SolitaryGeek

TortoiseSVN is the dominant Subversion client for Windows. While there so many Subversion clients available, what makes TortoiseSVN special is it’s smooth integration with the Windows Explorer. As a result, working with your Subversion repository becomes super easy. When I switched completely from Windows to Ubuntu Linux, TortoiseSVN is one of the few applications I missed. Not anymore!

As I mentioned earlier, NautilusSVN attempts to be the TortoiseSVN for Linux. It looks like NautilusSVN is not yet available in the Ubuntu repositories but fortunately they had a “deb” package which I downloaded.

Though their documentation specifies that you don’t need anything extra, I had to install a few packages before proceeding to NautilusSVN. I installed the dependencies using the following command,

sudo apt-get install python-nautilus python-svn python-configobj

Then I installed the “deb” package using the command,

sudo dpkg -i nautilussvn*.deb

I had to just close and open Nautilus to see NautilusSVN in action.

All other SVN tasks can be performed by simply doing a “right click” at appropriate places in your working copy.

NautilusSVN has a commit window quite similar to TortoiseSVN.

NautilusSVN provides decent support to create branch/tag, move, change properties, view revisions etc. But there is no “Repository Browser” yet and the “Revert” option needs more polish. Also I noticed that as my working copy grew, NautilusSVN seems to slow down Nautilus. This can be a major downside which might prevent the adoption of this otherwise great tool. But NautilusSVN is still in beta and I hope these issues will be resolved shortly.

Subversion is a very popular version control system. Though Subversion provides a very robust command line client, most of us prefer using a nice GUI front end. Windows users are really fortunate to have a powerful tool like TortoiseSVN which without any argument is simply the best front end for Subversion. Unfortunately, TortoiseSVN is available for just the Windows platform. Here I would like to highlight about RapidSVN, a cross-platform GUI front end for Subversion.

This tutorial is directed towards new users of Linux or people who migrated from Windows to Linux recently. If you are a Windows user, TortoiseSVN might be the best bet for you. Learn more about TortoiseSVN from the post “Extending Subversion by using TortoiseSVN“.

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Introduction

Continuous Integration is a software development practice where members of a team integrate their work frequently, usually each person integrates at least daily – leading to multiple integrations per day.
- Martin Fowler

Hudson is a popular open-source continuous integration server used by many organizations like Redhat JBoss. Though there are many well known and well established open-source projects like CruiseControl, Continnum and some commercial offerings like Bamboo, what makes Hudson special is it’s powerful yet easy to use web interface, it’s simplicity and it’s extensible architecture with many plugins.

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In my previous post, I explained how to convert audio files from one format to another in Ubuntu. Ubuntu provides native support for this through Sound Converter which can be installed using a simple command. After trying Sound Converter, I was confident that there will be similar applications to convert video files. That made me to install applications like WinFF, Avidemux.

My objective was to convert *.DAT files from a VCD into *.mp3. I decided to try WinFF first. The interface was pretty simple to use.

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“Linux lacks good multimedia applications“. How many times have we heard this! This was my perception as well. Not that I do my living based on these tools but I do use them often at home. Atleast, many of us might be in a need to convert audio/video from one format to another and rip tracks out of audio cds.

Traditionally I use softwares like Any Video Converter, Format Factory to convert audio/video files but unfortunately they are available only on Windows and I had to boot into my old Windows XP in order to use them. I thought I had no other choice and also since those tools did the job for me, I was eventually using them whenever the need arises. Fortunately there are some good tools in linux as well.

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NetBeans 5.0 – Simplified Swing development
NetBeans 5.5 – Simplified Java EE development
NetBeans 6.0 – Made the NetBeans editor and other core infrastructure on par with competitors
NetBeans 6.5 – Looked beyond Java development by supporting languages like PHP
NetBeans 7.0 6.7 – Tries to make collaborative team development seamless.

I was quick to download the “All Java” pack of NetBeans IDE for linux. Installation, as usual was pretty smooth on my Ubuntu 9.04. The installation didn’t give me much surprises and it was very much similar to version 6.5. I customized the installer to install Glassfish v2.1 and Tomcat 6.0.18 for me.

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gOS or “Good OS” is an operating system based on Ubuntu. What makes gOS special is it’s “mac” like look and feel, out of the box support for google apps like Gmail, Google Docs, Picasa, Youtube etc through a special mozilla application called prism.

gOS also provides skype, wine in the default installation. Since gOS is based on Ubuntu, ubuntu users will feel right at home when using gOS. All these facts prompted me to go after gOS.

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I recently started using Ubuntu 8.10 at my workplace as well. Till then, I have been using Ubuntu only at home. For me, Ubuntu@Work was very different from Ubuntu@Home. I mostly surf, blog, listen to music and play some games at home. But Ubuntu@Work was a completely different scenario.

Since I’m new to this linux stuff, it took me some time to configure things like static ip address, host names etc. But once everything was setup, things started moving quickly. I initially had doubt in my minds about the font rendering of NetBeans (or any swing app for that matter) under linux. I even wrote an post showing my frustration with NetBeans font rendering when compared to Eclipse. But with jdk.1.6.10, font rendering is smooth and NetBeans works like a champ! You can see some samples here:

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WUBI dramatically reduces the gap that prevents windows users to try Ubuntu. If you are wondering what WUBI is all about, you may get some idea from my post “WUBI – A wonderful little gem that helps windows users to try Ubuntu“. Yes, with WUBI, installing Ubuntu is just like installing Firefox or Thunderbird on a windows machine.

Well, while there are so many great things that WUBI offers, there is one drawback that can make eyebrows rise. WUBI downloads the latest “iso” image from the web automatically when you run it. There is nothing wrong with that and infact this is what makes WUBI a very very easy tool to use. Then what really is wrong with WUBI?

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Yesterday I asked my wife to chat with her mother using my new Ubuntu 8.10 and she happily accepted it. She quickly picked up pidgin and started chatting. But then she asked me, ” I want to speak to my mother, how can I go about?”. I told her that with pidgin you can only do text chat and voice chat facilities are not supported in pidgin. When she asked me, “Why don’t you just install Google Talk?”, I replied her, “Google Talk is not yet available for Linux”. She just went to her Windows XP notebook. Looks like I missed a major oppurtunity to convert my wife to Ubuntu.

I too love Google Talk and I miss it whenever I use Ubuntu. Most of my friends have google talk account but I was able to only chat with them by sending text messages from either Pidgin or Gmail. Though many Google products like Google Earth, Picasa are now available in Linux, Google Talk is not yet there and many Linux users like me need it very badly.

So I was looking around for some solution and I came to know about a great product called “Empathy“. I quickly opened my Synaptic Package Manager and searched for “empathy”. Luckily the required packages were available in my Synaptic Package Manager and I selected the package “empathy” and marked it for installation. The other required packages were automatically selected and the download/installation went smoothly as it use to be in Ubuntu.

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