The Transmission is one of the best BitTorrent Clients which are available recently. The software is so good that people love it and the Ubuntu appreciates it by making it as the default Client. It has all the features that you need and is lightweight also.
The Ubuntu has a BitTorrent Client named Gnome and it is now being replaced by the Transmission. This Ubuntu torrent Client is being included in the 4^th Alpha release of hardy heron. In April 2008 a stable version of Ubuntu torrent Client 8.04 was released.
The most of the users after using the Transmission BitTorrent Client are more than satisfied and so there has been an increase in its popularity. The users feel that it is very fast and allows them to use it with less disk space usage. The cross platform product is available for all the operating systems and is an open source project. But it is not provided for windows instead utorrent is being used. They both are relatively similar and satisfy a BitTorrent user’s needs.
This is what the Transmission team words meant when BitTorrent was adapted by Ubuntu: “The Transmission software has been built with the goal of being lightweight but also being a commanding BitTorrent Client. It has a very elegant yet simple interface that allows you to work on any chosen platform. Transmission is the perfect choice as it would provide functionality without bloat and is well balanced.”
Since the BitTorrent Client is lightweight it can be used on mobile phones, routers and NAS devices. The clutch adds to the advantages of Transmission as you would be able to control and supervise the torrent transfer from one particular place. The clutch team has released v0.3 and further.
For more information on Ubuntu Hardy Heron you can go to Ubuntu Wiki.

The torrents have become one of the best ways to upload and download almost anything you want. The most preferred cross-platform named BitTorrent Client, Transmission had released a better version in the recent past. The newer version is much more advanced and would allow you to control your torrent from any web browser. It also comes bundled with clutch and loads of new features.
The multi platform BitTorrent Client – Transmission is totally free and has gained a very good popularity. The most of the software users consider it to be the best as it is fast and does not eat up large disk space.
The open source BitTorrent would run on any of the given operating system providing functionality without any bloat. The Client has exception of windows but on the ubuntu torrent web interface it is default.
The most of the windows users prefer the utorrent as their BitTorrent Client and they are able to control their torrents from the webUI which is known as web user interface. This webUI which is used for the transmission is better known as “Clutch”. There is a big advantage of this additional software as it would allow you to observe and control any torrent transfers from any of the websites that are connected on the internet by just sitting at one place.
When you were using the older versions of the BitTorrent Client the Transmission and the clutch had to be obtained separately. But it was all changed when the BitTorrent launched its new Transmission releases which are v1.30 and v1.31.
This is what one of the well known clutch developers – Gimp, had to say: “We are more than happy to announce that the Clutch developmental project and the Transmission project have become one. There will be no separate clutch releases from the v1.30 onwards and it would be bundled within Transmission. But if you have any older version of Transmission then you can download the clutch v0.4 from clutchbt.com. But anyhow that version is not supported any more.”
The Transmission version released last would work on the JSON-RPC protocol. The advantage of the new protocol is that other applications of BitTorrent Clients including the windows version would be able to make backend Transmission. The v1.30 and v1.31 of Transmission include enhancements such as:

• The compatibility to add or remove tracker addresses.
• Create .torrent files along with multiple tracker URLs.
• Includes support for FTP/HTTP seeding.

If you want to search for the clutch then go to ‘Preferences’ and under that click the ‘Remote’ tab.
There were few more additional words from Gimp to the community saying that: “Even though clutch has merged with the Transmission but clutch would remain a very new project. This is a new version of the Transmission with clutch but there is still room for improvement as there are few areas to be worked on. The people who make the usage of the clutch should go ahead and submit patches for improvements! But clutch does not have developer with enough time to work on clutch and anyone with good experience and time can walk in.”
You can contact Gimp at the clutch forums for recent updates.

The GIMP image editor, version 2.6, has been released. It includes significant user interface changes, an improved free select tool, new brush dynamics options, and the new GEGL backend. If you’re a regular GIMP user, this is a very worthwhile upgrade.
Toolbox windows are now reported as utility windows to the window manager by default. This, along with some other changes, allows GIMP to have a much more Photoshop-like single window interface:

Compiz users will not be able to take advantage of the utility-hinted toolbox windows. Until Compiz supports them (I’m sure I read somewhere that this is being fixed) the toolboxes will act like normal windows. To work around this you can right click on the toolboxes’ window title bars and select Always on Top.


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It can be annoying how the GIMP image editor’s image and toolbox windows are separate, if all of them are hidden behind another window you have to bring not only the image to the front but also the toolboxes. This could work much more productively, why not show all the toolboxes whenever a image is in the foreground?
GIMP has a preference that will do just that. In the main GIMP window, click File->Preferences. In the preferences dialog, select Window Management from the list. Under the heading Window Manager Hints, change the two drop down boxes to Utility window.

You’ll need to restart GIMP to make the changes take effect. You’ll notice that the window decoration has changed on the toolboxes. They’ll now no longer appear in the window list, and will stay on top whenever an image window has focus.
Unfortunately, if you’re using Compiz desktop effects this will not have any effect. While GNOME’s Metacity window manager recognizes that GIMP’s windows should be treated differently, Compiz does not. This doesn’t mean Compiz users are out of luck entirely.
Another option is to use another workspace for GIMP, and optionally change the toolboxes to always stay on top. You can do this by right clicking on a window’s title bar and selecting Always on Top. If you’d perfer not to be setting this all the time for GIMP, you can select the Keep above in those two drop down boxes.

[via tombuntu.com]

Flash Player 10 adds new filters, 3D effects, better typography support, and more. For Linux users this version offers windowless mode support (transparency through Flash, and page elements rendered above Flash), V4L2 camera support, smooth fullscreen video playback, and better performance.
[update] Adobe still does not provide a 64-bit Flash Player. I don’t have a 64-bit Ubuntu installation to test on, but Alejandro left a link in the comments that could help 64-bit users.
The Flash Player in Ubuntu 8.10 has not been kept up to date with recent testing versions, so it’s not looking likely that this final release will be included now. However, Adobe is now making it much easier for Linux users to install the Flash Player.
[update] This version of the Flash Player is now available in Ubuntu 8.10! Install it from the flashplugin-nonfree (click link to install) package.

I’ve tested these steps on both Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10.

1. You’ll need to first remove any previous versions of Flash Player you have installed. This includes manual installations and the flashplugin-nonfree package from Ubuntu. Use this command to remove Ubuntu’s Flash package:
   

   sudo apt-get remove flashplugin-nonfree

2. Visit Adobe’s download page, select the .deb for Ubuntu 8.04+ download, and install the package.
3. Restart your web browser.

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Wouldn’t it be useful if your computer could email you? I’d like to be notified by email when my server is in trouble, but I don’t want to run my own mail server. sSMTP is perfect for this; it’s a simple way to send email from your system to an SMTP mail server, like Gmail’s.
Here’s how I set up sSMTP on Ubuntu to send mail through my Gmail account.
Install sSMTP from the package ssmtp (click the link to install), or by running the command below in your terminal:

sudo apt-get install ssmtp

sSMTP can be configured from one text file. Open /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf in a text editor:

sudo gedit /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf

The configuration file is very short and well commented by default. Here’s the options I use for sending mail through Gmail:

root=myemailaddress@gmail.com<br />mailhub=smtp.gmail.com:587<br />AuthUser=mygmailusername<br />AuthPass=mypassword<br />UseSTARTTLS=YES

If you’re using Gmail like I am, change the root, authuser, and authpass options to the email address, username, and password of your Google account. If you’re using another mail service you’ll need to change mailhub to the relevant SMTP server.


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It looks like there will be no theme overhaul in Ubuntu 8.10, but a number of nice themes and concepts have been proposed. I’ve been using one of these themes, called Dust.
Dust controls and window borders:

Dust Sand controls and Dust window borders:

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On Saturday I moved Tombuntu to a new virtual private server at Linode (the computer in my basement just wasn’t enough anymore). I chose Linode (referral link) because they sell unmanaged Linux VPS systems, so I can continue to run whatever software I like.
I used Linode’s control panel to install Ubuntu 8.04 64 bit. Their Ubuntu images are not exactly the same as an installation from a CD, so I learned a few things while setting up.
Install a more comfortable environment
The Linode Ubuntu system is extremely minimal, things like man pages and tab-completion are not installed to save space. Install the ubuntu-standard metapackage to get a more comfortable command line environment:

apt-get install ubuntu-standard

Setting up users
A Linode Ubuntu system comes configured for only the root user. I prefer the Ubuntu way of using sudo instead of logging in as root.
Create a new user:

adduser myuser

This new user doesn’t have permission to use sudo yet. Open the sudo configuration file (let’s use the simpler nano editor instead of vi):

EDITOR=/usr/bin/nano visudo

Add this line to allow users in the admin group to use sudo:

%admin ALL=(ALL) ALL

Save and close the editor. The admin group may not exists yet, so create it:

groupadd admin

And add the new user to the group:

usermod -g admin myuser

Fix locale warnings
While installing updates and starting some programs, I noticed warnings similar to this one:

perl: warning: Setting locale failed.<br />perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:<br />LANGUAGE = (unset),<br />LC_ALL = (unset),<br />LANG = "en_CA.UTF-8"<br />are supported and installed on your system.<br />perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").<br />locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory<br />locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory<br />locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory

Installing the language-pack-en package fixed these warnings:

apt-get install language-pack-en

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This guest article was written by Vivek Kumar from TNerd.com, a blog focused on technology news, tricks and tips and Linux tutorials.
It’s a good idea to ensure that you have a backup and restore system in place. Today we’ll see how in a few very easy steps you can setup system backup and restore in Ubuntu. The good part is that there’s no rocket science involved.
In order to achieve this we are going to need software called SBackup. This is not installed by default in Ubuntu and hence we need to install it. First, let’s see a little bit about this wonderful software.
Homepage: http://sbackup.wiki.sourceforge.net/
Description: SBackup is a simple backup solution for Linux. It is generally developed with a Gnome desktop in mind, but will also work in other desktop environments and also on the console.
Features of SBackup

• Back up using GUI and hence avoid the terminal.
• Restore using the GUI in simple steps.
• You can easily setup automatic backup.
• Custom choose the files to backup.
• Exclude and include files using regular expressions.
• Backup files depending on size and extension.
• You can also use terminal to backup and restore.

Limitations of SBackup
As of now you can only backup data to local or remote machine. Backing up to DVD or CD is not available as of now. However, it’s not difficult to burn a backup to disk yourself manually.
Install SBackup
Install SBackup from the package sbackup (click the link to install), or by running the command below in your terminal:

sudo apt-get install sbackup

Launching SBackup
In order to launch SBackup go to System->Administration->Simple Backup Config.
Configuring and setting up backups using SBackup
Once you launch SBackup it’ll open a configuration window for you to configure backup and restore.


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Have some spare CPU cycles to burn? Using a utility called XWinWrap you can use screensavers, videos, and other applications as your desktop wallpaper.
One drawback is that you will not be able to use desktop icons with XWinWrap due to a limitation in Nautilus. Compiz desktop effects are not required, but a fairly powerful computer if you don’t want reduced performance.



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