Blizzard Is Not Banning Diablo III Linux Players

In spite of some rumors that Blizzard is banning people running Diablo III on Linux platform, emulated through Wine, it appears that this is not the case.

The whole shenanigan was started on Blizzard's official forums by some gamers complaining about being banned after playing Diablo III on Linux.

Blizzard has replicated the setups described by the users and tested their own system, and Linux clients were not banned. The company has said plainly that they are not banning the Linux players, only cheaters.

“We’ve extensively tested for false positive situations, including replicating system setups for those who have posted claiming they were banned unfairly.”

“We’ve not found any situations that could produce a false positive, have found that the circumstances for which they were banned were clear and accurate, and we are extremely confident in our findings.“

“Playing the game on Linux, although not officially supported, will not get you banned – cheating will,” a Blizzard statement said through their forums.

Calibre Plugin of the Week:FanFictionDownLoader

Calibre is one of the best eBook management software available right now, but its strength lies in the abundance of plugins available for it.

This week we’ll take a look at an interesting extension called „FanFictionDownLoader." According to the developer, this plugin brings the functionality of FanFiction Downloader to Calibre.

FanFictionDownLoader can download FanFiction stories and books from over 50 different sites into ebook format, has support for downloading images in the story text, and many other features.

It can be easily installed from the Preferences menu or from the official forum, and it needs version 0.8.30 or higher of Calibre. A comprehensive tutorial about its usage can also be found on the above forums.

You can also check out our review of Calibre.

Download Calibre 0.8.58

Updates to Gnome-Calendar

Erick Perez Castellanos announced in his blog yesterday that Gnome Calendar is moving forward!
There is still a lot of work to be done, but the development of various aspects has been re-started. The most important is the implementation of the event-view that is missing functionality, but the widgets part is almost done.
Below you can see some screenshots that show the month-view and the even-view. There is still a lot to be done, like the addition of more elements and the use of some symbolic icons etc, but you can get the idea from these “skeletal” designs.

How to Take a Screenshot from Terminal on Ubuntu/Linux Mint

In this tip, we will see how to use the terminal under Ubuntu 12.04 or Linux Mint 13 to take screenshots. There are many applications with GUI available for Debian-based systems for taking screenshots, and the list keeps growing. However, in this tutorial we will try to use the CLI mode for taking screenshots.

Method 1

Open the terminal under Ubuntu and take a screenshot with this command:

gnome-screenshot

To take a screenshot after xx seconds, you can use this command:

gnome-screenshot -d 3

or

sleep 3; gnome-screenshot

For Linux Mint, you can use this command:

mate-screenshot

To delay it, use this command:

mate-screenshot -d 3

or

sleep 3; mate-screenshot

Method 2

You can also use imagemagick to take screenshots under Ubuntu/Linux Mint. You can install it with this command:

sudo apt-get install imagemagick

Then take a screenshot with this command:

import screenshot.png

Method 3

Scrot can also be used to take screenshots. Install it with this command:

sudo apt-get install scrot

Use now this command:

scrot screenshot.png

Method 4

This command also allows to take screenshots under Ubuntu or Linux Mint:

DISPLAY=:0.0 import -window root screenshot.png

If you have something to add, please do using the comment form below.

The less command

The "cat" command is one of the most popular linux commands. It is used to display a file in the terminal. However, one problem is that when using "cat" to read a big file, it will display the whole file in the terminal so you will have to scroll up a huge wall of text to read the file. The "less" command is somewhat similar to "cat", it is also used to read a file but "less" displays only a part of the file instead of the whole file. To read files with "less", you just need to scroll up and down. The real advantage of "less" is that because it doesnt read the entire file so with very huge files, "less" will start faster than "cat" or any text editor like vi.

The usage of "less" is simple like this:

 less filename

"less" displays the beginning part of the file only, to scroll up and down, you can use the keys "j" and "k" or the arrow keys, you can use the "enter" key to scroll down as well.

Here are some tips you can use with "less":

- Display line numbers

To display line numbers before each line, the command is:

 less -N filename

- Open multiple files

You can open multiple files with "less", the command is:

 less filename1 filename2 filename3

With this command, only the first file will be displayed in the terminal. To move to the next file, you just need to type this command in the terminal:

 :n

To move back to the previous file, the command will be:

 :p

You can also replace "n" with "p" in the above commands with a certain number N and the N-th file will be displayed.

To remove the current file, the command will be:

 :d

 - Bookmark scrolling

When opening a huge file, there will be some certain lines you need  to check again. Instead of remember the line numbers, you can bookmark the line with this command:

m &

Just replace "&" with any letter you want and keep scrolling down to read the file. When you want to go back to the bookmarked line, the command will be:

 ' &

(Replace "&" with the letter you picked before.)

- Search

You can search forward through the file with this command:

 /search-term

 The command to search backward is:

 ?search-term

- Quiting

To quit less, you can just hit the letter "q" or hit "Shift + zz"

To know more about "less", just run:

 man less

Unity News Lens Gets Local News With Geolocation, More

 

Unity News Lens lets you search Google news from Dash and it currently supports 61 countries. The lens was updated recently, and it now includes local news, topics and top stories with up to 100 results.

The updated News Lens uses geolocation for local news to define the language used based on your country, but you can also use your session language by selecting Language > Current from the Unity News Lens filter.

The lens will fallback to English and world news for countries not supported by Google News, but the news will be as local as possible, according to the Unity News Lens changelog.

To install Unity News Lens in Ubuntu 12.04 or 12.10, use the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:scopes-packagers/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install unity-lens-news

Once installed, log out and log back in.