Example and Demos

Welcome to Diligent Creators Demo Section as we are going to update our recent work here.

This is the place where all demos and examples will be posted those are being created/developed by the Diligent Creators’ Staff.

We also would like to start some tutorial section on our websites for Designer / Developers who needs to learn more in less time also some of the freeware projects and development stuff will be provided in this sections.

also follow on twitter @dcreators and facebook

Source

The Linux Foundation launches their own branded Visa card

The Linux Foundation seems to be quite adamant of getting their image out there, as of late; not too long ago, they sent out their own advertisement to show off their offerings to the public, and now they're taking publicity one step further. As TechCrunch are reporting, they've now teamed up with CardPartner and UMB Bank to debut their own Visa card, sporting their mascot 'Tux' on the front.

The card isn't just handy for showing your dedication to the open source cause, but it's also great for helping them out, too. For each card activated, The Linux Foundation will receive $50, and they will also pick up a percentage of each purchase made by users. Apparently, 100% of the proceeds will "go directly towards providing community technical events and travel grants for open source community members in order to accelerate Linux innovation." The current executive director of The Linux Foundation, Jim Zemlin, says that there's a whole bunch of ways people can contribute to the organization (be it by code, or other means) but now they can do it "by carrying Tux in their pocket."

So, hoping to pick one of these up, but you don't live in the United States? Tough luck, unfortunately. The card is only available in the aforementioned region, though others are hoping to be added in the current months. However, if you do meet the criteria, head to this link to get business sorted out.

Run Linux inside Windows – Portable Ubuntu

Portable Ubuntu Remix is a free application for Windows XP, Vista, 7 that runs runs an entire Linux ( Ubuntu ) operating system as a Windows application. This is a useful tool for when you need to use Ubuntu on an machine that has Windows as operating system.
This lets you seamlessly run Linux apps on your Windows desktop, Portable Ubuntu is a stand-alone package that runs a fairly standard (i.e. orange-colored, GNOME-based) version of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. Download here. Some cool things about Portable Ubuntu are:

• This is portable – fits on a USB drive, carry anywhere and save changes.
• You can work and save directly to Windows folders and files.
• This works great on dual monitors.

Portable Ubuntu Inside Windows XP

How to Send an Email (Mail Message) from Linux Command Line Shell

Occasionally system administrator may need to send a test email, or emergency mail message right from the shell or command line interpreter when using a Linux flavor or distribution of operating system, be Red Hat Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, Open SUSE, FreeBSD and others. In this case, the mail command will come in handy.

mail is a command to send and receive mail in Unix, Linux and BSD operating system. To initiate a mail sending process, just type in the following command:

mail recipient@domain.com

Obviously, replace recipient@domain.com with a valid email address.

The system will prompt for a subject of the email before allowing user to type in the mail message body.

# mail receipent@domain.com
Subject: For Testing Only
This email is for testing the mail delivery system only.
^D (EOT)
Cc:

Once finished typing the email message, press Ctrl-D (shown as ^D in example above), which represents End of Text (EOT). Depending on system, mail may or may not prompt another input request for any recipients to cc (carbon copy) to. Press Enter to skip or accept the input, and get the mail sent.

Tip: If the sender and recipient is on the same system, it’s possible to omit the domain (@domain.com) part of the address, leaving only user name.

It’s also possible to use mail’s arguments or switches to directly send mail without interactive input. For example,

mail -s Test address@domain.com < /dev/null

Command above will immediately send a blank email with empty body to the recipient address with the subject "Test". For more arguments, type "man mail".

First Look: Fedora 11

Four days ago, on June 9th, Fedora fans once again rejoiced as their favorite operating system reached a new version. Fedora 11, or Leonidas, is available for 32 and 64 processor architectures on single Live CD formats or Install DVDs. Of course, both KDE and GNOME users will be able to choose Fedora 11 with one of these two desktop environments. Moreover, for a truly lightweight system, Xfce spins can also be downloaded from the official website.

As usual, take a moment to go through our test machine's hardware specifications:

• GigaByte GA-8IP900 Motherboard
• Intel Pentium 4 @ 2.4 GhZ Processor
• Nvidia GeForce FX5500 Video Card
• 1024 MB of RAM
• LG CD-RW/DVD-ROM Drive
• 19" Samsung Syncmaster 913v Monitor

For our First Look we decided to go with the "main" GNOME edition and see if Fedora 11 lived up to the expectations. From the plethora of worldwide mirrors we chose one that was close to us and the 688 MB download was over in no time. Booting the Live environment was fairly quick; once everything's loaded you will almost forget that you're running Fedora 11 from the CD, as the desktop is very responsive. But, for the full experience, you will obviously want to install it to the hard drive by double clicking the corresponding icon on the desktop.

Fedora 11 gives you multiple installation options: either use existing partitions, wipe everything and use the entire disk, or install the system side by side with one that's already on the HDD. I chose to use the entire drive and, after Fedora 11 finished setting up the partitions (which, by the way, were EXT4-formatted by default), the installation started. Five minutes later the process was completed and, honestly, this has to be the fastest operating system I've installed in a long time.

The boot time was also significantly improved, so Leonidas won't lag behind the competition. I was expecting a gorgeous animated ribbon to replace the ugly three colored loading bar from Fedora 10, but unfortunately, on our test computer, only the KDE version displayed it. I even re-downloaded the ISO and tried again but to no avail. Maybe this will be addressed in a future update.

Before reaching the desktop, I had to type in my credentials – root password, username and user password. The final step will ask you to submit your hardware profile information to the Fedora team, which I highly recommend, as this will help a lot with bugfixing and future development. The first thing you will notice is, of course, the new wallpaper – dark blue, wavy lines and a flock of birds are its highlights; all in all, there's nothing not to like about it. Unfortunately, the theme is exactly the same as in Fedora 10. It doesn't look bad, but it's definitely getting old fast.

Being pampered with the easiness of enabling proprietary video drivers in Ubuntu and Mandriva, I was also expecting the same from Leonidas. Well, it's still not the case. Fedora 11 does come with the exciting Nouveau open-source driver but it's yet to have 3D support so you'll want to install the official Nvidia one. For that, you will have to enable the RPM Fusion repositories through a terminal command executed as root. There is also the graphical alternative of downloading two RPMs and installing them instead. Once that's out of the way, you will have access to not only the graphics driver, but to a lot of multimedia codecs, including MP3, MPEG or Xvid.

The next obvious step after successfully installing the Nvidia driver was too enable some cool effects. Sadly, Fedora 11 doesn't come with the Compiz Settings Manager out of the box and the only settings you can modify are wobbly windows and the 3D Desktop Cube.

Seeing Mandriva finally switch to the "browser" mode in the Nautilus file manager, I was almost certain that Fedora 11 will follow. Well, it didn't and I truly can't find one good reason for them sticking to the old, totally inefficient way of navigating directories. Though I quickly went to the Edit --> Preferences menu and configured the behavior the way I liked, surely new users will not know how to do that without asking around on forums and such.

On the included applications front, you should know that, as in previous releases, OpenOffice.org is missing. Instead, Abiword will do a pretty good job for basic word processing tasks, being also able to save in a lot of popular formats, including .doc and .docx. But, as expected, the great package manager gives you access to a lot of extra software, including the latest 3.1.0 version of the popular office productivity suite. Multi-protocol instant messaging is available through Pidgin 2.5.5 and a quite useful virtual keyboard is in the form of Indic On Screen Keyboard. GIMP 2.6.6 is still around and the Transmission BitTorrent Client is at version 1.5.3.

But what about the most popular open-source browser? Well, Fedora 11 apparently wanted to be ahead of the pack and included Firefox 3.5 Beta by default. It's a great update, no doubt about it, but there will be some users who will complain about possible stability issues and the lack of compatibility with some extensions. The Mozilla Thunderbird email client was also updated to its latest 3 version, it too in a Beta state. The bright side is that Fedora 11 users will probably be the first to have these two applications updated to their final versions once they are available.

The Update Manager received a pretty exciting feature called Presto that decreases update download times by a lot. How does it work? When an update becomes available for a certain program, instead of downloading the whole package again Presto will only download the new bits and apply them to the existing version. Beware though, as this is not enabled by default and you will have to download and install the Presto plugin through a simple terminal command: yum install yum-presto.

Say you have an MP3 file but you don't have the codec for it installed; provided you already enabled the RPM Fusion non-free repositories, Rhythmbox will ask if you want to install the necessary codec in order to play the file. This nifty new feature is called Automatic Fonts & MIME Installer and will work in all kinds of other scenarios, including video playback or documents that need additional fonts.

Lastly, while typing my password at the login screen I noticed a new icon: a hand with its index finger highlighted, a sign that logging in by using fingerprint readers is now possible. Though I couldn't test it myself, the developers promise it will work with many models of such devices.

As a conclusion, I have to say that I was expecting more from this release. Surely, it is a great operating system overall, but there are a few minor annoyances that will probably keep new users away. If you are a fan, go ahead and upgrade, there's no reason to stick with Fedora 10. A faster boot, the Automatic Fonts & MIME Installer or the Yum Presto plugin may be enough incentives to give Leonidas a spin.

Download Fedora 11 right now from Torrent.

Fedora 11 DVD (torrent) i386 | Fedora 11 CDs (torrent) i386 | Fedora 11 Live KDE (torrent) i686 | Fedora 11 Live GNOME (torrent) i686 | Fedora 11 Sources DVD (torrent) | Fedora 11 Live KDE (torrent) x86_64 | Fedora 11 Live GNOME (torrent) x86_64 | Fedora 11 CDs (torrent) PPC | Fedora 11 DVD (torrent) PPC | Fedora 11 DVD (torrent) x86_64 | Fedora 11 CDs (torrent) x86_64

Ubuntu 9.04 vs. Fedora 11 Performance

Fedora 11 was released earlier this week so we have set out to see how its desktop performance compares to that of Ubuntu 9.04, which was released back in April. Using the Phoronix Test Suite we compared these two leading Linux distributions in tasks like code compilation, Apache web server performance, audio/video encoding, multi-processing, ray-tracing, computational biology, various disk tasks, graphics manipulation, encryption, chess AI, image conversion, database, and other tests.



For this testing our system we used was an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 clocked at 4.00GHz, ASUS P5E64 WS Professional motherboard, 2GB of DDR3 memory, a Western Digital 160GB WD1600JS-00M SATA hard drive, and a NVIDIA GeForce 9800GT graphics card. Ubuntu 9.04 ships with the Linux 2.6.29 kernel, GNOME 2.26.1, X Server 1.6.0, GCC 4.3.3, and an EXT3 file-system by default. Fedora 11 was using the Linux 2.6.29 kernel, GNOME 2.26.1, X Server 1.6.2 RC1, xf86-video-nouveau 0.0.10, GCC 4.4.0, and an EXT4 file-system by default. The x86_64 builds of both Fedora 11 and Ubuntu 9.04 were used.

We were using the latest Phoronix Test Suite code for managing our testing process, which will go on to form the 2.0 Sandtorg release. Older versions of our testing software are available in the Fedora and Ubuntu repositories. The test profiles we used included timed PHP compilation, Apache benchmarking, LAME MP3 encoding, Ogg encoding, FFmpeg, GMPbench, Bwfirt, C-Ray, timed MAFFT alignment, Threaded I/O Tester, PostMark, Dbench, GraphicsMagick, OpenSSL, Crafty, Sunflow Rendering System, dcraw, Minion, SQLite, and PostgreSQL pgbench.

Source: Phoronix
View: Benchmark Results

Linux is first OS to support USB 3.0

Sarah Sharp, a self-styled "geekess" and Linux developer at Intel's Open Source Technology Center who has recently been working on the Linux USB subsystem, announced on her blog that support of USB 3.0 will soon be integrated into the Linux kernel This makes Linux the first operating system to support the standard. If you can't wait and have the expertise necessary, she includes instructions on how to get USB 3.0 support in Linux now.

According to Ankika Kehrer, "the basic specifications for USB 3.0 show it to have a transfer rate of 5.0 Gbps. The standard was announced in November 2008 by the USB Implementers Forum, Inc. The Board of directors of the Forum are represented by companies such as NEC, HP, Microsoft and Intel (which has the current chairmanship)."

Sharp writes, "I'm working with Keve Gabbert (the OSV person in my group at Intel) to make sure that Linux distributions like Ubuntu and Red Hat pick up the xHCI driver. Advanced users can always compile their own kernel on a standard distro install." Given that her driver is already queued to appear in Kernel 2.6.31, Linux aficionados who aren't keen to compile their own kernel should be able to enjoy the new feature from September of this year in kernel and distro updates from their favourite sources.

Intel is one of the foremost corporate contributors to Linux and open source, and this is just one more example of the work the company and its employees like Sarah Sharp are doing to promote the development of free hardware drivers and of free software more generally.

Sharp concludes, "This is a giant project that I've been working on for the past year and a half. It's gratifying to see the code finally released, and exciting to know that hardware is on its way."

Ubuntu targets 10 second boot time for 2010 release

In an email to developers of the Linux distribution Ubuntu, Canonical's Scott James Remnant explained how they hope to achieve a 10 second boot time with Ubuntu 10.04, the version to be released in 2010, after 9.10 is released this fall.

The projected speed improvements come with changes to the kernel, such as making the X.org server, which controls the display elements in Linux, load up quicker. The boot process will divided into sections with time budgets: two seconds for Kernal and initramfs, Plumbing (drive loader), and X.org server; and four seconds for the desktop session and other services.

"This benchmark time is to a fully logged in desktop (auto-login) with an idle CPU and Disk. Deferring services is not an option unless done properly," Remnant wrote.

The reference platform that Canonical plans to use for this target is a Dell Mini 9 netbook, equipped with the typical Atom processor and an SSD hard drive. Remnant feels this is a good benchmark because it represents what he calls a "middle of the road" system and that some will be faster and slower, but the low price of the machine allows other developers around the world to purchase one to perform their own testing while helping to contribute to the goal.

"10s is a good number, especially for a generic, hardware agnostic, non-stripped down Linux distribution," Remnant wrote, "from that starting point, development teams will be able to customise and tailor Ubuntu for specific hardware - and the OEM team will be able to produce custom remixes of Ubuntu that boot even faster."

Remnant also said that a side-effect of the fast boot speed is that there will be no splash screen. He also said that the team is working to reduce the boot time in 9.10 (codenamed Karmic) but users should not expect the near instant boot they hope to hit with the next release.

Ubuntu already is known for having a quick boot time, as one user proved by back in April. He was able to install Ubuntu 9.04 RC on a system equipped with a speedy Intel SSD drive inside an IBM ThinkPad. When formatted in the ext4 file system, he was able to boot the system in 7.83 seconds. These additional speed improvement that Canonical is targeting for the upcoming Ubunutu release is a feature that Linux enthusiasts should be proud of.

Download: Fast Boot Presentation

Fedora 11 due for release next Tuesday

Fedora 11, the next version of the popular Linux distribution, is due to be released on Tuesday next week, according to the Fedora Project website. The new version features better performance, increased security, and several improvements. Some of the more interesting features and improvements include a quicker startup time (no more than 20 seconds from power up to login screen, at least when first installed), ext4 being used as the file-system by default (on Anaconda installs), as well as coming with the latest versions of GNOME or KDE.

The move to ext4 as the default file-system should mean users notice better performance overall, and the optimised startup should also result in better system performance.

A new feature will provide users with the option to perform an installation taking up less than 500MB of space (at mount point). Obviously this means that some of the extra features will be cut out, however it should also provide better security and performance, potentially appealing to those considering Fedora for use on a server, or those who want to run it on older hardware.

Several other features have also been improved, including volume control and power management. There are several administration tools that have been updates, as well as development tools, which can be found on the feature list, linked to below.

Security has been increased, with support for stronger hashes, such as SHA-2, which will enable operating systems built based on Fedora certifiable for government use. In addition, many security holes will be fixed with the newer versions of the software that come with Fedora 11. The new update will be available from 10:00am (Eastern US time) on 2 June.

Link: Fedora 11 Features

Red Hat sues Swiss government over no-bid Microsoft contract

According to a blog post by Red Hat, Microsoft was given a three year contract, with no public bidding, which Red Hat and 17 other technology groups are appealing. The contract was worth 14 million Swiss Franc (approximately equivalent to £8m or $12m) per year, and was awarded by the Swiss Federal Bureau for Building and Logistics, for "standardized workstations" and the applications and support that go with it.

The government agency claimed the decision was made because there was "no sufficient alternative to the Microsoft products", however Red Hat stated that several other Swiss government agencies are using alternatives, provided by Red Hat.

Red Hat produce open-source software, namely Linux operating systems, which are targeted towards the commercial market. The money is made by selling subscriptions, which provide support for their products, amongst other services.

Red Hat is leading a group of 18 technology companies who are "seeking a public bidding process that allows for consideration of the technical and commercial advantages of open source software products". The companies have filed a brief with Swiss Federal Administration Court, and aim to have the contract with Microsoft overturned.

Open-Xchange, one of the other companies offering alternatives, said "We have alternatives to what Microsoft is offering, so at least we should have a chance at the bidding process," according to an article by PC World. "The IT landscape changes so rapidly, it makes sense to have the freedom to change components without lock-in."

Ubuntu 9.04 RC released, final coming Thursday

While Microsoft preps their upcoming RC of Windows 7, and Apple continues work on Snow Leopard, the Ubuntu Linux team has already published the release candidate of their upcoming 9.04 version, dubbed "Jaunty Jackalope," and is set to publish the final version of the code on Thursday, April 23.

Some of the major features of this release include:

• GNOME 2.26
• UPnP support for Totem
• MAPI support for the Evolution e-mail client
• Improved multi-monitor support
• X.org server 1.6, with Mesa 3D DRI, version 7.4
• Wacom tablet hotplugging
• New style for notifications and notification preferences
• Quicker boot performance (30% faster)
• Linux kernel 2.6.28
• Ext4 filesystem support (ext3 will remain the default)

In the release notes for 9.04, the team cites some problems with their Ext4 support that are present in the release candidate, but that they say should be fixed before the final release.

The 9.04 release will be an important one for Canonical and the Ubuntu team, as it should be the release that is out and in use when Windows 7, Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard" and Fedora 11 are released. That is, unless Windows 7 slips into an RTM at a date past October of this year, in which case Canonical will get a second chance when they release 9.10, which is already dubbed "Karmic Koala."

Download: Ubuntu 9.04 RC

To highlight the decreased boot time of Ubuntu 9.04, one user installed the beta onto their ThinkPad, equipped with a Intel X25-E solid state hard drive. The result was a boot time of only 17 seconds, from GRUB loader to starting Mozilla Firefox.

Free Open Source Video Editor for Linux

Acidemux is a free open source multi-format, cross-platform video editor for Ubuntu Linux, specially designed for simply cutting, filtering and encoding tasks. It supports many file types, including AVI, DVD compatible MPEG files, MP4 and ASF, using a variety of codecs.

This program is written and available for almost all distributions of Linux that are capable of compiling C/C++, GTK+ and the SpiderMonkey ECMAScript scripting engine.

It supports OGM, MP4 and Matroska files natively, direct read input for various types of MPEG files, and many other video formats and containers. It offers MPEG editing and requantization. It also has built-in subtitle handling.

The functionality may be a little difficult for the newbies but once you get use to the applciation, you will find tens of possibilities and figure what more you can do with it. Its probably one of the best tools for editing videos in Linux. It has lots of options for tweaking and the best part is not only that its free but it produces high quality output files.

Key features of Acidemux include

• User Friendly interface
• WYSIWYG cutting, appending, filters and re-encoding into various formats
• mux and demux audio streams into and out of video files

Supported file formats : Avi, OpenDML, ASF, flash video, bmp, jpeg, png, Matroska, MPEG PS, OGM, Mp4, 3Gpp and Nuppel Video.

Supported Video formats includes Cinepak, DV, FFV1, H.263, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, HuffYUV, Mpeg-1, Mpeg-2, Mjpegm MSMSPEG-4, Raw RGB, SVq3, VP3, VP6F and WMV2.

Last but not the least, audio formats cover AAC, AC3, AMR, Mp3, Mp2, Vorbis, WAV and WMA.

For linux users, this is a very useful software. While it is often touted as a Virtualdub clone for linux but it does have some features that differ.

The current stable version of Avidemux is 2.4.3. Compared to the 2.3 and earlier versions, Avidemux 2.4 offers 3 user interfaces: GTK+, shell and Qt 4.

Download Avidemux 2.4.3