Author Archive
Posted in February 14th, 2008
This article reports that Sun Microsystem has acquired Innotek the makers of Virtualbox. Sun asserts that Virtualbox will remain open source and will compliment Sun’s xVM Server products which addresses both desktop and server virtualization. It was only a few weeks back that Sun had acquired MySQL for a cool billion dollars.
continue reading.....
Posted in January 1st, 2008
I am sure by now you have heard of the gPC loaded with gOS via various news sources. For those in the dark, gPC stands for green PC which is a sub $200 PC which comes loaded with a customized version of Ubuntu known as gOS or in popular parlance called Google OS.
continue reading.....
Posted in November 21st, 2007
Here is a sub $200 PC which runs a customized version of Ubuntu called gOS. The computer is aptly named gPC (Green PC) for its very low power consumption. The gOS runs Enlightenment Window manager instead of KDE or GNOME.
continue reading.....
Posted in November 8th, 2007
When the OLPC first made news, a prominent official in the HRD ministry of the Indian government had gone on record snubbing the OLPC project ($100 laptop), even making a preposterous claim that work was under way to create India’s own $10 laptop. But as things have worked out, OLPC has already made an entry into India in the form of a pilot project in a rural primary school in a village in the state of Maharasthra.
continue reading.....
Posted in October 26th, 2007
This article explains how you can install all the multimedia codecs to play any music or video file in Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon.
continue reading.....
Posted in August 6th, 2006
Whether it be a production grade server or a home computer, as long as it is connected to the outside world, running a firewall is unavoidable. GNU/Linux comes with its own firewall called iptables (netfilter). And there are a number of front-ends available such as Firestarter which make maintaining a firewall childs play especially on the desktop. In the past, I have published articles explaining
continue reading.....
Posted in August 5th, 2006
Ask me which is the most user friendly programming IDE available for Linux platform and I will without a pause tell you that it is KDevelop. True, you have got a plethora of IDEs and editors from the ubiquitous Vi (clones) to those which are meant for coding in a particular language such as bluefish. And then there is the GTK(+) GUI user interface builder in Glade. But when it comes to seamless
continue reading.....
Posted in August 4th, 2006
A couple of months back, I did something really interesting. I downloaded the WordPress content management suite from the wordpress.org site and installed it on my machine. The installation as such was a simple affair of unpacking the WordPress files in the desired location - I unpacked it in the ‘/var/www/’ location - and in no time I had a robust blog hosted on my PC. The prerequisites for
continue reading.....
Posted in August 1st, 2006
In this age of numerous flavours of Unix and Linux OSes, it is imperative that applications are developed to work on a vast majority of them. But historically, Unix had been fractured, with each flavour of Unix - be it IBM AIX, Sun Solaris or HP-UX implementing its own libraries and system calls. And it would have been a nightmare to port an application running on one Unix flavor to another. But
continue reading.....
Posted in July 30th, 2006
One persistent problem I used to face while using GNU/Linux was when I visited sites containing certain flash based games. The games played well but they never displayed the text embedded in it. I thought that it was a drawback of the flash player ver 7 provided for Linux. It never occurred to me to dig into the problem and find why it was happening so.
But recently, in the process of installing
continue reading.....
Posted in July 27th, 2006
There was a time when installing Linux on one’s machine was a chore and involved opening up the case and collecting information about the various hardware components attached to the motherboard such as finding what chipset was used in a particular PCI card. I remember having to open the case and check the chipset used in my internal dial-up winmodem to get it to work in Linux. And I am happy
continue reading.....
Posted in July 26th, 2006
At the time of the official release of Ubuntu Dapper Drake, I happened to visit the site of Kubuntu - the alter identity of Ubuntu. And on an impulse, I ordered a CD of the latest Kubuntu 6.06 LTS which was also released more or less at the same time as Ubuntu Dapper Drake but with a lot less fan fare. I forgot all about it till a couple of days back, when I received the single CD I ordered
continue reading.....
Posted in July 25th, 2006
All the news sites and news television channels are agog with the news of AMD acquiring ATI - one of the foremost graphics card manufacturing firms which rivals Nvidia. In the future, when one buys a PC with an AMD chipset, there is a good chance that it will have on-board graphics as powerful or even more than the graphics cards sold by ATI. This means that we need not have to buy a separate
continue reading.....
Posted in July 23rd, 2006
There was a time when it was practically impossible to buy a computer with GNU/Linux pre installed. If you wanted to run Linux, you had to install it yourselves. Almost all PC manufacturers were shipping PCs with Windows OS. And if the buyer did not want Windows, he still had to pay the full price of the machine which included the cost of Windows OS. But with Linux getting more user friendly as
continue reading.....
Posted in July 19th, 2006
Anybody who keep an eye on the happenings around the world would know by now that the Indian Government, in its drive to curtail and restrict anti-national elements from playing havoc have passed orders to all ISPs in the country to ban 22 sites which post volatile material and spread hatred. This comes in the aftermath of the dreadful bomb attack on a couple of suburban trains in Mumbai - the
continue reading.....
Posted in January 1st, 1970
This is a brief synopsis of the PVR for Linux that is MythTV. It also contain a number of useful links which help in setting up MythTV in a simple manner.
continue reading.....
Posted in January 1st, 1970
This is an elaborate review of a very good book on Google Maps and how one can use the Google Map API to integrate interactive maps with ones personal websites. For the uninitiated, Google Maps mashes up satellite telemetric data with the maps and displays it in a web browser allowing a wide degree of user interaction.
continue reading.....
Posted in January 1st, 1970
This interesting article ponders whether it is right after all to price the OS at par or even more than the hardware on which it runs. The author raises pertinent questions and wonders if it won’t be better to use a free OS such as GNU/Linux instead of spending money to buy the state of the art proprietary OS.
continue reading.....
Posted in January 1st, 1970
This interesting article gives a visual introduction to a couple of new features in the latest version of Vim (7.0). The USP of vim is that you can do everything using the keys on the keyboard and need not even touch the mouse. More over, this is a universal text editor which runs on a variety of OSes.
continue reading.....
Posted in January 1st, 1970
Ask any person who has used a computer atleast once and he will agree that fonts form a very important part of the operating system which is installed in the computer. At one time, GNU/Linux lacked good font support and any webpage viewed in a web browser was at the most lackluster.Things changed somewhat with the release of good set of fonts for GNU/Linux called Bitstream.
continue reading.....
Posted in January 1st, 1970
This is a down-to-earth review of the latest Linux offering from Debian Etch Beta 3 which optionally sports a very intuitive GUI installer. The review looks at the pros and cons of Debian Etch Beta 3
continue reading.....
Posted in January 1st, 1970
This article is a review of the latest version of FreeDOS and how it can be installed in GNU/Linux using an emulator QEmu. This informative article is replete with screenshots and makes an interesting read.
continue reading.....
Posted in January 1st, 1970
The upcoming Debian Etch is a very promising Linux distribution with all the latest versions of software included. And coupled with the Debian’s ideology, it makes a fantastic distribution. And in most cases the sound works out of the box flawlessly. But sometimes it doesn’t though and this article explains how to get sound to work in Etch when it isn’t working.
continue reading.....
Posted in January 1st, 1970
It is now in the open that Microsoft is all set to build in anti-piracy technology in the upcoming Vista OS. Assuming that Microsoft is largely successful in stopping the pirates in their track, this interesting article pursues why this could be a good thing after all for the advancement of GNU/Linux.
continue reading.....
Posted in January 1st, 1970
Quite often, we speculate about Linux grabbing a major share of the desktop PC market. But it seems the film industry are heavy users of Linux, and applications that run on Linux which include both open source and closed source custom made software. Take the popular Hollywood movie ‘Scooby Doo’ for instance. It was created at Rhythm and Hues studio and the whole movie was rendered and touched up using custom made software which ran on Linux.
continue reading.....
Posted in January 1st, 1970
This article gives a first hand take on configuring and using Xen to run multiple OSes. The software used for the purpose is the Xen LiveCD which comes with two OS images - CentOS and Debian Etch. It is remarkable that the virtualization can be demonstrated even on a machine running with just 256 MB ram. The article replete with screen shots also lists a couple of practical uses of Xen virtualization technology.
continue reading.....
Posted in January 1st, 1970
When you hear the name Slackware, you are at once transported to a world where Linux users feel more at home in setting the configurations by editing ordinary text files. In fact the credo of Slackware is to keep it as simple as possible. In popular speak, it is known by the acronym KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid).
continue reading.....
Posted in January 1st, 1970
This article gives a visual explanation of some of the new features found in Firefox ver 2.0. It also describes a sure shot way of installing Firefox on any Linux distribution.
continue reading.....
Posted in January 1st, 1970
A Content management system is a software which allows one to publish content online without being bogged down by any technical aspects. This article takes an indepth look at Drupal ver 5.0 beta and explores the pros and cons of this very popular CMS.
continue reading.....
Posted in January 1st, 1970
AptonCD is a GUI tool which allows one to create a backup of all the packages and their dependencies to a CD/DVD. This article takes a good look at this unique program which eases the lives of Debian Linux loving people who have a slow internet connection.
continue reading.....