FFmpeg is one of the best multimedia frameworks that contains various tools for different tasks. For example the ffplay is a portable media player that can be used to play audio/video files, ffmpeg can convert between different file formats, ffserver can be used to stream live broadcasts and ffprobe is able to analyze multimedia stream.

This framework is really powerful due to the diversity of available tools in it, that provide the best technical solution for the user. According to the description of FFmpeg in the official website, the reason for having such a great multimedia framework is the combination of the best free software options available.

The FFmpeg framework offers high security and the reason for this is the seriosity of the developers when they review the code, it is always done with security in mind.

I am very sure you will find this framework very useful when you would like to do some digital audio and video streaming or recording. There are many other practical thing that you can do with the help of the FFmpegframework such as converting your wav file to an mp3 one, encode and decode your videos or even scale them.

According to the official website FFmpeg is able to do the followings.

1. decode multimedia files
2. encode multimedia files
3. transcode multimedia files
4. mux multimedia files
5. demux multimedia files
6. stream multimedia files
7. filter multimedia files
8. play multimedia files

Let me take an example, a very simple one. The following command will convert your mp4 file into an avi file, simple as that.

# ffmpeg -i Lone_Ranger.mp4 Lone_Ranger.avi

The above command is only useful for explanation, it is not recommended to be used in practice because the codex, bitrate and other specifics are not declared.

In the next part we will practice with some of the FFmpeg multimedia framework tools, but before doing that we have to install it in our Linux box.

How to Install FFmpeg Multimedia Framework in Linux

Since the FFmpeg packages are offered for the most used Linux distributions and the installation will be relatively easy. Lets start with the installation of the FFmpeg framework in Ubuntu based distributions.

Install FFmpeg on Ubuntu and Linux Mint

I will install FFmpeg via the PPA recommended in the official blog. Open a new terminal (CTRL+ALT+T) and then run the following commands.

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mc3man/trusty-media
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install ffmpeg
$ ffmpeg -version

Install FFmpeg on Debian

To install FFmpeg, first you need to add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list file. As per your distribution, change ‘<mydist>‘ with ‘stretch‘, ‘jessie‘, or ‘wheezy‘.

deb http://www.deb-multimedia.org <mydist> main non-free deb-src http://www.deb-multimedia.org <mydist> main non-free

Then update system package sources and install FFmpeg with the following commands.

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install deb-multimedia-keyring
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install ffmpeg
$ ffmpeg -version

Install FFmpeg on CentOS and RHEL

To install FFmpeg on CentOS and RHEL distributions, you need to enable EPEL and RPM Fusion repository on the system using following commands.

To install and enable EPEL, use following command.

# yum install epel-release

To install and enable RPM Fusion, use following command on your distribution version.

-------------- On CentOS & RHEL 7.x -------------- 
# yum localinstall --nogpgcheck https://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/el/rpmfusion-free-release-7.noarch.rpm https://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/el/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-7.noarch.rpm

-------------- On CentOS & RHEL 6.x --------------
# yum localinstall --nogpgcheck https://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/el/rpmfusion-free-release-6.noarch.rpm https://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/el/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-6.noarch.rpm

After enabling repositories, run the following command to install FFmpeg:

# yum install ffmpeg ffmpeg-devel
# ffmpeg -version

Install FFmpeg on Fedora

On Fedora, you need to install and enable RPM Fusion to install FFmpeg as shown.

$ sudo dnf install https://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm https://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm
$ sudo dnf install ffmpeg ffmpeg-devel
$ ffmpeg -version

FFmpeg Compiling from Source

Compiling software from source is not the easiest thing in the world, but with the right instructions we will be able to do it. First make sure your system meet all the dependencies. The installation of these dependencies can be done with the help of the following commands.

First, tell the system to pull down the latest packages.

$ sudo apt-get update

Install the dependencies with the following command.

-------------- On Debian & Ubuntu --------------
$ sudo apt-get -y install autoconf automake build-essential libass-dev libfreetype6-dev libgpac-dev \
libsdl1.2-dev libtheora-dev libtool libva-dev libvdpau-dev libvorbis-dev libx11-dev \
libxext-dev libxfixes-dev pkg-config texi2html zlib1g-dev

-------------- On CentOS and RHEL --------------
# yum install glibc gcc gcc-c++ autoconf automake libtool git make nasm pkgconfig SDL-devel \
a52dec a52dec-devel alsa-lib-devel faac faac-devel faad2 faad2-devel freetype-devel giflib gsm gsm-devel \
imlib2 imlib2-devel lame lame-devel libICE-devel libSM-devel libX11-devel libXau-devel libXdmcp-devel \
libXext-devel libXrandr-devel libXrender-devel libXt-devel libogg libvorbis vorbis-tools mesa-libGL-devel \
mesa-libGLU-devel xorg-x11-proto-devel zlib-devel libtheora theora-tools ncurses-devel libdc1394 libdc1394-devel \
amrnb-devel amrwb-devel opencore-amr-devel

Then use the following command to create a new directory for the FFmpeg sources. This is the directory where the source files will be downloaded.

$ mkdir ~/ffmpeg_sources

Now compile and install yasm assembler used by FFmpeg by running the following commands.

$ cd ~/ffmpeg_sources
$ wget http://www.tortall.net/projects/yasm/releases/yasm-1.3.0.tar.gz
$ tar xzvf yasm-1.3.0.tar.gz
$ cd yasm-1.3.0
$ ./configure --prefix="$HOME/ffmpeg_build" --bindir="$HOME/bin"
$ make
$ make install
$ make distclean
$ export "PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin"

$ cd ~/ffmpeg_sources
$ wget http://download.videolan.org/pub/x264/snapshots/last_x264.tar.bz2
$ tar xjvf last_x264.tar.bz2
$ cd x264-snapshot*
$ ./configure --prefix="$HOME/ffmpeg_build" --bindir="$HOME/bin" --enable-static
$ make
$ make install
$ make distclean

$ cd ~/ffmpeg_sources
$ wget -O fdk-aac.zip https://github.com/mstorsjo/fdk-aac/zipball/master
$ unzip fdk-aac.zip
$ cd mstorsjo-fdk-aac*
$ autoreconf -fiv
$./configure --prefix="$HOME/ffmpeg_build" --disable-shared
$ make
$ make install
$ make distclean

$ cd ~/ffmpeg_sources
$ wget http://downloads.xiph.org/releases/opus/opus-1.1.tar.gz
$ tar xzvf opus-1.1.tar.gz
$ cd opus-1.1
$ ./configure --prefix="$HOME/ffmpeg_build" --disable-shared
$ make
$ make install
$ make distclean

$ cd ~/ffmpeg_sources
$ wget http://ffmpeg.org/releases/ffmpeg-snapshot.tar.bz2
$ tar xjvf ffmpeg-snapshot.tar.bz2
$ cd ffmpeg
$ PKG_CONFIG_PATH="$HOME/ffmpeg_build/lib/pkgconfig"
$ export PKG_CONFIG_PATH
$ ./configure --prefix="$HOME/ffmpeg_build" --extra-cflags="-I$HOME/ffmpeg_build/include" \
   --extra-ldflags="-L$HOME/ffmpeg_build/lib" --bindir="$HOME/bin" --extra-libs="-ldl" --enable-gpl \
   --enable-libass --enable-libfdk-aac --enable-libfreetype --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libopus \
   --enable-libtheora --enable-libvorbis --enable-libvpx --enable-libx264 --enable-nonfree --enable-x11grab
$ make
$ make install
$ make distclean
$ hash -r

$ ffmpeg -i video.flv -hide_banner

Note: The -hide_banner option is used to hide a copyright notice shown my ffmpeg, such as build options and library versions. This option can be used to suppress printing this information.

For example, if you run the above command without adding -hide_banner option it will print the all FFmpeg tools copyright information as shown.

$ ffmpeg -i video.flv

Hide FFmpeg Version Information

2. Split a video into images

To turn a video to number of images, run the command below. The command generates the files named image1.jpg, image2.jpg and so on…

$ ffmpeg -i video.flv image%d.jpg

Split Video into Images

After successful execution of above command you can verify that the video turn into multiple images using following ls command.

$ ls -l

total 11648
-rw-r--r-- 1 tecmint tecmint   14592 Oct 19 13:19 image100.jpg
-rw-r--r-- 1 tecmint tecmint   14603 Oct 19 13:19 image101.jpg
-rw-r--r-- 1 tecmint tecmint   14584 Oct 19 13:19 image102.jpg
-rw-r--r-- 1 tecmint tecmint   14598 Oct 19 13:19 image103.jpg
-rw-r--r-- 1 tecmint tecmint   14634 Oct 19 13:19 image104.jpg
-rw-r--r-- 1 tecmint tecmint   14693 Oct 19 13:19 image105.jpg
-rw-r--r-- 1 tecmint tecmint   14641 Oct 19 13:19 image106.jpg
-rw-r--r-- 1 tecmint tecmint   14581 Oct 19 13:19 image107.jpg
-rw-r--r-- 1 tecmint tecmint   14508 Oct 19 13:19 image108.jpg
-rw-r--r-- 1 tecmint tecmint   14540 Oct 19 13:19 image109.jpg
-rw-r--r-- 1 tecmint tecmint   12219 Oct 19 13:18 image10.jpg
-rw-r--r-- 1 tecmint tecmint   14469 Oct 19 13:19 image110.jpg

3. Convert images into a video

Turn number of images to a video sequence, use the following command. This command will transform all the images from the current directory (named image1.jpg, image2.jpg, etc…) to a video file named imagestovideo.mpg.

There are many other image formats (such as jpeg, png, jpg, etc) you can use.

$ ffmpeg -f image2 -i image%d.jpg imagestovideo.mpg

Convert Images to Video

4. Convert a video into mp3 format

To convert an .flv format video file to Mp3 format, run the following command.

$ ffmpeg -i video.flv -vn -ar 44100 -ac 2 -ab 192 -f mp3 audio.mp3

Convert Video to Audio

Description about the options used in above command:

1. vn: helps to disable video recording during the conversion.
2. ar: helps you set audio sampling rate in Hz.
3. ab: set the audio bitrate.
4. ac: to set the number of audio channels.
5. -f: format.

5. Covert flv video file to mpg format

To convert a .flv video file to .mpg, use the following command.

$ ffmpeg -i video.flv video.mpg

Convert Avi to MPG Video Format

6. Convert video into animated gif

To convert a .flv video file to animated, uncompressed gif file, use the command below.

$ ffmpeg -i video.flv animated.gif.mp4

Covert Video to Animated Gif

7. Convert mpg video file to flv

To convert a .mpg file to .flv format, use the following command.

$ ffmpeg -i video.mpg -ab 26k -f flv video1.flv

Convert Mpg to Flv Video Format

8. Convert avi video file to mpeg

To convert a .avi file to mpeg for dvd players, run the command below:

$ ffmpeg -i video.avi -target pal-dvd -ps 2000000000 -aspect 16:9 video.mpeg

Explanation about the options used in above command.

1. target pal-dvd : Output format
2. ps 2000000000 maximum size for the output file, in bits (here, 2 Gb).
3. aspect 16:9 : Widescreen.

Convert Avi to Mpeg Video Format

9. Convert a video to CD or DVD format

To create a video CD or DVD, FFmpeg makes it simple by letting you specify a target type and the format options required automatically.

You can set a target type as follows: add -target type; type can of the following be vcd, svcd, dvd, dv, pal-vcd or ntsc-svcd on the command line.

To create a VCD, you can run the following command:

$ ffmpeg -i video.mpg -target vcd vcd_video.mpg

Convert Video to DVD Format

10. Extract audio from video file

To extract sound from a video file, and save it as Mp3 file, use the following command:

$ ffmpeg -i video1.avi -vn -ar 44100 -ac 2 -ab 192 -f mp3 audio3.mp3

Explanation about the options used in above command.

1. Source video : video.avi
2. Audio bitrate : 192kb/s
3. output format : mp3
4. Generated sound : audio3.mp3

Extract Audio from Video

11. Mix a video and audio together

You can also mix a video with a sound file as follows:

$ ffmpeg -i audio.mp3 -i video.avi video_audio_mix.mpg

Mix Video and Audio

12. Increase/Reduce Video Playback Speed

To increase video play back speed, run this command. The -vf option sets the video filters that helps to adjust the speed.

$ ffmpeg -i video.mpg -vf "setpts=0.5*PTS" highspeed.mpg

Increase Video Playback Speed

You can also reduce video speed as follows:

$ ffmpeg -i video.mpg -vf "setpts=4.0*PTS" lowerspeed.mpg -hide_banner

Reduce Video Playback Speed

13. Compare/Test Video and Audio Quality

To compare videos and audios after converting you can use the commands below. This helps you to test videos and audio quality.

$ ffplay video1.mp4

Test Video Quality

To test audio quality simply use the name of the audio file as follows:

$ ffplay audio_filename1.mp3

Test Audio Quality

You can listen to them while they play and compare the qualities from the sound.

14. Add Photo or Banner to Audio

You can add a cover poster or image to an audio file using the following command, this comes very useful for uploading MP3s to YouTube.

$ ffmpeg -loop 1 -i image.jpg -i Bryan\ Adams\ -\ Heaven.mp3 -c:v libx264 -c:a aac -strict experimental -b:a 192k -shortest output.mp4

Add Image to Audio

15. Add subtitles to a Movie

If you have a separate subtitle file called subtitle.srt, you can use following command to add subtitle to a movie file:

$ ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -i subtitles.srt -map 0 -map 1 -c copy -c:v libx264 -crf 23 -preset veryfast video-output.mkv

Summary

That is all for now but these are just few examples of using FFmpeg, you can find more options for what you wish to accomplish. Remember to post a comment to provide information about how to use FFmpeg or if you have encountered errors while using it.

Reference: https://ffmpeg.org/

Source

Infrastructure monitoring is an integral part of infrastructure management. It is an IT manager’s first line of defense against surprise downtime. Severe issues can inject considerable downtime to live infrastructure, sometimes causing heavy loss of money and material.

Monitoring collects time-series data from your infrastructure so it can be analyzed to predict upcoming issues with the infrastructure and its underlying components. This gives the IT manager or support staff time to prepare and apply a resolution before a problem occurs.

A good monitoring system provides:

1. Measurement of the infrastructure’s performance over time
2. Node-level analysis and alerts
3. Network-level analysis and alerts
4. Downtime analysis and alerts
5. Answers to the 5 W’s of incident management and root cause analysis (RCA):
   • What was the actual issue?
   • When did it happen?
   • Why did it happen?
   • What was the downtime?
   • What needs to be done to avoid it in the future?

Building a strong monitoring system

There are a number of tools available that can build a viable and strong monitoring system. The only decision to make is which to use; your answer lies in what you want to achieve with monitoring as well as various financial and business factors you must consider.

While some monitoring tools are proprietary, many open source tools, either unmanaged or community-managed software, will do the job even better than the closed source options.

In this article, I will focus on open source tools and how to use them to create a strong monitoring architecture.

Log collection and analysis

To say “logs are helpful” would be an understatement. Logs not only help in debugging issues; they also provide a lot of information to help you predict an upcoming issue. Logs are the first door to open when you encounter issues with software components.

Both Fluentd and Logstash can be used for log collection; the only reason I would choose Fluentd over Logstash is because of its independence from the Java process; it is written in C+ Ruby, which is widely supported by container runtimes like Docker and orchestration tools like Kubernetes.

Log analytics is the process of analyzing the log data you collect over time and producing real-time logging metrics. Elasticsearch is a powerful tool that can do just that.

Finally, you need a tool that can collect logging metrics and enable you to visualize the log trends using charts and graphs that are easy to understand. Kibana is my favorite option for that purpose.

infrastructure-monitoring_logging.jpeg

^{Logging workflow}

Because logs can hold sensitive information, here are a few security pointers to remember:

• Always transport logs over a secure connection.
• The logging/monitoring infrastructure should be implemented inside the restricted subnet.
• Access to monitoring user interfaces (e.g., Kibana and Grafana) should be restricted or authenticated only to stakeholders.

Node-level metrics

Not everything is logged!

Yes, you heard that right: Logging monitors a software or a process, not every component in the infrastructure.

Operating system disks, externally mounted data disks, Elastic Block Store, CPU, I/O, network packets, inbound and outbound connections, physical memory, virtual memory, buffer space, and queues are some of the major components that rarely appear in logs unless something fails for them.

So, how could you collect this data?

Prometheus is one answer. You just need to install software-specific exporters on the virtual machine nodes and configure Prometheus to collect time-based data from those unattended components. Grafana uses the data Prometheus collects to provide a live visual representation of your node’s current status.

If you are looking for a simpler solution to collect time-series metrics, consider Metricbeat, Elastic.io‘s in-house open source tool, which can be used with Kibana to replace Prometheus and Grafana.

Alerts and notifications

You can’t take advantage of monitoring without alerts and notifications. Unless stakeholders—no matter where they are in this big, big world—receive a notification about an issue, there’s no way they can analyze and fix the issue, prevent the customer from being impacted, and avoid it in the future.

Prometheus, with predefined alerting rules using its in-house Alertmanager and Grafana, can send alerts based on configured rules. Sensu and Nagios are other open source tools that offer alerting and monitoring services.

The only problem people have with open source alerting tools is that the configuration time and the process sometimes seem hard, but once they are set up, these tools function better than proprietary alternatives.

However, open source tools’ biggest advantage is that we have control over their behavior.

Monitoring workflow and architecture

A good monitoring architecture is the backbone of a strong and stable monitoring system. It might look something like this diagram.

image_2_architecture.png

In the end, you must choose a tool based on your needs and infrastructure. The open source tools discussed in this article are used by many organizations for monitoring their infrastructure and blessing it with high uptime.

Source

If you’re used to be a VMware user and try to switch to the Open-Source side of the Force by using VirtualBox, you may run into difficulties if you try to import an existing VDI file into VirtualBox. Actually it’s quite easy, if you know how.

The main difference between VMware and VirtualBox is that VMware captures a whole virtual machine in an image, whereas VirtualBox only supports images of a hard disk. So in VirtualBox’s world, you first need to create a new virtual machine, before using an existing VirtualBox image.

1. First copy your VDI file into VirtualBox’s virtual hard disks repository. On Mac OS X it’s $HOME/Library/VirtualBox/HardDisks/.

2. Start VirtualBox and create a new virtual machine (according to the OS you expect to live on the VirtualBox image):

   

3. When you’re asked for a hard disk image, select Use existing hard disk and click on the small icon on the right:

   

4. Which will brings you to the Virtual Media Manager. Click on Add and select the VDI file from step 1.

   

5. After leaving the Virtual Media Manager, you’ll be back in your virtual machine wizard. Now you can select your new VDI as existing hard disk and finalize the creation process.

   

6. Back in the main window, you’re now able to start your new virtual machine:

   

It’s quite easy, if you know how.

It’s been a number of months since last trying the RadeonSI NIR back-end, which is being developed as part of the OpenGL 4.6 SPIR-V bits for this AMD OpenGL driver, but eventually RadeonSI may end up switching from TGSI to NIR by default. Given the time since we last tried it out and the increasing popularity of NIR, this weekend I did some fresh tests of the NIR back-end with a Radeon Vega graphics card.

The RadeonSI NIR support isn’t enabled by default but requires setting the R600_DEBUG=nir environment variable for activating. They have been pursuing this support to re-use existing code as part of the long-awaited OpenGL 4.6 SPIR-V ingestion support, which is still ongoing.

The last time I tried out RadeonSI NIR months ago it was causing issues with a few OpenGL games, but fortunately that seems to be an issue of the past. When trying all of the frequently benchmarked OpenGL Linux games with RadeonSI NIR on Mesa 19.1-devel, I didn’t run into any game problems or any corruption problems or other nuisances to deal with… The experience was great.

This round of testing was with Mesa 19.1-devel via the Padoka PPA on Ubuntu 18.10 and using the Linux 5.0 Git kernel. The Radeon RX Vega 64 graphics card was what I used for this quick weekend comparison.

Besides being pleased with running into no visible issues when using the NIR intermediate representation by RadeonSI Gallium3D, I also ran some benchmarks comparing the stock behavior to the Linux OpenGL gaming performance when taking the NIR code-path. Benchmarks were done using the Phoronix Test Suite.

Source

Alacritty is a free open-source, fast, cross-platform terminal emulator, that uses GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) for rendering, which implements certain optimizations that are not available in many other terminal emulators in Linux.

Alacritty is focused on two goals simplicity and performance. The performance goal means, it should be speedy than any other terminal emulator available. The simplicity goal means, it doesn’t supports features such as tabs or splits (which can be easily provided by other terminal multiplexer – tmux) in Linux.

Prerequisites

Alacritty requires the most recent stable Rust compiler to install it.

Install Required Dependency Packages

1. First install Rust programming language using an rustup installer script and follow on screen instructions.

# sudo curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh

2. Next, you need to install a few additional libraries to build Alacritty on your Linux distributions, as shown.

--------- On Ubuntu/Debian --------- 
# apt-get install cmake libfreetype6-dev libfontconfig1-dev xclip

--------- On CentOS/RHEL ---------
# yum install cmake freetype-devel fontconfig-devel xclip
# yum group install "Development Tools"

--------- On Fedora ---------
# dnf install cmake freetype-devel fontconfig-devel xclip

--------- On Arch Linux ---------
# pacman -S cmake freetype2 fontconfig pkg-config make xclip

--------- On openSUSE ---------
# zypper install cmake freetype-devel fontconfig-devel xclip 

Installing Alacritty Terminal Emulator in Linux

3. Once you have installed all the required packages, next clone the Alacritty source code repository and compile it using following commands.

$ cd Downloads
$ git clone https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty.git
$ cd alacritty
$ cargo build --release

4. Once the compilation process is complete, the binary will be saved in ./target/release/alacritty directory. Copy the binary to a directory in your PATH and on a dekstop, you can add the application to your system menus, as follows.

# cp target/release/alacritty /usr/local/bin
# cp Alacritty.desktop ~/.local/share/applications

5. Next install the manual pages using following command.

# gzip -c alacritty.man | sudo tee /usr/local/share/man/man1/alacritty.1.gz > /dev/null

6. To add shell completion settings to your Linux shell, do the following.

--------- On Bash Shell ---------
# cp alacritty-completions.bash  ~/.alacritty
# echo "source ~/.alacritty" >> ~/.bashrc

--------- On ZSH Shell ---------
# cp alacritty-completions.zsh /usr/share/zsh/functions/Completion/X/_alacritty

--------- On FISH Shell ---------
# cp alacritty-completions.fish /usr/share/fish/vendor_completions.d/alacritty.fish

7. Finally start Alacritty in your system menu and click on it; when run for the first time, a config file will be created under $HOME/.config/alacritty/alacritty.yml, you can configure it from here.

Alacritty Terminal Emulator

For more information and configuration options, go to the Alacritty Github repository.

Alacritty is a cross-platform, fast, GPU accelerated terminal emulator focused on speed and performance. Although it is ready for daily usage, many features are yet to be added to it such as scroll back and more.

DomTerm is a free open-source feature-rich, modern terminal emulator and screen multiplexer (like tmux or GNU screen), which is based on web technologies and a rich-text console written mostly in JavaScript.

It uses libwebsockets as a backend and a byte-protocol to communicate with the back-end, this implies that you can invoke it in a browser using web sockets; embed it in a third-party application; or simply run it as a generic terminal emulator program.

DomTerm Terminal Emulator for Linux

DomTerm Features:

• It is xterm-compatible and supports multiple sub-commands.
• It comes with multiple applications which include a: xterm-compatible terminal emulator, command console, chat/talk window and a read-eval-print-loop for an interactive scripting language.
• Supports multiplexing and sessions.
• Its back-end allows for printing images, graphics as well as rich text.
• Supports controlling of user preferences via a CSS file.
• Supports keyboard shortcuts with smart line-wrapping.<./li>
• Optionally allows for input editing and movement of cursor using mouse.
• Supports preserving of TAB characters with automatic pagination.
• Support draggable tabs and panes.
• Automatically turn URLs and mail addresses in output into links and much more.
• An experimental package atom-domterm for the Atom editor.

How to Install DomTerm Terminal Emulator in Linux

There are no pre-built DomTerm packages available, therefore you need to install it from source, but before downloading the source code and compiling it. First you need to install following dependencies on your respective Linux distributions using package manager as shown.

On Debian/Ubuntu

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install git gcc make cmake automake libjson-c-dev pkg-config asciidoctor libmagic-dev zlib1g-dev qt5-qmake qt5-default libqt5webengine5 libqt5webchannel5-dev qtwebengine5-dev

On RHEL/CentOS

$ sudo yum update
$ sudo yum install gcc make automake autoconf texinfo patch libwebsockets libwebsockets-devel json-c json-c-devel openssl-devel file-devel libcap-devel asciidoctor

On Fedora

$ sudo dnf update
$ sudo dnf install gcc make automake autoconf texinfo patch libwebsockets libwebsockets-devel json-c json-c-devel openssl-devel file-devel libcap-devel asciidoctor

DomTerm also requires libwebsockets version 2.2 or later. Therefore, you need to build and install the latest version from source as shown.

$ cd ~/Downloads
$ git clone https://github.com/warmcat/libwebsockets
$ cd libwebsockets
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake -DLWS_WITH_SSL=0 -DLWS_WITH_ZIP_FOPS=1 . .
$ make

$ cd ~/Downloads/
$ git clone https://github.com/PerBothner/DomTerm
$ cd DomTerm
$ autoreconf
$ ./configure --with-qtwebengine --with-libwebsockets=$HOME/Downloads/libwebsockets/build
$ make
$ sudo make install

$ domterm

Linux commandline is the best and most powerful thing that fascinates a new user and provides extreme power to experienced users and geeks. For those who work on Server and Production, they are already aware of this fact. It would be interesting to know that Linux console was one of those first features of the kernel that was written by Linus Torvalds way back in the year 1991.

Terminal is a powerful tool that is very reliable as it does not have any movable part. Terminal serves as an intermediate between console and GUI environment. Terminal themselves are GUI application that run on top of a desktop environment. There are a lot of terminal application some of which are Desktop Environment specific and rest are universal. Terminator, Konsole, Gnome-Terminal, Terminology, XFCE terminal, xterm are a few terminal emulators to name.

Last day while surfing web, I came across a terminal namely ‘guake‘ which is a terminal for gnome. Though this is not the first time I have learned about Guake. I’d known this application nearly one year ago but somehow I could not write on this and later it was out of my mind until I heard it again. So finally the article is here. We will be taking you to Guake features, installation on Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora followed by quick testing.

What is Guake?

Guake is a Drop Down Terminal for Gnome Environment. Written from scratch mostly in Python and a little in C this application is released under GPLv2+ and is available for Linux and alike systems. Guake is inspired by a console in computer game Quake which slides down from the top by pressing a specially Key (Default is F12) and then slides-up when the same key is pressed.

Important to mention that Guake is not the first of this kind. Yakuake which stands for Yet Another Kuake, a terminal emulator for KDE Desktop Environment and Tilda which is a GTK+ terminal Emulator are also inspired by the same slide up/down console of computer game Quake.

Features of Guake

1. Lightweight
2. Simple Easy and Elegant
3. Functional
4. Powerful
5. Good Looking
6. Smooth integration of terminal into GUI
7. Appears when you call and disappear once you are done by pressing a predefined hot key
8. Support for hotkeys, tabs, background transparency makes it a brilliant application, must for every Gnome User.
9. Extremely configurable
10. Plenty of color palette included, fixed and recognized
11. Shortcut for transparency level
12. Run a script when Guake starts via Guake Preferences.
13. Able to run on more than one monitor

Guake 0.7.0 was released recently, which brings numerous fixes as well as some new features as discussed above. For complete Guake 0.7.0 changelog and source tarball packages can be found Here.

Installing Guake Terminal in Linux

If you are interested in compiling Guake from source you may download the source from the link above, build it yourself before installing.

However Guake is available to be installed on most of the distributions from repository or by adding an additional repository. Here, we will be installing Guake on Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Fedora systems.

First get the latest software package list from the repository and then install Guake from the default repository as shown below.

---------------- On Debian, Ubuntu and Linux Mint ----------------
$ sudo apt-get update
$ apt-get install guake

---------------- On Fedora 19 Onwards ----------------
# yum update
# yum install guake

After installation, start the Guake from another terminal as:

$ guake

After starting it, use F12 (Default) to roll down and roll up the terminal on your Gnome Desktop.

Seems very beautiful specially the transparent background. Roll down… Roll up… Roll down… Roll up…. run command. Open another tab run command… Roll up… Roll down…

Guake Terminal in Action

If your wallpaper or working windows color don’t match you may like to change your wallpaper or reduce the transparency of the Guake terminal color.

Next is to look into Guake Properties to edit settings as per requirements. Run Guake Preferences either by running it from Application Menu or by running the below command.

$ guake --preferences

Guake Terminal Properties

Scrolling Properties..

Guake Scrolling Settings

Appearance Properties – Here you can modify text and background color as well as tune transparency.

Appearance Properties

Keyboard Shortcuts – Here you may edit and Modify Toggle key for Guage Visibility (default is F12).

Keyboard Shortcuts

Compatibility Setting – Perhaps you won’t need to edit it.

Compatibility Setting

Conclusion

This Project is not too young and not too old, hence has reached certain level of maturity and is quiet solid and works out of the box. For someone like me who need to switch between GUI and Console very often Guake is a boon. I don’t need to manage an extra window, open and close frequently, use tab among a huge pool of opened applications to find terminal or switch to different workspace to manage terminal now all I need is F12.

I think this is a must tool for any Linux user who makes use of GUI and Console at the same time, equally. I am going to recommend it to anyone who want to work on a system where interaction between GUI and Console is smooth and hassle free.

That’s all for now.

Terminal is one of the most important application in Linux which makes it possible for the end user to communicate to the Linux shell and pass instructions. There are several Terminal-like Application, available either in repository or by third party for most of the Standard Linux Distribution. But this time it is a bit different.

Yeah! We are going to test “Nautilus Terminal”. The name itself tells a lot about itself. The Nautilus is default file browser for GNOME Desktop Environment. Nautilus Terminal is an embedded terminal into the nautilus file browser.

What is Nautilus Terminal?

Nautilus Terminal is a Nautilus file browser embedded terminal, which follows your movement and automatically cd to your current directory. Nautilus Terminal makes it possible to work in command line while navigating in Real GUI.

Features of Nautilus Terminal

1. Completely compatible with Nautilus File Browser.
2. Designed to follow your movement and Instructions within directories.
3. Feature of Hide/Show Terminal in file browser, as required makes it very much useful.
4. Supports Copy and Paste in Terminal.
5. Supports Drag and Drop of files/folders in Terminal.
6. The Embedded Terminal is re-sizeable, as per need.

Install Nautilus Terminal in Linux

Nautilus can be downloaded from the link below. Download the correct package, according to your System architecture.

1. http://projects.flogisoft.com/nautilus-terminal/download/

After Downloading the package which is in the form of *.tar.gz from its official website, as pointed out above, we need to do rest of it, as described below.

$ cd Downloads/ 
$ tar -zxvf nautilus-terminal_1.0_src.tar.gz 
$ cd nautilus-terminal_1.0_src 
# ./install.sh -i

Sample Output

:: Checking the Runtime Dependencies... 

  > Python (>= 2.6)                                                      [ OK ] 
  > PyGObject                                                            [ OK ] 
  > GObject Introspection (and Gtk)                                      [MISS] 
  > VTE                                                                  [MISS] 
  > Nautilus Python (>= 1.0)                                             [MISS] 
  > Nautilus (>= 3.0)                                                    [ OK ] 
E: Some dependencies are missing.

We need to resolve dependencies manually. These dependencies were required to be fixed on my Debian 6.0.9 (Squeeze). This may not be the case with you.

On Ubuntu/Debian/Linux Mint

On an Debian based systems, you can use the official PPA to install nautilus from repository as shown below.

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:flozz/flozz
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install nautilus-terminal

After successful installation of Nautilus Terminal, we are ready to test it but before that it is necessary to restart nautilus as.

$ nautilus -q

Next, start the nautilus terminal using the following command.

$ nautilus

Nautilus Terminal

Conclusion

Nautilus Terminal is a wonderful tool, which lets your execution in GUI to be visible in embedded command line and Vice-versa. It is a very nice tool for those newbies who are afraid of Linux command Line and/or Newbie.

That’s all for now.

There are multiple terminal emulators you can find on the Linux platform today, with each of them offering users some remarkable features.

But sometimes, we find it difficult to choose which terminal emulator to work with, depending on our preferences. In this overview, we shall cover one exciting terminal emulator for Linux called Tilix.

Tlix (previously called Terminix – name changed due to a trademark issue) is a tiling terminal emulator that uses GTK+ 3 widget called VTE (Virtual Terminal Emulator). It is developed using GTK 3 with aims of conforming to GNOME HIG (Human Interface Guidelines).

Additionally, this application has been tested on GNOME and Unity desktops, although users have also tested it successfully on various other Linux desktops environments.

Just like the rest of Linux terminal emulators, Tilix comes with some illustrious features and these include:

1. Enables users to layout terminals in any style by splitting them vertically or horizontally
2. Supports drag and drop functionality to re-arrange terminals
3. Supports detaching of terminals from windows using drag and drop
4. Supports input synchronization between terminals, therefore commands typed in one terminal can be reproduced in another
5. Terminal grouping can be saved and loaded from disk
6. Supports transparent backgrounds
7. Allows use of background images
8. Supports automatic profile switches based on hostname and directory
9. Also supports notification for out of view process completion
10. Color schemes stored in files and new files can be created for custom color schemes

How to Install Tilix on Linux Systems

Let us now uncover the steps you can follow to install Tilix on the various Linux distributions, but before we move any further, we have to list the various requirements for Tilix to work on Linux.

Dependencies

To work very well, the application requires the following libraries:

1. GTK 3.14 and above
2. GTK VTE 0.42 and above
3. Dconf
4. GSettings
5. Nautilus-Python for Nautilus integration

If you have all the above requirements on your system, then proceed to install Tilix as follows.

On RHEL/CentOS 7 and Fedora 22-27

First, you need to add the package repository by creating a file /etc/yum.repos.d/tilix.repo using your favorite text editor as follows.

# vi /etc/yum.repos.d/tilix.repo

Then copy and paste the text below into the file above:

[ivoarch-Tilix]
name=Copr repo for Tilix owned by ivoarch
baseurl=https://copr-be.cloud.fedoraproject.org/results/ivoarch/Tilix/epel-7-$basearch/
type=rpm-md
skip_if_unavailable=True
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://copr-be.cloud.fedoraproject.org/results/ivoarch/Tilix/pubkey.gpg
repo_gpgcheck=0
enabled=1
enabled_metadata=1

Save the file and exit.

Then update your system and install Tilix as shown:

---------------- On RHEL/CentOS 7 ---------------- 
# yum update
# yum install tilix

---------------- On Fedora 22-27 ---------------- 
# dnf update
# dnf install tilix

On Ubuntu and Linux Mint

There is no official package repository for Ubuntu/Linux Mint, but you can use WebUpd8 PPA to install it as show.

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/terminix
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install tilix

On Debian, tilix added to official repository and can be installed using command:

$ sudo apt-get install tilix

Alternatively, you can install using source code manually using the commands below:

$ wget -c https://github.com/gnunn1/tilix/releases/download/1.7.7/tilix.zip
$ sudo unzip tilix.zip -d / 
$ sudo glib-compile-schemas /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/

OpenSUSE users can install tilix from the default repository and Arch Linux users can install the AUR Tilix package.

# pacman -S tilix

Tilix Screenshot Tour

Tilix with Two Horizontal Linux Terminal Windows

Tilix with Two Vertical Linux Terminal Windows

Tilix with One Vertical and Two Horizontal Linux Terminals

Tilix with Multiple Linux Terminal Windows

How to Uninstall or Remove Tilix Terminal

In case you installed it manually and want to remove it, then you can follow the steps below to uninstall it. Download the uninstall.sh from Github repository, make it executable and then run it:

$ wget -c https://github.com/gnunn1/tilix/blob/master/uninstall.sh
$ chmod +x uninstall.sh
$ sudo sh uninstall.sh