Prakash Advani's Blog

Mashable has a nice infographic on how Cloud Computing has changed businesses.

Recently published postcast on Ubuntu Cloud. This was recorded at Intel Cloud Summit.

Conversations in the Cloud.

Direct link to the pod cast.

If you want to test drive your own private cloud, try Ubuntu Cloud Live. It’s a 600 MB image, just download, burn to USB drive, boot your system with it and you have a cloud setup.

Download the image from here:

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-cloud-live/releases/11.10/ubuntu-11.10-cloud-live-amd64.img

Note: This is a 64-bit mage.

Recommended to have atleast a 4GB pen drive.

Use the ‘dd’ command to copy the image over to your USB drive. For example, if your USB drive is connected to /dev/sdb,  then run `dd if=ubuntu-11.10-cloud-live-amd64.img of=/dev/sdb`. WARNING: THIS COMMAND WILL ERASE ALL DATA PREVIOUSLY STORED ON THE TARGET DEVICE. MAKE SURE YOU HAVE THE CORRECT DEVICE WHEN FLASHING.

Have fun

Ubuntu 11.10, code named Oneiric Ocelot,  is now available. It has loads of new functions, which puts other operating systems to shame! Here are a few cool features of this new release.

Touch support

The new Unity interface works well with mouse, keyboard and even touch. The dash allows you to quickly search for files, music, applications and everything in your computer. The launcher allows you to quickly launch your commonly used applications. The ‘must-have’ feature for music lovers is the Music Lens, which allows you to browse and find your music on your computer quickly and easily. You can sort music in folders by author, album or song wise. Similarly any new lenses or filters can be developed to have a multidimensional view of your data.

Mozilla Thunderbird is now the default email application, which happens to also be my favourite. Thunderbird supports all email standards and can manage thousands of emails in a breeze. It also has very good filters to quickly search through your emails.

Firefox 7 is the default browser. Firefox has seen vast improvements over its earlier versions and is now faster and has a much lower memory footprint. For people who prefer other browsers such as Chrome/Chromium, they can easily install those from the Ubuntu Software Centre. Skype, Flash, Acrobat and other popular applications can also be installed from there too.

The Ubuntu Software Centre is your place to install new applications, both free and paid for. With this release it also has application ratings, which makes it easy for you to decide which application to install. The Software Centre has a large collection of applications from education, games, science to development tools and more.

Ubuntu goes social

Ubuntu’s best kept secret is social networking. The Empathy IM client allows you to chat with your Facebook friends as well as integrates the usual suspects such as Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, Windows Live (MSN), Jabber, ICQ and many others. The Gwibber social networking client collates all of your social messages from Facebook and Twitter. This is integrated with your desktop, so you can see your updates. You can also post your own updates straight from Gwibber.

With Shotwell, you can easily manage your photos, crop them, edit them and publish them on Flickr, Picasa or Facebook. OpenShot Video Editor makes it easy to edit, clip and resize your videos. It supports many effects and file formats. 3D has attracted the attention of OpenShot developers and they have enabled the functionality to add 3D animated titles to your videos.

Data backup

Data back up is also a key feature in Ubuntu 11.10, and you realise how important it is when you don’t back up and lose data! To make your backup activity easy, Ubuntu bundles Ubuntu One which can automatically backup all the files to the cloud. If you need external backup, you have Déjà Dup, which means you can backup to external media.

Ubuntu One gives you 5GB of free online storage, it can synchronise your data between Ubuntu PCs as well as Windows. It also has clients for iOS (iPhone and iPad) and Android so you can access your files on the go. Ubuntu One mobile client also gives you an option to backup your photos automatically. For example if you take a photo on your mobile, it would get backed up automatically to the cloud. It also allows you to stream your music to your mobile device. If you have tons of music and don’t want to carry all of it with you, you can keep it on Ubuntu One and stream it to your mobile phone when you want to listen to them.

This article was first published on Digit.

Zotac has come up with even smaller media center the ZOTAC ZBOX nano AD10.

Its a palm size full fledged computer which can be used for computing or can be tucked behind your TV and be a media center. It has limited expandability unlike a PC but still every possible port that you may need.

Here is the config:

• AMD Fusion processor: Dual Core 1.6 GHz
• DDR3 Expandable memory (1 slot)
• WiFi
• Bluetooth 3.0
• 2.5″ hard rive bay (laptop hard drives)
• USB IR receiver  and remote control

Ports:

• Gigabit Ethernet
• 2 USB 3.0, 1 USB 2.0
• HDMI
• Display port
• eSATA
• IR for remote control

Ships with USB IR receiver  and remote control to build your media center as well as WiFi Antenna and VESA mount so it can be mounted behind Monitors or TVs.  The Nano doesn’t ship with memory or hard drive, you need to add that on your own. If you don’t want the hassle of installing it yourself, go for the Nano Plus. It doesn’t come with an OS, you can install Ubuntu  + XBMC and build your media center.