Drawing Rectangles in GIMP

Select a rectangular region by clicking "Rectangle Select Tool". Then click on Edit -> stroke selection. Inside this tool, you can select different line styles like continuous, dashed etc. In order to change color of the line, click on "Foreground and background color" item available in Gimp's main menu. More elaborate discussion is available in the following link:

http://pbs01.wordpress.com/2007/09/30/145/

Setting UP NFS server/client on Ubuntu

Install NFS Server Support

This is mostly a local copy of the instructions available at this link. I have tried this howto and it works perfectly for me.


at the terminal type
sudo apt-get install nfs-kernel-server nfs-common portmap
When configuring portmap do =not= bind loopback. If you do you can either edit /etc/default/portmap by hand or run:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure portmap
sudo /etc/init.d/portmap restart

Editing /etc/exports
the /etc/exports file is used for creating a share on the NFS server

invoke your favorite text editor or
sudo vi /etc/exports

Here are some quick examples of what you could add to your /etc/exports

For Full Read Write Permissions allowing any computer from 192.168.1.1 through 192.168.1.255

• /files 192.168.1.1/24(rw,no_root_squash,async)

Or for Read Only from a single machine

• /files 192.168.1.2 (ro,async)

save this file and then in a terminal type
sudo /etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server restart

Also aftter making changes to /etc/exports in a terminal you must type
sudo exportfs -a

Install NFS client support
sudo apt-get install portmap nfs-common

Mounting manually
Example to mount server.mydomain.com:/files to /files. In this example server.mydomain.com is the name of the server containing the nfs share, and files is the name of the share on the nfs server

The mount point /files must first exist on the client machine.
cd /
sudo mkdir files

to mount the share from a terminal type

sudo mount server.mydomain.com:/files /files

Note you may need to restart above services:
sudo /etc/init.d/portmap restart
sudo /etc/init.d/nfs-common restart

Mounting at boot using /etc/fstab
Invoke the text editor using your favorite editor, or
gksudo gedit /etc/fstab

In this example my /etc/fstab was like this:

• server.mydomain.com:/files /files nfs rsize=8192,wsize=8192,timeo=14,intr

You could copy and paste my line, and change “servername.mydomain.com:/files”, and “/files” to match your server name:share name, and the name of the mount point you created.
It is a good idea to test this before a reboot in case a mistake was made.
type
mount /files
in a terminal, and the mount point /files will be mounted from the server.

Gtalk Voice chat on Ubuntu

After such a long wait, today I could talk to one of my friend in India through Gtalk on linux. I am talking about voice chat. I am very much impressed with Ubuntu. Its amazing. Things had never been so easy and comfortable.

Presently Empathy supports voice calls through gtalk. The installation instructions are available here. Just for convenience, I am reproducing the set of instructions necessary to get you started with it. Visit the above site for user comments and more information if things don't work out for you.

Use Synaptic package manager, go to Settings->Repositories->Third Party Software and then click Add and add the following line

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/telepathy/ubuntu hardy main

Then, Install the following packages using Synaptic Pagakage manager.

1. Empathy
2. telepathy-gabble
3. telepathy-mission-control
4. telepathy-stream-engine

After successful installation, open the Empathy application and use the menu, Edit->Accouts to add your gtalk account. Enjoy using voice chat with your favorite gtalk account using Empathy in Linux.