Archive for the ‘LINUX & Open Source Application’ Category

Jangan emosi dulu liat judul nya ya .. hehehe ..
The Moobella adalah sebuah mesin pembuat es krim yang sedang di uji di New England. Es Krim yang dihasilkan cukup enak .. hehehe .. Read the rest of this entry »

Text-to-Speech Software for Linux: If you’ve been using Mac OS X or Windows Vista before, you may be a bit disappointed to learn that there’s no speech synthesizer or text-to-speech (TTS) application that is installed by default on your Linux distribution. For those of you who don’t know what a speech synthesizer is, it’s simply a computer program that converts normal language text into speech. Text-to-speech software can be of great help particularly for people who are visually impaired and those who are mute.

If you’ve been looking for a free speech synthesizer for Linux, the one that I can highly recommend is a program called Festival. As described from its project website: Festival offers a general framework for building speech synthesis systems as well as including examples of various modules. As a whole, it offers full text to speech through a number APIs: from shell level, though a Scheme command interpreter, as a C++ library, from Java, and an Emacs interface. Festival is multi-lingual (currently English (British and American), and Spanish) though English is the most advanced.

Festival is probably available in most distro repositories so just search for it and install it via the package manager. Once installed, you can immediately set it to work. Here are some basic uses of Festival:

It can read whatever you type on the command line. Open a terminal and start festival with this command:

$ festival

A prompt will appear. Make it speak by typing this from the command line:

(SayText “festival will read this line”)

Festival can also be very useful if you want it to read a whole text file. From the terminal, simply navigate to where your text file is located, and use this command:

$ festival –tts your_text_file.txt

For more information and other options on using Festival, you can read the complete manual from HERE.

In KDE desktop, there’s already a text-to-speech software installed by default called KTTS, but it is currently under development. Try to make it speak “Hello World” by typing these commands from the Linux terminal:

$ kttsd
$ dcop kttsd KSpeech setText “Hello World” “en”
$ dcop kttsd KSpeech startText 0

KTTS has a GUI front-end called KMouth.

A user can type a word, phrase, or sentences that he/she wants to hear through its input field. KMouth also contains a history of spoken phrases so the users can easily select phrases from the history which he/she wants to be re-spoken using a few mouse clicks. It also has a phrase book and word completion options.

For GNOME users, you can use Orca’s speech synthesizer. I haven’t tried it yet so for those of you who have, please share with us your experiences of using Orca.

I’ve used the text-to-speech software of Mac OS X before and I must say that it’s more functional than those we currently have for Linux. But, that’s just my opinion.

How about you? How do you compare Linux speech synthesizers to those available for Windows or Mac?

http://www.junauza.com/2010/03/text-to-speech-software-for-linux.html

Hulu is one of the most popular video sites on the web. You can watch all kinds of different television shows and movies right in your browser. But there’s also another way to watch Hulu and that’s to download the Hulu Desktop application for Linux.

Please note that Hulu Desktop for Linux is currently labeled “beta” so don’t be surprised if you find some burps here or there if you try to use it. Also, I did not test this with a remote control as I ran the application in Linux Mint 8 in VMWare and the Apple remote I had didn’t work. So I used my trackball to navigate the application.

The package download for Hulu Desktop for Linux weighed in at a very petite 598KB.

I installed Hulu Desktop for Linux on my Linux Mint 8 virtual machine. On the Hulu site there are two download options:

1. Fedora
2. Ubuntu

Since Linux Mint 8 is an Ubuntu remaster, I downloaded the Ubuntu package.

Installation Steps:

1. Download the Hulu Desktop for Linux package.
2. Click the package to open the package installer.
3. Run the installer.
4. Agree to the end user license agreement.

That was it for the install. It was very easy and very fast.

After it concluded, the Hulu desktop application opened and a very cool video of some fighter jets called “Speed and Angels” began playing. The sound and video looked great in Linux Mint 8. I didn’t need to do anything to get the video to play or the sound to work.

There really is an enormous amount of content available via Hulu. It’s nice to have at your fingertips and chances are that, no matter how picky you are, you’ll probably be able to find something that interests you.

I have to admit that I was tickled to find “Tentacles” available on Hulu as I remember seeing it when I was a kid back in the 70s. You haven’t lived until you’ve watched a giant octopus wreak havoc among residents at an ocean town.

The Hulu Desktop for Linux interface is really geared toward using a remote control for navigation (obviously that’s the main reason they created this application in the first place). If you’ve ever used Apple TV or Boxee, you’ll know what I mean. You can certainly use a mouse or a trackball but it feels weird as you have to move up or down through the interface to choose a category, subcategory and then the program or movie you want to watch.

I’d like to see two interface options offered in the desktop version. One for remote controls and another more geared toward mice and trackballs. This would make it easier for those who prefer the desktop version of Hulu to the web version but who still would like to use a mouse or trackball to navigate.

-Jim Lynch

http://www.itworld.com/software/105936/hulu-desktop-linux-review