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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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%

As Google unveil its Chrome OS last Thursday. The basic idea is actually great for net books, which for time being they are focusing.

Check out this video for the demo.

Arif

Popularity: 6%

Hi all,

Last Thursday Google had a press conference, where all expected that they will announce the 1st release of Chrome OS, but due to some unfortunate facts, there was no such news from them. But they announced, that chrome OS  will go open source and code will be available to external developers as like internal.

Chrome OS will be available in end of 2010 as planned. The target market is netbooks, after that laptops and then PC. Google is working with some hardware vendors to provide better support to end users.

Chrome OS is new approach in computing world. A web browser will be used as an OS. Its like Chrome browser bulked with multiple tasks and tabs.

“In Chrome OS, every application is a web application”, Pichai said. “There are no desktop applications”.

Chrome OS is based on cloud computing, where every thing will be saved on cloud computers. The boot time as they said would be “7 seconds”.

Media, PDF, Word files, Storage media all will be available in one browser, which will communicate with PC hardware.

“We want Chrome OS to be blazingly fast,” Pichai said. “We want it to be like a TV – turn it ON and it’s booted up”.

The operating system will support anything supported in chrome browser, such as media codecs and plug-ins. Chrome OS will digital cameras out of the browser, and Pichai said, “We are still working on printers drivers, and i can gave assurance, that by next year Chrome OS will support printers”.

Sergery Brin, Google’s co-founder and president, said his company isn’t focusing on Chrome OS’s potential effects on Windows, Mac OSX, Linux or other traditional operating systems.

He said, “We really focus on user needs rather than strategies against different companies”.

At the news conference, Google also announced:

• that 40 million people use the Chrome browser as their primary browser,
• that the Chrome browser will soon officially be available for Mac and Linux,
• that it is still working on finding a safe way to use HTML5 to take advantage of multicore processing and a computer’s own graphics card.

Screenshots of the new Chrome OS:

Chrome OS demo and introduction:

Arif

Popularity: 4%