Better Gnome Desktop Magnification with eZoom

The Gnome desktop provides magnification with gnome-mag. This program has very limited features and has quite a few performance issues. After upgrading to Ubuntu Jaunty, we had trouble using the full screen magnification. Ever since I have been searching for a better magnification for partially sighted, low vision Gnome desktop users.

The Compiz-Fusion's eZoom (Enhanced Zoom) desktop plugin steps in to fill the gap.

The zooming is quite smooth, but its appears very jerky in this video.

How to enable eZoom in Ubuntu Gnome Desktop?

To use eZoom desktop plugin, first install the compiz-fusion-plugins-main package. This package is available in Ubuntu itself. Then open the Compiz Configuration Manager and enable "Enhanced Zoom Desktop" under Accessibility menu.

Next step is to assign the keyboard shortcuts to zoom in and out. I have assigned Super+1 (Windows Key+1) to zoom in and Super+2 to zoom out.

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NLTK Installation with Python easy_install

Few weeks ago I wrote the NLTK on Ubuntu Quick Start Guide. Now with the release of NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit) 2.0b5 today the NLTK installation has been greatly simplified thanks to the nltk python egg (See Changelog).

To get started with NLTK install, you first need the python-setuptools package.

$ sudo apt-get install python-setuptools 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  python-setuptools
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 195kB of archives.
After this operation, 909kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://in.archive.ubuntu.com karmic/main python-setuptools 0.6c9-0ubuntu4 [195kB]
Fetched 195kB in 9s (20.2kB/s)                                                 
Selecting previously deselected package python-setuptools.
(Reading database ... 106971 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking python-setuptools (from .../python-setuptools_0.6c9-0ubuntu4_all.deb) ...
Setting up python-setuptools (0.6c9-0ubuntu4) ...



 Now lets install the NLTK with easy_install program.


$ sudo easy_install http://nltk.googlecode.com/files/nltk-2.0b5-py2.6.egg
 
Downloading http://nltk.googlecode.com/files/nltk-2.0b5-py2.6.egg
Processing nltk-2.0b5-py2.6.egg
creating /usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/nltk-2.0b5-py2.6.egg
Extracting nltk-2.0b5-py2.6.egg to /usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages
Adding nltk 2.0b5 to easy-install.pth file

Installed /usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/nltk-2.0b5-py2.6.egg
Processing dependencies for nltk==2.0b5
Searching for PyYAML==3.08
Reading http://pypi.python.org/simple/PyYAML/
Reading http://pyyaml.org/wiki/PyYAML
Best match: PyYAML 3.08
Downloading http://pyyaml.org/download/pyyaml/PyYAML-3.08.zip
Processing PyYAML-3.08.zip
Running PyYAML-3.08/setup.py -q bdist_egg --dist-dir /tmp/easy_install-T7Y0La/PyYAML-3.08/egg-dist-tmp-vRjvDM
build/temp.linux-i686-2.6/check_libyaml.c:2:18: error: yaml.h: No such file or directory
build/temp.linux-i686-2.6/check_libyaml.c: In function ‘main’:
build/temp.linux-i686-2.6/check_libyaml.c:5: error: ‘yaml_parser_t’ undeclared (first use in this function)
build/temp.linux-i686-2.6/check_libyaml.c:5: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
build/temp.linux-i686-2.6/check_libyaml.c:5: error: for each function it appears in.)
build/temp.linux-i686-2.6/check_libyaml.c:5: error: expected ‘;’ before ‘parser’
build/temp.linux-i686-2.6/check_libyaml.c:6: error: ‘yaml_emitter_t’ undeclared (first use in this function)
build/temp.linux-i686-2.6/check_libyaml.c:6: error: expected ‘;’ before ‘emitter’
build/temp.linux-i686-2.6/check_libyaml.c:8: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘yaml_parser_initialize’
build/temp.linux-i686-2.6/check_libyaml.c:8: error: ‘parser’ undeclared (first use in this function)
build/temp.linux-i686-2.6/check_libyaml.c:9: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘yaml_parser_delete’
build/temp.linux-i686-2.6/check_libyaml.c:11: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘yaml_emitter_initialize’
build/temp.linux-i686-2.6/check_libyaml.c:11: error: ‘emitter’ undeclared (first use in this function)
build/temp.linux-i686-2.6/check_libyaml.c:12: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘yaml_emitter_delete’

libyaml is not found or a compiler error: forcing --without-libyaml
(if libyaml is installed correctly, you may need to
 specify the option --include-dirs or uncomment and
 modify the parameter include_dirs in setup.cfg)
zip_safe flag not set; analyzing archive contents...
Adding PyYAML 3.08 to easy-install.pth file

Installed /usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/PyYAML-3.08-py2.6-linux-i686.egg
Finished processing dependencies for nltk==2.0b5



 Now you done, import the NLTK and start downloading the NTLK data.


$ python
Python 2.6.2+ (release26-maint, Jun 19 2009, 15:14:35) 
[GCC 4.4.0] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import nltk
>>> nltk.download()
NLTK Downloader
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    d) Download      l) List      c) Config      h) Help      q) Quit
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Downloader> l

Packages:
/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/nltk-2.0b5-py2.6.egg/nltk/__init__.py:588: DeprecationWarning: object.__new__() takes no parameters
  [ ] maxent_ne_chunker... ACE Named Entity Chunker (Maximum entropy)
  [ ] abc................. Australian Broadcasting Commission 2006
  [ ] brown............... Brown Corpus
  [ ] alpino.............. Alpino Dutch Treebank
  [ ] cess_cat............ CESS-CAT Treebank
  [ ] brown_tei........... Brown Corpus (TEI XML Version)
  [ ] cmudict............. The Carnegie Mellon Pronouncing Dictionary (0.6)
  [ ] biocreative_ppi..... BioCreAtIvE (Critical Assessment of Information
                           Extraction Systems in Biology)
  [ ] cess_esp............ CESS-ESP Treebank
  [ ] chat80.............. Chat-80 Data Files
  [ ] city_database....... City Database
  [ ] conll2002........... CONLL 2002 Named Entity Recognition Corpus
  [ ] conll2000........... CONLL 2000 Chunking Corpus
  [ ] conll2007........... Dependency Treebanks from CoNLL 2007 (Catalan
                           and Basque Subset)
  [ ] dependency_treebank. Dependency Parsed Treebank
  [ ] floresta............ Portuguese Treebank
  [ ] genesis............. Genesis Corpus
  [ ] gazetteers.......... Gazeteer Lists
Hit Enter to continue: 

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GDM Timed Login

The Gnome Display Manager(GDM) is the graphical login program for Gnome Desktop environment. It is being completely rewritten, one of its goals is to provide better accessible login support.

The latest version of GDM has been uploaded into Ubuntu Karmic and is under active testing. There are few issues to be ironed out before we can have a fully accessible login with orca screen reader and magnifier. Until then I advice the blind gnu/Linux users to use GDM timed login.

Add the following lines to your /etc/gdm/custom.conf file to enable GDM timed login. Replace 'user' with your username.


[daemon]
AutomaticLoginEnable=true
AutomaticLogin=user
TimedLoginEnable=true
TimedLogin=user
TimedLoginDelay=10



Please note that the configuration of GDM has moved away from previously single configuration file /etc/gdm/gdm.conf . As of now you can't use the graphic gdmsetup to configure GDM.

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NLTK on Ubuntu Quick Start Guide

Update July 19, 2009 : You can now use nltk python egg instead, read the NLTK Installation with Python setuptools post.

While attending a short program in computational linguistics at Dravidian University, Dr. Arul introduced me to NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit). It was full two years before that I finally decided to have a close look at it. Like most linguists at the lab I used Perl programming language. With new version of NLTK 2.0 released last month, NLTK now works with python 2.6. Here a quick start guide for NLTK on Ubuntu Linux.

Installing NLTK on Ubuntu with Python 2.6

At the time of writing this post the Debian package on NLTK download page is built for Python 2.5. Ubuntu ships with Python 2.6 by default. So you need to download the source package from the NLTK download page.

NLTK needs some dependency modules, lets install them.

sudo apt-get install python-numpy python-matplotlib prover9

Uncompress the source package and run the NLTK setup.

$ unzip nltk-2.0b3.zip

$ cd nltk-2.0b3/

$ ls build LICENSE.txt nltk PKG-INFO README.txt setup.py yaml

$ sudo python setup.py install

After finishing the NLTK setup, you should download the NLTK data which contains various corpora, tagsets and treebank data etc.

$ python

Python 2.6.2+ (release26-maint, Jun 19 2009, 15:14:35)

[GCC 4.4.0] on linux2

Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

>>> import nltk

>>> nltk.download()



Learning NLTK

The best place to start is the NLTK book Natural Language Processing with Python Analyzing Text with the Natural Language Toolkit. The book is released under public domain, so you can read it online on NLTK website itself. I would recommand you to buy a copy of this book as the procceds will go into the future development of NLTK.

There aren't many videos about NLTK. I recently stumbled upon this video lecture by the trinity of NLTK Steven Bird, Ewan Klein, and Edward Loper.

If you are new to computational linguistics and need good grounding in this field you should also consider reading these texts.

Speech and Language Processing (2nd Edition)

Natural Language Understanding (2nd Edition)

Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing

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