Opera TV

From the looks of it, Ubuntu TV already has some stiff competition. Its called "Opera TV" and from the outset it looks like it will do far more than what Ubuntu TV could do. While Ubuntu TV is going for the "everything video" angle focusing on showing video and showing it well, Opera TV is planning to have all of its already user created apps, widgets and extensions available in its new software built into a TV. This could have far more uses than Ubuntu TV and appear to a wider audience as well. Who wouldnt want to have all these apps right on their television? No longer will you be glued to your computer doing Facebook or Google Plus, you can just sit in front of the TV all day :)

Another benefit for Opera app developers is that they could get paid for their apps, which has not yet been mentioned in any plans for Ubuntu TV.

The project appears still in its infancy and could go head to head with Ubuntu TV in terms of courting potential TV manufacturers, developers, and more. What do you think about Opera TV versus Ubuntu TV? Totally different beasts, one in the same basically, or complimenting each other?

http://www.opera.com/portal/tv/

You can also watch the demo video here:

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GnomeBaker Simple CD DVD Burning

Brasero works pretty good, K3B works great, but if those give you any problems and you just want a nice simple and stable CD and DVD burning app,  give GnomeBaker a try.

GnomeBaker is really straight forward. Data DVD, Data CD and Audio CD are all really easy to do. You can even copy discs, erase RW discs and burn image files.

Installation is easy. Open up the Ubuntu Software Center and search for GnomeBaker and install it. There are some rumors that it has been dropped in Oneiric Ocelot 11.10 and if that is the case you will have to install it via the terminal.

Open a terminal window and type:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gnomebaker/stable

That will install the needed repository. Now to update and install GnomeBaker, paste this in the terminal...


sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install gnomebaker

Thats all! Have fun!

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Teamviewer 7 Remote Desktop App

TeamViewer 7, the remote desktop app, has landed into beta for linux users bringing a batch of all new features with it.

Start up time is noticeably faster now which is nice. Multi monitor support, overall optimized performance and more make this one of the best remote desktop applications for Ubuntu linux users. This is the remote desktop app we have used for a couple of years now.


Ubuntu users can easily install this by downloading the 32 bit or 64 bit DEB file for their particular system.

http://teamviewer.com/en/download/index.aspx?os=linux

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Agave Color Scheme Designer

Agave is a very simple application for the GNOME desktop that allows you to generate a variety of colorschemes from a single starting color. It is free software licensed under the open-source GPL License.

Ok folks. We all know that people belonging to our tribe, the tribe of nerds, are not famous for their taste and ability to match colors. Linux conventions are filled with people dressed in very horrible color combinations. Even when it comes to choosing the right color scheme for a website, nerds are not exactly the best specimen around and that’s why for every website we make, it is better to get the help of a professional “color picker”. But us nerds are good at computing and have tried to exploit the formula for perfect color matching. They made an algorithm out of it and put it inside Agave, a software that will quickly become your best friend, if you mind about looking decent. Given any color Agave is able to pick up the perfect match, which will let you save time, money and honor while picking up your clothes or while painting the walls of your room. Agave features also the possibility to obtain the hex code for each color, so that you will simply have to copy-paste it in your code to have a decent looking website. Agave also offers some lists of web-safe colors, giving you the opportunity to pick up from a list of colors that won’t give your readers headaches or vomit.

Agave is the best friend for people like me, people that constantly fail at picking up decent color combinations. Believe it or not, Agave totally changed the way I present my work, making it look better designed overall.

Agave comes under the terms of GPL and it can be freely modified and redistributed.

Install it simply by searching for it in the Ubuntu Software Center or by typing “sudo apt-get install agave” in your favorite terminal.

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Full Circle Magazine EPUB MOBI

Full Circle Magazine has started publishing their free monthly Ubuntu magazine in both EPUB and MOBI ebook reader formats. We definitely still prefer the PDF layout in all its beauty as the new ebook formats leave much to the imagination. All in all, its a great idea especially with so many digital readers available nowadays and best of all, its free. No need to go through Amazon to make the purchase.

Grab your ebook formats to the latest edition here:

http://fullcirclemagazine.org/issue-56/

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Computer Deals via Our Twitter Feed

Back during the holidays we were posting articles about great computer deals. So many people were thankful we came across these deals, we have decided to continue this practice, sort of.

Instead of posting a full article here on the website, we'll be posting great computer deals we come across on our twitter feed. Although you wont see the deals here on the site, we still will be posting them. So follow along on Twitter as well!

http://twitter.com/iheartubuntu

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12.04 Precise Pangolin Wallpaper Contest

The Ubuntu Wallpaper Flickr Group for Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin is open for submissions! You can go here to see whats been uploaded and to upload your own...

http://www.flickr.com/groups/1860176@N24/

We have added submissions for most of the Ubuntu releases in the past few years. You can see what we submitted for 11.10 here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/iheartubuntu

If you are a photographer or a wiz with graphics, we hope you join in and contribute to Ubuntu. this is an easy way to help out the greatest linux distro! UBUNTU!

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Sunday JANUARY 22 at SCALE10X

For those who cannot attend SCALE 10X on Sunday, you can still sit in on the live presentations. To see the live feed for your chosen presentation, visit the schedule at: http://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale10x/schedule and find the time and room name for the presentation, then visit http://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale10x/video and click on the room name for the presentation when it is scheduled to start.

Here's a look at what's coming up on Sunday at the Southern California Linux Expo SCALE 10X:

SUNDAY KEYNOTE: Selena Deckelmann will be giving the Sunday keynote address at 10 a.m. in the LaJolla room. The title of the keynote is “Mistakes Were Made.” Stories illustrating success and failure in projects come from Deckelmann’s 15 years in education, public and private sectors, as a consultant, DBA and IT manager.

DEVELOPER TRACK: Don Marti's presentation on “Advanced Web Content Management with Revision Control” at 11:30 in the Carmel room kicks off Sunday's Developer Track. Other talks on this track include Matt Harrison's “It's All Good: Martha Stewart, Python and Decorators” at 1:30 p.m. in Carmel, and Josh Berkus speaks on “Firehose Engineering” at 3 p.m. in Carmel.

OSSIE TRACK: Sebastian Dziallas leads a workshop on “POSSE Intensive” at 11:30 in the BelAir room.

CERTIFICATION EXAMS: The LPI and BSDA Certification Exams take place today in room Santa Monica B beginning at 11 a.m. If you're taking the test, don't forget to sharpen that No. 2 pencil and good luck.

CLOUD AND VIRTUALIZATION TRACK: Karsten Wade kicks off the Cloud and Virtualization track with a talk on “oVirt – Infrastructure and Management Platform for the Data Center” at 11:30 in LaJolla. Other talks include Richard Su's “Aeolus – Clouds Flying in Assembly” at 1:30 in room Los Angeles A; Kir Kolyshkin speaking on “Reinventing Linux Loopback Device for Clouds” in LaJolla at 3 p.m.; and John Mark Walker leading a panel discussion on “Open Source Could Computing” in LaJolla at 4:30.

EXHIBITION HALL: The expo floor will be open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Sunday.

For more information on Sunday's schedule, visit http://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale10x/schedule

ABOUT SCALE 10X
The Southern California Linux Expo SCALE 10X will be held Jan.20-22 at the Hilton Los Angeles Airport hotel. For more information on the expo, visit http://www.socallinuxexpo.org

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Summoning Wars Diablo 3 Style Game

Summoning Wars is an open source role-playing game, featuring both a single-player and a multiplayer mode for 2 to 8 players. Summoning Wars is free software and is released under GPL. It is available for Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems.

We have got a feeling. The fantasy RPG genre will never die. One day, we will be 70 and we will still be looking at the huge and constantly updated list of fantasy RPG available for our platform. So, why bother? We bother because Summoning Wars, the game we introduce today, has the potential to become a very good game, if it is not already. Thanks to its developers, who have done a really good job, offering a very immersive environment, achieved by good scripts both for music and dialogues. The beef, sad to say, is the same of many famous RPG we had the chance to play on our Linux machines. It doesn’t fall far from titles like Neverwinter Nights and well, why bother to differ when the formula is well tested and still appreciated by thousands of players? While the developers of Summoning Wars cannot surely afford expensive textures and scenarios like the big firms of software developing, they surely did a great job.

The game, which still feels slightly buggy and with many easy-to-fix things that we are sure they will fix in the next release, offers a very enjoyable game experience and hey, did I forget to mention that it also supports multiplayer?

As we said before, Summoning Wars comes under the terms of GPL, which means that, if you feel so, you can modify and redistribute the game.

The game can be downloaded and installed from the website of the developer. Since I can be terrible at compiling from source, I was never able to get the game working in Ubuntu using the linux source code that is available. The Readme file calls for several items to be installed on Ubuntu systems before compiling. All seems to go well, until another program which needs installing didnt work out so easy. There was a PPA made for that program over a year ago (before Ubuntu 11.10) and the PPA doesnt work on the newest version of Ubuntu. Maybe it will work fine for 10.xx versions.

In any event, we did get Summoning Wars working fine in a round about way. We downloaded the EXE of the game and installed it fine using PlayOnLinux by selecting "install a non listed item", and installed the "vcrun2010" library before installing the EXE in PlayOnLinux. Depending on your video card, your mileage may vary.

http://sumwars.org/wiki/Main_Page

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SCALE 10X Live Streaming Presentations

Lights, camera, action! Presentations at SCALE 10X will be streamed live from the expo in Los Angeles today and tomorrow (JAN 21 & JAN 22).

The live streams can be found at http://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale10x/video – find the presentation you want to watch on the schedule and then click on the link to the room on the video page.

Southern California Linux Expo Schedule


http://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale10x/schedule

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