File browsers - Rodent and Emporer

Emperor is a new orthodox file manager for the GNOME desktop. It uses a two-pane “Commander”-style layout familiar to users of Total Commander, Krusader, or Midnight Commander. Emperor strives to bring this style of file management to the modern GNOME desktop by using GIO and GVfs, the technologies that are used in Nautilus and across the GNOME desktop to access the file system

http://code.jollybox.de/emperor.xhtml

Rodent Gamma release 4 (aka xffm-4.7.4) is now available in source tarball and debian packages for i386 and amd64 architecture (these .deb files built on debian-squeeze also work in ubuntu, xubuntu and kubuntu).



mutex/hashtable cleanups... Fix segfault on remote X connection... more pdf viewer options for debian... Add cancel button to find dialog to stop all the multiple threads that may be running.... additonal use of XInitThreads() ... Error control: fallback icons for population elements... disable gtk-icontheme-selection button if no Rodent theme found... Fixed the open with dialog: commands are saved in the temporary cache ...Open with no longer sets default mimetype application, this is done with CONTROL-click on the menu item. Open with should append the application ... Menu items that may set default application now have a tooltip to that effect... update translations ... fix for broken gtk_widget_hide in 2.24 which does not cover all the functionality available in gtk_widget_hide_all (won't hide top level popup menu items).



This release fixes several segfault conditions as well as enhancing the applications menu. Now setting the default application for any particular mimetype is as easy as control-click.



Documentation has also been updated to reflect changes and enhancements to Rodent Filemanager.



Download from http://sourceforge.net/projects/xffm/files/



http://xffm.org/

Ubuntu spotted on Robben Island

LAG ZA gaming community

http://lagza.co.za/community

Zram to the Max

While trying to optimize the elementary OS performance, Sergey Davidoff stumbled upon a project called compcache that creates a RAM based block device which acts as a swap disk, but is compressed and stored in memory instead of swap disk (which is slow), allowing very fast I/O and increasing the amount of memory available before the system starts swapping to disk. compcache was later re-written under the name zRam and is now integrated into the Linux kernel.

I decided to give it a try, and the result on my desktop with a quad-core CPU and 2Gb of RAM was fantastic: instead of freezing after running out of RAM, the system worked like nothing happened. I didn't notice any difference at all. It looked just like adding more RAM! Surprisingly, I got almost the same results on a 6-year-old laptop with Pentium M and 1Gb of RAM! So, I've improved the script to automatically adapt to the amount of memory in the system and automatically scale across several CPUs or CPU cores, packaged it in .deb and uploaded to PPA.

- Sergey Davidoff

Sergey also mentions that the only thing that prevents this from being enabled by default in elementary OS Luna for now is the existence of Atom netbooks with fast SSDs for which he doesn't know if this would be useful or not.

This is especially useful for netbooks, old computers (or computers that don't have too much RAM), virtualization or embedded devices but of course, you can use it on any computer.

To install Sergey's script in Ubuntu 11.04 or 11.10, use the following commands:
 sudo add-apt-repository ppa:shnatsel/zram
 sudo apt-get update
 sudo apt-get install zramswap-enabler

THANKS: Webupd8

Fritzing with Linux

Fritzing is an open-source initiative to support designers, artists, researchers and hobbyists to work creatively with interactive electronics. We are creating a software and website in the spirit of Processing and Arduino, developing a tool that allows users to document their prototypes, share them with others, teach electronics in a classroom, and to create a pcb layout for professional manufacturing.

Here is a link to the download page
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hxhd4HKrWpg&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

Introduction to Arduino Comic

Here is link to a great introduction comic book by jody culkin.

Teagueduino