Download youtube videos via command line

I know there are plenty of plugins, application out there which allows us to download youtubue videos.

One of the best ways to download youtube videos on Ubuntu is play any video on youtube or vimeo and navigate to  folder /tmp. you’ll find your download file, sitting right there. Can’t get any simpler than this right?

However those who love command line, would definitely love this. There is some kind of feeling when you do your tasks via command line

youtube-dl is a  command line utility, which  downloads youtube videos without any online applications, converters or etc.

Installation:

Ubuntu : sudo apt-get install youtube-dl

Windows : guide to install youtube-dl under Windows XP.

Usuage:

If you want to download some youtube video, for example this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjDjPCCgxvE

Just enter this command

youtube-dl http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjDjPCCgxvE

The downloaded video will be in your home folder. Check out the below screenshot!

Turpial – Awesome Lightweight native Linux twitter client

Turpial is no doubt one of the best native linux twitter client out there. Though i’m a huge fan of adobe Air Based Tweetdeck, this thing looks promising. Turpial until now was availble only in Spanish, thanks to developers now its available in English via PPA.

Turpial has both single window mode, as well as Tweetdeck like wide mode.

Single Window mode

Wide Mode:

It supports every feature any decent twitter app provides like Url shortening and image upload with dozen services.

Installation:

• sudo add-apt-repository ppa:effie-jayx/turpial-devel
• sudo apt-get update
• sudo apt-get install turpial

This client is still under development, and you’ll surely have lot of crashes. But once the final release comes its a very promising twitter client.

Congratulations Microsoft and Launchpad !

1. Microsoft is releasing some Linux drivers they wrote under the GNU GPL-2 license so that it can be included in the Linux source tree.

2. Canonical have released Launchpad.net under the GNU AGPL-3 license.

FTW

Update Ping.fm status messages from Terminal

Ping.fm is a web service that lets you update status messages across social networks at one go. No doubt its popular and saves lot of time and there are plenty of apps out there. But i was looking for something different, thats lets me update the status message to ping.fm. I use Gwibber on my ubuntu, but for some reason the ping.fm doesn’t work at all in Gwibber.

So i was searching around i found this cool python program that lets me update messages from commandline. cool isn’t it.  Its really simple program, the author calls it Terminal Pings. Terminal pings is commandline client written in python. With it you can easily send updates to ping.fm from your terminal

Download the package here and extract it.

1) open pingfm.py
2) add your app key to line 19 (get your key from http://ping.fm/key)
3) run it with “python pingfm.py”

If you want fast access to it anywhere on your computer add this line to your .bashrc:

alias pingfm = ‘python /home/username/full/path/to/pingfm.py’

You can find the author here

A simple theme for Gwibber

This is one of the best and nice theme i found for Gwibber.

You can download this project in either zip or tar formats.

To install, put this in ~/.local/share/gwibber/ui/themes/ and pick the theme from Gwibber’s preferences.

[via gwibber-gilouche]

Linux Chrome now with Flash & extensions

Yeah, somebody finally figured out how to make flash work in Chromium. Have a look at this blog. I checked it with youtube and it worked fine!

To install under Ubuntu:
sudo su
echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main #chromium-browser" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/chromium.list
sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 0xfbef0d696de1c72ba5a835fe5a9bf3bb4e5e17b5
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

To enable Flash support:
cd /usr/lib/chromium-browser/plugins
sudo ln -s ../../flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so

For extensions:
Start browser with the following:
chromium-browser --enable-greasemonkey --enable-user-scripts --enable-extensions

Click on a crx link (such as adsweep) and browse to chrome://extensions/ to check installation.

Solution:Freezing problems with Intel Graphics driver on Ubuntu Jaunty

I was really excited when i installed Jaunty two months back! It was really happening destro with soo many updates.  I installed it and started playing around with it and suddenly to my surprise system just hung. The cursor moves but the nothing responds, only way to get around the problem was hard reboot. Even ctrl+alt+F2 didn’t work. It never happened with me before on ubuntu. I thought this should be some minor issue but it kept happening within some intervals.

So got irritated i started searching and then i came to know that it was a big bug in jaunty with intel drivers. You can read about the issue here and bug filed here They blacklisted the intel driver so that visual effects couldn’t be turned on, since it causes freezing issues. However I had found a hack to remove the intel driver from blacklist and turn on the visual effects. This was causing the freezing problem. The only option was to turn off the visual effects which i can’t do since i use the AWN and it doesn’t run unless visual effects are turned on.

There was no solution, no one knew properly what was the problem. As the time went by, i upgraded to Karmic Koala. The freezing problem suddenly stopped but since it was alpha release it was very unstable, so i had to revert back to Jaunty. Then to my relief there came an update in bug page that fix for Xorg-intel drivers has been released. I installed it even it didn’t seem to solve the problem but for most it worked out. No idea why, it didnt work out for me Then i saw a post about reverting to previous intel driver on ubuntu help. I tried it and now no freezing problems.

The solution : Reverting the Jaunty Xorg intel driver to 2.4

Installing the package

Add the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

 deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/siretart/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
 deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/siretart/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

Import the appropriate GPG key:

 sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 0xce90d8983e731f79

Install the driver:

 $ sudo apt-get update
 $ sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-intel-2.4

According to the dev at ubuntu this problem should not be there in Karmic Koala

More about the Issue :

Reverting the Jaunty Xorg intel driver to 2.4

X freezes starting on April 3rd

Transform Ubuntu into OS X

This post is aggregate of all my research i have done to make ubuntu or gnome look like a OSX. Why OSX you might ask, well no doubt it is the best when it comes to style. Im a big fan of apple user interfaces though they lack a bit in functionality and obviously they are very expensive unless you have lot of money

Ubuntu’s Gnome GUI is extremely customizable.  With themes, icons, cursors, etc., you can have that OS X Leopard look without the OS X price.

Follow these steps :

1. Download :

- Great OS X theme for Gnome is the Mac4Lin project over at SourceForge.net. Its like OSX transformation pack. Just head over to the site and download the latest package. Extract the Mac4Lin in your home directory.

- Download the tarball archive containing the cursors, login screen, icons, splash screen  here. The tutorial assumes you have downloaded the archive to your home folder. To unpack the archive use the following in a terminal:

• cd ~
• wget http://www.stchman.com/themes/OSX_Theme_Icons_Cursor_LoginGDM_Fonts_Splash.tar.gz
• tar -zxvf ~/OSX_Theme_Icons_Cursor_LoginGDM_Fonts_Splash.tar.gz

The tarball contains 10 different files:

Cursors_57588-Shere_Khan_X.tar.gz
Fonts.zip
gdm-osx-theme.tar.gz
Icons_LeopardX-V2.6.tar.gz
Mac4Lin_GTK_Aqua_v0.3.tar.gz
OS_X_Splash.png
GDM_Login/gdm-osx-theme.tar.gz
GDM_Login/gdm_osx-login.tar.gz
GDM_Login/Mac4Lin_GDM_v0.4.tar.gz
GDM_Login/UbuntuLeopard_GDM_theme.tar.gz

2. Install OSX Theme
CD to the Mac4Lin directory and issue the command

sh Mac4Lin_Install_v1.0_RC.sh ( the file name should be the one in the directory, since the version keeps changing )

Viola you are done. now you have the OSX theme , login screen and icons. Max4Lin is still in development hence when you apply the theme not all components like fonts, cursors are changed. That is fine, I’ll show you how to do that.

3. Install AWN theme

Awn is the great OSX like dock. Nothing comes better than that in ubuntu. The default theme of awn doesn’t match much with OSX theme. Mac4Lin has the OSX theme for AWN. Open up the Mac4Lin directory and find the folder by name AWN. Here is how to install it

Just open awn and click on dock preferences and click themes. There you can add theme by selecting the awn theme in Mac4Lin directory. Apply it and you are finished.

4. Install the OS X cursors

- Open the Themes Manager or Appearance Preferences
- Click the Install button and point to the Cursors_57588-Shere_Khan_X.tar.gz archive
- Do not Apply the changes
- Open the Mouse manager via System—>Preferences—>Mouse and click the Pointers tab
- Select the Shere_Kahn_X cursors
- Select Close

5. Install the OS X fonts

- Open a terminal and type or copy the following

sudo unzip -d /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ ~/Fonts.zip
sudo fc-cache -f -v

- This will install the fonts to your system.  Apple uses the Lucida Grande font.
- Open the Font menu via System—>Preferences—>Font and make the following changes
Application Font         Lucida Grande                       9 Point
Document Font           Lucida Grande                       9 Point
Desktop Font               Lucida Grande                       9 Point
Window Title Font     Lucida Grande Bold              10 Point
Fixed Width Font       Bitstream Vera Sans Mono  9 Point

- Reboot  the workspace CTRL-ALT-BKSP for the changes to take effect

6. Firefox Theme

Change Firefox skin to a Safari theme here.  I have found that the iFox Metal theme give the best OS X look.

You now have a Gnome desktop that looks very much like OS X Leopard. I hope it helps you. If you like this article please consider a digg, tweet

A special thanks to stchman and Anirudh Acharya, Developer – Mac4Lin

Enjoy the screenshots

Watch the text-based episode of StarWars IV on Terminal!

Im a huge fan of George Lucas and star wars. It just fascinates me! well recently came across this awesome text based episode of star wars. Yeah you heard it right, text based episode right on your Linux terminal. Don believe me ?

If you feel like being nostalgic (and have plenty of free time to spare), why don’t you connect to the net, open the terminal and type in:

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

That’s how far a REAL fan will go.

Check out the screenshots! Im loving it

Source

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

Update twitter from command line!

Are a command line freak like me! ever wanted to tweet from commanline ? Don worry Commandline Fu has the answer..

First you’ll need to have curl command in your path. if you don have install it by sudo apt-get install curl on ubuntu.

You ‘ll need to put a line “machine twitter.com login TWITTERUSER password TWITTERPASS” in $HOME/.netrc and better chmod 600 that file.

Then use this command.

$ curl -n -d status='Hello from cli' https://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml

Thanks Commandlinefu.com

Update :

A script version without netrc dependence (also prevents blank status updates): thanks Dan
#!/bin/sh
# usage: ./update.sh STATUS
if [ "x${1}" != "x" ]; then
curl -u twitterid:password -d “status=${1}” https://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml
fi