I’m sure a lot of you out there got an N800 or N810 over the holidays. If you got an N810, you’re probably bragging to the closest N800 user about how sweet OS2008 is. Not to worry, N800 users, you can enjoy all of the software an N810 user can, as Nokia gave us all a little present a few weeks ago: OS2008 for the N800.

Before we begin flashing your device, here’s a little background info: OS2008 (and all prior versions) are versions of Maemo, an open-source OS created by Nokia. It is derived from Debian and uses a lightweight GNOME toolkit dubbed “Hildon.” Maemo is the base for the operating systems for all of Nokia’s Internet Tablets.

Read the rest of N800 Users: Flash to OS2008

Recent releases of Ubuntu have a feature where the installation CD can be used as a repository for installing software, just like any repository on the web.

The advantage of this, obviously, is it means that you can save bandwidth for some packages that haven’t been updated since the release, or even sometimes be able to install new packages without an internet connection at all. The main disadvantage - the CD has to be in the drive.

And when you get asked for that CD when installing something, and you really don’t feel like finding it on your messy desk, or wherever it’s hiding, it can be frustrating.

Thankfully, it’s pretty easy to switch off the support for installing from the CD. In Ubuntu (the normal Gnome version), go to System > Administration > Software Sources. On Kubuntu, head to the Adept Manager application, then go to Adept > Manage Repositories.

In both cases, you’ll get a dialogue looking something like this. Go to the Third Party Software tab.

In there, simply untick the entry starting with cdrom: (the top one in my screenshot) and close. You might be asked to reload the software lists, so do so.

And that’s it. The CD should be disabled, and you’ll always go online to download new packages.

Well, Peter showed you how to do it in KDE, so now I’ll show you how to make GTK dialogs using a little program called Zenity.

It runs in a similar manner to kdialog:

zenity --info --text="FOSSwire is Awesome."

As you can see, it is fairly similar to KDialog in execution. The only main differences are the syntax of the command and the GTK backend. Zenity supports all sorts of GTK widgets, just as KDialog supports all sorts of Qt widgets.

Chances are, if you can make a dialog in KDialog, you can do the same with Zenity, and vice-versa. For a full list of options available for scripting, simply run:

zenity --help-all

Now you can make native-looking dialogs in any desktop environment!