Category Archives: Software

Ubuntu’s Ambiance/Radiance gtk themes for Debian

24 Replies

(EDIT Sep, 2010: now with updated packages, see below!)

Running Debian Lenny on my Acer Aspire 5572 notebook I wanted a more “up-to-date” look for it’s Gnome desktop. As I recently came across some screenshots of Ubuntu‘s upcoming release “Lucid Lynx” with it’s new GTK theme I decided to give it a try (you have to get used to the buttons being on the left side of the windows, though! ;-) see screenshot below). Of course, the new Ubuntu Mono iconset goes very well with this theme, so I needed that, too.

To make everything work in Lenny, I grabbed all the source packages from Ubuntu’s package repository and then made deb packages for Lenny from them. I also replaced the Ubuntu logo within the two icon packages with Debian’s logo.

The new Ubuntu “light-themes” (Ambiance/Radiance) need the latest murrine engine, which of course isn’t included in Lenny. So, this was the first thing I took care of. This is the only package which is architecture dependent and I can only provide it for i368. If you need murrine engine for amd64, do as follows:

Continue reading →

Switching from mp3 to ogg

When it comes to multimedia software most Linux distributions have one thing in common: no proprietary codecs – and this might include MP3 playback. I have no deeper insights in the license terms of the MP3 codec, but there is a whole website about it by THOMPSON, the company claiming to control MP3 licensing: mp3licensing.com. There are other proprietary codecs as well, i.e. “aac” which I think is the default file format for Apple’s iTunes and devices by Nokia and Sony. Wouldn’t it be nice to not care about this crap? The open source alternative is “ogg vorbis“, providing great quality audio files and high compression at the same time. So, how can you switch from mp3 to ogg?

If you already have a large collection of MP3 files I guess it wouldn’t make any sense converting them to OGG (though possible). Just keep them as they are. But you could start ripping your new CDs to OGG and go on with this format.

If you’re interested http://www.vorbis.com/ would be a good starting point.
Continue reading →

Debian with lame, mencoder, transcode, xvid & dvd::rip

Debian has one of the largest software repositories around but also has a very strict policy (which I respect) when it comes to legal stuff concerning free software or copyrights. I guess this is the reason why some multimedia software packages are missing. If you stick with Debian you have to install them manually, or – if you want the easy way – you could of course add some third party respositories or change for example to Ubuntu which doesn’t seem to share Debian’s concerns. As I’m running sidux (which is based on Debian Sid) I wanted to go for the manual installation (I don’t like to add repositories other than Debian’s). Debian comes with an MPlayer package but it lacks menconder. If you need menconder you’ll have to install from sources. lame, transcode, xvid and dvd::rip are not part of Debian repositories at all, so we’ll have to install them from sources, too. In this HOWTO I’ll explain how this worked for me (running sidux on amd64). I guess it should be similar to Debian testing or even stable.

Continue reading →

“gpsbabel 1.3.5″ for Ubuntu Hardy

Ubuntu Hardy Heron is out but sadly it comes with a rather old version of gpsbabel: 1.3.3. To read data from my Wintec WBT-201 I need at least gpsbabel version 1.3.4. With 1.3.5 already released I wanted the latest version – of course!

I tried to follow my own instructions given here to build a deb package for Hardy, but it didn’t work… It wouldn’t compile cleanly and errored out with:

lmx.c:34: Fehler: »link« als andere Symbolart redeklariert

(Sorry, got it in German only)

I googled a lot, but nothing… Compiling the sources worked well, but not if I tried to build the deb package via “uupdate”. As I’m no expert in building packages this gave me a hard time, but finally I got it: you have to edit debian/rules a little and it works! But now, step by step.

Continue reading →

Updating phpBB2 forum to phpBB3 via local installation

Recently I upgraded a phpBB2 powered forum to the new phpBB3. I theory, this shouldn’t be a problem as the new version provides a script which transfers the old database tables to the new ones. In my case, the conversion stopped somewhere when importing the old database tables. It gave me an error with something like “…end of script…” – that was it. I guess this was due to some PHP/Apache settings and as my forum is hosted by a simple webhoster, I had no chance of dealing with the settings (no root access!). If you run into the same problems maybe the following can be of help.

My initial setup with my webhoster was a phpBB2 forum with no addons running on an apache2 webserver with PHP5 support and a MySQL 4 database as backend. I wanted to run the new phpBB3 forum with the same setup except for the database, which would be MySQL 5 then (this is optional, but I had the choice of creating a new database).

WARNING: This HOWTO worked very well for me. It may fail though and could destroy your forum/forum database. So, follow it at your own risk and always keep backups!

Continue reading →

(K)Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon

About two months ago Ubuntu 7.10 aka “Gutsy Gibbon” was released and I couldn’t resist… So I first gave the KDE flavored amd64 version of Kubuntu a chance which worked very good. Out of curiosity I recently changed to Ubuntu with Gnome desktop.

Installing (K)Ubuntu is pretty easy. If your system has at least 320MB of RAM download the “desktop CD”, boot it and click the “Install” icon on the desktop. When booting from the Desktop-CD, your screen might go blank right after the desktop shows up for the first time. If so, just hit any key and it should reappear. Or maybe I’m the only one who ran into this? To avoid such things I prefer the “alternate” CD which isn’t harder to install. I won’t concentrate here on installing (K)Ubuntu Gutsy as it’s very straight forward and not different to former (K)Ubuntu releases. This post will be about customizing Gutsy and how to avoid/repair some small issues you might run into.

Continue reading →

WP Theme “MDAGM” released

This is the release of my first WordPress theme: “Modernpaper Dark And Green Mod”. As already mentioned, it’s based on “Modernpaper 1.0” by Performancing, so most of the credit goes to him.

This is what I did:

  • changed colors and fonts in css file
  • minor style modifications in css file
  • added support for tags (WordPress >= 2.3 required)
  • added tag cloud to right sidebar

The original theme and of course my modification is released under GPL.

If you like to convert an existing “Modernpaper 1.0″ to “MDAGM” just overwrite your previous “style.css” (make a backup first!) with the modified version.

Here’s a screenshot (just in case I change my website’s theme again ;-) ):

Modernpaper dark and green mod

Download “MDAGM WP Theme 1.01”
(md5sum: facfe196b5ba97f7db2cad0263989796 modernpaper-dark-and-green-mod.zip)