There are many reasons to use the console. Sometimes you need to run on older hardware. Or you may be stuck running remotely over a slow connection, where using an X11 desktop is just painfully slow. There are lots of articles that describe the tools and utilities available for the console.

But how do you use them all together? This tutorial will look at one way that you can combine all of these programs together to give you a fully functional desktop. You’ll essentially end up with a console desktop where you can check email, surf the web, chat with people, catch up on the news, and more. We’ll use tmux to organise your desktop and make the most of your screen real estate.

Email will handled by Mutt; web browsing by ELinks. The great thing is that there are multiple options for many of the tasks you may wish to do. So these should only be taken as examples. You can replace any of these utilities with your favourite versions. You should end up with a desktop that you’d be proud to use in 1985. Note: For easier screen grabbing we took the grabs for this article in X11, running these apps from an xterm window.

Setting up your console
The first step is setting up your console. You can set the colours used by setting escape characters. You can set the fonts you want to use with the command ‘setfont’. In Ubuntu, the fonts available are located in /usr/share/consolefonts. Most simply, you can run ‘setfont fontname’ to set some other font dynamically. If you want to see all of the characters available in the font you selected, you can use ‘showconsole’. When you are ready to set this new font as your default on login, set the environment variable ‘CONSOLE_FONT’ in the file /etc/kbd/config.

Monitoring your machine
One of the classic tools for monitoring your machine is Conky. You can also use Conky on the console. An example configuration would be:

out_to_x no
out_to_console yes
total_run_times 1
TEXT
${time %H:%M}|free space:${fs_free /}|$loadavg|free mem:$memeasyfree

You could place this in a file called .conkyintmux in your home directory. Then you can tell tmux to use this as its status line with the line:

set-option -g status-right “#(conky -c ~/.conkyintmux)”

in your tmux configuration file.

File management
People who are old enough to remember the days of DOS will likely remember Norton Commander. There is an open source version called Midnight Commander. This utility provides all of the file management tools that you will ever need. By executing ‘mc’, you will have a two-pane display of your file system, and can move, view and edit files at the touch of a key.

Web browsing
Some of the options available include Lynx, w3m, Links, Links2 and ELinks. You can even surf the web using Emacs. Links2 has the added ability to display graphics using the frame buffer or SVGA driver, among many others. It can also handle frames and tables correctly. So, for that reason, we’ll use it here. If you do want to use it in a non-text mode, you will have to switch to a new virtual console (usually by pressing Alt+Fn, where n is a number). You may also need to check into permissions to access the graphics device. A very quick fix if this is an issue is to run Links2 under sudo.

Getting your daily tasks
Many people use Google Calendar to organise their lives. Google has released a console-based tool called gcalcli which allows you to interact with your Google Calendars. There are several options available to add new appointments, or query and display your current appointments in lots of interesting ways. One possibility is to show what your next appointment is in your tmux status line, with:

set-option -g status-interval 60
set-option -g status-left “#[fg-blue,bright]#(gcalcli --user ‘username’ --pw ‘password’ agenda | head -2 | tail -1)#[default]”

This will update every 60 minutes.

Keeping up with news
Many people get their daily dose of news through RSS feeds. The options on the console include Snownews and Canto. Here we’ll use newsbeuter. It has been described as the Mutt of RSS feed readers. The URLs of your feeds are stored in the file ~/.newsbeuter/urls. You can either enter them manually, one per line, or you can import an OPML file that you got from some other news-reading program. You would do this with:

newsbeuter -i import.opml

Once it is up and running, it really does look like Mutt for RSS feeds.

Email, the Mutt way
Mutt is one of the more popular email clients out there. It supports local mail delivery, so you could use something like Fetchmail to go out and collect your email and deliver it locally on your machine. Mutt also supports IMAP connections, so you can use it to check your email directly if you have an external email server. This comes in handy for all the people who use Gmail to handle their email needs. You set it up in the configuration file .muttrc in your home directory. To receive mail, you would set the following options:

set from = “yourusername@gmail.com”
set realname = “Your Real Name”
set imap_user=”your.email@gmail.com”
set imap_pass=”yourpassword”
set folder=”imaps://imap.gmail.com:993”
set spoolfile=”+INBOX”
set postponed=”+[Gmail]/Drafts”
set trash=”imaps://imap.gmail.com/[Gmail]/Trash”
set header_cache=~/.mutt/cache/headers
set message_cachedir=~/.mutt/cache/bodies
set certificate_file=~/.mutt/certificates

You will also need to create the following directories in your home directory:

mkdir ~/.mutt
mkdir ~/.mutt/cache

You can also send your email through the SMTP server at Gmail with Mutt. To do this, you will need to set the following options:

set smtp_url=”smtp://your.email@smtp.gmail.com:587”
set smtp_pass=”yourpassword”

Chatting on the console
There are several chat programs available for the console. The one we’ll look at here is CenterIM. It supports ICQ, Yahoo! chat, AIM, IRC, Jabber, LiveJournal, gadu-gadu and MSN. Configuration can be handled with menus from within the program. It is broken up into a nice set of panels with contacts on the left and your message window on the right. This is all configurable, too.

Twittering on the console
There are a handful of applications that let you tweet from the console. Twidge is one of them. With it, you can check on tweet timelines, send tweets, add and remove users to your follow list, and get a list of recent tweets from those that you follow. You will need to authorise twidge so that it will have access to your Twitter account. Once you do that, you can start interacting through commands. To send a tweet, you would use:

twidge update “Trying out twidge from the console”

Your tweet needs to be no more than 140 characters, and needs to be quoted so that the shell treats it like a single object to hand in to twidge. To check the recent activity, you can simply use:

twidge lsrecent

As a repeating display, you can use:

while true; do twidge lsrecent | head -n 10; sleep 60; clear; done

This will print out the top ten lines of your feed, refreshing every 60 seconds. You can go ahead and change the number of lines and/or the refresh time easily.

Setting up screen estate with tmux
Tmux is kind of like a next-generation GNU Screen. It not only allows you to multiplex a single console, but it also lets you divide your console display into multiple windows. You can interact with tmux by pressing Ctrl+b and a command. For example, to create a new window would require ‘Ctrl+b c’. Each window can be broken down into several panes. You can navigate the windows with ‘Ctrl+b n’ (next window) and ‘Ctrl+b p’ (previous window). You can navigate panes with ‘Ctrl+b o’ (select the next pane in the current window).

The real power comes in the ability to script everything. There is a complete command language available. You can set all of the windows and panes, and all of the applications to be started in each window/pane, in the file .tmux.conf in your home directory.

Scripting tmux
Now we will pull the whole thing together by letting tmux script it all together. One starting point could be:

new -s TmuxDesk “links2 http://www.google.com”
splitw -t TmuxDesk:0 “centerim”
select-layout tiled
splitw -t TmuxDesk:0 “mutt”
select-layout tiled
splitw -t TmuxDesk “mc”
select-layout tiled
splitw -t TmuxDesk “while true; do twidge lsrecent | head -n 10; sleep 60; clear; done”
select-layout tiled
splitw -t TmuxDesk “newsbeuter”
select-layout tiled
set-option -g status-interval 60
set-option -g status-right ‘#(conky -c ~/.conkyintmux)’

Even though the Linux software catalogue is huge, there are times when you may feel that you are missing an application that is otherwise available on Windows. There could be many reasons behind why you want that exact application. Probably the most common is that support for a particular file format or an application used at work is simply not available for Linux. Thankfully, there are many ways by which you can use a Windows app on your Linux system. Here’s a quick breakdown of some of the most popular methods…

Dual booting: In this method you will need to create a separate partition and install Windows on it. Then whenever you need to run a Windows application you will need to restart your system, then boot into Windows and use the app. This method is only recommended for an intermediate audience who are comfortable with partitioning their hard drives. It also requires that you have a large amount of disk space at
your disposal.
Virtual machine: In this scenario you will need to install a virtualisation program such as VMware Workstation or VirtualBox on your Linux system, then install Windows as a virtual machine. You can the use this virtual machine to run Windows applications without rebooting your system. However, using virtual machines requires a considerable amount of system resources in terms of RAM, CPU and disk space as the virtual machine needs to run a fully fledged operating system within another operating system simultaneously.
Using Wine: Wine lets you run Windows applications without rebooting or virtualisation. In this tutorial we will be using Wine to run Windows applications on a Linux system.

Introducing the world of Wine
Wine (a recursive acronym for Wine Is Not an Emulator) is a translation layer (or a program loader) capable of running Windows applications on Linux and similar other POSIX-compatible operating systems. Wine does not emulate Windows applications on Linux – instead it provides alternative implementations of DLLs  that a typical Windows application calls and a process substitute for the Windows NT kernel. Wine is made of 100 per cent Microsoft-free code.
Wine supports a large number of applications, but not all are supported equally. You can visit the Wine Application Database (AppDB, http://appdb.winehq.org) to see how well your favourite Windows application works with Wine. AppDB is maintained by the community and you can also add your own discoveries. AppDB defines the following type of ratings…

Platinum: An application can be rated as Platinum if it installs and runs flawlessly ‘out of the box’. No changes are required in Wine configuration files.
Gold: Application works flawlessly with some DLL overrides, other settings or third-party software.
Silver: Application works excellently for ‘normal’ use. For example, a game works fine in single-player but not in multiplayer; Windows Media Player works fine as a plug-in and standalone player, but cannot handle DRM etc.
Bronze: The application works, but it has some issues, even for normal use. For example, a game may not redraw properly or display fonts in wrong colours, be much slower than it should etc.
Garbage: An application gets this rating if it cannot be used for the purpose it was designed for. If so, there should be at least one bug report in Bugzilla. The application cannot be installed, does not start, or starts but has so many errors that it is nearly impossible to use it.

01 Installing Wine
Wine is available for all popular UNIXes, including Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat, SUSE, Mandriva, FreeBSD, Solaris and Mac OS X.

Continue to page 2 to see how to install Wine within Ubuntu…

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Few of our readers will need telling about Google’s new Facebook alternative. However, the launch of the Google+ has also sparked a war of ideologies within the personal data space. With the new social network being widely pillored for simply offering an identical service to Facebook, just not from Facebook, it appears data freedom is being used as Google’s key differentiator.

Alongside building Google+, a team headed by Subversion developer Brian Fitzpatrick has been working on Google Takeout, a set of tools, which simplify mass export of data from multiple Google products in one go. The development team, which calls itself ‘The Data Liberation Front’, was started by Google four years ago on the basis of CEO Eric Schmidt’s stance:

“How do you be big without being evil?  We don’t trap end users. So if you don’t like Google, if for whatever reason we do a bad job for you, we make it easy for you to move to our competitor.”

Google’s stance stands in stark contrast to Facebook, who have begun blocking the popular Facebook Friend Exporter tool. Friend Exporter is a free extension for Chrome, developed by open source enthusiast and Chromium committer Moralfhammed Mansour. The tool was developed last year to let people export their friends’ email addresses, phone numbers and other details as a text file or directly into Gmail in order to allow direct communication outside of Facebook. However, with Google+ presenting a very real threat of mass exodus and a spike in usage, Facebook has now blocked the extension.

“Facebook just removed the emails from their mobile site. They implemented a throttling mechanism that if you visit your ~5 friends in a short period of time, it will remove the email field,” commented Mansour on his Google+ page. “No worries, a new version is in the making … I am bloody annoyed now, because this proves Facebook owns every user’s data on Facebook. You don’t own anything! If I were you, I would riot this to the media outlets again.”

Mansour is not the only person working to liberate your data from Facebook. Open source email and communications software provider OpenXchange are also developing a dedicated Facebook export function for their Social OX module.

SocialOX is a set of features in Open-Xchange to centralise management of personal information distributed across different systems and services, like address data on Xing or LinkedIn, birthdays on Facebook, various brands of calendar software like Google, Exchange or Lotus.

We contacted Open-Xchange CEO Rafael Laguna, who tells us that the SocialOX tool and, in particular, the Facebook export functionality is currently in beta, requiring a somewhat labourious seven step process. However, he kindly provided us with this basic tutorial:

That’s it: OX.IO to the rescue. Your contact data that you desire, all in one spot…
This newly “merged” address book can then be exported as vCard and imported into whatever you like making your magic address book available wherever you like – no questions asked – by no sugar mountain or paranoid android. :)

Ok, first, to be clear — this is still sort of geeky at the moment, so buyer beware (even though its free)…

1. Allow popups in your browser. Then go to ox.io

2. Click on “Create Account” and do so

3. Click on the link you received in your Email – you’ll be logged into your private OX account immediately.

4. Click cancel on the Wizard screen, you may go back there later from the help menu, instead go to the Mail View (click on the envelope in the top left corner) and click on the “Add Email account…” and add at least that account that you use for communications with the people from your network. NOTE: Your email account must be IMAP – not POP, or it won’t work. Also, your Open-Xchange account will not copy and emails, it just makes that account available inside the Web UI.

5. Optional: Add more Email accounts (must be IMAP). The more Email your Open-Xchange user can harvest for Email addresses and names the more it can overcome the limitations of the API’s.

6. Now we will import your networks and address books. If you only want to import Facebook skip to step 7, otherwise use the import wizard first. Go to “Help (the “?” on the top)->Wizard”. On page 2 you can select from many other services. Don’t do Facebook, this comes last. The more the better.

7. Go to the contacts view (the black figure icon), click on the “Import facebook contacts” button. Click the “—or create a fresh one for your profile” oAuth Account button to allow access of Open-Xchange to your Facebook account. Press “Start” when done.

This will run a while. For each email account we go through each mail folder and use the first 6000 Emails to look for contacts. The more Emails we parse the more of your Facebook friends contacts will have this data. Go do something else and come back later…

At the end of the process the download of the newly merged super address list will start. Import to your liking, in Apple iCal, Gmail/G+, Facebook, Outlook, whatever you like. The data is also in the newly created “Facebook” address book for more exporting or playing pleasure.

01 Setting up Sync
Setting up the Sync feature from scratch is a cinch. Choose Tools>Set Up Sync, press the ‘Create a New Account’ button and fill in the required fields.

02 Sync Options
If you don’t want to sync specific data (eg passwords), press the Sync Options button and disable the options you want.

03 Adding a device
If you already have an account, press the Connect button to generate a unique code. On the primary machine (the one you used to create a Sync account), choose Edit>Preferences>Sync, click on the Add Device link and enter the provided code.

This article originally appeared in issue 94 of Linux User & Developer magazine. Subscribe and save more than 30% and receive our exclusive money back guarantee – click here to find out more.

Email and collaboration servers are vital to any organisation, whether small or medium in size. ‘Collaboration services’ is an umbrella term used to refer to services which help people inside an organisation to communication. These services include email, calendars, chat etc. Traditionally organisations used to pay hefty licence fees for Microsoft Exchange Server to enable these services – not to mention the vendor lock and the ecosystem lock that come as part of Exchange. Vendor lock means only Microsoft will be able to support Exchange and it decides when the licence support goes away. Ecosystem lock means it only runs on Windows servers and the client support is partial towards Microsoft-based clients only.

Meet Zimbra, an open source collaboration server which provides support for services like email, calendars, wiki, web, instant messaging etc. Zimbra Open Source Edition is completely free and can even be compiled on your own if you like. Like many other open source packages (such as Red Hat Linux), Zimbra also maintains commercial versions of its software with extra features such as Microsoft Outlook support, iPhone sync support, clustering and high-availability support, and technical support.  This tutorial covers Zimbra Open Source Edition.

Please Note
The following changes can alter your system behaviour. Therefore it is recommended that you use a test machine or better yet a virtual machine (using VMware workstation or VirtualBox) to test out these steps. Proceed with caution if you are using your main machine for this tutorial. If you are performing these steps on a virtual machine, make sure that you are using the ‘Bridged Networking’ mode. This will enable the virtual machine to participate directly on the network as if it were a physical machine.

Resources
Ubuntu 10.04 LTS 64-bit (Server version is supported, desktop version will also work but not supported by Zimbra.) This tutorial uses Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Desktop System.

sysstat: this is a collection of tools for system monitoring:

$ sudo apt-get install sysstat

BIND DNS server: BIND is a DNS server package. This is required to install a DNS server on our Ubuntu box:

$ sudo apt-get install bind9

Network information: You should have the following information handy about your network. The following lists the required information and the assumed values for this tutorial…

Local IP Address: 192.168.1.34
Netmask : 255.255.255.0
DNS Server (Private): 192.168.1.34 (Same as the local IP address, as we will be installing a DNS server on the same machine)
Gateway: 192.168.1.1 (Internet gateway, or the Router IP address)
DNS Server (Public): 8.8.8.8 (Google Public DNS Server)
Hostname: ludzserver
Fully qualified hostname: ludzserver.lud.com
Domain name: lud.com

Zimbra Open Source Edition installer: Download the Zimbra Open Source Edition here. For this tutorial we are using file zcs-6.0.8_GA_2661.UBUNTU10_64.20100820044159.tgz which is meant for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

Preparing for Installation

Configuring the network settings
It is recommended that you use the static network setting for the server. Perform the following steps to set up the static network settings on your server…
1. Remove network-manager: network-manager is known to cause to problems in a server environment.
2. Edit the network interface file to look like following:
@config file: /etc/network/interfaces

auto lo eth0
iface lo inet loopback
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.1.32
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.1.1

Continue to: Page 2

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Screencasts are short narrated video screen captures of your computer screen. They are usually shared on the web and used heavily by tutorial websites. They make tutorials a lot more lively and at times can be more effective than tutorials that use only text and images. You can create a screencast quite easily and share it with others on your website or over a video sharing service such as YouTube or Vimeo. Let’s look at how you can create a screencast using free software on your Linux desktop or laptop. We’ll set up the software recordMyDesktop through Ubuntu and then create a simple screencast so that you can see how the entire cycle works.

Resources
recordMyDesktop
Audacity
Virtual Box

01 Let’s make a screencast
To explain how to make a screencast on your Linux desktop or laptop, we’ll install the software recordMyDesktop, set it up and then create a simple screencast. The screencast we’ll create here will be about how to install software on Ubuntu Linux using the Synaptic Package Manager. First we’ll look at what are the different elements involved in performing this task, then we’ll look at the installation of the software, we’ll create a storyboard for the screencast, before we proceed to recording the video and audio. After the recording is done, we’ll edit both the video and audio elements and add some text to create the final product.

02 The plan and the storyboard
Before you start playing with all the cool tools involved in making your screencast, it is quite important to plan things out. You need to figure out what your screencast aims to do, how long it’s going to be, what the level of understanding the audience you are creating this video for is, among other things. You also need to write a storyboard for your screencast. A storyboard is a rough representation of the video and can be used as a general timeline of scenes. Each scene would address a different aspect of your product. In the screencast we are working on, we would need the following:
1. Introduction (explain to viewers what you will cover in the video)
2. What is Synaptic
3. How to launch Synaptic
4. How to install software using Synaptic
5. How to remove a package
6. Adding/removing repositories
7. Refreshing your sources
8. Comparison to other package managers
9. Conclusion (a few words summarising what you have covered)

03 Write the script
Once your storyboard is ready, you have a scaffolding of your screencast. Now it’s time to fill this in with some content. The content we are using in this screencast consists of a video and an audio commentary. In this step, you will need to write out the script for the audio commentary that you will read out for the screencast based on the storyboard. Read the text out loud a few times to make sure things are fine and that you are comfortable with the commentary. Let’s get our hands dirty with the video now.

Continue to: Page 2 – getting down to business

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Resources:
Before we go any further it’s worth making sure you have everything you need to follow this tutorial.

Mozilla Firefox  3.6 or later
If you are trying to build a standalone application, you can also use the XULRunner SDK that uses Gecko 1.9.2 or later. Using Firefox is much easier since the SDK is already configured to work with Firefox

Python 2.5 or later
To check the version of Python installed in the system, perform the following command:

$ python
[~ $:] python
Python 2.6.1 (r261:67515, Jun 20 2010, 21:47:49)

Mercurial (optional)
In case you want to check out the Jetpack SDK  source code from its source code repository, you will need Mercurial installed on your system, since the Jetpack is hosted on the Mercurial version control system. To install Mercurial on Ubuntu, perform the following command:

$ sudo apt-get install mercurial

Following installation, Mercurial’s hg command should be available.

Mozilla Jetpack SDK
To obtain the Jetpack SDK from the Mercurial repository, perform the following command:

$ hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/labs/jetpack-sdk/

Please note that the Mercurial repository of the Mozilla Jetpack SDK is being updated constantly and may not work with this tutorial. Please use the stable version of the Jetpack SDK for maximum compatibility. To set up the SDK development environment, enter the following command from the jetpack-sdk directory:

$ source bin/activate

There was a time when a dinosaur named Internet Explorer used to rule the planet ‘Internet’. It was so big that in order to support Internet Explorer, people would happily ditch the support for other browsers. Then came a meteoroid called Firefox (read the name) that destroyed most of the dinosaurs and established a lot of key features that changed the face of planet Internet for times to come. It was like freeing humankind from a ruthless alien empire. These features were…

Open source: There is no doubt that open source software packages are of great quality. But mainstream adoption has always been a difficult task to achieve for an open source application. Firefox was one of the first open source projects which went head on head with something that was as popular as Internet Explorer. Being an open source project, it attracted lot of developers who worked under the Mozilla Foundation’s guidelines to create it.

Portable: Firefox was portable like most open source applications. But at the same time it was also a popular web browser. This got lot of web developers to develop their websites and web apps so they would also work with Firefox. Previously the situation was a little awkward for those of us who were using our Linux boxes with either Netscape or Mozilla web browser, because most of the websites and web apps were only designed to work with Internet Explorer. Firefox helped a lot in the adoption of Linux and other desktop operating systems because it ensured that the internet would not be incompatible on Linux or other alternative operating systems.

Extensibility: This was and still is the landmark feature that Firefox had to offer. Companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft are still figuring out the extensibility of their browsers, but Firefox had got it just right from the start. Extensibility allowed users to add features to Firefox without hacking into the original source code. This allowed users to customise the browser according to their own needs.
Out of these three features, extensibility proved to be the most popular for the Firefox project. Not that the other web browsers weren’t extensible, but the extension mechanism in other web browsers was… for lack of a better word, let’s call it horrible. We all know about the trouble with spyware and Internet Explorer BHOs (Browser Helper Objects). Firefox, being an open source browser, provided a  very easy way to install extensions and manage them. It also included a sandbox-type environment and a consistent user interface. Even developing Firefox extension proves very easy. You do not need to learn C/C++ or any other low-level programming language.

Continue to: Page 2 – Ways you can extend Firefox

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Even if you are not a technology buff, it’s hard not to notice how the iPad has taken over the world of gadgets. Before its launch, the iPhone and the iPod touch had a similar impact and they are visible just about everywhere you go. All of Apple’s portable devices use iTunes to synchronise their information with a computer, and iTunes is only available on Windows and Mac systems. So where does that leave Linux users like you and me? Thankfully it’s not a lost cause – let’s take a look at how you can get the maximum out of your fruit branded mobile device on an Ubuntu desktop setup. You’ll also be pleased to hear that all the solutions that we look at here will work on your Apple mobile device without the device requiring to be jailbroken.

You’ll have to forgive the obligitory disclaimer however – all the software and syncing solutions discussed in this article are not built or approved by Apple, and therefore cannot be guaranteed to work as intended. Now, on with the guide…

Required resources
libimobiledevice The project that allows you to sync your iPod, iPad, or iPhone to your Linux machine
Handbrake For converting videos from one format to another
Fuse File system This allows read-write access to your Apple devices

Installation

1. Getting libimobiledevice
Both Ubuntu 10.04 and 10.1 support the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad out of the box. This is using the libimobiledevice project, which is hosted here. You can visit the project’s website and download the source code, along with that of the supporting packages. Ready-made binaries for several popular distributions are also available from this website. However, the easiest way to get hold of the libimobiledevice packages is by using your distribution’s package management system. For example, Ubuntu Linux and openSUSE have the software in their official repositories. Ubuntu 10.04 and 10.1 users can skip the next step.

2. Installing on Ubuntu 9.10
Although Ubuntu 9.10 does not ship with support for the Apple devices, you can set things up reasonably easily. Launch the package source manager by going to System>Administration>Software Sources. Click on the Other Software tab and then on the Add button. Now add the line ‘ppa:pmcenery/ppa’ as the source. Save it and hit the Reload button to reload the repository information. Now launch the Synaptic Package Manager and install the package ‘libimobiledevice0’. Note that you will need to restart your computer for the installation process to complete correctly.

3. Installing libimobiledevice for everyone else
If you have landed on a computer which does not have libimobiledevice pre-installed and you can’t find it in your distribution’s binary repositories, you can always download the source release of libimobiledevice and compile it yourself. First, make sure that you have the development tools required for compiling packages installed. Download the source package from the libimobiledevice project website and extract it to a temporary location. Get into the source directory and execute the following commands:

./configure
make
sudo make install

4. Plug and play
When you have set things up, you should plug your iPad, iPod or iPhone into your Ubuntu computer. Connect it with the USB cable that you got with your device. When you plug it in, you should see two windows pop up, like the ones shown in the screenshot below, and your device’s icon appear on the Desktop. The two window panes will ask you which applications you want to use to view and manage the photos and the music on your device. The list that will appear depends upon what applications you have installed on your computer. If you see this screen, you should be in business. Let’s proceed and see how you can manage the music, photos, video and other data on your Apple device.

Continue to page 2 – working with your music

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Selenium is a set of open source tools which you can use to set up automated tests for your web applications. The tools are quite simple to install and use, and are quite flexible (Fig 1). A great advantage of using an automated testing tool such as the ones provided by Selenium is that you can schedule the nightly testing of your web applications. The testing is triggered off automatically at a certain hour and you see the report in the morning.

The tools that we will look at here are Selenium IDE and Selenium RC. Selenium IDE (integrated development environment) is essentially a Firefox plug‑in that allows you to record, edit and play browsing sessions. So when you perform certain actions on a webpage, such as clicking on a link, Selenium IDE will record the steps involved and allow you to edit them and have them performed automatically. Selenium RC is a test tool that allows you to write automated web application UI tests in any programming language against any HTTP website using any mainstream JavaScript-enabled browser.

01 Introducing Selenium IDE
Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for running Selenium tests. It has been implemented as a Firefox extension, and has a recording feature which will maintain a list of user actions as they are performed and store them as a reusable script to play back. Selenium IDE also offers full editing of test cases for more precision and control. This tool has been advertised by the Selenium team as the easiest and the quickest way to get started with Selenium. One drawback, however, is that your testing is limited to Firefox. Although Firefox runs on all operating system platforms, it still has a long way to go to becoming the most popular web browser around. Testing your web application with Internet Explorer is still a necessity for a lot of developers. Selenium IDE does not allow you to do that.

02 Installing Selenium IDE
Installing Selenium IDE is quick and easy. All you need is to have a recent version of the Firefox web browser and an internet connection. Point Firefox here and add the Selenium IDE extension. Once it’s installed, you will need to restart your web browser to activate the Selenium IDE extension. Then you should be in business. Check to make sure that Selenium IDE is indeed installed. Go to Tools>Selenium IDE to check it out.

03 Quick tour of IDE settings
Although Selenium IDE is a pretty straightforward tool to use, there are a number of settings changes that you can make. To access these settings, you can click on the Preferences button in the Selenium IDE Add-On pane. This will launch a Preference pane for Selenium IDE. It has three tabs: General, Formats and Plugins. Tweak the settings here to make changes to the way Selenium IDE functions. For example, you can add or modify the format in which Selenium should expect information. It supports several different scripting languages including Perl, PHP and Ruby. Just be careful to make changes after understanding things.

04 Record your first script
There are a number of things that you can do using Selenium IDE. You can either record the moves you make on a website as a script, and have it played back or edit it and then play it, or you can write a script from scratch. Let’s look at how to record our steps on a website first. Pick a website and visit it with Firefox. Once you are at the website, launch Selenium IDE by going to Tools>Selenium IDE in the Firefox menu. The Selenium IDE pane will now launch. At the top right-hand side of the pane you will see a red button. This button is what you will need to use to record your script. Hit the button to begin recording. Now browse the page you want to test and perform the steps you need for this particular test. Once you are done, hit the red button again.

05 View the script
If you look at the Selenium IDE pane you will see that it has two tabs – Table and Source. These are for two editing modes: Table for graphical editing, and Source for textual editing of the script. In the Table view, the data is quite well organised for you to edit. At the top there’s a box that lists all the steps that were recorded by you. When you click on any of the steps, you see an expanded version of it below. This is where the command and the content are separated and presented to you for easy editing. You can also look at logs and other information in this view. The Source view is a bit cleaner. You have an editor and the logs. As the name suggests, you get to view the script in its source, and edit and save it.

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Prism is an open source project from the Mozilla team that allows you to run web applications in standard windows, just like desktop applications. They get their own icon and can be launched directly from the Ubuntu menu. Application crashes are restricted to the window they are running in. Prism comes in two different flavours: for the desktop and as an extension for Firefox. Let’s take a look at both.

1. What is Mozilla Prism?
Mozilla Prism is what is referred to as a ‘single-site browser’. It is a web browser implementation that allows web applications to be integrated with a traditional desktop and act like native applications. Launching a web app using Prism is done in the same way as launching an application installed on your computer, from the Applications or Start menu. The Prism browser is simplified to not get in the way of the web app. Aside from being able to launch and run popular web applications such as Facebook, Google Analytics, and Google Mail like desktop applications, Prism also allows you to launch websites in a similar manner. Another great thing about Prism is that, like most products that come from the Mozilla team, it is a cross-
platform application that works on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

2. Installing Mozilla Prism – the quick way
There are two ways to install Mozilla Prism. If using a distribution such as Ubuntu or Fedora Linux, you should be able to find a ready-to-use binary in the applications repository. You can use a command such as ‘# sudo apt-get install prism’ to install it on Ubuntu Linux. RPM packages for Fedora and other Red Hat-based distributions are available.

3. Installing Mozilla Prism manually
We looked at how easily you can install Mozilla Prism using the package manager that comes with distributions such as Ubuntu Linux. However, there are times when you would rather install applications manually. At the time of writing this article, the latest release of Mozilla Prism was version 1.0, beta 4. You can get it here. Download the file next to the Prism option, not the Firefox plug-in. Once downloaded, you can extract the tar.bz2 compressed archive using the command:

# sudo tar -jxvf prism.1.0b4.en-US.linux-i686.tar.bz2 -C /opt/prism

You can pick a different location than ‘/opt/prism’ if you like. To launch it, execute the command ‘# /opt/prism/prism’.

4. Installing Mozilla Prism apps – the easy way
Distributions such as Ubuntu Linux have had popular web applications such as Facebook and Google Mail bundled with Mozilla Prism in its repositories for a while now. What this means is that you need not bother much about installing Mozilla Prism and then manually installing these web applications; you can simply install the ready-made prism-facebook or prism-google-analytics package and you should be in business. So, to install the Facebook web application on your Ubuntu desktop (Fig 2), all you would have to do is to execute the command ‘# sudo apt-get install prism-facebook’. Simple as that. You can install several other applications in a similar manner. Here’s a list of some of the other web applications packaged with Mozilla Prism that are part of the Ubuntu repositories: prism-google-mail, prism-twitter, prism-google-docs, and prism-google-analytics.

5. Installing Mozilla Prism apps manually
As we mentioned in the previous step, there are a number of popular web applications pre-packaged for you to download and use. However, should you come across a web application that is not available as a ready-made package, Prism allows you to manually install web applications to your desktop. Once you have installed Mozilla Prism, you can launch it from the menu by going to Applications>Internet>Prism. A window will then appear for you to add your new app. You will need to fill out the details of the app you want installed here…

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Apache is obviously the most popular open source web server, and it’s a good one too. But in some circumstances it really pays off to look at alternatives. For instance, when you rent a virtual private server with not much RAM, you’ll soon meet the limits of Apache. By default, this web server is quite resource-hungry and although there are ways to let it use less memory, tuning Apache is something of a dark art.

So if you don’t have the time to fine-tune Apache on your low-end VPS, why not try another web server? lighttpd (pronounced ‘lighty’) is a promising alternative, because its developers are focusing on performance and simplicity. Moreover, most of the functionality you are used to in Apache – such as modules, URL rewriting and support for CGI and FastCGI – is also available in lighttpd.

The main difference between the two web servers is simple: Apache creates a separate process for each request, whereas lighttpd is able to process multiple requests inside one process. That’s why the latter uses less RAM, as well as less processor time. And that’s why lighttpd can be a better choice than Apache when your server has a small amount of RAM or has to handle large amounts of requests. The latter situation explains why lighttpd is used by popular websites such as Wikipedia and YouTube, and the former situation is why you could benefit from using lighttpd on your VPS to host your blog.

Installing and configuring lighttpd

Resources:
lighttpd
lighttpd blog
lighttpd documentation
lighttpd forums

lighttpd is available in the repositories of most mainstream Linux distributions. Just install the lighttpd package and maybe some lighttpd-mod packages for extra modules. After starting the web server manually with ‘/etc/init.d/lighttpd start’, it normally starts serving the webpages in /var/www or (in openSUSE) /srv/www/htdocs. For this article, we used Debian Lenny (5.0).

All configuration of lighttpd is done in the file /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf. The syntax is simple: each line has a variable name, an equals sign and the value of the variable. Strings and Boolean values are surrounded by double quotes; numbers are not. A list is surrounded by parentheses and uses commas to separate its elements.

Some basic variables you have to define are the document root and the port that lighttpd is listening to:

server.document-root = “/var/www/”
server.port = 80

You’ll also want to define the location of the error log and access log (which needs the mod_accesslog module, which is enabled by default):

server.errorlog = “/var/log/lighttpd/error.log”
accesslog.filename = “/var/log/lighttpd/access.log”

If you don’t want to show a directory listing in directories without an index file, add the following line:

dir-listing.activate = “disable”

Now after you have changed something in the configuration file, you have to tell lighttpd to reload it:

/etc/init.d/lighttpd force-reload

It’s also a good idea to test the syntax of the configuration file first:

lighttpd -t -f /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

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Document management systems (DMS) are not necessarily reserved for companies with complex workflows and thousands of documents. A no-frills personal DMS can come in handy in many situations. You can use it to organise your research materials, or manage article submissions. While there are a few open source DMSes out there, most are geared towards companies who need to manage their complicated document workflow. Also, most DMSes are server-based applications which require some skill to deploy and maintain.

But why not build your own little desktop document management solution? After all, OpenOffice.org Base is a rather capable tool for creating databases, and the OpenOffice.org Basic built-in scripting language can help to add some nifty features to your database applications. Like the idea but don’t know where to start? No problem: this tutorial will guide you through the process of creating a simple document management database and adding a couple of useful features to it with OpenOffice.org
Basic macros.

The first order of business is, of course, to create a new database. Fire up the OpenOffice.org Base application, and use the Database Wizard to create a new database. When prompted, tick the ‘Yes, register the database for me’ checkbox to register the created database as a data source. Press Finish to save the database under the DocMaBase name (or any other name you like) and open it for editing.

The next step is to add a table and populate it with fields. Switch to the Tables section and click on the ‘Create Table in Design View’ link. Which fields to add to the table depend largely on what information you want to store in the database. In our case, we add the following fields: ID (a numeric primary key), Title (the document’s title), DateAdded (record creation date), Notes (miscellaneous notes), Status (document’s status, eg In Progress, Archived etc), FileName (name of the attached document) and FileObj (a binary field for storing documents). Once the table is ready, give it a name (eg ‘documents’) and save it.

We now need to create a form which will act as a graphical front-end to the data stored in the ‘documents’ table. To create a new form, switch to the Forms section and click on the ‘Create Form in Design View’ link. Creating a form using the Form Designer is rather straightforward. All you have to do is to add the fields you want to the form, then specify their properties. There are, however, a couple of things that require some additional work. Since the Status field is used to store the status of the document, it is most likely to contain only a handful of unique items (In Progress, Proofread, Archived and so on).

So instead of typing the same status every time you create a new record, you can add a combo box which lets you simply select the desired item from the list. To do this, choose the Combo Box control in the Form Controls toolbar and draw a box in the form. This opens the Combo Box Wizard which helps you to configure the created combo box. By default, the created combo box is empty, so you have to enter the name of the status you want. Once you’ve done that, the entry is saved in the database and it appears in the combo box.

The key feature of the document management solution is the ability to store documents and files in the database itself. To add this feature, you need two form elements: a file selection field and buttons to import and export the selected file. The buttons are used to trigger OpenOffice.org Basic macros that insert the selected file into the FileObj field and save the file in the specified directory on the hard disk.

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