Prakash Advani's Blog » Linux

Mozilla Thunderbird 3 rocks

Prakash — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 13:59:04 +0000

I have been using Thunderbird 2 for more than 2 years now, I recently upgraded to Thunderbird 3 and found it very well designed. Here is what I liked:

Has an attachment reminder, so if you write “please see the attached… ” and then forgot to attach, it reminds you. Neat!
Tabbed emails. Used to tabbed browsing? welcome to tabbed email. Allows you to open emails and mail folders into different tabs.
Powerful search. You can type a search string, and it will find that string in inbox, sent box, subject. This is quite useful if you are looking for something but don’t know where it could be.
It also has smart folders and and archive folders.
Addon manager to manage all your addons.

Here is a complete list of features.

Ubuntu 10.04 scheduled to be released on April 29,2010 already bundles Thunderbird 3.

For Ubuntu 9.10, there are ready packages available. To Install Thunderbird 3 on Ubuntu 9.10 read this documentation on how to add the repository.

Use this link to Download Thunderbird for Windows, Mac and Linux.

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Linus Torvalds ditches iPhone for Android based Google Nexus

Prakash — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 06:08:24 +0000

Linus Torvalds has purchased a Google Android based Nexus One cellphone.

But I have to admit, the Nexus One is a winner. I wasn’t enthusiastic about buying a phone on the internet sight unseen, but the day it was reported that it finally had the pinch-to-zoom thing enabled, I decided to take the plunge. I’ve wanted to have a GPS unit for my car anyway, and I thought that google navigation might finally make a phone useful.

Read 10 reasons why eWeek believes that it could affect iPhone Sales.

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OpenOffice Marketshare India and other countries

Prakash — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 19:23:56 +0000

WebmasterPro has an interesting way to calculate the percentage of people using OpenOffice.

Poland & Czech Republic lead in OO usage and have 22 percent people using OpenOffice.

Germany 21 percent and France 19.

UK/US at 9 percent.

India is low at 5 percent.

See more at WebMasterPro.

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Avatar was created on Ubuntu

Prakash — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 18:12:09 +0000

What common between Avtar, King Kong, Lord of the Rings, Fantastic Four, X-Men, i-Robot? They were all created at Weta Digital in New Zealand.

Now some vital stats:

2 Petabyte disk array
10gbps networking
10 TB Ram
35,000 cores (4,000+ blades)
Ubuntu

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Symbian goes Open Source

Prakash — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 11:00:18 +0000

After Google Android, now Symbian has decided to go Open Source. Since Android is Linux based and this had a good chance of Linux becoming the de facto operating system in Cellphone too. So Symbian reacted and released all its source code too, in the hope that their customers don’t switch to Linux and they are able to retain their 46 percent market share in smartphones.

It remains to be seen weather cellphone manufacturers decide to use Linux or continue to use Symbian, however this is great news as Symbian as this will only improve Symbian. Expect stability improvements, as more people can now see the bugs.

Get the code, if you interested. And yes you can use the code to build your own phone without any licensing costs.

Is there still a market for proprietary operating systems? The game is changing and this will create enough competition for Apple/Microsoft to release their code. Show me the code!

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Skype to go Open Source

Prakash — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 09:16:55 +0000

This is awesome News.

Skype is planning to open source its Linux client.

The current Skype client on Linux is functional but buggy and it lags behind the Windows version in terms of features.

Now if Skype opens up, it will make the client development go faster, people will be able to fix bugs faster and add more feature.

Waiting for this to happen.

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AWN Manager – Mac OSX like dock for Ubuntu

Prakash — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 05:13:03 +0000

I installed AWN Manager on Ubuntu, following the instructions here.

Here is what I liked.

It looks cool
Can auto-hide, giving you more desktop real estate.
Has cool applets like fortune which I enjoy reading and reminds me of bash days.

What I didn’t like

It crops up when you don’t want it to.
A little buggy, it doesn’t show when you want it to! and sometimes the icons goes missing, a refreshing of the screen fixing this issue.

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Ubuntu vs Windows Hardware Requirements

Prakash — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 04:53:17 +0000

I compared the hardware requirements of a popular Linux Desktop: Ubuntu 9.10 with Windows 7 both of which were released last month.

Hardware	Windows 7	Ubuntu 9.10
RAM (MB)	1024 MB	256 MB
Processor (MHz)	1000 MHz	300 MHz
Disk Space (MB)	16 GB	4 GB

Ubuntu 9.10 remained a modest 265MB memory with 300MHz computer. Also Ubuntu can run on lesser hardware as well, if you have 128MB Memory, you can still use Xbuntu (a variant), or if you have 64 MB you can use LTSP and run Ubuntu off a central server.

Now Windows 7 demands 1GB Memory with 1GHz computer.

While Windows 7 required 16GB of space to install, Ubuntu can be installed on on less than 4 GB of space.

Some people may argue that hardware is getting cheaper by the day, however there are millions of PCs around in the world which won’t be able to run Windows without an upgrade. If the use Ubuntu, they will save on upgrade costs and hurt the environment less by not having to throw away their old computer.

Some interesting findings: Ubuntu’s hardware requirements has not changed in the last 8 releases over the last 4 years.

Even thought Vista Basic claimed that it requires 512MB RAM and Vista Business claimed 1GB. Both crawled on 1GB of RAM and required 2GB to run effectively with 15GB of disk space.

Sources:

Ubuntu Release Notes
Windows 7 System requirements.
Windows Vista System requirements.

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Plug Computing is a very interesting

Prakash — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 04:39:49 +0000

What’s a plug computer?

Small ARM Based Computer
Runs Linux and other OS: Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo and FreeBSD
Consumes just 2 watts of power
Can be kept always on to run those long nightly downloads such as Torrents
Can you used for any application that requires an always on computer
Access through browser or shell
Has USB, Ethernet and SD Card.
And yes costs $99

More photos

For more information check plugcomputer.org

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Open Networking alternative to Cisco

Prakash — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 06:28:54 +0000

Vyatta is providing a Linux based Networking routers and equipments to compete with Cisco. All their software is open source and they have very competitive pricing. Seem to also have an impressive customer list so far including Toyota, Rackspace and Boeing. Related posts:Infosys to contribute to Open Source The currently global economy seems to be getting [...] Related posts:

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