Friday, January 29, 2010

High-Res Dock Icons from Netbeans

I often use Netbeans and hence want that on my desktop. This time when I dragged to the desktop, it looked a bit out of touch... Edgy icon didn't look to good for  my favorite IDE. Luckily I knew Netbeans ships an icns file for the OSX.

The icns (Apple icon format) - as wiki states "supports icons of 16×16, 32×32, 48×48, 128×128, 256×256 and 512×512 pixels, with both 1- and 8-bit alpha channels and multiple image states (example: open and closed folders). The fixed-size icons can be scaled by the operating system and displayed at any intermediate size"

So, I go ahead and install "icnsutils" which gives me the nifty tool icns2png. Then I run the tool:
icns2png -x -s 128 -d 32 netbeans.icns
...and get a nice 128x128 32-bit png file. This I use as the icon for the launcher or use it at the dock.

Linux Mint 8 is Perfect for me

Over the last 12 yrs that I've been using Linux never has a distribution impressed me this good. I keep experimenting with distributions when they are released. From Mandrake to Mandriva, Redhat to Fedora, SuSE to openSUSE and even Debian to Ubuntu... I thought I had seen it all. All the time I kept coming back to SuSE, but this time it seems different. I tried Linux Mint and I guess I will be sticking to it for long.

Over these years, everytime I've felt something is missing and I will need some bloody configuration to make something work, but Linux mint is one distribution which suites me perfectly. It has video/audio codecs, flash, Java out-of-the box. Nice looking fonts, simple installation, everything I would want to have from an OS. Photoshop was available through the Wine Doors. All the devices worked, volumes were perfect, performance was good...

I needed Cheese... Click on menu, in filter i write cheese... it shows install cheese, I click and enter password... cheese installed and I click the photo!! Perfect...

Sunday, January 24, 2010

Freedom to Innovate

This one brings me back to blogging:

Don’t we all want to be free??