A.P.P.L.E

I am a total newbie to Ubuntu Linux. Although I tried installing Ubuntu at home, but I didn’t really play around with it. In my workplace, there are 3 computers running on Ubuntu Linux. This is the part that makes my job challenging. Yesterday I was requested to remove Firefox in an Ubuntu Linux pc. In Linux, you don’t remove application like what you do in Windows. I did something, but failed to remove. So I just let it be.

This morning, right after I was logon to my Skype account, I got a message from my boss. Questioning me why she still observed the user surfing AirAsia website! Crap..I knew things gonna be bad if I still don’t find solution for this. I was really pissed off this early morning. Because, I REALLY AM NOT FAMILIAR WITH ANY LINUX PC!!!! I’m the only IT personnel here. Who should I discuss with? Well, in almost every situation like this, I will consult my friend, Google.

I’m glad that I did bookmark a very useful link some time earlier when I was looking for source for learning Ubuntu. This post is basically for my own reference, if I meet this sort of situation again.

An Easier Way to Install Programs

Ubuntu has a great package manager called Synaptic that lets you search for or find applications to install or remove from a list. You can check it out by going to System>Administration>Synaptic Package Manager. You can easily sort packages by category, their installation status, or by searching. If you find a package you want to add click it and select Mark for Installation. Once you’ve selected all the packages you wish to install, remove or upgrade at this time, click the Apply button. It’s as easy as that. However, not every application will be on this list and betas are usually never listed. In those cases you must go out and download the installer elsewhere and install it manually. Such is the case if you want the latest version of Firefox the day it comes out. It might take the repositories a day or two to get the latest versions.

The Synaptic Package Manager

Right click the application you want to install/remove/update and mark it to your preference.

After that, click on the Apply button

There is also a simpler version of the Synaptic Package Manger aptly-named Add Applications. You can access that via Applications>Add Applications.

Note: I used the “Add Application” shown above, to remove Firefox, but failed. It doesn’t allow, perhaps that time I was not login as root.

Source: PaulStamatiou

Sharing your computer with other friends and family? Have you ever met the situation where you want to hide some files so that it will not be accessible by others other than yourself? Or simply, you don’t want anybody to access to your secret files via your personal computer. What way can you think of? Set your folder as “hidden”? That’s not very wise as those with a little bit more computer knowledge will be able to retrieve your secret files. Compress your file and set password to it? That’s so uncool. Let’s check out this video tutorial by Jimmy R. Impressive! You’ll love it!

This is fun. All you need is just your command prompt (Start>Run>cmd), a compression software (such as 7zip, winrar, etc), an image file, and of course those files that you wanna hide/embedded into the image.The magic code:

COPY /B image-filename + compressed-filename new-filename

So, the result will be an ordinary image. Double clicking it will only show the image. Who will ever think of an ordinary image is being embedded your secret files?

It has become a trend for people to share videos in places such as YouTube, Google Videos, etc. With flexible Firefox browser, you can have add-ons such as DownloadHelper, UnPlug, VideoDownloader and many more to name, for downloading the videos and save it in “FLV” format which can be played back in an FLV player. However, the quality of an FLV video is not as good as those such as .avi, .mpeg, etc… So, there’s a very handy website called vixy.net, which enable us to directly coverts flash videos to the desired format, but it only supports video from YouTube.

So, other than YouTube, we probably have no choice but to only get the .flv version of any videos from site such as Google videos. Still, we prefer higher quality videos, don’t we? And we try to search for “flv to ‘other-you-name-it format’ converter”. Yes, there are lots of such software available, but most of them are sharewares or with watermark in it. This is really a turn off~

Worry not! Some wise heads have developed a 100% FREE video converter which can converts video from one format to the other. And guess what? It can covert FLV to any other desired format too! It’s called SUPER ©.

Although it might not have fancy or very attractive interface, it has powerful features. You can read more about this free software from their website. In short, this is what it is:

• A freeware
• 100% free to download & to use
• Plays & converts very fast full length movies to ANY other format without any time or function limitation

Download it now, and you can converter your favorite videos to any format you desire. Remember, now you can convert any FLV videos without any problem, and it’s FREE.

It’s nice to watch DVDs from your DVD players. But sometimes, we would like to have the same DVD movies or whatever you name, in a different formats. Then you will need something called the DVD ripper or DVD converter. Most of these software are not free and even if you download a free trial from the Internet, you might get your movies watermarked or having the time limitation.

HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 converter, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.

Worry not! HandBrake is now available for downloads and you can get your favorite DVDs ripped just in time! When you see the terms open-source and GPL-licensed, you get the idea of FREE usage. I’ve tried this software before, just need to play around with it a little while then you will get use to the interface - an Easy-to-use software. However, for Windows user, you are required to have .NET Framework version 2.0 installed in your machine, before you can actually install HandBrake.

HandBrake Website: http://handbrake.m0k.org/

Virus has revisited MSN or Windows Live Messenger. Watch out, all MSN or Windows Live Messenger users!! This morning right after I read a new blog entry “Live Messenger Virus: look at my summer pictures” in LiewCF.com, I received similar suspicious files from one of my friends in my contact list. This time, it was not sent together with any messages, just a file waiting for me to receive. It’s a zip file named picture041.zip. Few minutes later, another file was automatically sent to me by the name of images031.zip. Of course, I just declined it and asked my friend about it. She said she got this virus and didn’t know how to solve it. So I suggested a link which was posted in Liew’s blog. Hope she can follow the instructions and solve this virus problem. (Yea, for more details and removal instructions, please refer to LiewCF’s post.)

Here’s a quote from Liew’s blog:

About “summer2008.zip” virusAfter digging the Internet, I found a detail information page about the summer2008.zip worm or known as IRC-Worm.Win32.Agent.a (Backdoor.Win32.IRCBot.acd) by Kaspersky Anti Virus. The virus send random messages in different languages such as English and Chinese.

Upon execution of the worm (.scr file), it drops random file name in your Windows folder:

images0XX.zip
photos0XX.zip
albumXX.zip
photoXX.zip
pictures0XX.zip
pictureXX.zip
(XX is random digitals, such as album39.zip, images091.zip.)

So, please be alerted and DO NOT ACCEPT any suspicious files.

Lastly, another short note quoted from Liew:

Never open a downloaded file before scan for virus.

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I’m a fan of LiewCF.