I think, you all maybe already know about the Google recent updates which are/were rolled out to Gmail, search engine and some others.

The main focus is on Gmail, the hot news is the Google Voice integration to Gmail and now you can call from Gmail to any Landline or mobile service any time from your pc with great voice quality. You didn’t check it yet, give it a try then..

Call phones from Gmail

Another hot recent news is the realtime search updates within Google search page. You may not miss this post.

A week ago, they released voice/video plugin for Linux, this is really a great news for we Linux geeks… But some of us still have to wait for a while, because they didn’t rolled out the RPM(Fedora, openSUSE etc etc) yet, it is available in the form of DEB(Debain, Ubuntu,Linux mint etc etc) at the moment and some users who tested it commented positive about it, that means it works well.

Download page

Announcement page

Some other news one can find on their respective blogs. One can read reviews on different sites like ZdNet etc.

Google Gmail Blog

Google Blog

Update-1 (31-08-2010): Are you using openSUSE, an RPM is available for this plugin. Read this thread for more details and installation steps. Download the RPM from the link provided in the thread.

Update-2 (02-09-2010): RPM’s are available for fedora/openSUSE etc distros now, Download page .

Happy reading!

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Firefox 4 is in beta stage at the moment. Beta 2 is available for use. There are some good new features available and more to come, i hope you guys already heard about it if not read this page. Here i am going to guide you how to install it in openSUSE 11.3. openSUSE has its own repo for it, which updates from time to time upon new packages. So lets start with YaST.

1- Open YaST and click on software repositories, add the following repo.

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/mozilla:/beta/openSUSE_11.3

Give it a name(any name) and save it. Close software repositories.

2- Now open software management and search for firefox and select firefox4 for installation, and there you go.

Note: If you have Firefox 3.6.x installed, please close it and then open Firefox 4 to start browsing.

Have fun!

Arif

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Popularity: 10%

Salam/hi all,

Ok, this was not that easy stuff if you don’t know how to do it and where to find it. I mean 1st fonts, then installation or copying to the right directories. Websites like bbcurdu.com and urdupoint.com are common Urdu news sites which i am sure most of the Urdu reading surfers will surf for the latest news and articles. These two websites use different fonts rendering system for browsers like Firefox and Chrome. I am not using any Urdu keyboard here and not using translation for the whole system, its just how to read Urdu websites in Linux, this tutorial is just for installing fonts system wide for browsers in Linux not a language pack etc. I will focus on two distros at the moment, Ubuntu and openSUSE. Ubuntu 9.04,9.10 and openSUSE 11.2(KDE4.4.3) will be used for the installation with Firefox 3.6.3, Firefox 3.0.19, Chrome 6.0.400.0. If you are on 10.04(Ubuntu), you can install it there also by the mentioned way below.

Before going further to discuss the installation, we need to download these fonts:

1- NafeesWeb.ttf (For urdupoint.com etc)
Go to this web page, http://www.crulp.org/software/localization/Fonts/nafeesWebNaskh.html
Download the file with this title ‘Font with MS VOLT project source‘. Unzip it in the directory where it is downloaded. Until here we are done with this font.

2- asunaskh.ttf (For bbcurdu.com etc)
Download directly from this site, http://www.urdulife.com/font/asunaskh.ttf

So lets start from openSUSE, the easy one which will make your life easier.
1- Open ‘Personal Settings(Configure desktop)‘ and click on ‘Font Installer‘
2- Click on ‘Add‘ button and navigate to the fonts where you downloaded it.
3- It will ask for three options like: Personal, System, Cancel. Which means you want to install it just for this user or system wide for all. I went for System to install it system wide for other users too. It will ask for the root password upon installation.
4- Repeat step 2 and 3 for the 2nd font.
5- Restart your browser and there you go.

Easy i would say!

Now its turn for Ubuntu. Here also have two types of installation/copying, one is system wide and another is user specific.
Method-1 (User specific):
1- You are not much familiar with this terminal thing?, so lets do it the easy way then. Go to your home directory like my case /home/mian. You can use nautilus for this. Click on Places -> Computer and then navigate to your home directory.
2- Now click on ‘View‘ in the menu and check ‘Show hidden files‘. Alternatively you can use Ctrl+h, just press and hold Ctrl and press h.
3- Search for folder .fonts, is it there?, if yes then no worries. Ohh..is not there?.. don’t worry, lets create it, right click and create a directory with name without quotes ‘.fonts‘. (Note the point before fonts, don’t be confused. It’s dot with fonts, so that it becomes .fonts).
4- Now copy the fonts from the downloaded directory and paste it in .fonts directory.
5- Now a little bit terminal thing, but don’t worry its not rocket science. Just open terminal and type this.

sudo fc-cache -vf

If ask for the password, enter your password.
6- You are done, restart the browsers and check the websites.

Method-2 (System wide):
1- In this case, we will use terminal, but will be just two commands to get you these fonts working. Open terminal and type this:

gksudo nautilus

Enter your password to proceed.
2- Now go to this directory, /usr/share/fonts/truetype and create a folder named ‘urdu‘ without quotes, and paste fonts here from the downloaded directory. Close this window now.
3- Now in the terminal, run this command:

sudo fc-cache -vf

4- Done, restart Firefox or Chrome or other browser and navigate to your favorite Urdu site.

I haven’t tested this on new release of Ubuntu 10.04. I have to give it a try later.

Here are the two working examples in the form of snapshots for urdupoint and bbcurdu after font installation:

urdupoint.com

bbcurdu.com

So now your fonts are installed and working. Enjoy reading and surfing these sites.
Good luck with it!

Arif

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Hi all,

Firefox 4 will be released in the upcoming winter with a lot of promises, as Mike Belzner, vice president of engineering at Firefox added, ‘Performance, power and personalization’. Chrome?, yeh its a fact chrome is fast, light weight and elegant. Many of us are using chrome, but the fact is that that many are not near to Firefox many. Firefox have a lot of user base than chrome. Both are ideal browsers and very good one to use. I personally use Firefox instead of Chrome, yup i use Chrome for some websites like surfing Google and news sites etc.  So that mean, i am using both at the same time. Chrome is from openSUSE contrib repo with weekly build and updates. Currently using 6.0.397.0 (0) from build repo and have facing some crashes with flash (annoying and disaster flash), but at the same time i also have little bit crashes with Firefox 3.6.3. but its rare and not caused by flash.

Here are some more reading and some screen shots of Firefox 4 from zdnet.com.

What you think about it?

Happy reading.

Arif

Popularity: 2%

Hi folks,

I had deleted my Twitter account because i got some Spam messages from my follower, that i should not. I am also not a happy user of these social networks any way. For me, useless junk with waste of time. I started a community thread in openSUSE forum for this. If you are interested to read this Twitter non sense, just follow the link below and you will get more information about it. That why i deleted it?

http://forums.opensuse.org/general-chit-chat/434005-twitter-sent-spam-porn-messages.html

Also this ZDNet article is quite useful for more read and information.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Howlett/?p=1825&tag=nl.e539

Arif

Popularity: 2%

Hi all,

1st of all let me introduce Project32, what is Project32?

Project32 is a forum based board where i will publish my scripts written in bash, PHP etc including some stuff related to database, javascript, CSS etc etc. Also will include Linux administration, web hosting tips. Apart from all these, Project32 is open to all to post/reply to any thread. Users are free to open new threads and post any sort of material they think is useful for other members. There are some useful forums available at the moment. Which can be enhanced upon the growth of the board community.

For the time being, there are limited forums offered in the board. There are plans in future to add more but that will depend on  growth of the community and demands.

Since yesterday i am working hard on it to configure the system and make it ready as soon as i can. Till now, most of the system basic configuration is managed, need a bit tweaking of the graphics on some areas. Which will not take much of my time. In the board two forums are read only, which are for moderators and administrators to administrate.

So stay tuned for the latest updates, I will post the board URL soon here. And hope every body will participate in it and join the community.

keep in touch!

Arif

Popularity: 5%

Hi all,
Yesterday i recieve an email from Monty(MySQL AB) as part of the “Save MySQL”.
A lot of users who are using MySQL wrote letter to EC to stop the deal between Sun and Oracle.

The deal is not finalized yet, so MySQL need us now at this crucial stage.

I already filled and sent this petition to Monty. Would also appreciate if some one using MySQL want to part of this mission and help MySQL by filling and sending it to Monty.

Here is the link.

http://helpmysql.org/en/petition

Here is detailed link, where Monty explain everything about the deal and its results. This is an interesting read.

http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2009/12/help-keep-internet-free.html

And this make the things more interesting:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10412734-16.html

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20091208104422384

If  you have some free time, read the above articles and i am sure they are enough to decide. Choice is YOURS.

Arif

Popularity: 5%

Letter:

Hi,

Size of company: 15
How many MySQL installations: 6 (ATM)
Total data stored in MySQL (megabyte): Over 2GB
For what type of applications is MySQL used: Online Monitoring, Company sites

I think that Oracle could be a good steward of MySQL, but I would need EC to have legally binding guarantees from Oracle that:
- All of MySQL will continue to be fully Open Source/free software in the future (no closed source modules).
- Open Source version and dual-licensed version of MySQL should have same source (like today).
- That development will be done in community friendly way.
- The manual should be released under a permissive license (so that one can fork it, the same way one can fork the server)
- That MySQL should be released under a more permissive license to ensure that forks can truly compete with Oracle if Oracle is not a good steward after all.
Alternatively:
- One should be able to always buy low priced commercial licenses for MySQL. (Nope, not under Oracle).
- All of the above should be perpetual and irrevocable.

There should also be mechanism so that if Oracle is not doing what is expected of it, forks should be able to compete with Oracle.

Arif

Popularity: 5%