How to add an entry for Zend Studio in your Ubuntu programs list

I had been trying to add a shortcut/entry for Zend studio in my Ubuntu 11.10.  Finally I could find a way to make Zend studio entry come up in the Unity Application search or Filter. Actually its a rather straight forward procedure. Create a file zendstudio.desktop in the /usr/share/applications/ as root, add the following contents to it, using your editor of choice(I used vi editor).

[Desktop Entry]
Version=9.0
Name=Zend Studio
GenericName=PHP IDE
Type=Application
Comment=Zend's PHP IDE
Exec=/opt/ZendStudio/ZendStudio
Icon=/opt/ZendStudio/icon.xpm
StartupNotify=false
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Programming;

Courtesy:
http://thanhquanky.wordpress.com/2011/06/28/create-icon-in-unity-ubuntu-11-04-natty-narwhal/
(You could check out the above link to find way to add antry for any custom software using the same method).

N.B: Its my first blog post after nearly one year. Hope that I can follow it with more such useful posts.
The above method was tested by me in Unity based Ubuntu. But it should work fine in any GNOME based OS.

How to type New Indian Rupee Symbol(the right way)

Pre-Requisite

To display the Indian rupee symbol , you must have a font—such as the Ubuntu Font Family—with support for the character.

Windows users may use the new Rupkara font which has the Unicode postion mapping for the symbol. For  downloading the font, please visit-http://blog.foradian.com/rupakara-first-font-with-indian-rupee-symbol

How-To

For K/Ubuntu 10.10 users, this is automatic.The sign can inserted in your own documents using copy-and-paste from another location, or using the Unicode-entry method, which is the correct way of doing it, and it is as follows-

• Ubuntu 10.10:<Ctrl-Shift-u>20b9<enter>
• MS Windows: <Press-and-hold Alt>20b9<Release Alt>
• Kubuntu 10.10: Copy-and-paste ‘₹’
• HTML: insert “&#x20b9;”

History:

The codepoint at U+20B9 was assigned by the Unicode consortium on 11 August 2010 (2010-08-11).

A fact-

Ubuntu 10.10 is the first operating system to ship with out-of-the-box support for displaying the Indian Rupee Sign, and this happened on 10 October 2010 (2010-10-10).

Courtesy:http://font.ubuntu.com/rupee/

Artha- The Best offline Dictionary for Ubuntu

I had done a lot of googling in the past to find out a dictionary that I could use in Ubuntu when I’m not connected to the internet. It yielded nothing, atleast not anything that is ready-packaged for Ubuntu.. Few days ago I was just going through the ‘Ubuntu Software center’ to find out any random software that may interest me. Well, I found something that interested me; ‘Artha’.

Artha is a pretty decent dictionary which works with Wordnet 3.0 as its backend which is very comprehensive(atleast for common use, if not more). It has many features like ‘relatives’ of the word, which includes “Synonyms, Antonyms, Derivatives, Similar, Domains, Causes, Kinds(Hyponyms)”. In my experience I found it very good and indeed comprehensive.

The best feature that I liked in it is its HotKey which is Ctrl+Alt+w. This is a very handy feature, you can just select a word in any software and press the Hotkey combination to invoke Artha, its notification/window will then come up with the meaning, as per your settings selection.(I like the Notifiaction feature)

The version of Artha found in Ubuntu 9.10(Karmic) repository is 0.8.0. But, Artha is available in version 1.0.1 for Ubuntu and many other Linux distributions(Update-30/10/2011: and now for Windows too). It has regular expression based search.You can find the download details for the new version for Ubuntu and other Linux distributions, at the following link:
Download Artha 1.0.2

 

Update-30/10/2011: The latest version is Artha 1.0.2.  This version sports the first ever Windows release of Artha dictionary. I had tried using it in Windows too, it works just as fine in Windows as well. So, Windows users cheer up..