Episode 121 – TRADIC

Posted by Tony on March 16, 2014 in Show-mp3, Show-ogg | ∞

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Intro:

Tony Bemus, Mat Enders, and Mary Tomich
Sound bites by Mike Tanner

Kernel News: Mat

Time: 14:05

mainline: 3.14-rc6 2014-03-10
stable: 3.13.6 2014-03-07
stable: 3.11.10 [EOL] 2013-11-29
longterm: 3.12.14 2014-03-10
longterm: 3.10.33 2014-03-07
longterm: 3.4.83 2014-03-11
longterm: 3.2.55 2014-02-15
longterm: 2.6.34.15 [EOL] 2014-02-10
longterm: 2.6.32.61 2013-06-10
linux-next: next-20140314 2014-03-14

Distro Talk: Tony

Time: 16:00

Distrowatch.com

3-2 – Linux Caixa Mágica 21
3-2 – Linux Mint 201403 “Debian”
3-3 – Linux From Scratch 7.5
3-4 – Wifislax 4.8
3-4 – Salix 14.1 “Xfce”
3-5 – Calculate Linux 13.11.1
3-5 – Point Linux 2.3
3-6 – Beyond Linux From Scratch 7.5
3-7 – SparkyLinux 3.3 “LXDE”, “E17”, “Razor-qt”
3-7 – Linpus Linux 2.1 “Lite”
3-8 – Slackel 6.0 “Openbox”
3-9 – CAELinux 2013
3-11 – Porteus 3.0
3-12 – Puppy Linux 5.7 “Slacko”
3-13 – Proxmox 3.2 “Virtual Environment”

Distro of the Week: Tony

Fedora – 1287
Puppy – 1454
Debian – 1821
Ubuntu – 2136
Mint – 3623

Mary Distro Review

Time: 42:50

This week’s review is of TuxTrans, a specialist distro for translation of text.

The Vitals:
Name: TuxTrans
Maintainer:
Distro Latest Birthday: 2/28/2014
Derivative: Ubuntu
Kernel: 3.8.0-34
Review Desktop: XFCE

Live Environment:

TuxTrans books to an XFCE desktop with a single panel at the top. There are a couple of icons on the desktop: Install TuxTrans, Home folder, and Onboard the desktop keyboard. Unlike the other two icons, Onbaord stayed in the foreground albeit in a semi-transparent state. Not too annoying unless I needed access to something behind it…then it became annoying.

Graphics:  ( i915)
Wireless: ✘ then (b43)
The kernel had the module already loaded but the firmware was not installed. The Ubuntu forum contained the necessary steps (install two packages then comment out the module from the blacklist) and wireless worked.

The Defaults
Browser: Firefox
Office Suite: LibreOffice 4.1.3.2
Mail Client: Thunderbird
File Manager: Thunar, Midnight Commander, Tux Commander

The Install Process:

No problems encountered until it came time to upgrade. Apparently the regular upgrade was only a partial so the little cautionary box said – because I needed a distribution upgrade. So I clicked upgrade. A little while later it was time to reboot. I was typing comments for this review as the laptop went through the reboot. Suddenly, through no action from me, I was in Memtest86. Not sure how that happened, unless Memtest86 became the default boot option. I decided to let it run its course. Fast forward to 1:09:50 later…Memtest86 is still running…after 1:25 minutes later I escaped and attempted to boot past it.

My work around was to start hitting the down arrow after post to make sure the selected option was not Memtest86. That worked and I was soon watching the standard boot process.

Installed Environment:

I booted to the same XFCE desktop environment but without the two desktop icons or the Onboard graphic keyboard. The top panel was the standard XFCE-type fare. On the right side, the system tray held the standard icons. The Onboard keyboard was now available from that position.

There were two menus: Applications Menu and Translation which also is duplicated in the Applications Menu.

TuxTrans had quite a bit of software available, and I was impressed with the list of applications, especially in the accessories submenu. For example—the three previously mentioned file managers. If you’re looking to manage files, TuxTrans has you covered. TuxTrans had many PDF tools at the translator’s disposal:

PDF Chain: PDF Chain is a graphical user interface for the PDF Toolkit (PDFtk). The GUI supports all common features of the command line tool in a comfortable way.
PDFEdit: Free editor for PDF documents. Complete editing of PDF documents is possible with PDFedit.
PDFsam PDF Split and Merge- a platform independent tool for –you guessed it– splitting and merging PDFs.
gPDFText: an ebook app to convert ebook PDF content into ASCII text, reformatted for long line paragraphs

Other interesting Programs:

So what will you find on TuxTrans? Quite a bit, actually…

In the accessories menu, you’ll find some interesting items:
Hamster indicator- a method to track your time. Opening it places a small hamster wheel in the system tray (at first I thought it was a clock face)

Convert All – a unit conversion utility—you know…amps to calories, etc.
DiffPDF – program that compares the text or the visual appearance of each page in two PDF files.
TrueCrypt – file/partition encryption utility.
Jitsi – Open soure VoIP and instant messaging
Squeeze – lightweight and flexible archive manager for the XFCE desktop environment.
Referencer – a document organizer and bibliography manager. What was in this instance of Referencer were the manuals for many of the tools contained in this distro.

Translation menu had these apps:

OmegaT: Robust translation tool
Machine TranslationApertium – Apertium is a toolbox to build open-source shallow-transfer machine translation systems, especially suitable for related language pairs: it includes the engine, maintenance tools, and open linguistic data for several language pair. It was similar to google I was able to easily translate between English and Spanish character by character, on the fly.
Two subtitling editors: Gaupol and the appropriately called, “Subtitle Editor”
Virtaal – line by line translator. With each character you type, the translator is figuring out what you’re saying.
AdTAT Concordancer – A concordance is an alphabetical list of the principal works used in a book or body of work, with their immediate contexts.

Localization is adapting computer software to different languages, regional differences and technical requirements of a target market. TuxTran has several tools, Lokalize, XLIFF

Translation Editor (which asked me to agree to a binary license agreement – CDDL) Per GNU.org:

This is a free software license. It has a copyleft with a scope that’s similar to the one in the Mozilla Public License, which makes it incompatible with the GNU GPL. This means a module covered by the GPL and a module covered by the CDDL cannot legally be linked together. We urge you not to use the CDDL for this reason. Also unfortunate in the CDDL is its use of the term “intellectual property.”

a couple of tools for text alignment, one of which was a shell script for text alignment.

Rating: 3.1 (aside from the crazy memtest86 loop during initial boot, TuxTrans is a pretty solid distro. Adiós!