If you have a cPanel on your server you can schedule tweets using cron jobs. Anyone with a website has access to cron with cPanel, if you have DirectAdmin settings are similar. No need to use HootSuit to schedule tweets.

First copy this:

curl -u username:password -d status="Text to tweet" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml

change username, password and Text to tweet. If you have cPanel find Cron jobs on home page. Select when you want to tweet and paste in the field command, click Add job.

(Picture from meds.queensu.ca)

Every Linux has two commands for scheduling: at and cron. Programs scheduled by command at will be executed once at a defined time. With crontab it’s possible to define a command that will be executed periodically.
To make sure you can use crontab, check if there is /etc/cron.allow file and if it exists check for your username there. If you use a Debian based Linux you don’t need to worry, you may use it by default.
Crontab saves configuration in a simple text file and by entering crontab -e you can edit it in terminal. The syntax is simple:

time command

Time has this syntax:
m h dom mon dow

• m is for minute
• h is hour
• dom is day of month
• mon is month
• dof is day of week

Simple example:

0 0 2 2 1 dd if=/dev/sdb of=./backup

This will backup a device /dev/sdb at midnight 2nd February, this command will be executed once, to make it run repetitionly, you will need to put asterisk (*) in the place needed. If you want to run this command at midnight every day, put asterisk(*) in every place except m and h:

0 0 * * * dd if=/dev/sdb of=./backup

For weekly (every monday):

0 0 * * 0 dd if=/dev/sdb of=./backup

You can also define a range using a hyphen (-) to define a range and a comma for multiple values:

0 12 * * 0-4 mpeg321 ./dont_worry_be_happy.mp3

0 10,16 * * * mailprogram

The first command plays “Don’t worry be happy” every day from monday to friday at 12 and second one checks your mail twice a day.
And for the end the most interesting, to schedule GUI apps with crontab use: export DISPLAY=:0 && command.

(Picture Ubuntu Inside by Kordite)

Phatch

(http://photobatch.stani.be/)

How many times you needed to edit multiply photos. It could be just resize, but you needed to open every single one and edit it. There is one cool program for batch photo editing, Phatch. You can do: resizing, adding watermarks, text, shadow, rotate picture, … But there is no crop, I needed it couple of times.

Motion

(http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/WebHome)

Motion is a motion detection software. If you have camera it’s funny tool to play with. Has a lot of options about sensitivity, output type and others. If you have a large family, or if you’re student and have couple of roommates you can spy who is touching your computer.

StarDict

(http://stardict.sourceforge.net/)

When I used Windows there was a great program called Babylon, it’s a commercial dictionary but has some great features like adding multiply dictionaries like Britanica, Oxford, Merriam Webster and also French, German, Chinese and other. When I switched to Linux I missed it a lot. But than I find out about StarDict it’s open source opponent of Babylon. There are also dictionary converters, so I was able to convert Babylon dictionaries to StarDict format. When you press a defined key you get a popup with definition of the word.

RemsterSys

(http://geekconnection.org/remastersys/remastersystool.html)

With RamasterSys you can create your own Live Linux distro by modifying Ubuntu and share it with your friends. Its made for Debian and Ubuntu. If you are using different Linux distro there are similar tools for every distro like mklivecd for Mandriva. There is a great tutorial about RemasterSys here.

TrueCrypt

(http://www.truecrypt.org/)

TrueCrypt is a multi platform tool able to create crypted partitions using many algorithms. You can use it on Linux, Windows and Mac without any trouble. Basicly it creates a crypted file which can be mounted as partition, but you can also crypt the whole partition. Crypting a system partition can be only done on Windows, it’s possible to crypt a Linux system partition but not with TrueCrypt.

OpenShot

(http://www.openshotvideo.com/)

OpenShot was mad by Jonathan Thomas, when he installed Ubuntu back in 2008. he saw that there is no good video editor for Ubuntu so he decided to make his own. It’s made for GNOME using Python, GTK and MLT framefork. It’s relatively new program and right now exists for Debian based distos and Arch Linux. OpenShot is very powerful, simple and easy to use, it’s not quite stable but you should give it a shot.

EasyTAG

(http://easytag.sourceforge.net/)

If you have a large collection of Mp3s on your hard drive you might want to install EasyTAG. It’s a great tool for editing ID3 tags in multiply mp3s. Not just that it can also rename your tracks to lets say Artist – Song name.mp3. It also supports: MP2, MP4/AAC, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, MusePack, Monkey’s Audio and WavPac. There are packages for every distribution or if you like you can download source and compile it.

(Picture by knihm)

This is the most doubted question when there is a new version of Ubuntu or any other OS. Ubuntu 9.10 is released a week ago and it brings some improvements. There is a new version of the kernel included 2.6.31.1, Ubuntu now ships Ubuntu One by default, GRUB is now in version 2 available. But there are two things that are important to us when we are deciding about clean install or upgrade. Those features are the ext4 filesystem which is now default filesystem and the focus of the Ubuntu developers to the boot time. Ubuntu is doing great job on this, their goal is to have 10s boot time in the next 10.04 LTS release. Many of those improvements are already implemented in the 9.10 Karmic Koala. People who have measured  boot time and compared it with the boot time of Ubuntu 9.04 said that it’s nearly a half.

Almost everyone on Ubuntu forums suggested to do a clean install rather than upgrade (Clean install fiesty vs upgrade) and it was a discussion about Fiesty. If you upgrade to Karmic Koala you will not have the ext4 filesystem which is a little bit faster than old ext3 filesystem and most importantly you will not sense much of the boot time improvements.

The problem with most people is that they have much applications installed and many themes or something else installed so they will need to do that again. I’m like that myself, but upgrades have failed in some cases for me and I had to do a clean install. Now I didn’t even think about upgrade I’ve done a clean install and soon I will do a clean install of Linux Mint that I have on another partition. I first do a clean install, than install couple of applications which I use mostly and which are not included in Ubuntu. And that’s it, I will install other thing when they are needed. So install and setup time for me is 1 hours.

(Picture by Jonathas Rodrigues)

By migration I mean using some Linux distribution or more distributions as only installed OSes. I’m a Linux user since 2005., my first Linux was Ubuntu 5.04, but I didn’t migrated fully to Linux till September 2009. In this post I will cover some important things that you need to keep in mind about performing migration to Linux. If you have problems with some of them, maybe you need to wait a little bit or use Windows and Linux as dual boot. If you are prepared to delete Windows but still doubting about it, there are many advantages of migration, just jump to the next part.

Things that brought me back to Windows

I have decided many times to use just Linux on my computer, but after a couple of days I have installed Windows again. Every year I tried about 2 times to switch to Linux, but every one of those was a failure. In the beginning it was because customizability of Linux. There is always something to tweak or setup more custom. Sometimes it ended up good and sometimes not. When there was a problem in many cases it was my fault. For example Slackware just prints the output when it boots, I didn’t like that so I spent hours and hours on trying to find the right patch for my kernel and compile it in order to have bootsplash. That worked well and I thought that it’s easy to compile the kernel so I tried to change some kernel configuration and recompile it. That was the end.

Some other things that have brought me back to Windows are games, I liked playing Pro Evolution Soccer so much that it alone was enough to take me back to Windows. Also it was because of some apps that exist only on Windows like DevCpp or Visual Studio. If you are using some IDE for programming or if you use some commercial app for movie editing or something like that, there is a good chance that you will not find that app for Linux. But wait don’t cancel the migration, check Open Source Alternatives to see if there is some application for Linux similar to that you use.

Some other people had problems with drivers, if your computer is brand new try to find out is hardware working in Linux. Support for hardware is much faster available on Windows than on Linux.

Linux awesomeness

Many people install some Linux distribution on a 5Gb partition or even on VM. In order to explore Linux more you need to give it space and time. You don’t need to make the full migration to Linux but at least give it more time and space to shine, you’ll like it.

If you use some famous distributions like Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, … you may install any application with just one click and there are thousands and thousands of applications available. The beautiful thing about that is that you can update all those applications and also the OS with one click. You will never be able to do that in Windows, because OS and software you run on Windows is stored on many different servers and there is no way to easily track if there is new version or not.

If you are a developer or you like to learn about the system you use, Linux is perfect for you. There are so many tutorials and books about Linux that you can find on Internet without spending money on expensive books. You will find a lot of joy by customizing the look or behavior of your Linux distribution or app. If you want to build some new application there is amazing set of tools and compilers to help you. There is a large set of libraries so maybe you’ll just need to combine those libraries or build an GUI for them.

On Linux you will not play every new game that comes out, you can play some using Wine. But you can play almost any retro game that exists. There are emulators for Atari, Dos, Sega, N64, PS 1 and 2 and many more. They are all available through software channels and can be downloaded and installed as any other program with just one click.

Some Linux Myths

Many people think that it’s very hard to use Linux and that it’s hard to install it. Linux is just as easy to install and use as Windows and maybe even more easier. Every Linux distribution can be very easily installed and configured through GUI applications, Linux was hard to install but 10 years ago. My friend with which I share a room at college was once bored and asked me if he can play with my laptop. I said OK, but didn’t even mentioned that I have Linux Mint installed on it. He used it without any problem he played a little bit SuperTux, listen to music and played with Chesee. So myth busted

There is also a myth that if you run on some problem there is no one to help you. That is so not true, just on Ubuntu forums there are currently 936,047 registered members, there are so many nice people that know much stuff and can help you at any time. You will even get help faster on any Linux forum than from Microsoft. Just try to email Microsoft and ask for help and try to ask on Ubuntu forum for help and see who’s faster .