Prakash Advani's Blog

I came across an interesting article on how to  convert your Ubuntu Notebook  into a WiFi Hotspot  so that you can connect other devices to your Ubuntu Notebook for sharing the internet connectivity.

You don’t need to install any fancy software, in fact the functionality is built into Network Manager itself. Its very easy and I tried it and it works well.

Here is the article if you need.

98 percent of people surveyed out of a total of 75,000 users, confirm that they use Open Source. If you still fall under the 2 percent that doesn’t, please do the honours of telling us why.

In fact 48 percent says there is no reason not to use Open Source.

Reason for using Open Source:

• Flexibility
• Lower Cost
• Quality
• Ease to Deploy
• Source Code

Read more on TechEye.

If you wish to automatically cache all you Ubuntu/Debian updates on one computer, you can use Squid-deb-proxy. This is useful if you have multiple Ubuntu/Debian clients in your network and they all download the updates. Instead of each system connecting to the internet to get the updates, it will get the updates from the caching server.

The advantage of caching:

• Save on bandwidth
• Get updates faster
• Can be more secured, only the caching server needs to have direct internet connection.

The advantage of using this package is as follows.

• No complicated configurations
• No client configuration (just install the client)
• Gets the updates from the caching server when available and automatically switches to direct connection when caching server is not available

To install this on Ubuntu, use the Ubuntu Software Center (or using your favourite package management tool) .

Install these two packages on the system that will act as a server.

squid-deb-proxy

squid-deb-proxy-client

Install this package on each of the client systems.

squid-deb-proxy-client

Bingo, you are now ready to go. Every file that is downloaded on the client system, will also be automatically cached on the server.

squid-deb-proxy is the server. squid-deb-proxy-client is the client, which you should also install on the server, so that it caches all the updates on the server as well.

Additional notes for customising your configuration/debugging.

This folder contains all your configuration information:

/etc/squid-deb-proxy

in this folder:

This is the file where you can add additional mirrors.

mirror-dstdomain.acl

The first few times, you should monitor your logs, to ensure it is working as desired.

This folder contains all the log files.

/var/log/squid-deb-proxy

Happy Hacking! Or Should I say happy caching?

Linux powered devices are experiencing an exponential growth. E-book readers are gaining popularity because they can carry huge volumes of books, are environmental friendly and can do other things amongst being a book reader like listen to music or run apps.

I didn’t realise that so many of the popular e-book readers run Linux:

• Amazon Kindle DX
• Sony Reader PRS-900
• Spring Design Alex
• enTourage eDGe
• PocketBook 302

I find the enTourage very interesting. which is a dual screen one is e-ink based (easy for reading) and another is a LCD.

Read More.

What happens when a Taiwan ODM (Original Device Manufacturer) starts making their own phone? Result is you get good value for money, it start selling well and as a result they also get sued!

For those who came in late, ODMs are the actual manufactures of the device sold by the likes of Apple. ODMs actually make the devices and these are branded and sold by the big MNC brands.

HTC is  an ODM for many big brands. For example they manufactured the Google Nexus One for Google which is similar to HTC Desire. They have now been releasing their own phones.

They are so successful, that Apple sued them for patent infringement cause they enabled multi-touch on their phone and actually did a better job than Apple did on its iPhone.

HTC the number 1 brand as per GSMArena,  has launched some nice  phones to give customers a choice:

• HTC Wildfire
• HTCL Legend
• HTC Desire

Here is whats common between them:

• 5 Megapixel Camera
• LED Flash
• 3G with HSDPA for upto 7.2Mbps download speeds (network dependent)
• Wi-Fi
• Stereo Bluetooth
• GPS receiver
• FM Radio
• Touch screen with Multi-touch support
• Proximity sensor
• Accelerometer
• Optical Trackpad
• Flash Player
• 3.5mm standard audio jack
• Unlimited phonebook (limited by memory)
• MicroUSB
• Limitations: No front video camera for video conferencing. No Qwerty keyboard.

• All of them Run the latest Linux based Android 2.1 and are expected to be upgradable to 2.2 this quarter.

Android 2.2 will add:

• HTML 5
• Flash 10.1 support
• Faster speeds due to JIT compiler

Now here is the main difference between the three:

Features	HTC Wildfire	HTC Legend	HTC Desire
Display Type	TFT	AMOLED	AMOLED
Display Resolution	240×320	320 x 480	480 x 800
Display Size	3.2 Inches	3.2 Inches	3.7 Inches
Internal Memory	384 MB RAM	384 MB RAM	576 MB RAM
CPU	528 MHz Qualcomm	600 MHz Qualcomm	1GHz Qualcomm
Weight	118g	126g	135g
Price	$379/Rs. 15,000	$495/Rs. 21,000	$659/Rs. 26,000

The main difference between these phones are processor speeds, display quality and the price. The Legend and the Desire sports an AMOLED display which is the latest LED display, which is razor sharp.  The Desire also sports a slight larger display of 3.7 inches with the highest resolution. It also bundles a 4 GB MicroSD Memory Card. The processor speed is not so important if the OS works well and you don’t need to run too many apps simultaneously.

Here is my suggestion:

If you want an Android phone but not willing to shell out a bomb, the Wildfire is your best bet. Since the Wildfire is the latest amongst these, it also has some newer features.

If you don’t have budget constrains and wants to show off to your iPhone friends, then go in for the Desire. Its will also do justice in video playback capabilities. The Legend is ofcourse for people who want the best of both worlds: Lower cost than desire but with better display than the Wildfire.

Android has overtaken Apple OS (iPhone,itouch,iPad) to be number 2. Blackberry RIM is still Number one,  however they are quickly loosing marketshare to Android.

• RIM’s BlackBerry OS at 36 percent;
• Android at 28 percent;
• Apple iPhone OS at 21 percent.

Read more.

WordPress is scaling new heights! For those who came in late, WordPress is the best blogging platform and it open source.

You can either use their free blog service at wordpress.com or download WordPress and setup your blog on your own domain.

WordPress Vital Stats:

WordPress 2.9: 10.3 Million Downloads

WordPress 3.0: The recently released version has already reached 3 Million downloads.

Number of WordPress Plugins: 10,000

WordPress Plugins downloaded: 100 Million

Google Search results: 202 Million results

Now those are huge numbers for a software which is primarily hosted and is not a client application.

BtrFS is the newest filesystem for Linux. Its is likely to replace ext4 at some point of time. Ubuntu 10.10 will include this in October this year.

Here is what is interesting about it.

• Compression on the fly. If you remember Stacker days when you could double your disk space without buying a new disk, you would know what I am talking about. BtrFS now brings on the fly compression to Linux file system.
• Easy resizing: Today if you want to resize your partition, you have to take a backup, shutdown, use gparted and cross your fingers/prey everything works well. With BtrFS, you will be able to resize any time even when you are using the file system.
• Snapshot backups, you can take snapshots of an existing file system when can be restored any time to go back to the same state.
• Checksum support for protection against crashes.
• Better performance, specially on SSD drives.

Phoronix has done a stress test by comparing Btrfs with ext4 with on this and published the results. Btrfs with compression gave best results in most tests.

If you want to build a Media Center PC to play your movies, music and photos on a high definition TV. Here is a simple way to build so.

Step 1

First get the tiny Zotac Media Center PC.

Step 2

Install Ubuntu, which is very easy just download from Ubuntu.com and follow the simple instructions. You can install via CD or bootable USB pen drive which is faster.

Step 3

After you install Ubuntu, install XBMC. XBMC (XBox Media Center)  is the coolest media center on Ubuntu.

Following  these steps:

Go to Accessories – Terminal.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc

It will ask for your password, once that is done, close the Window.

Then go to system-administration-synpatic

Search for “xbmc” (without quotes).

Check this package, select mark for installation and then click Apply. It will now install this package.

After that go to Applications-Sound and Video-XBMC.

If you want to try XBMC on a regular Ubuntu system follow step 3.

If you are a bit more adventurous, these are things you can try.

1. Buy a Zotac board and build your own box, here you can add blueray disk or a 3.5″ 2 TB hard drive. The Zotac PC supports only a 2.5″disk, so you are limited to lower capacities.

2. Add a remote control.

3. Made XBMC your default window manager.

Nice you tube video.

Zotac with Ubuntu

If you want to figure out where all your bandwidth is getting used, without bothering with Networking, protocols and IP addresses try Etherape.

Etherape provides an easy to understand graph of all your network traffic in real time. This is how it works.

• It shows all your IPs/computers on your network.
• The more the traffic the thicker the connection gets between the IPs.
• It uses colour codes to denote the type of traffic on your network.

You can change to different network interfaces from capture interfaces. For best results run this on your internet gateway.

Not sure, how many people already know or realise that most of the cellphones sold today are based on Open Source.

• Android is the fastest growing Operating System for phones is based on Linux.
• Nokia’s N900 platform runs Linux too.
• Palm’s (now acquired by HP) WebOS is based on Linux too.
• Symbian the most popular phone operating system is now Open Source.
• iPhone is based on a BSD kernel which is also Open Source.

Is there still room for proprietary operating systems?

Buffalo Technology which makes good WiFi routers has decided to use open source firmware. Instead of their own firmware, they are going to be using DD-WRT instead.

DD-WRT is open source and has host of features, which are normally not found in WiFi Routers. DD-WRT also has open firmware for many other routers too. Her are some of the features:

• VPN (PPTP, OpenVPN)
• VLAN (tagging)
• Virtual AP (multi-SSIDs for multi-connection and security)
• RADIUS server
• Hot spot support
• Volume quotas
• IPv6 support
• Detailed monitoring and
• A host of other high-end features

Way to go Buffalo! Hope to see more hardware vendors using open firmware.

McLaughlin, a Certified Information Systems Security Professional and CIO of CNL Bank is  sending Ubuntu bootable live CD to its customesr, this disks will boot into Ubuntu, start Firefox and go straight to the banking website. He believes that desktop computers running Windows are highly vulnerable and this is the best option available.

Read the complete article: Can Ubuntu save online banking?

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.

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.

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.

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 🙂

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!

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.

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.