• Support for many languages
• Settings for voice, pitch, volume, speed and word gap
• The text played can be recorded to WAV file
• Works well with Gnome, XFCE, LXDE environments
• Plugins for aMSN, Kopete, Emesene, Pidgin, Empathy messenger
• Eight male voice and five female voice variants

squid-deb-proxy

Squid-deb-proxy is a new package for Ubuntu 10.04, and it’s designed to make your life easier and allow faster updates if you manage more than one Ubuntu machine. Conceptually, squid-deb-proxy consists of two pieces, a client and a server. The server package is “squid-deb-proxy” and the client package is “squid-deb-proxy-client”. The “squid-deb-proxy” server package is basically a squid caching server, with an out-of-the box configuration that allows it to cache .deb packages and make them accessible to the local area network. The “squid-deb-proxy-client” package is basically an include file to your standard apt configuration that makes apt aware of the squid-deb-proxy.

To install the server, simply “sudo apt-get install squid-deb-proxy avahi-utils” on the machine that you wish the server to be on. This will install the squid caching server and the avahi (Bonjour) auto-configuration network utilities, and start both servers, so your new caching squid proxy will start broadcasting its availability on your network. Then, a “sudo apt-get install squid-deb-proxy-client” on each Ubuntu 10.04 machine (including the squid-deb-proxy server) will install the apt configuration. You’ll want to install the client on the server as well, so whenever the server downloads updates those updates get cached by the squid proxy. This will also allow the server to install already-fetched updates via the proxy.

Once this is done, squid-deb-proxy is transparent to the user. Each machine’s apt program will look on the network for a squid-deb-proxy, and if it finds one, it’ll pass its requests through that. The proxy will cache any .deb packages that come through it, and make them available for the next update client that needs them. The second client to request these same updates will pull them down from the squid proxy, rather than having to get them from the Internet. You get the benefit of a local repository without the hassle of setting one up!

The beautiful part about the squid-deb-proxy solution is that it is completely transparent. If you have the squid-deb-proxy client installed on your laptop and you choose to download an update while on a business trip, your laptop will grab the updates from the main repository in your sources.list file, since the proxy isn’t on that local area network, broadcasting its services via avahi. There’s no need to modify your sources.list in any way, because apt becomes proxy-aware automagically. It’s really cool stuff.

GNOME blog

GNOME blog is a desktop blogging application for Linux and Unix. Easy and quick to use to help you writing your great blog posts.

Features

• Simple to use interface
• WYSIWYG styled text support
• Panel popup allows entries can be written gradually over the course of a day
• Spell checking
• Drag and drop support for images

http://projects.gnome.org/gnome-blog/

wikidPad

or application server, or groupware solution. wikidPad is a standalone notepad like application, albeit notepad on steroids. wikidPad is like an IDE for your thoughts. IDE for your thoughts Software developers have grown accustomed to certain features from their integrated development environment that make their jobs easier. Features like auto-completion, outline views, incremental search, easy source code navigation. IDE’s that provide these features can greatly increase developer productivity. wikidPad attempts to utilize some of these features to address the problem of personal information management. Personal Information Management How do you manage all of the random bits of information in your personal and professional life? Word documents, text files, Microsoft Outlook folders/notes. If you’re an expert user maybe you have a weblog, or a personal database, or possibly an outlining application. Where do you track your wifes favorite food, your bosses kids names, your personal todo list, the name of the movie you just read a review of, the name of the book a friend recommended. wikidPad was created to address this issue of personal information management. It provides a place to manage the massive amounts of information you have stuffed in your head, on stickies, or on your computer.

http://quanta.kdewebdev.org/index.php

The vision with Quanta has always been to start with the best architectural foundations, design for efficient and natural use and enable maximal user extensibility. We recognize that we don’t have the resources to do everything we would like to so our target is to make it easy for you to help make this the best community based desktop application anywhere. Pretty much everything in Quanta is designed so you can extend it. Even the way it handles XML DTDs is based on XML files you can edit. You can even import DTDs, write scripts to manage editor contents, visually create dialogs for your scripts and assign script actions to nearly any file operation in a project. You can even look at and communicate with a wide range of what happens inside Quanta using DCOP.

Quanta Plus

Quanta is based on KDE so this means it is network transparent from any dialog or project. It can use not only FTP but other KDE KIO slaves from file dialogs or in project settings. For instance if you want secure access try the fish KIO slave that uses SSH. Just enter fish://[user]@domain in any dialog or select fish in your project settings. Here on this site you will find information on using Kommander to visually build dialogs you can extend Quanta with. These applications talk to each other using an IPC (Inter Process Communication) called DCOP (Desktop Communication Protocol).

Of course I realize this can sound like alphabet soup techno-babble to some web developers, but here’s what it means. When you are using Quanta and realize you would like to do something and you want to ask “Can I do this?” you can expect the answer will not only be yes, but it will probably be even cooler than you hoped for. Not included on this site are other tools you can use with Quanta for revision control and reviewing and merging changes in files. Those applications are Cervisia and Kompare, and if they are not installed and you install them Quanta will use them. We would like to think that there are rich rewards to be found here for those willing to explore new ways of doing things, or perhaps in some cases old ways that are just new to you.

http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/

Bluefish

Scribus

Scribus supports most major image formats including scalable vector graphics (SVG). Professional type/image setting features include CMYK colors and ICC color management. It has a built-in scripting engine using Python. It is available in more than 24 languages.

Printing is achieved using its own internal level 3 PostScript driver, including support for font embedding and sub-setting with TrueType, Type 1 and OpenType fonts. The internal driver supports full Level 2 PostScript constructs and a large subset of Level 3 constructs.

PDF support includes transparency, encryption and a large set of the PDF 1.4 spec as well as PDF/X3, including interactive PDFs form fields, annotations and bookmarks. While PDF export is very good, it is not currently able to import/edit PDF files, and PDFs exported from Scribus 1.3.3.x and earlier are not searchable in Acrobat Reader if the fonts were outlined/subsetted as vector objects.

Cheese

http://www.gnome.org/projects/cheese

kdenlive

Some features included in version 0.7 include: interface based on KDE’s Oxygen style, capture from FireWire cameras, webcams and Video4Linux devices, grab video from your screen (screen capture), support for jog shuttle devices, independent rendering processes, interactive timeline operations, high definition editing, lossless formats and clip organization/location tools.

Kdenlive makes use of a number of frameworks to provide a range of audio and video effects and transitions, including MLT, Frei0r effects, SoX and LADSPA.

Audio effects include normalization, phase and pitch shifting, limiting, volume adjustment, reverb and equalization filters amongst others.

Video effects include options for masking, blue-screen, distortions, rotations, colour tools, blurring, obscuring and others.

Kdenlive also provides a script called the Kdenlive Builder Wizard or KBW that compiles the latest developer version of the software and its main dependencies from source, to allow users to try and test new features and report problems on the bug tracker.