Huntsville and Firefox: A Love Story

Since mid August I am living in Huntsville, Alabama as a part of Kosovo Youth Exchange Program.  I will be here till the school year ends. I am taking classes at Huntsville High School.

I was very lucky to come this year, Huntsville City  Schools which is in charge for all schools in Huntsville decided to switch to laptops for all it’s 23,000+ students. The laptops are HP and all of them run in Windows, knowing that Internet Explorer doesn’t work as good as other browsers, and the student were having problems with the textbooks etc in  the test phase. They decided to switch to Firefox, as a better and more stable alternative to Internet Explorer. Is a big thing for the Mozilla Community, to get 23k+ users at the same time in a single day, they update Firefox regularly and students didn’t have any problem so far.

GNOME 3.2

Today I got a new 320GB HDD and right fresh installed Fedora 16 with GNOME 3.2 using the Live DVD. I have a Dell Vostro A180, it has 2GB of RAM. I used Fedora with Xfce before because was disappointed with GNOME 3.0 at the beginning for it’s low-speed but now got it deserved love back! It’s so fast and stable.

We finally got our Fedora 15 Media

After nearly two months I finally managed to get the Fedora Media (330 DVD’s) from our customs in Kosovo together with a expensive fee of 330.00EUR in total which I am waiting to get reimbursed in cash at FUDCon Milan because we are not being able to transfer money internationally to Kosovo’s banks. The reason why it was stuck in the customs is that we declared the package value of 330EUR, we had to pay 27.6% + shipping cost + freight forwarder.

Lessons I learned from the shipping regarding to the customs are that never forget to add a name above the address, the customs will consider it as the owner, in our case it was in FLOSSK’s name and FLOSSK wasn’t a registered to import packages and that took us time until we found the solution. The other thing is that always try to put a very low value so you won’t have to pay a lot for it, in Kosovo every package above 22 EUR is obligated to pay taxes to customs, with that comes together the shipping price and the freight forwarder.

In a nutshell next time we should prepare 2 weeks before asking for shipment, in order to get it safe,fast and cheap.

Thanks a lot to Joerg,Christoph and Fedora Project.

I’m going to FUDCon Milan 2011

I am really excited because this is going to be my first FUDCon (Fedora Users and Developers Conference), thanks to FUDCon’s Planning Team I got full sponsorship for my airfare and hotel room. The conference starts on the 30th of September this year until 2nd of October, it gathers Fedora Users and Contributors from around the world. This is also going to be a great chance for me to meet other contributors I met online over mailing lists or irc and even meeting again with the guys I met at FOSDEM this spring.

(Get the badge on the left designed by Vinzenz Vietzke as SVG or PNG)

How to add XChat in the notification area/enabling system tray icon

When I first started to use Xfce as my main desktop environment because my pc couldn’t handle GNOME3 properly, I found out that XChat didn’t minimized as a tray icon like it did on F14 with GNOME 2.3.x so I had to make that happen because I don’t want XChat to stay as a window button.

So you want to put XChat in the notification area together with others apps like on the picture:

To do that open XChat then go to: Settings -> Preferences -> Chatting -> Alerts -> Check Enable system tray icon -> click  OK and XChat now on will be on the notification area whenever you run it:

 

P.S. It didn’t take me 9 minutes to fix it if you base on the clock!

I finally found you Xfce and I am not going to let you go!

  When I first installed Fedora 15 to try GNOME3 was fascinated by it’s look and differences from the older versions, I still like it but after a couple weeks using it started to work very slow and crashed many times, now finally decided to move to Xfce but not removing GNOME 3 because maybe one day I will come back but not until I upgrade my computer. Applications start very fast, don’t crash, it’s simpler and reminds me the ClearLooks of Gnome 2.6 from F13 and F14.

Resizing images with Mogrify

You shot some photos but they have a big resolution and take time to upload online, here is a fast way to scale them from the terminal using Mogrify. Mogrify comes by default on Fedora.

As root type:
# mogrify -path /home/user/example -resize 1000x1000 /home/user/example

FFmpeg

FFmpeg is a complete, cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video. It includes libavcodec – the leading audio/video codec library. It’s a free and open source software release under GPL.

I love it, I mostly use it to convert videos.

Here’s a simple how-to convert a .wmv to .avi on Fedora:

[gent@fedora ~]$ su -c "yum install -y ffmpeg"
[gent@fedora ~]$ cd Videos/
[gent@fedora Videos]$ ffmpeg -i gent_on_bike.wmv gent_on_bike.avi

Lost data!

After long time not blogging, I am posting this blogpost for those who will have problems with lost data, a couple of hours ago I was trying to run a Windows game on GNU/Linux through Wine which I copied inside my External Western Digital HDD (It only works as NTFS file-system). Then trying to remove the dir after the copying the files did a typo with “rm -rf *” on Parent Directory removing everything including Documents and Movies.

After starting to panic and search across the web, a friend of mine reminded me TestDisk, a great free data recovery software under GPL which could do the work if I didn’t re-mount the device and then remove the “wanted-to-remove-before” directory where in that case basically overwrote it. I also tried with dd but still everything was gone

So if you accidentally deleted everything on a NTFS-partitioned HARD-DRIVE theres still a great hope with TestDisk if you didn’t touch anything after, simply install TestDisk and follow the steps: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk:_undelete_file_for_NTFS

If you do so you are probably able to recover them. and I hope you’ll have a better luck than mine ^^.

 

Cloud Servers for FLOSSK from Rackspace!

Rackspace was nice to give us 2 cloud servers with Debian 5.0 GNU/Linux distribution which we’re very thankful. Plan is to to move our FLOSSK web-site to Drupal fully in near future from the current proprietary CMS. We will also use the space to host other platforms for ours needs like Open Atrium, for project managing etc.  We also thank Dave Hall, which made the contact with Rackspace guys to make it possible.