Prakash Advani's Blog

As some of you were expecting that Ubuntu 8.10 will be including OpenOffice.org 3.0, but as a matter of fact its still has OpenOffice 2.4.1. If you wish to upgrade to 3.0, check this out.

You can still go and upgrade to OpenOffice 3.0. Read the instructions in this article.

Ubuntu 8.10 just got released and here is a summary of What’s new:

• Guest Session: If your friend comes over and wants to use your laptop, you can give guest access which is completely locked down so the guest user can’t see or touch your data.
• Support for 3G data card. This becomes easy with the new Network Manager 0.7. It also makes it easy to configure Broadband connections that rely on PPPoE.
• Encrypted Private Directory. You can create an Encrypted folder and store all your confidential data there. If you ever lost your laptop, then this will ensure that someone else can’t access your data.
• BBC Content: Totem now has a plugin for BBC content which makes it easy to find and stream BBC content.
• Automated Printer Driver install. If you have a new printer, Ubuntu will find the driver automatically and install it for you.
• VM Cloning for testing. You can convert your current Ubuntu image to a VM to do any upgrades/testing. This way all your testing can happen in a VM before actually deploying.
• Kubuntu Users would find that the new release is now using KDE4.

Go here to download the ISOs or better still download the torrent: ubuntu-8.10-desktop-i386.iso.

All the Ubuntu torrents.

If you are already running a previous version of Ubuntu, you can upgrade:

Press Alt+F2, and type

update-manager -d

Now click on the Update button.

The Valley of Butterflies is situated at Rhodes Island in Greece. A popular tourist attraction, which was once full of butterflies. Now its hard to find any butterflies there. And it not just global warming, its also because of increase in number of people visiting the place.

I managed to spot one butterfly and a nice Lilly too.

OpenOffice.org released OpenOffice 3.0 which reported 3 Million downloads in the first week itself! Way to go OO!

What’s interesting is, 80 percent of the downloads were on Windows and price being the major driver since OpenOffice is both Free and free. Free as in Open Source and free as in free of cost too.

In today’s economy, I am sure cost would be a major factor which will work in favour of Open Source alternatives.

My friend Arun Khan told about this great way to improve the download speed of packages and updates for Ubuntu users.

Start Synpatic, go to Settings-Repositories.

Under Ubuntu Software tab, there is “Download from:” and next to that it will say Main Server/Server for India/etc. Click on that and select other.

Now on the right there is a button which says Select Best Server. Click on that.

Synaptic will ping all the servers, run a couple of other tests and automatically select the fastest server.

Now Click on Choose Server – Close,

You are done!, Next time you run an update or try to install any software, it will be faster.

Happy updating

Hyperdrive has the fastest photo backup solution. Just remove the memory card from your camera, pop it in and it will copy your photos to the hard drive inside.

In short its a portable hardrive with a built-in memory card reader. You can even view your photos on the LCD screen.

Read more.

The 451 Group has released a survey which says that Open Source is not a business model.

As per the survey most of the companies doing open source have a hint of proprietary software.

This is done to create a reason for customer to pay. Why would a customer pay if he/she is getting everything for free?

If you know if any pure open source companies, do write in.