Prakash Advani's Blog

Ubuntu has received coverage on CNBC TV18 and CNN-IBN.

Ubuntu review

Toshiba’s Portege R835-P56x is an in-expensive light-weight laptop. Here is what is cool.

• 13.3″  at 1366 x 768 and LED Backlite
• Dual layer DVD burner
• Intel i5 (who needs more performance ?)
• 640GB hard drive
• 4 GB RAM (enough for atleast us Linux users)
• Built in webcam and microphone
• Gigabit Ethernet
• 6-Cell battery
• Ample ports: USB 2.0, USB3.0, eSata and HDMI
• Can charge USB devices even when the laptop is on sleep mode.
• Magnesium allow casing
• Multi-touch pad

Whats missing

• No bluetooth
• No SSD

Final thoughts:

This is a good laptop at this price, the price is attractive because Toshiba is planning to launch the  Portege Z830 Ultrabook in November. The Z830 will be lighter and sleeker like the Apple Air but would not be having an DVD drive.

Asus has launched the X101 Netbook. This is low cost, light weight netbook. Good for browsing on the go.

This comes with Meego, however you should be able to install Ubuntu or other Linux. May not be able to run Windows.

Here are the specs:

• Intel Atom N435 (1.33GHz)
• 10.1″ LED Backlight WSVGA (1024×600) Screen
• 8GB SSD (2.5″SATA)
• 1GB DDR3 RAM
• 0.69-Inch Thin
• 0.3M Pixel Camera
• 2 USB 2.0 Ports
• WiFi
• Bluetooth 3.0
• MicroSD card reader
• Weight: 0.92kgs
• Colours: Black, Red, White, Brown
• Battery 3 Cell
• Battery life 4 hours (claimed)

Olympus has released 3 micro four-third cameras with interchangeable lens.

First lets see what is common in them.

• All follow the micro four-third standard which give you small lenses. Being a standard which means you can switch camera body and lens providers easily.
• All the cameras are 12.3 megapixel. Which is enough for most users.
• ISO 100-12,800 which is sufficient for low light conditions.
• Inbuilt image stabilisation.
• RAW photo support.
• 3″ LCD Screen.
• Live View.
• Electronic View Finder (Optional)
• All support shutter speeds up to 1/4000
• Full HD Video support 1920×1080.
• SD/SDHC/SDXC card support
• USB 2.0
• HDMI port
• Lithium ion Rechargeable battery

While the E-P3 and E-PM1 have fixed LCD, the E-PL3 can be tilted to give you some flexibility. It’s not as flexible as some of the other cameras but it still is a nice feature to have.

The E-PM1 is also called the Pen Mini. If you are looking for a really small camera with interchangeable lens, then this is for you. However this is not the smallest in the category, the Panasonic is smaller. However the E-PM1 has built in-body image stablisation.

I have been using Quicktext as an addon for Thunderbird for a while now and find it very useful.

Recently I upgraded to Thunderbird 7 with Ubuntu 11.10. The Quicktext download doesn’t work beyond version 6. So I modified it to work with Thunderbird 7. It has been working well for me, if you want it try at your own risk.

Download Quicktext 0.9.11.1 for Thunderbird 7.

What does Quicktext offer?

Quicktext is the powerful tool to automate routine and repetitive emails. You can define actions such as Hi [FirstName], and it will pickup the first name to whom the email is addressed to. Similarly you can define templates for standard email replies. You can even define where the cursor should stop.

In June this year, Eclipse, a popular IDE, published the results of a global survey of its community, which aims to show how people are using Eclipse and other open source software (OSS), and participating in open source communities. The purpose was to create a  profile of how open source developers interact with the community. Incidentally, the Eclipse developer survey had the fourth highest number of respondents from India.

The results showed that 28 percent of developers use Linux as their primary developer workstation and Ubuntu was the most popular among them. Linux was also the most popular deployment platform with almost 42 percent deploying their applications on Linux.

The findings support the fact that Ubuntu is being increasingly used by many developers in the high tech industry. It is also popular amongst the mobile developer community. The android SDK, for example, can be easily installed on Ubuntu. Web developers also find Ubuntu very powerful as it has all the tools that they need to develop and test applications using the latest web development standards such as HTML5.

Being open source in nature means developers  get access to millions of lines of code, which can be used in any developer’s application.  However, the licensing of the application needs to be checked, as some of them may require the application to be open source  as well. Developers can also look at the source code to understand some of the applications.

So what makes Ubuntu popular among developers?

Easy to get developer tools

With Ubuntu it’s easy to get development tools, IDEs, debuggers, libraries, sources and more.  The Ubuntu Software Center or apt-get, offers a whole range of developer applications and tools with ease. Apt-get also works very well in resolving dependencies, for example if Eclipse is installed, it will install all the Java libraries, plugins and documentation required by the application automatically.

Powerful editors

Ubuntu has powerful editors which are developer friendly, offer code beautifications and syntax highlighting and code to make it easy for for developers to  read t their code. Ubuntu has easy to use editors apart from Vi and Emacs for hardcore developers.

Easy scripting

Linux has powerful scripting capabilities such as Bash, this makes it easy to automate tasks. It is very useful for  developers, because it helps save a lot of time by writing simple scripts for repetitive tasks.

Ubuntu has built-in virtualisation

Ubuntu has KVM built-in and VirtualBox, VMWare can be installed with ease. Virtualisation is a developer’s friend because it allows them to test their application on different versions of different operating systems on their workstations.

Easy integration with revision control 

Ubuntu has easy integration with code version control systems such as CVS, sub-version and Bazaar.

Ubuntu is secure and stable

Ubuntu is secure and doesn’t suffer from virus problems, this protects the developer from security worries, so they can focus on developing. Once  Ubuntu is installed, it just works.

Ubuntu is free

Users don’t need to pay any license fees for using Ubuntu, and  all the development tools on Ubuntu are also free.  These include popular ones such as Java, GCC, Python, Perl and Ruby. This saves a lot of money for the organisation. The savings are even more evident when there are lots of developers.

Eclipse a popular IDE, today is very actively developed with over 1,000 active developers, 170 companies and 200 open source projects. What started as a Java IDE, it has now become a full fledged development platform with plugins for several popular languages such as Perl, Python, C, C++ and many others.

This article was first published on Digit.