Twitter apps for ubuntu

Hey guys back again, hope all of you are doing fine, and thanks for commenting on my previous posts those are really encouraging. :)
As everyone is talking about Twitter and tweeting a lot I thought its better to talk about few twitter apps. If you are new to twitter read A crash course on Twitter it will help you a lot.
Now lets get down to business; I'll start with the application I'm using and that is

1 Choqok
This is a KDE based application therefore when you are installing Choqok you have to install all the dependencies too. Though it gives a headache sometimes with the Gnome desktop its is a good application with a lot of facilities. The list of features are provided in the Choqok homepage I'll list my favorites here,

# Supporting User + His/Her Friends time-lines.
# Supporting @Reply time-lines.
# Support for send and receive direct messages.
# Twitpic.com integration.
# Minimizing to the notification area
# Display of unread tweets
# NotifyOSD integration
if you want to install Choqok the apt line is sudo apt-get install choqok



2 Tweet Deck
Tweet Deck is written using Adobe AIR platform so to use Tweet Deck you have to install Adobe AIR too. What I like the most about tweet deck is the @ reply auto fill its a great help when you are sending a tweet to someone without responding to a reply and also you can integrate facebook with Tweet Deck but it becomes a headache if you are getting too many FB notifications. The whistling sound it makes when a new tweet arrives is a big distraction and "Sinhala Unicode" support sucks in tweet deck. Those are the minus points of twitter but for the plus points it has a cool UI design :D and the column view looks nice (at first).



3 Spaz
Spaz is written using Adobe AIR platform too so to use that you have to install Adobe AIR. What I like the most about Spaz is it supports "Sinhala Unicode". Other than that the tabs it uses are confusing because of that I didn't use it much.



4 Gwibber
Gwibber is made for the Gnome desktop so when we install gwibber no dependency problems occur. This is more like Tweet Deck it supports many accounts like Facebook identi.ca etc. This is the official app which will be used in Ubuntu 10.04 with more improvements such as columns etc. To install Gwibber on your machine the apt line is sudo apt-get install gwibber



5 Web
And finally there is web I don't think I have to explain how it works and what are the pros and cons but personally don't like to use the web interface because to update the time line you have to refresh and also by pressing enter you cant send a tweet.



There are so many other applications which you can use to tweet. What I gave above are the ones I have used so far there are MS windows apps too and also remember you can use all the AIR apps in windows by installing the Adobe AIR sdk on windows.
For further information I'll list some other, more popular twitter apps for your reference.

Seesmic
Twhirl
Twitterfeed
Echofon
Chromed Bird a chrome extension
Twitgether
Gravity (Mobile app)
Tweetie
Twitterfox a Firefox extension

And many more :)
bye for now happy tweeting

~~ Rusiru Boteju ~~

VirtualBox and Windows

I thought of writing this post after the installation of Windows 7 in VirtualBox. This may be old news for some guys out there but still this can be new to some.
As I have told you earlier I don't use Windows, Ubuntu dual boot anymore, now I solely depend on Ubuntu, it's not that I hate windows but I'm uncomfortable with it ;) ok now lets get down to business.
First you have to install VirtualBox, to do that go to Applications -> Ubuntu Software Center and on search type VirtualBox and press install to install. After the installation go to Applications -> Accessories -> VirtualBox OSE and that will start virtualbox.
At first you have to create a new machine you can do by clicking on the light blue color new button after clicking on that you'll get a window like this;



so there you have to enter the name of the OS (You can give any name you like) and you have to select the OS type then after pressing next you'll see a window like this;



and there you have to select the base memory that means the RAM so the greener part of the bar shows the size that is available for the virtual machine. Let me explain this a bit, in my laptop I'm currently using 2.5Gb of RAM, that is shown at the end of the bar, that means for the host OS that complete capacity is available. But as I'm trying to run two operating systems at once I should be able to share the RAM so the greener part of the bar shows the safe side or the safe capacity that I can use and approximately its about half of the total capacity. So its better to stay on the safer side then you can use both the OSs without any problem (hope you got what I'm trying to say if not put some comment on that I'll explain a bit more :) ). Now after pressing next you'll get a window like this;



Here we have to select the hard disk that means the virtual hard drive so now you have to create your first virtual hard drive (hope you are doing this for the first time). I'll go to the creation of hard disk in a bit till then lets look at the final image of our virtual machine creation process.



Now in the above image we can see the hard disk size is 20Gb and base memory is 955Mb etc.

Lets take a look at the creation of virtual hard disk. Ok now after selecting create a new hard drive and clicking next you'll get a window like this;



In the above image we can see there are two radio buttons,

#Dynamically expanding storage :- That means the size of the hard disk will grow as you install more softwares and when you download more data. When you use this option make sure you have enough space on your physical hard drive.

#Fixed size storage :- This means the size of the hard drive is fixed.

After selecting the option you want click next then you'll get a window similar to this;



In the above image I have given the name windows 7 and the size was given as 20Gb. Now in this case if you select dynamically expanding storage the whole 20Gb wont be allocated at once it will be allocated as the memory fills but if you use fixed size storage then 20Gb will be allocated at once. Therefore you have to allocate space according to your need. In the image you can see there is a little folder icon next to the textfield but clicking on that you can select the location of your virtual hard drive if you don't change the path it will get saved in ~/..VirtualBox/HardDisks. After clicking on the next button you'll get a summary like this;



Ok now we are done with the creation of the machine and you'll see your virtualbox window like this;



Now it's time to install the OS. Before doing that there are certain configurations you have to do. First of all you have to select the new machine you created and click on the settings button and from there when you click on General you'll see a summary of what you have done so far. Now go to system and check the boot order here you can change the base memory once again (if you really need it). The image below is a screenshot;



And after that click on Storage if you are installing the OS using a DVD or CD image then you have to give the path of the image you can do that by selecting the CD icon in the storage tree and on the Attributes you have to click on the little folder icon and browse the image file. If you are planning to use the host CD/DVD drive you have to select the Host CD/DVD drive from the CD/DVD Device dropdown menu like the image below;



Now network settings, click on Network and click on the enable network adapter and cable connected check boxes and that will enable networking (and also remember you have to install samba server on ubuntu "sudo apt-get install samba"). After installing the OS you can access all the shared "Folders" in your computer by typing //10.0.2.2 on Run (For windows).



And now we are good to install the new OS after installing it will look like this;



After installing Guest Additions you can have a full screen view like the image below;



You can install Guest Additions by going to Device -> Install Guest Additions in the window which you get after clicking on the Start button. Now its your time to do your experiments.

Hope this was helpful
bye for now
have fun :D

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