Last week I showed you how to turn on some neat desktop animations using Compiz Fusion (formally beryl) - you can watch last week’s tutorial here. Today I will show you some of the useful productivity enhancements that Compiz has to offer, such as multiple desktops (workspaces), moving windows between desktops, expo (preview and choose from all your desktops), resizeable window previews, and scale (display and choose from all your open windows at once). I even throw in some wobbly windows for good measure!
People with disability who relied on built-in TTS (text to speech) application in OSX or Vista will be disappointed with the fact that most popular Linux distributions does not have any TTS applications installed by default. While researching for a friend in need, I bumped in to Festival, the de-facto TTS project for Linux Systems. Fedora and Debian based distro users can install festival or flite package from their respective package manager. These are both CLI apps.
For a more practical usage via a proper UI, you can check out KDE Accessibility package which comes with KTTSmgr a front-end GUI manager for festival with very extensive options and kmouth a GUI for text to speech.
Ever wondered how to make your Ubuntu desktop more spiffy? It’s easy when you enable the desktop effects through Compiz Fusion. Compiz “aims to provide an easy and fun-to-use windowed environment, allowing use of the graphics hardware to render each individual window and the entire screen, to provide some impressive effects, speed and usefulness.”
So, you have a nice shiny DVD with your favorite movie, and your dog chews it to pieces. If only you had ripped that movie to a file that you could burn to a new DVD, or play on your favorite media player. In this video tutorial I show those of you outside of the United States** how to do this in Linux.
First we need to install several libraries, including libdvdcss2 (for help installing this see my previous video here). Then we install a DVD ripper (I chose Thoggen because it is quick and easy). And that’s it, you can rip away to your heart’s content!
The DVD ripping program I chose was Thoggen for its ease of use and simplicity. It automatically rips the DVD to .OGM (Ogg media) format. VLC and other media players should be able to play this without a problem, but if you need help installing codecs install ffmpeg (see my video here where I explain it) as it contains a whole codec library. Other DVD ripping programs can save to other formats, so feel free to install and use the ripper of your choice.
iEntry 10th Anniversary
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