TuxCentre

Good news for all voice+video chat lovers… Skype 2.0 is finally out as a stable version.

• Hardware requirements
• 1 Ghz processor or faster
• 256 MB RAM.
• 20 MB free disk space on your hard drive.
• Microphone and speakers or headset.
• Internet connection (broadband is best, GPRS is not supported for voice calls, and results may vary on a satellite connection). .
• Video card driver with Xv support.

• Software requirements
• Qt 4.2.1+
• D-Bus 1.0.0
• libasound2 1.0.12

Skype 2.0 supports both video and voice chat support. all you need is a webcam and its drivers installed. The other requirements are listed above.

http://www.skype.com/intl/en/download/skype/linux/choose/

Skype allows users to make telephone calls over the Internet to other Skype users free of charge and to landlines and cell phones for a fee. Additional features include instant messaging, file transfer, short message service, video conferencing and its ability to circumvent firewalls.

For Linux Skype came with a full voice support and an friendly interface made in Qt.

And now video support has also been added and is comming with the new beta version available at :–

http://www.skype.com/intl/en/download/skype/linux/beta/

Actually i couldnt find a direct like on the Skype site to download this beta version so i thought givibg this link might help many Linux voice chat aspirants.But please beware its a beta version and have many bugs so expect many surprises, though its good that both voice and video chat can be done using a single software ( unlike previously when i had to use skype for voice and amsn for video to chat with the same person).

Compiz fusion and compiz have been updated to version 0.7.2  with the following updates —

Compiz:
- Translation support in gtk-window-decorator.
- Updated translations.
- Added wrapable session functions to core. This allows to provide a full
session save/restore in a plugin.

Compiz Fusion:
New Plugins:
compiz-fusion-plugins-main:
- session: Communicates with session manager to save/restore window state
- bs: Change window brightness and saturation with key/button bindings
- mousepoll: Provides a generic system for other plugins to get the current
mouse position
- mag: Provides a magnifying glass under the mouse pointer with 3 different
display modes (simple/image overlay/fisheye)

compiz-fusion-plugins-extra:
- 3d: Adds depth to your desktop by raising windows in layers off the cube
- loginout: Provides a simple system to implement login and logout animations
- maximumize: Resizes a window to fit within the available empty screen space
- notification: Displays error messages on the screen with libnotify
- shelf: Shrinks a window to a preset size for monitoring many windows at once
- showmouse: Paints particle emitters that orbit the mouse pointer to make it
more visible

compiz-fusion-plugins-unsupported:
- atlantis: Renders an aquarium inside of the transparent cube

Configuration manager changes:
ccsm:
- Action settings were split into button, key, and edge settings, each using
its own widget.

simple-ccsm:
- New settings manager focused on simplicity and aimed at end users

I just came across a new distro called Parted Magic. This distro is made to handle partitions efficiently. I think this can be very helpful for offline partition handling for all types of partitions.

The latest version of  Parted Magic is 2.1 and an be downloaded from –

http://partedmagic.com/wiki/PartedMagic.php?n=PartedMagic.Downloads

Other details (including screen shots ) can be attained from  — www.partedmagic.com

Kiba dock is a beautiful application dock that uses the Akamaru physics engine to render
complex interactions. Its a MAC style dock that i built for Linux. It works on Linux with graphics effects turned on. Can be used with both KDE and Gnome. Well what more can be said…the with the video below you can see it all for your self…

Installing Kiba Dock :–kiba dock source can be downloaded form its svn server using the command “svn co https://kibadock.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/kibadock/trunk kiba” which will copy the files to kiba directory in the directory you execute this command. Then you will have to install it normally by using the commands — make , make install and intall.
If you are using openSuse simply use 1 click install option from the link www.software.opensuse.org/search.

Debian has updated libicu (arbitrary code execution).
Fedora has updated phpMyAdmin (F7, F8: information disclosure), ghostscript (F8: buffer overflow).
Gentoo has updated mantis (cross-site scripting), splitvt (privilege escalation), sword (shell command injection), paramiko (information disclosure).
Mandriva has updated wireshark (multiple vulnerabilities).

Ever wondered how people make Such wonderful figures out of various ASCII characters ( like ! , @ etc.)??

Well the process is not as tedious as it seems to be. Don’t worry you don’t have to waste your brain think when character to use when. Simply use LINUX and a command in it.

The command “asciiview” converts an image to ASCII character sequence.

usage:

asciiview path_to_image_file

example:

asciiview /root/1.jpg

After you get the ASCII image in a new window press “s” to save it and if that doesn’t work simply take screenshot.

By default amarok saves all the downloaded album covers in “/root/.kde/share/apps/amarok/albumcovers” but if u re install your linux then all the covers are lost, and also if you use an external drive to keep music files and want to play these files in different computers and you will have to download covers on each computers.

Solution For this problem is using Copy Cover script of amarok  from http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=22517 or directly download this from script manager of amarok (from tools menu) and use Get More Scripts. From here you can also get many more useful scripts like ( script to play video from amarok, display song name in pidgin and many more… )

When i first used compiz fusion with kde the way to enable was using the command “compiz ccp” (which is also there even now) but another way introduced was the compiz fusion icon which have many advantages as will be discussed further…

Previously compiz was enabled automatically but making an executable text document containg the command “compiz ccp &” in the bin folder of the user you use to log in. The compiz fusion icon which came in fedora from the start only, can be started  in the same manner by making an executable text file in the bin folder of the user you log-in into and adding the text “fusion icon &”.

Revison of the steps to do so :–>

1. Open the bin folder in the folder of the user u log into (eg: for root user open “/root/bin” for other users use “/home/user_name/bin”).

2.Create a text file in it.

3.Open the file and write in it “fusion-icon &”.

4.Save and Exit.

5.Right click on the file and in open properties for the file.

6.Under the permissions tab check is executable.

Restart and u will see the compiz fusion icon in system stray.

The greatest advantage of the fusion icon i think is that whenever compiz crashes (which happens many a times due to unstable versions) u can simply reload it by right clicking on the fusion icon and clicking on the reload window manager. Secondly you can Switch between various window decorators installed on your system (again by right clicking on the fusion icon). Thirdly you can change the window manager whenever you want (like when you are doing some serious work and the effects are irritating you). Fourthly you can also access the settings manager from it….

Please note the you need to have fusion icon installed on your system.In openSuse its available in the XGL repository.

SUSE has updated ghostscript (buffer overflow), opera (several vulnerabilities).
rPath has updated lighttpd (denial of service), pcre (buffer overflow), espgs (ghostscript buffer overflow), am-utils (overwrite arbitrary files).
Mandriva has updated dbus (privilege escalation).
Fedora has updated horde (F7, F8: several vulnerabilities), turba (F7, F8: several vulnerabilities), imp (F7, F8: several vulnerabilities), dbus (F7, F8: privilege escalation), thunderbird (F7, F8: multiple vulnerabilities), xen (F7, F8: insufficient block device address range).