Google Desktop

Those Linux users who use Google for every internet search will be happy to hear that there exists a Linux version of Google Desktop - the Desktop search tool. Now u can get blazing fast search results in seconds. The tool is amazing. It literally feels like the real Google on your machine.Like most modern search tools it runs in background and utilizes the idle time available on your machine. It maintains an index of all the available files and searches this index when you type in an filename to search. First time usage will be slow and will not show all the results since the indexing process may not be completed. The status of the indexing process can be seen from the index -> Status option available which looks like the one in this screen shot.


The tool also has options to exclude items from indexing so that they do not appear in search results. Also it integrates nicely with the on line version merging the on line search results with the desktop one.

Overall a nice tool but be warned that once you get into the habit of using it you might get addicted and may behave weirdly in situations where you cannot get to use the tool.

XMMS song names in Pidgin Status.

I was wondering on how to display my song title as the status for Pidgin much like provided by 3rd party tools for yahoo messenger or for Gtalk when i came across this piece of info.

xmms has a built in plugin called 'Song Change' which allows one to execute any command when a song changes or when the play list ends.

Pidgin also has a command line tool called 'purple-remote' where in one can send commands to Pidgin.

This is all the information you will need.Put the following command to the xmms plugin configuration box

purple-remote "setstatus?message=%s"

xmms would replace the %s with the song title.

Now start a song and Voila! the song title appears in Pidgin status.

Messengers!!!!!!!

Pidgin previously known as 'gaim' is a kool multi protocol messneger available for Linux.

You can have your yahoo, gtalk contacts in a single place . The interface is cool without the usual bloat added by other messengers.



PS. On my Fedora core 5 system the application installed correctly but would not start. I found the problem already logged in at the pidgin bug database and the solution also . The problem it seems was that pidgin required a new version of library called lib-purple whereas in fedora core 5 a older version was present. Updated my lib-purple library and then pidgin popped up on the screen with its full glory.

LAMP

Many newbies in the Linux world hear regularly about LAMP. LAMP is a acronym used for the combination of LINUX, APACHE, Mysql and PHP . This combination is used to develop and power web based solutions. All of the components are free and open source. LAMP is quite popular the reason being that all the components are really good in doing their job.

Also the 'AMP' in LAMP ensures portability since your solution would not depend upon the operating system. So the development of such a solution might happen in Linux but the deployment of the solution may be on a Windows server. The migration to any other OS would be trouble free as your solution would only depend upon Apache,Mysql and PHP.

Though 'AMP' ensures portablity its recommended to use the 'full' LAMP for your solutions as the software stack has undergone rigorous testing by thousands of people who have successfully deployed it in production web sites.

ext3 in Windows

Recently I had a experience where in i had to reverse the migration of Linux to Windows. Although I was not really happy doing it , the job needed to be done. I needed information which was present in the Linux system and needed to be copied to the Windows system. The difficult part used to be that moment when i used to realize that the info needed by me was present in the ext3 file system which needed a reboot in to the Linux System.
But as they "Necessity is the mother of Invention"..I googled for something which would allow me to read the ext3 file system in Windows and within minutes i was using a tool called LinuxReader by DiskInternals. The program has a Windows Explorer like interface and does its job pretty well. I was able to access all my files and could save into the Windows file system.

A good tool for those dual booting between Windows and Linux and looking to share information between the 2 systems.

The only disadvantage is that this tool can only read ext2/ext3 file systems and will be of no use if u r file system is different.