GS Design » Windows

Advanced guide to Aspire one

Gabi Solomon — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 12:06:04 +0000

A friend of mine just bought a e-pc from acer that runs a custom linux OS called aspire one.
At first sight it seems like it a great solution for basic users since it has a very friendly interface, and it comes preinstalled with a a pack of software that is generally used like IM client, email reader, browser, office suite and much more.

But although this looks nice, it becomes a problem when you want more from your epc, when you want to install new apps or want to customize something. You dont even have a right menu on the desktop.

How to enable advanced menu [small hack]

To do this you will need to go to Files > My Documents. In the window opened go to the File Menu and click on Terminal.
In the terminal window input xfce-setting-show and hit enter.
This will bring up the Xfce Settings Manager.

Click on the Desktop link and you will get the Desktop Preferences window where you must select the Behavior tab.
Now mark under Menus the Show desktop menu on right click option and close the window.

Now you will bring up the normal desktop menu when you right click somewhere on the desktop which contains more options than the limited user interface on the Aspire One.

Changing the root password

Now for even more advanced usage you will need to use the root user. But after a lot of searching i came to the conclusion that you cant find out what the password for the root is, instead you can change it.

To do so you must click on the desktop and open a terminal window ( you can find it under System > Terminal ).
In the terminal window first type “Sudo –su” and hit Enter.
Then type “passwd” and hit Enter.
You will now be prompted to enter the new password. After typing press enter and retype it.
That is it. You have successfully changed the root password

Installing new applications

Now that you have enabled the advanced menu and have the root password you can proceed to installing new applications.
This is quite simple, you just right click on the desktop and select System > Add/Remove Software.
You will be prompted to enter the root password and after you enter it the package manager will launch.
And now the install should be easy as cake and is similar to any Linux based OS.

Adding new shortcuts to your desktop

Even though you have enabled the new advanced menu and you can access your new installed software from that menu, it just doesn’t feel right. I bet you want them to be included in the shortcuts from the desktop. Well that is just a bit tricky, you will need to edit an xml config file.
The address for it is :

/home/user/.config/xfce4/desktop/group-a pp.xml

Hope this was helpfull,
Cheers

How to optimize the RAM on your PC

Gabi Solomon — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 17:32:13 +0000

I am a really “power” user of computers, not because i am an expert at them but because i have the problem that i opened a lot of programs at once … and i mean a lot, which sometimes puts my computer into a sluggish state, because it runs out of RAM memory. I do admit an update of my RAM is in order but until then i found a small software to optimize my PC RAM usage just a little to make it work a little faster.

Its called RamBooster 2 and its available for download here.

Below is a video review of the software from cnet.com

boxee – the new generation in media centers

Gabi Solomon — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 22:23:17 +0000

Just a few minutes ago i happened to tune into Chris Pirillo Ustream Chanel that was showing the GnomeDex conference, and it caught my attention right away.

It was a presentation of a new media center software called boxee.

boxee is a social media center. with boxee you can play videos, music and pictures from your PC or from the Internet. you can also share with your friends what albums you’re listening to, what movies and TV shows you’re watching, send recommendations and more.

boxee is designed to work with a remote control (it looks great on a big screen TV), but you can also control it using your keyboard.

once installed boxee will start scanning your local Movies, Music and Pictures folders automatically. boxee will attempt to bring artwork, reviews, cast, etc. for your media, so browsing your library becomes more useful and fun than looking at a list of files.

boxee is based on the best media center on the planet, xbmc.

If you havent figure it out what the fuss is about, well this media center will drive content right to your screen from services like youtube and last.fm and display it right on your screen, and above all it will let you know your friend activity on those services, get recomandation from your friends on what videos, shows to watch or what music to listen too.

Plus it can connect to other devices on your home network being computers, file storing servers or even mobile devices ( that have a way to comunicate on the network ) and pull in content from them as well : pictures, music or video.

I dont know if this has caught your attention, so i am going to add another BIG + … its OPEN-SOURCE, yes you heard right … open-source, plus it has versions for windows, mac and linux … how cool is that.

The only bad side is its in alpha state and hasnt opened download to everybody, you must register on the site to get a download link ( hope i receive one soon ).

Enjoy the screenshots and videos below.
Cheers.

Open-source FTP client

Gabi Solomon — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 18:58:03 +0000

I have tried and tested a few FTP clients in search for one that would be to my liking, but couldnt really find one. So i revert back to using Total Commander as my ftp client.

A few dayas ago I stumbled across FileZilla. It’s an open-source FTP client for Windows and i find it to be really good. It’s fast, reliable, and user-friendly.

I think i finally found something to replace old Total Commander with .

What FTP clients do you use ?

the first real windows OS competitor

Gabi Solomon — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 19:02:12 +0000

Yes i know there are other competitors for Windows, that are very real such as Linux or MacOS , but you have to admit that they are pretty exclusive. I mean this in the way that some software that you run on windows, cant use on the other OS because there is not version of that software that suports the OS.
I believe this is one of the reasons why people use windows a lot, this and the fact that people got used to the windows feel and look.

Free alternative to windows

Today i found out through the youtube chanel of chris pirillo about a new alternative to windows called ReactOS

ReactOS is a free, modern operating system based on the design of Windows XP/2003. Written completely from scratch, it aims to follow the Windows architecture designed by Microsoft from the hardware level right through to the application level. This is not a Linux based system, and shares none of the unix architecture.
The main goal of the ReactOS project is to provide an operating system which is binary compatible with Windows. This will allow your Windows applications and drivers to run as they would on your Windows system. Additionally, the look and feel of the Windows operating system is used, such that people accustomed to the familiar user interface of Windows would find using ReactOS straightforward. The ultimate goal of ReactOS is to allow you to remove Windows and install ReactOS without the end user noticing the change.

Please bear in mind that ReactOS 0.3.5 is still in alpha stage, meaning it is not feature-complete and is not recommended for everyday use.

Below you can find his review of this new OS.
Hope you find this usefull

Cheers

Extracting text from Word Documents in PHP with COM objects

Gabi Solomon — Thu, 29 May 2008 10:08:41 +0000

dont know if you know but i have a pet project called infostud.ro that is a university teacher grading website. It also has a students essay section where members can download various essay and papers written by other members for there inspiration with there own projects. Almost all those papers are in the word format. In the hope to help them i wanted to have a description of each file so they can preview some of the contents of the files before downloading it, so they know if its going to help them or not. Until recently that description was entered manually by the users, but i decided to give them a hand and make php read the files and have the first X characters from the file as the description.

So i start googling for ways to read the word files, since simple opening the file would return a buch of strange code. On my browsing in the past i remembered reading something about COM objects and how you can read word documents with it.

As i discovered COM ( Component Object Model ) is a interface standard for software componentry introduced by Microsoft. Sounds pretty fancy, but what that means is that using COM objects any other application can communicate with any Microsoft application ( Word, Excel, IE ) and perform various commands as if a user would use it.

Now that i knew what i was looking for, i started to look for documentation on how i could use a COM object in php to open a word document. Even if i thought i would have to read tons of documentation, turns out that using a com object is pretty straight forward.

For my needs i actulay found to ways of reading the text from a word document.

The first way was to convert the word document to a TXT file.

PLAIN TEXT

PHP:

$filename="file.doc";
$TXTfilename = $filename . ".txt";
$word = new COM("word.application") or die("Unable to instantiate Word object");
$word->Documents->Open($filename);
// the '2' parameter specifies saving in txt format
$word->Documents[1]->SaveAs($TXTfilename ,2);
$word->Documents[1]->Close(false);
$word->Quit();
$word->Release();
$word = NULL;
unset($word);
$content = file_get_contents($TXTfilename);
unlink($TXTfilename);

Although this method worked pretty good, as i was about to close the google found pages i saw a different approach to the problem that i liked more then the above ( ans showed me new COM commands - i couldnt find a list of it anywhere )

PLAIN TEXT

PHP:

$word = new COM("word.application") or die ("Could not initialise MS Word object.");
$word->Documents->Open(realpath("Sample.doc"));
// Extract content.
$content = (string) $word->ActiveDocument->Content;
echo $content;
$word->ActiveDocument->Close(false);
$word->Quit();
$word = null;
unset($word);

As the author points out here this uses a small trick, if you would check $word->ActiveDocument->Contentyou would find that it is an empty object (variant). If you assign the value to a variable you’ll get an empty string, as the variant object has no real __toString(). The workaround in PHP is to explicitly type cast the value as a string and make PHP/COM take care of finding the real value.

As a last pointer, if you look at the script you would see the 3 last commands that are meant to destroy any the COM object and release the memory taken by it, since it takes about 10-15MB upon initialization because it opens a full instance of WINWORD.exe.

So, in just ten lines of code you can get the text out of an MS Word document, easy as ever!

Hope this helped you,

Cheers

How do I Open or Mount a Bin File Without a Cue File ?

Gabi Solomon — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 18:15:59 +0000

You downloaded a CD image in a bin format. However, nothing will read it. Here's what you do.

You just downloaded the latest, baddest program from some torrent somewhere. However, it's just a bunch of bin files. You realize these are CD images or ISOs... but you don't know how to run them.

You just create a text file that is named the exact same thing as your bin file except with a cue extension. In this text file you need this information:

FILE "yourbinfilenamehere.bin" BINARY
TRACK 01 MODE1/2352
INDEX 01 00:00:00

Step-by-step:

Say you have a file called gameiso.bin

1. Right click on a blank space in the same folder
2. Select new text document
3. Double click to open your New Text Document.txt
4. Paste this into the file:
FILE "gameiso.bin" BINARY
TRACK 01 MODE1/2352
INDEX 01 00:00:00

Make sure you edit gameiso.bin to the exact name of your bin file.

5. Click File menu
6. Click Save
7. Click the Red X to close it
8. Right click the New Text Document.txt and select Rename
9. Rename it like your bin file except with a cue extension:
gameiso.cue
10. Now any program that can read CD-rom ISOs (nero, alcohol, etc) should be ready to read the file.