Techs Palace

The GNOME Shell redefines user interactions with the GNOME desktop. In particular, it offers new ways for the user to find and open applications and documents, switch between various activities, and view incoming information such as chat messages or system notifications. Later, it will introduce a framework for creating custom extensions. The GNOME Shell replaces functions handled by the GNOME Panel and by the window manager in previous versions of GNOME. The GNOME Shell has rich visual effects enabled by new graphical technologies. In short its cool! This will be included in Gnome-3.0 which is going to be released in September 2010. Nevertheless gnome-shell is already available as package in Karmic Koala. You can see the new look of gnome very easily. In terminal type: sudo aptitude install gnome-shell This will install gnome-shell. Now to try it press ALT+F2 and type: gnome-shell --replace To get your regular gnome-desktop, press ALT+F2 and type: compiz --replace I...

Blogger pages let you to publish static information on stand-alone pages linked from your blog. For example, you can use pages to create anAbout This Blog page that discusses the evolution of your blog, or a Contact Me page that provides directions, a phone number, and a map to your location. http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/answer.py?answer=165955 You can only have 10 pages. The guide above has instruction to enable page in custom template too. For this you have to enable your blogger draft. This is some kind of beta version of blogger and new updates are rolled through this.

Mozilla released Firefox 3.6 few days ago. It is fast to start and fast to do js things. More in release notes here . Installing Firefox 3.6 is same as installing Thunderbird 3 which I have already covered here . I'll just copy pate those things here. So to update your Firefox follow the steps below: Open Terminal Add Mozilla's sources by: For Karmic: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa For version older than Karmic: echo 'deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa/ubuntu ubuntu_version main' | sudo tee -a  /etc/apt/sources.list sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 247510BE sudo aptitude update sudo aptitude install firefox-3.6 firefox-3.6-gnome-support firefox-3.6-branding sudo aptitude safe-upgrade (just in case you've missed anything) sudo rm /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ubuntu-mozilla-daily-ppa-karmic.list (Otherwise your update manager will show new updates each day) sudo aptitude update

I am never the fan of mail client. They are difficult to use, slow and ugly. Mozilla recently released 3rd version of their popular email software, Thunderbird.  As said earlier, I wasn't much excited. Nevertheless I gave it a try. Thunderbird has made major changes in its UI. They have added new features like tabs, archive, smart folder and so on. More here http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/3.0/releasenotes/# After using this for few days I must say they have made definitive improvement on this software. I highly recommend everyone to update to this version. There was some problem with 'lightning' extension but this is already fixed. To install follow the steps below: Open Terminal Add Mozilla's sources by: For Karmic: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa For version older than Karmic: echo 'deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa/ubuntu ubuntu_version main' | sudo tee -a  /etc/apt/sources.list sudo apt...

Many People liked the new task bar introduced in Windows 7.  If you don't believe me you can see this lifehacker's poll on "Best Application Dock". There is similar bar in Linux by the name " DockBarX ". I have been reading about it from long time back but I was very lazy to give it a try. Also I never believed it would be very smooth and bug free. However, I decided to give it a try and believe it or not now I am very big fan of it. It is a powerful program in a sense that you can configure multiple options like grouping, pinning applications, themes, click actions and so on. It has worked flawlessly for me. If you also want to give it a try install it by: Open terminal Add the dockbarx source: If you are using Karmic sudo add-apt-repository ppa:dockbar-main/ppa If you are using older version than Karmic echo 'deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/dockbar-main/ppa/ubuntu ubuntu_version main' | sudo tee -a  /etc/apt/sources....