How-To: Install Simon Speech Recognition Application in Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope

Simon is a very nice KDE4 project with the goal of developing a speech recognition application and it currently works pretty well by letting the user record certain words and execute various commands given via a microphone. Since currently it is not included in the Ubuntu repositories, here are instructions on getting it up and running in Jaunty.

First of all, open up Konsole or GNOME Terminal and install the package flex, needed by simon:

sudo apt-get install flex

Next, download the Ubuntu DEB package from kde-apps.org page and install it as:

sudo dpkg -i simon-0.2-Linux_i386.deb

Or whatever version you downloaded. This should be it, run simon by typing Alt+F2 and typing simon followed by Enter.

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How-To: Install OpenOffice 3.1 in Debian 5.0 Lenny

Debian Lenny comes by default with OpenOffice 2.6.4, but in the meantime OpenOffice 3.1 was released. You can easily install it on your Debian box by using the Debian Lenny backports repository, which is a repository including newer versions of applications than the ones which come by default with Lenny. Just follow the steps below:

Add the backports repositories
To add the Lenny backports repositories, just edit as root your /etc/apt/sources.list file and add the following line:

deb http://www.backports.org/debian lenny-backports main contrib non-free

Make sure to save the file (Ctrl+O followed by Ctrl+X in Nano) and proceed to the next step.

Install the Debian backports keyring
As root, type:

apt-get install debian-backports-keyring

This will install the debian-backports-keyring package, adding the key to your trusted repository keys.

Update the package lists
Now, update the package lists as root:

apt-get update

And install OpenOffice.org:

apt-get -t lenny-backports install openoffice.org


This should be all. OpenOffice.org 3.1.0 should be now installed properly on your Debian box, and you can run it by typing openoffice.org in a Run box or opening a terminal application and typing openoffice.org.

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How-To: Compile and Install GIMP 2.7.0 in Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope

Ubuntu Jaunty comes by default with GIMP 2.6 included in the repositories, but you can try the latest development version available, which is 2.7.0. This last release is a step forward the next stable GIMP version and contains a lot of user interface improvements and changes, GEGL migration, two new plug-ins to mention the major ones. To compile and install it in Ubuntu, just follow the steps below:

1. Make sure to have the sources repositories enabled
Notice that you can skip this step if you haven’t deleted or commented lines out of your /etc/apt/sources.list file.

Edit as root the /etc/apt/sources.list file and make sure to have a line which starts with deb-src, like in the example below (if not, add it and save the file):

deb-src http://ro.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ karmic-updates main restricted

Again, this should be enabled by default. Next, update the package lists:

sudo apt-get update

2. Install the development libraries
Open a terminal and type:

sudo apt-get build-dep gimp

This command will fetch and install both the development libraries and the build-essential package needed for the compilation.

3. Get the GIMP source tarball
Download the source code from here, make sure the working directory is the one where you saved it and uncompress it:

tar -xjf gimp-2.7.0.tar.bz2

4. Compile and install GIMP
In the gimp-2.7.0 directory, issue the commands:

./configure
make
sudo make install

The last one with your user password. Notice that you can install it as normal user too, by specifying a prefix in your home directory for example and including the bin directory in your $PATH variable:

./configure –prefix=/home/USER/usr
make
make install

No root privileges needed in this case.

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5 Simple Bash Tips, Part III

This is the third article in the Bash tips series, you can find the other two here and here.

1. Use cd - to go to the previous working directory
cd - is the same as cd $OLDPWD, where the $OLDPWD variable holds the previous working directory. You can also alias this to something like:

alias back=’cd -’ # or alias back=’cd $OLDPWD’

If you’ve just opened a new Bash session or sourced .bashrc, the $OLDPWD variable will be unset. Also, follow this discussion on reddit which is a great resource on this matter.

2. Make copies of files easier
This one is especially useful for creating backup files, but not only. To fasten up rename commands like mv file1 file1bak you can use something like:

mv file1{,bak}

Here, Bash will expand this command into mv file1 file1bak and execute it afterwards.

3. Search history backward or forward
This one is very popular due to its usefulness. Add the following two lines inside your .bashrc file:

bind ‘”\e[A"':history-search-backward
bind '"\e[B"':history-search-forward

Now type a command, for example ls, and then press the Up or Down arrows. You will see how it autocompletes the last ls commands. This will not change the default behaviour of Ctrl+P and Ctrl+N.

4. Use grep -e "-pattern" to search man pages for entries starting with -
This one is not necessarily a Bash tip, but you can use it to search man pages for entries that start with characters like -

man gcc | grep -e "-Wall"

5. Change the Bash prompt colour
You can customise your Bash prompt the way you like, including colours and what to display. Here's a simple example, just add this line at the end of .bashrc:

PS1="\[\033[1;33m\]$USER@$HOSTNAME$ \[\033[0m\]“

This will offer a nice yellow prompt like in the screenshot below:

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How To: Maximize Profit using Adsense Section Targeting for Blogs

This post was written to support the ‘Adsense Target‘ WordPress Plugin
Introduction:
This article provides a very brief overview of how contextual advertising works and then illustrates how a webmaster using section targeting can have more control over the advertisements served by Google Adsense. Specific recommendations for bloggers are made on how best to use ad [...]

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