to impress your friends at any Linux user group or FOSS-UG meetup!

How to find fastest Debian apt-get mirrors with netselect-apt

Using the nearest server to your location does not guarantee that you will get faster connection speed, other factors such as network congestions, faulty routers and bandwidth may affect the speed of your software installations.

Thus it is best to update the sources.lst file from time to time to keep updated with the fastest mirror to you, to ensure faster software installation and updates on your computer.

Generally there are two ways to do this, one is by using Synaptic to check for the fastest mirror (works for Ubuntu too!) and secondly by using netselect-apt (currently does not work for Ubuntu).

How to get fastest apt-get mirror with netselect-apt (Debian)

Firstly you need to install netselect-apt. then just run the command by typing “netselect-apt distribution name” to get the fastest mirror. Append -n switch, if you want to include the non-free repository too

Example :
# netselect-apt lenny

Example (non-free repos) :
# netselect-apt -n lenny

The application will test each apt-get mirrors it could find on debian.org site and perform some connection to estimate its speed. At the end of the test, the fastest mirror will be selected and used in the /etc/apt/sources.lst file.

Nice, but does it work on Ubuntu?
Note that although Ubuntu has netselect-apt, the application is currently broken under Ubuntu
( as of Gutsy Gibbon ). Ubuntu users should try the Synaptic method instead.

Squeezing size out of zip and gzip files in Ubuntu Linux

Here is how you can squeeze out few more kilobytes from your zip or gz files by using advzip or advdef from AdvanceCOMP package (installable from Ubuntu respository) :

advpng -z4 example.zip

Output
[code]
mypapit:$ advzip -z4 example.zip
761604 655677 86% example.zip
761604 655677 86%
[/code]
Saves you almost 6KB per file.

Similarly gzip files can be recompressed the same way to save more space.

advdef -z4 *.gz

[code]
mypapit:$ advdef -z4 *.gz
214451 207312 96% coolplayer.tar.gz
21523 20800 96% phex-pkg1.00.tar.gz
26527 25516 96% png2ico-src-2002-12-08.tar.gz
262501 253628 96%
[/code]
Saves you almost 11KB total.

The differences may be small for most of you, but it means a lot in situation where space is at premium and every little bit of Kilobytes count.

p/s: w00t, this is the first post for 2008!

Tango Icons Theme on Nokia Symbian Phone

I know, I know. Tango icons has been done to the death on websites, documents, presentations and as Desktop icons. This is due to the popularity of Tango icons itself. and thanks to the liberal Creative Commons license, everybody is free to use the icons (without paying royalty) as long as they give credits (attribution) to the Tango icon project.

Checkout this cool Symbian Series 60 theme. It almost made your phone looks like its running a Linux based operating system, does it?

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This theme can be downloaded from Tango Symbian60 Theme website and is available for Noka Symbian Series 60 2nd and 3rd Edition.

Ubuntu Linux : How to combine multiple PDF file

Here’s how to combine multiple PDF file on Ubuntu.

First install ghostscript and pdftk from Ubuntu repository :

apt-get install gs pdftk

Then, using ghostscript, combile all the pdf files you desired into one file, using this command

[code]
s -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=combined_file.pdf -dBATCH file1.pdf file2.pdf file3.pdf
[/code]

The command will produced the combined pdf output on “combine_file.pdf”

Minibuntu – the tiny, minimalist Ubuntu-based distribution

Ubuntu has gained enormous popularity, since Canonical first released Ubuntu back in 2004. There were a lot of Ubuntu spin-off along the way including Ubuntu Christian edition, Ubuntu studio, Embun, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, Ubuntu Muslim Edition, Linux Mint, gOS and many more. Some of it made its way as the officially supported Ubuntu version by Canonical.

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Now comes yet another Ubuntu-based Linux distribution, named Minibuntu. What set itself apart from other distro is, it does not come with a window manager, instead it boots straight into command-line interface bash prompt.

This makes minibuntu suitable for acting as a rescue and emergency Linux boot CD, eventhough the main intention of minibuntu is to help others to create another Linux distribution based on Ubuntu using either UCK or Reconstructor.

To me, Miniubuntu is a nice distro as it provide a starting point for creating a new and customised Linux distribution based on Ubuntu.

Minibuntu can be downloaded from its official website, and is only available for i386 platform only (at this time of writing).

Ref :
Minibuntu Official Website
Minibuntu Launchpad Page