Quake style drop down terminal for Gnome-Shell

Have you ever craved for Quake style drop down terminal?. In this post I'll share how to setup one on Gnome-shell desktop. Let's get started by installing the Drop down terminal extension from extensions.gnome.org. Let's test if it works. Press '~' to active the drop down terminal. Usually U assign 'Alt+F12' hotkeys on my computer. Here is the video of drop down terminal in action.

Let's customize the drop down terminal to launch in full screen mode. In the extension preferences I have set the terminal height to 800px. You have play around with transparency settings to show the underlying windows.

Another good customization is to launch tmux. You can do this by setting custom command to run instead of launching the default shell.

That's it folks! Now you can enjoy the Quake style drop down terminals on Gnome-shell. Here is video of my setup.

Orca on Ubuntu Mobile Internet Device (MID) Edition

After trying various gnu/Linux distributions for mobile devices, I choose Ubuntu MID (8.10 Intrepid Ibex), a keyboard / mouse driven distribution from Ubuntu. It was possible to use a spare PC laptop as my test development platform instead of a MID Development kit. The idea behind this experiment to try running Orca screen reader on devices other than gnu/Linux personal computers.

Ubuntu MID distribution is targeted at new Mobile Internet Device (MID) devices, though it doesn't include gnome-orca package. But don't let that stop you, you can get the packages and its dependencies from main repositories and install it manually with dpkg. Right now not possible to install the gnome-orca packages from the main repositories due to 'lpia' architecture package tag conflict.

The list of needed packages are given below.

• at-spi_1.24.0-0ubuntu3_i386.deb
• gnome-orca_2.24.1-0ubuntu1_all.deb
• libatspi1.0-0_1.24.0-0ubuntu3_i386.deb
• libbrlapi0.5_3.10-0ubuntu2_i386.deb
• libgail-gnome-module_1.20.0-1ubuntu1_i386.deb
• libgnome-speech7_0.4.21-0ubuntu5_i386.deb
• libxevie1_1.0.2-3_i386.deb
• libxevie1-dbg_1.0.2-3_i386.deb
• python-brlapi_3.10-0ubuntu2_i386.deb
• python-gnome2_2.22.3-0ubuntu1_i386.deb
• python-gnome2-desktop_2.24.0-0ubuntu1_i386.deb
• python-gnomecanvas_2.22.3-0ubuntu1_i386.deb
• python-pyatspi_1.24.0-0ubuntu3_all.deb

Once the packages are installed with 'dpkg -i *deb'. The orca can be enabled via the accessibility menu or by setting the gconf settings. Though the interface is not yet accessible, I was able to use midori browser with Orca without any trouble.

Running Ubuntu Mobile Internet Device (MID) Edition

A big thanks goes to Rad for poking me to try out Ubuntu MID. Running the Ubuntu MID in virtual environment is pretty straight forward. Have a look at the Installing Ubuntu MID in Virtual Box.

The screenshots below show Ubuntu MID running gnome-terminal and firefox web browsers.

These presentation slides from CELF Embedded Linux Conference 2008 provides a quick overview about Ubuntu MID.

Linux Terminal Support for Indian languages

Listening to Prof.Amba P. Kulkarni talk about the Anusaaraka was a pure delight. It was here I first heard about the old GIST (Graphics and Indian Script Terminal) technology, as a gnu/Linux OS user I asked her if its possible to display Indian Language characters on a Linux virtual terminal, however Prof. Kulkarni didn't have a ready answer.

Its common knowledge that Indian script characters are well supported under X window system, but I didn't find any information on compiling Linux kernel to support a Indian scripts much like the older GIST machines. Please do share information about this issue.

Guide to Unix/Linux Commands

In October 2005 I contributed to the Guide to Unix/Linux commands wikibook. It is targeted at users who want to learn the shell commands by typing them on a Unix or gnu/Linux console. The wikibook is nowhere near complete but I guess it would be a good start if want to master the shell. For experienced users I request you to spare some time and contribute to this wikibook. If possible please try to adopt this documentation project.

The Guide to Unix/Linux Commands

The Guide to Unix/Linux command line is often considered difficult to learn. This book aims to help beginners by introducing various commands in lucid and simple language. Unlike most command references, this book is designed to be a self-study guide.

Contents

• Getting Help man info apropos whatis makewhatis
• File System Utilities ls mkdir cd pwd chroot cp mv rm touch df link ln unlink chown chmod mount
• Finding Files find whereis which locate
• File Viewing cat more less od head tail
• File Editing pico nano zile vi joe emacs
• File Compression gzip gunzip zcat gzcat tar pax bzip2 zip compress
• File Analysingfile wc cksum stat
• Multiuser Commandswho finger su
• Self Information whoami groups id tty
• System Information uptime uname dmesg free vmstat 50% top df hostname
• Networking ifconf ifdown ifup
• Process Managementnohup ps kill pgrep pidof killall
• Devices fuser lsof fstat
• Kernel Commands lsmod modprobe sysctl
• Compress Commandstar cvf | tar xvf bunzip2
• Miscellaneous sync echo cal date time mail clear PS1