Create Flow Charts, Network Diagrams, Circuits & More With Dia

Ever found yourself required to make flowcharts, network diagrams, circuit sketches and more at work or for studies? Dia is a strong and very powerful application meant for all such occasions. Presentations are a particularly powerful tool to communicate your ideas, and at times, plain old text is just boring. So, for those of you who have a tough time creating diagrams in MS Power Point or MS Word, Dia will make it much easier for you to convey your ideas, with an elaborate set of preset tools that are custom made for a plethora of subjects. Packed in a tiny 19mb to 30mb package (varying with the OS), the application’s interface – as boring and dull as it might seem – is actually very intuitive, with stuff like copy, cut, paste, delete, dragging, skewing all coming naturally as they would in most popular software. Even better, a portable version of the app is also available. Read on after the break to learn more.

The app starts off with a neatly laid out interface, with the tools you need to get started located in the left panel, just like most drawing and editing software. With different line presets available, you either choose to go with them and manipulate later to create shapes, or you can simply choose from the presets of shapes available.


There’s more than meets the eye when it comes to these shapes. Click where it says Flowcharts in the screenshot above, to open up an extensive list of sheets available. From circuits to Cisco network diagrams, the list is enough to accommodate diagrams of most sorts, as can be glimpsed in the screenshot below.


The properties of the objects inserted can be easily accessed by simply double clicking them, or by the rather-obvious Right click > Properties method. The screenshot below shows us the properties of the text inserted; however, doing the same for objects brings up options like line color, width, style, and more importantly, the fill color.

Concluding with saving your project, the application will preserve your work as a .dia file. However, you can save your file with numerous extensions by navigating to File > Export and selecting the format that you want to save your work in. Common image export formats include BMP, JPG, TIFF, PNG, and loads more.


Dia is a cross-platform tool with packages available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, and comes in both installable and portable flavors. Testing was performed on Windows 7 Ultimate, 64-bit edition.

Download Dia for Windows | Linux | Mac

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Record Screencasts In Ubuntu Linux With Kazam Screencaster

Kazam Screencaster is an open source Linux application, which makes it easy to create and share screencasts via YouTube and VideoBin. It impeccably records the on-screen activity, and additionally, provides the option to captures system audio (if enabled), to provide a robust screencast experience like other useful tools of it’s kind, such as Screencast-O-Matic for Windows. During testing, we experienced no lags or functionality issues with Kazam, and the video recording and uploading feature was extremely smooth.

You can install Kazam in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot by entering the following PPA to your software sources and updating it.

ppa:bigwhale/kazam-oneric

Once done, install Kazam from Ubuntu Software Center.  After installation, launch Kazam from the Unity Dash, and enable video (and optionally, audio) recording. Click Record to being recording the screencast.

This will start a countdown before the recording process is initiated.

You can pause, finish or quit the recording process anytime from the app-indicator menu.

After the recording process is finished, you are provided with the option to either save the recording, or edit it with Kazam Screencaster.

If you choose to edit it with Kazam Screencaster, you can upload the recorded video to VideoBin or YouTube. Before uploading a video, you will be provided with various options to enter the title, description and keywords for the screencast. This way, you can quickly upload videos, e.g., video tutorials, without going through any complicated video uploading process. For instance, when you select YouTube option, a login dialog box opens up, and allows you to enter your YouTube credentials (after entering relevant video title, description etc), and automatically uploads the video to your YouTube account.

Below is an example of a test video that we created and uploaded to YouTube, using Kazam Screencaster.

You can report bugs for Kazam at Launchpad.

Kazam Screencaster at Launchpad

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Clementine, Now Available With Spotify & Grooveshark Support

Clementine is a cross-platform music player based on Amarok, which provides a quick interface for searching and playing music from a number of websites. Last year we reviewed the Windows version of Clementine. Recently, it has been upgraded with added support for Spotify, Grooveshark, digitally imported di.fm and Sky.fm radio stations, a new global search feature, which enables searching for music and radio, audio CD support, addition of Amazon as an alternative album art cover provider, and more.

You can install Clementine in Ubuntu 11.10, 11.04, 10.10 and 10.04 from the following PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:me-davidsansome/clementine-dev
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install clementine

To install additional plugins, click the plugin located on the left-sidebar (e.g., Spotify), and click Yes, when a prompt appears for installing the additional plugin.

Once done, you can login with your online accounts for the respective service via Tools –> Preferences.

Now, you can allow the artist and album to be specified separately when searching for album covers. The album cover art now searches more cleverly for the best image, rather than selecting the first one it finds. There are also some statistics displayed after the searching for album cover art, as you can see the album cover dimensions on each image. Furthermore, Clementine now also supports dragging and dropping images onto the cover within the edit tag.

You can download the DEB, RPM, Windows and Mac packages from the developer’s website.

Download Clementine

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Mounty: Mount Disc Images via App-Indicator Menu Applet In Ubuntu Linux

We previously covered an Ubuntu disc mounting tool known as Furius ISO Mount, which mounts virtual discs and provides options for performing checksums to check the integrity of disc images. While Furius ISO Mount is quite an advanced disc mounting tool, one can always benefit from a minimalist disc mounting utility that works from the app-indicator menu. Mounty is one such disc mounting utility, which enables sharing virtual disc images. After installation, Mounty sits in the system tray and provides easy disc mounting options via the app-indicator menu.

Ubuntu users can install Mounty by entering the following command in Terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kokoto-java/omgubuntu-stuff
  sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install mounty

When launched, you can mount a disc image via the app-indicator menu applet. To mount a virtual disc image, click Open disk image option and select your virtual disc. You can also enable the Remember mounted images option to make sure that recently opened virtual disc images are auto mounted for quick viewing. You can also load Mounty at system start up by selecting Load at startup option.

When a disc is mounted, a bubble message alerts you that the image has been added to Mounty. You can open the content of the mounted disc image to explore the files inside it. Mounted discs can be ejected anytime and reloaded when required.

What makes Mounty quite handy is the fact that it does not consume a lot of the desktop space and provides a minimalist menu for quickly mounting/auto mounting and ejecting disc images. Furthermore, its ability to remember recently opened disc images makes it even more useful, as compared to other applications of its kind. It is also worth mentioning here that Mounty additionally supports the ability to load (disc) image files from your file manager. You can grab the source code and submit bug reports of this application at Launchpad.

Mounty at Launchpad

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View Detailed System Information In Ubuntu With i-Nex

When trying to determine the hardware specifications for your computer, it is not desirable to open the hardware casing, which, in some cases, can lead to loosing your warranty claim (e.g., in the case of laptops). In such a scenario, one can use some handy tools for determining the installed hardware specifications. i-Nex is one such tool that provides detailed hardware information within a Graphical User Interface (GUI) for Ubuntu. Read on past the break to find out more about this handy tool.

i-Nex is written in Gambas, which is, “A Graphical Development Environment based on a basic Interpreter, with object extensions.” The program works pretty much like CPU-Z. i-Nex comes separated in numerous tabs, with each tab providing information regarding a specific system component. As visible from the screenshot below, you can get detailed information about the CPU, Motherboard/BIOS, Sound and Graphics card, as well as other components such as the Kernel, Memory, Network etc, by clicking the respective tabs. To move across tabs, use the left/right arrow buttons. i-Nex is capable of displaying precise information about a system, including the manufacturer’s name, model number, processors cache information, hard drive sectors, RAM information (total, used, free, shared, buffers, cached and swapped), host name of the system, operating system version, time zone (being used), and more.

You can also check out similar Ubuntu tools for listing hardware information, including HardInfo anddmidecode. You may install i-Nex for your Ubuntu version, from the packages available at Launchpad. The packages are available for all latest Ubuntu versions, including Oneiric Ocelot and Precise Pangolin.

Download i-Nex

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Nanoshot: Capture & Upload Screenshots To Cloud In Ubuntu

In a previous post, we showed you three different ways of capturing screenshots in Ubuntu and later reviewed, Lookit, which is a handy screenshot capturing utility for Ubuntu, which enables uploading captured screenshots to the cloud. Recently, we found another handy screenshot taking application for Ubuntu, known as Nanoshot. It provides users with the utility to capture screenshots to upload them to cloud services like Flickr, and to grab screens from specific elements such as a video frame or the Unity Launcher.

You can install Nanoshot by entering the following commands in Terminal. While its compatibility with the raw build of Precise Pangolin is unknown, we successfully tested it in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot and the below PPA works with earlier Ubuntu versions, including Lucid, Karmic, Maverick (as specified by the developer) and probably Natty, as well. You can get a list of dependencies for older versions here. The reason I have labeled Natty as a probable supported version, is because we did not test Nanoshot on it, but it worked fine in Oneiric (during testing).

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nanoshot/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nanoshot

Once installed, launch and select options from the app-indicator menu. You can capture the entire desktop, the current window, a selected desktop area, a webpage, a media player, add cursor in screenshot, select a time delay for capturing screenshots, enable auto-run for Nanshot and select a video file for capturing screenshots via the app-indicator menu.

If you wish to capture video frames, then you will have to specify a video file and select the number of frames that are to be captured, as well as the output directory. You can also pick videos from recently viewed video files.

When capturing a selected area, select an area and hit Enter to save the screenshot.

Captured screenshots can be uploaded to Flickr, ImgUR or ImageShack, or saved to a local directory.

You can download the package for Nanoshot from the links given below.

Download Nanoshot

Download Nanoshot [Fedora and Tarball Source Package]

[via WML Cloud]

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Replace-me: Replace Document Text String via Right-Click Menu In Ubuntu

If you are a programmer or someone who regularly requires replacing text strings from multiple files, thenReplace-me is just what you might need. It is a Nautilus extension to find and replace text strings from multiple files within numerous directories and sub-directories. It can identify and replace text strings from files via right-click context menu. Replace-me is  a useful tool for those who may require finding and replacing text string from, e.g., code files or even batch files (to change the command parameters).

You can install Replace-me in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot using the following Terminal commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:atareao/nautilus-extensions

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install replace-me

After installation, either use the below command or log off and log in again to refresh Nautilus.

nautilus –q

With Replace-me, you can easily search and replace words and phrases by right-clicking a file and entering the search and replace string.

This will open a new window which will display the path of the selected file. Enter the text that you wish to replace, followed by the text string that is to be replaced. As you can see in the below screenshot, you can replace an entire text string with specified text easily within any document. this can help you replace hundreds of text strings in several files, easily. For example, if you have a code file which contains a line of code that is recurring in the file and needs to be replaced with a different line, then you can simply right-click the document, enter the text string that should be replaced (in the Replace section), and enter the text string that is to replace the text (in With section). This will replace the text string wherever it may be present in the respective document.

For more information, check out the developer’s website.

Replace-Me Nautilus Extension

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