On Linux, you can find quite a lot free stuff. Most of the open source softwares come with its own source code for you to compile. But many Linux newbies don’t know how to compile it.

Here is the method:

Extract the compressed file – tar or tar.bz files in terminal

$ tar -zxvf file.tar.gz

$ tar -jxvf file.tar.bz2

Then goes into the directory:

Step 1: Configure application to suit your system

$ ./configure

Step 2: Compile the application

$ make

Step 3: Install the application

# make install

You might notice some applications will require your root rights to install. So You might need to key in your password before processing to Step 3.

Ubuntu provides a simple way to upgrade the software package in deb format. So, if you want to upgrade any applications, you might just type:

sudo apt-get install <application name>

However, sometimes you might find that either you can find the name because it is not inside the Ubuntu list or latest approved version. To skip this, you can go to directly to your System-> Administration-> Software Sources-> Third Party Software and add in this 2 lines

deb http://repository.debuntu.org/ feisty multiverse
deb-src http://repository.debuntu.org/ feisty multiverse

Then goes back to your terminal do the sudo apt-get to get some of the latest released applications. This is how I get my latest Pidgin 2.2.

What is Gnome? How important is it? I think most of the newbies out there most likely share the same question. Like Windows Manager in Windows 95 or Explorer in Windoes XP, Gnome react like a windows manager in Linux.

Of course, it does not monopoly in the open source world. There is another popular windows manager in Linux world called KDE. The different of Gnome and KDE is they are using different graphics library. KDE is using Qt+ while Gnome is using GTK+. So, if you are using KDE, you are cannot use application that is developed in GTK+, vice versa. Hopefully my short explanation help you a lot.

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Gnome 2.20 Released

On Linux, we don’t have Windows Messenger Live, ICQ, Yahoo! Messenger or any other instant messengers we commonly used on Windows OS. But, we do have Pidgin which combined everything in to one. In my opinion, it is not the greatest compared to the original application, however, it has done an excellent job by combining all of the IM into just one application.

With Pidgin, I do not need to worry I could not chat with my friends on different IM. For the latest version of 2.2.0, it includes new IM – MySpaceIM.

Below are some of the changelog on Pidgin 2.2.0:

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Pidgin 2.2.0 released

I admit Adobe Reader is not the greatest PDF reader, at least on Windows, it sucks. It take quite a longer loading time and weight heavily. However, they are the creator of PDF standard and they are now landing Adobe Reader 8 on Linux platform.

Visit their site Adobe today to downloa d it. It provides package like rpm, deb, bz2 and tar.gz. I will also look for more better PDF reader or any tweak.

The system requirement:

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Adobe Reader 8.1.1 For Linux

Recently, there are some problems with my desktop. It randomly crashed and frozen at there and the Ctrl + Alt + Backspace is not working. I think of the linux users know that when you force shutdown your desktop, you likely to cause some damages on it, especially during your hard disk is in the middle of writting or cache on the Swap.

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How to Restart a Frozen System?

Being a linux users, I think it is important to at least pronounce it correctly. When I first came across this word “linux”, I really not very sure how to pronounce it. Since, it is a Unix, so maybe the pronounce should be something like “Lee Nix”?

Then years later, I realise the linux was come from the name of the creator Linux Torvalds. So maybe again, the correct pronounce should be something like “Lee Nurse”?

Until recently, I finally get a correct way to pronounce it by Linus Torvalds himself. Hear it yourself.

[audio:http://www.mylinuxway.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/torvalds-says-linux.mp3]

Most of the people get the wrong idea of linux as I used to be. Linux is just the linux kernel. For Windows guys, it is like just like DOS, it is just a terminal, a console. On top of the linux kernel, there is X Windows System. Then on top of it is windows desktop, Gnome and KDE are the famous windows manager we nowadays heard using on most of the distro.

For a novice user, you would not like to want mess around the kernel stuff, you just want the beautiful interface. So, many linux distros come out to save your painful experience on installing linux yourself.

According to DistroWatch, there are more than 369 distro actively maintained by the community. The top 10 major distributions:

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Little Things About Linux

Compare to Windows IIS server, I choose my hosting server to be a linux platform running with Apache + PHP. Talk about Apache, it has always my favorite webserver, ever since I set up my server in university.

But recently I notice of another webserver called lighttpd. Youtube, wikipedia, meebo and some of the web2.0 sites are running on lighttpd!

So, maybe now you will pay more attention to this light weight and fast performance web server. Just today, Lighttpd has released 1.4.18 to solve some of the security issues.

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Lighttpd 1.4.18

On Windows, there are plenty download manager to download and resume. But on Linux, I could not find any yet until today. I used aria2 to resume and segmented the download. It supports HTTP, HTTPS, FTP and BitTorrent.

I am using Ubuntu, so just type in the following command into the terminal.

sudo apt-get install aria2

But something I still not very satisfy is it does not have any GTK+ interface! The only thing maybe I can please of it is the low processor consumption. It runs on single thread model. The memory usage is just like 3MB for HTTP download and 5MB for BitTorrent.

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aria2 – The high speed download utility