Google Redesigned

Google Redesigned is a Firefox extension that aims to fully redesign the look and feel of popular Google services. This is achieved with Cascading StyleSheet (CSS) files which are loaded on the client's browser. The extension simplifies the use of these styles by providing auto-updates, easy management and notifications of changes.

MS Office Fonts in OpenOffice Linux

Sometimes you open a MS Office Word document and you discover that some of the fonts don't look equal on your screen, and even worse, look very different on print-outs.

What happens?

MS Office users heavenly use some MS Office specific fonts (like Comic Sans, Webdings), which aren't installed by default on your fresh Ubuntu system. So OpenOffice tries to simulate these with similar fonts, the same applies to the printer driver.

Okay, you could go and setup a font replacement table in OpenOffice, but there's a much quicker way of solving the problem.

Installation of MS Core Fonts

Just install the msttcorefonts package from Synaptic, from the Applications menu or the command line:

sudo aptitude install msttcorefonts

Matroska

Matroska is a new multimedia container format usually found as .mkv files (matroska video) and .mka files (matroska audio).

This high-end container format supports fast seeking, embedded chapters and subtitle, several video and audio tracks, and supports latest codecs like H.264 and AAC (I highly recommend to encode your videos with these for quality reasons).
Unlike other container formats like AVI, you can easily switch between subtitle or audio tracks during playback and stream it over RTP.
In the near future it will also include menu support like found on DVDs.

Tools

To create such a multimedia stream the best tool is MKV-Toolnix, a graphical user interface for the mkvmerge program, which allows to create Matroska files from other formats.
It can be found for Windows and for Linux.

Install instructions for Ubuntu Hardy

The following instructions will install the latest version, not the old one which is found in the official Ubuntu repository.

sudo -s
echo "deb http://www.bunkus.org/ubuntu/hardy/ ./ #MKVToolNix - Cross-platform tools for Matroska
deb-src http://www.bunkus.org/ubuntu/hardy/ ./ #MKVToolNix - Cross-platform tools for Matroska" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/bunkus.list
wget -q http://www.bunkus.org/gpg-pub-moritzbunkus.txt -O- | apt-key add -
aptitude update
aptitude -y install mkvtoolnix-gui
exit

VirtualBox 2.0

VirtualBox 2.0 has arrived!

What's new in version 2.0:

• 64-bit OS guest support (only on 64-bit hosts, as one might expect)
• New-version notifier
• Guest property information interface
• Framework for collecting performance and resource usage data (metrics)
• Added SATA asynchronous IO (NCQ: Native Command Queuing) when accessing raw disks/partitions (major performance gain)
• and of course, bug fixes.

Even better, on Ubuntu Hardy it can be installed from a package repository now.

The complete install instructions for Ubuntu can be found in my special tutorial about VirtualBox.

subcommander

Recently, I discovered another graphical client for the subversion source control system.

Subcommander is a cross platform (MacOSX, Windows & Linux) client with diff and merge tool and integrates very well into Ubuntu, and supports much better subversions trunk, branches and tags layout.


Compared to eSvn it can browse and work directly with repositories, and has all features from kdesvn.
See also my previously post about subversion GUIs.

It can be installed from Synaptic, aptitude or apt-get, but unfortunately doesn't create an entry in the applications menu.

Thunderbird Window Border Fix

I got crazy these days, because after having upgraded Ubuntu to Hardy Heron, Thunderbird started to act strangely after some uses.
Suddenly, it started to miss its borders of the main window, being maximized always and didn't react on any changes like shrink, move, resize, maximize.
It covers the toolbar completely and when you open for example its addons window it doesn't show up, because it is hidden beneath the main window.

BTW, I use a two monitor system, and the main window always shows up on the left screen.
Haven't tried it with a single monitor.

Finally, I found a fix of this problem:

• Close Thunderbird


• Edit by hand the file ~/.mozilla-thunderbird/xyz1234.default/localstore.rdf in your default profile directory.


• Search the entry
  

  
    <RDF:Description RDF:about="chrome://messenger/content/messenger.xul#messengerWindow"
                     width="800"
                     height="600"
                     sizemode="normal"
                     screenX="5"
                     screenY="5" />
  



• Change the width, height and screenXY entries to the ones you see here


• Restart Thunderbird and it should have its borders again.