Tulains Córdova's questions

I don't like installing apps outside my distro's official repositories.

Linux's security relies a lot on having a repository meticulously curated and tested for library compatibility with current distro version, stability and security.

Once I installed, from outside repos, a fancy terminal emulator that mimicked retro green/amber phosphor monitors. This app wreaked havoc in my system and I had to reinstall Ubuntu.

I hesitate a lot about using PPAs as well.

I only trust very few external sources, PPAs or packages downloaded from websites.

But now Snap and Flatpak seems to be all the rage in Ubuntu-specialized sites.

• Is it safe to install Snap apps or Flatpak apps?
• Are there official repos for such?
• How is stability taken cared of with this non-apt stuff?

In recent anouncements, Canonical CEO said that the company would pull the cord of both Unity 8 and its device convergence plans.

Are the development of Unity and the goal of device convergence tied together in a way that they must be both killed at the same time?

Couldn't Ubuntu desktop environment continue to exist even though Canonical doesn't further pursue its convergence goal?

Is the killing of both projects unrelated, related?

I don't seem to find a way around this. Is there a one-liner to get only the right side of a diff --side-by-side output?

For example:

For this: diff --side-by-side file1 file2 I get either of this two types of results:

  2 Africa                            |   3 Africa
  3 America                               3 America    
  3 Asia                                  3 Asia
  4 Antarctica                            4 Antarctica
  4 Oceania                               4 Oceania
  7 Europe                                7 Europe

or

  3 Africa                                3 Africa
  3 America                               3 America
  3 Asia                              <
  4 Antarctica                            4 Antarctica
                                      >   4 Asia
  4 Oceania                               4 Oceania
  8 Europe                                8 Europe

How can I turn those into this:

| 3 Africa
  3 America
  3 Asia
  4 Antarctica
  4 Oceania
  7 Europe

And this respectively:

  3 Africa
  3 America
  4 Antarctica
> 4 Asia
  4 Oceania
  8 Europe

Note that I edited the original output of diff so that it appears justified in this question. They appear aligned (column-wise) in the terminal but I had to adjust them a little bit here so they appear exactly as they appear in the terminal (columns neatly aligned), but you can replicate the output creating this input files:

File1 version 1

  2 Africa
  3 America
  3 Asia
  4 Antarctica
  4 Oceania
  7 Europe

File2 version 1

  3 Africa
  3 America
  3 Asia
  4 Antarctica
  4 Oceania
  7 Europe

File1 version 2

  3 Africa
  3 America
  3 Asia
  4 Antarctica
  4 Oceania
  8 Europe

File2 version 2

  3 Africa
  3 America
  4 Antarctica
  4 Asia
  4 Oceania
  8 Europe

I use Ubuntu 12.04.

I want to make extensive use of the text-to-speech capabilities of Linux to create audio files from text.

I've tried Festival but finding good voices and installing them is overlly complex so I use it with its default voices.

I also tried Pico2Wave.

Festival text-to-speech is totally robotic and un-natural and it's not suitable for long term listening. It has a "whirring" sound in the background but you can hear the words crisply nonetheless, but again, robotic and bad quality in terms of speech.

Festival sample here

Pico2Wave is very natural and comparable to Apple's text-to-speech, in terms of diction and human-like speech, but the quality of the sound itself is awful. It sounds as if it was recorded in a very empty room with a lot of echo. It sounds "stuffy", muddy, tubby, whith too much bass. So much it makes the speakers rattle and it's very difficult to understand sometimes, unless you are using earphones. The sound is not crips at all. I also suspect the sound "clips" but I'm no audio expert.

Pico2Wave sample here

My question is:

How can I improve the sound quality of the generated audio file? I'm no audio expert so I don't know what I have to fiddle with (gain?, bass?, reduce noise? to what extend? etc.) Note that I'm an not asking for recommended tools, but to be explained what is exactly wrong with that audio and what qualities should I fiddle with in my audio editing/improving app of choice.

NOTE: The sample text is the first paragraph of "The Last of the Mohicans":

It was a feature peculiar to the colonial wars of North America, that the toils and dangers of the wilderness were to be encountered before the adverse hosts could meet. A wide and apparently an impervious boundary of forests severed the possessions of the hostile provinces of France and England. The hardy colonist, and the trained European who fought at his side, frequently expended months in struggling against the rapids of the streams, or in effecting the rugged passes of the mountains, in quest of an opportunity to exhibit their courage in a more martial conflict. But, emulating the patience and self-denial of the practiced native warriors, they learned to overcome every difficulty; and it would seem that, in time, there was no recess of the woods so dark, nor any secret place so lovely, that it might claim exemption from the inroads of those who had pledged their blood to satiate their vengeance, or to uphold the cold and selfish policy of the distant monarchs of Europe.

What does this icon mean in Pidgin's buddy list?

I can't figure it out. No specific tool-tip appears when hovering the mouse pointer over it, only the status of the user, which appears when you hover the mouse pointer over any user.

I need to install VNC in one Ubuntu machine. The problem is that machine is in a remote site with no internet access whatsoever.

I could download a VLC installer for Ubuntu and take it to the machine I want to install in, but...

The VLC site offers a "download" button but that button only calls the apt protocol. The site doesn't have a way to download a deb package or installer that I could take with me in a flash drive to install VLC in the isolated machine.

• What alternatives do I have?
• Can I somehow take the deb packages of a machine in which VLC is already installed? If so, how?

I have a customized /etc/apt.conf file. It has proxy information. It's structure is like this:

Acquire::http::Proxy "http://user:password@ip_addr:port";
Acquire::ftp::proxy "ftp://user:password@ip_addr:port/";
Acquire::https::proxy "https://user:password@ip_addr:port/";

Several times a week, the content of that file is erased by the OS leaving the file empty.

Afortunately I have a git repository with that file and I can check it back out. But I would really want to know:

What process erases the contents of the file and why?

My Ubuntu version is 12.04

We all know the ASCII randomart generated by ssh-keygen when creating or validating ssh public keys.

We also know you can generate hashes of any file with sha1sum or md5sum.

But, is it possible to generate randomart "ssh-keygen-style" from any file that is not a public ssh key?

That would be a funnier way of visually comparing the checksum of two files.

I've developed several utility scripts that solve specific problems of my team's day-to-day work.

Until now what I have done to deploy the script in my co-workers' laptops is as follows:

• Every solution has a main.sh script (as well as other scripts and supporting files)
• Create a folder in the user's home folder and put the files there
• Add an alias either to .bashrc or .bash_aliases, depending of the Linux distribution, pointing to the main.sh script
• Copy autocompletion file to /etc/bash_completion.d/ (completion file name is the same as the alias plus .auto extension).
• Copy man page to /usr/share/man/man1/ then gzipping it (man file name is the same as the alias plus .1 extension).

I would like to create an installer but the alias part is tricky.

• Is there a better option that would also allow for automation (installer)?
• Maybe putting a soft link to the main.sh file in /usr/local/bin instead of creating aliases?
• Is there a best-practice for this?

When you delete files from a flash drive or external hard drive, files go to a trash bin located physically in the drive.

But in the GUI, both the external drive's trash and the computer's trash are coalesced into one. When you empty the trash you are emptying both trashes. That also seems to be the case for OS X and Windows.

I could, obviously, delete the trash on the flash drive using the terminal, but it seems to me there should be a way of emptying the flash drive trash without emptying the computer's trash using the GUI.

Is there one in Ubuntu ?

Is there a way to open a terminal window ( or tab ) with another instance of an open SSH session ?

EDIT: I have a terminal window with a remote ssh session into a server. I want to open a new tab connected to the same remote ssh session.

With File->New Tab I get another tab but I have to open another ssh session to the remote server.

I use Ubuntu 12.04 with Gnome 3.4.1.

I've tried to upgrade to Gnome 3.6 to no avail.

I added this to my /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/gnome3-team/gnome3/ubuntu precise main

Then I ran

sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get upgrade

Then restarted the system.

But when I run:

gnome-shell --version

It continues to print

GNOME Shell 3.4.1

What can I do ?

I need to upgrade to 3.6 in order to be able to use an extension that allows the app switcher to only switch between apps in the current workspace.