Prakash Advani's Blog

If you are planning on buying a motherboard to run Linux, beware. Before you choose Foxconn, do check with them about this. From their article it implies that their BIOS is having code that will work perfectly fine with Windows but will crash Linux.

Read more on Digg.

Still running Firefox 2? Or worse still running IE? Time to check out the latest browser Firefox 3.

Download here.

Read more about the new features.

Still not sure ? See the download stats updated in realtime! Its a new world record of 8 million downloads within the first 24 hours!

Here are some 2007-2008 statistics on the Linux Kernel from Greg KH’s presentation.

Linux Kernel:

• 9.2 Million lines of code.
• Increases by 10% each year.
• Te core kernel is 5 percent of the code, device drivers is approximately 55 percent and the balance is architecture, networking etc.
• 4500 lines added. 1800 removed and 1500 modified per day.
• Kernel actively developed 24/7, 365 days a year.
• No more stable/unstable kernel. Earlier even numbers eg. 2.3 was for unstable and odd number eg. 2.4 was stable, this process is discontinued.
• Hierarchy system but not person dependant.
• Security updates after the release goes as x.x.x.. example, security fix for 2.6.19 go as  2.6.19.1 2.6.19.2 and so on.
• New release every 2-3 Month.
• 2399 Unique developers. 1/2 of them contributed only 1-2 patches.
• Number 1 funding comes from Amaetuers, or people who code as a hobby in the spare time
• Number 2 funding comes from Red Hat, Number 3, IBM and Number 4 Novell.

If you are more interested, see the online video (recommended) or read this article or download the presentation.

The much awaited Ubuntu 8.04 aka Hardy is finally released. Go ahead and download using your favourate bittorrent client.

Torrent links for Ubuntu.

Torrent is the most efficient way to download as it doesn’t depend on the infrastructure of the central server and each download PC also becomes a host.

If you don’t already have a torrent client and want to quickly get started, try µTorrent the smallest Bittorrent client (just 214KB) .

After hitting the 500 million download milestone, here is another feather in the cap for Firefox.

Mozilla Firefox’s share of the enterprise desktop market has reached 18 percent, according to a new Forrester report.

Read more.

There are a lot of good reasons for moving to Linux on the desktop, primary amongst them that is is more secure, it doesn’t have the virus problems that Windows has and of course you can save tons of money on licenses.For the IT department, once a Linux system is set up, it is very easy to manage and requires very little maintenance. Many IT administrator have found that they never have to attend to a Linux desktop, or reformat the machine every couple of months, or spend sleepless nights cleaning the viruses and wiping spyware.

But before you make the move, here are a few suggestions on the best practices to be followed before moving to Linux on the desktop.

1. If you are already using Microsoft Office, consider switching to open source applications on Windows first . For example, if people primarily need an Office Suite move to OpenOffice on Windows and then to OpenOffice on Linux. This will make the transition a lot easier when you move to Linux because users have more resistance while moving away from their favourite applications. They are attached to their favour Excel macro, Outlook short-cut or even their favourite game of Solitaire. Fortunately OpenOffice can run their Excel macros and provide a familiar look and feel.

Organisations have already saved a fortune by moving to OpenOffice alone. Ninety percent of users in any organisation need only ten percent of the functionality and OpenOffice today has most of the functionality an average user would use and a lot more. In fact today OpenOffice has many nice features such as export to PDF, native support for OpenDoc Format (ODF) and support for Microsoft file formats. It can also export presentations to Macromedia Flash.

In addition to the office suite, Mozilla Firefox is an excellent browser. It is the fastest growing browser, it is secure and there are lots of extensions with which you can enhance the browser for your requirements. Removing the fees for MS Office in your company and introducing open source applications is a great way to break down resistance in organisations to making the leap to Linux on the desktop.

See below for Some Open Source alternatives to popular applications

Windows Applications	Open Source Alternatives (These run on Both Windows and Linux)
MS Office	OpenOffice.org
Outlook Express	Mozilla Thunderbird
Internet Explorer	Mozilla Firefox
Photoshop	Gimp
MSN/Yahoo Messenger/ICQ Chat Client	Pidgin
Windows Media Player	VLC Media Player

2. If you are investing in new computers for new users or applications. This is good time to start directly with Linux. Particularly fixed function workstations which are only running 1-2 applications such as POS terminals, Data Entry machine, call center PCs, etc. Eliminating paying for a fullWindows license for a fixed function is an easy justifications for moving to a Linux desktop in your business.
3. A low impact way of persuading key people in the organisation to consider Linux is to ‘dual boot’ their windows machine with Linux. This is a very simple process usually and at start-up the user can choose which operating system to use. Very often, there will be some key hold-outs in any company who advocate no change. Increasing their familiarity with Linux, reassuring them that it works on standard machines and that it is compatible with their peripherals will go a long way to making the switch to Linux easier. It also offers them the reassurance of switching back to Windows should the decision not be made to go with Linux
4. Change your IT policy! When buying new applications, computers or peripherals ensure that you buy products that work well with Linux. This protects you in the future. When tomorrow you move to Linux, you aren’t stuck with legacy applications which can’t be ported.
5. And last but not the least. Invest some of the savings that you get from the licenses into training and support. This will ensure that users are more comfortable and they have access to expert support to rely on

The excellent Mozilla Firefox browser now had more than 500 million downloads! Thats excellent news and is perhaps the most popular open source application even more than Linux!

Join the celebrations:

In honor of the 500 million download mark we’re celebrating by raising 500,000,000 grains of rice in one day to help feed the world’s poor. Since we have reached the milestone, it is time to flock to freerice.com and attempt to push the days total over 1/2 billion. This is just a foreshadow to where one day Firefox will be. Food for thought, uh, better yet, Food for Lives; if we reach 500 million grains of rice, that’s a direct contribution in feeding 25,000 people for one day! Donate now, http://freerice.com

Now if only all the Indian sites can be Firefox compatible:

Related posts:

Firefox tweaks

Firefox now has 25% browser market share

Protecting yourself from phishing sites

Another reason to use Mozilla Firefox as the browser.

Freedom from Ads

HP Photosmart C4388 – Multifunction Device – Printer/Scanner/Copier

Configuring this with wireless printing and scanning Ubuntu Linux 7.10

Whats good about this printer:

Wireless Printing: So your printer/scanner need not to be physically connected to the PC/Laptop and can be anywhere on the Network.

Memory Card Reader: Remove your memory card from your digital camera, insert into the printer and print your photos directly.

LCD Display: It has a nice LCD display which displays the status.

Photo quality: The printer is designed to print photo quality prints, I haven’t compared the quality, but its a nice feature to have 🙂

Flat bed scanner: So you can scan documents and books.

Copier: You can take photocopies without using a computer. Directly like a photocopy machine.

What I don’t like:

Single colour cartridge: No separate cartridge for each colour so you need to replace the whole cartridge even if you run out of one colour. What a waste!

Also be careful when you run the printer for the first time. It takes a test print and asks you to scan the page. If you don’t wait for the ink to dry up, your scanner will have ink smudged all over! Wonder why don’t ask you to wait.

Now the meat:

Note: Please read the section on HPLIP below, before you start.

Configuring the printer on Ubuntu is a breeze. Just plug in the USB cable and the printer gets detected and configured. It uses the C4200 drivers which work fine.

To configure wireless, you need to run the setup utility the first time on Windows. This will activate the wireless printing.

Once that is done, from Linux, change the print port from USB to jetdirect and give the IP address. The printer IP address can be found through the router. Once you know the IP, just ping to check if its accessible.

If you can’t figure out the IP, you can force your router to assign a specific IP address to the MAC address and then use that IP address.

If I look into /etc/cups/printers.conf this is what I see:

DeviceURI hp:/net/Photosmart_C4380_series?ip=192.168.0.11

Where 192.168.0.11 is the Printer IP address.

HPLIP

To get the scanner working. I had to install the HP utility from HPLIP Site. This was a bit tricky to install. When it was trying to install the necessary packages, it gave me some strange errors.

Package install command failed with error: 100

To fix that I had to manually install the required packages and then it worked fine.

This utility also doesn’t work with the drivers bundled with Ubuntu and those drivers needs to be uninstalled.

Once this was installed, I was able to print and scan wirelessly!

To scan use xsane or xscanimage

Also refer to this article for more information.

When men were men and wrote their own device drivers – Linus Torvalds

Here are all the photos of the men 🙂

Kernel Summit 2007 group photo

Excellent collection of Open Source applications for design applications.

Read More

From PC World.

As Vista continues to limp toward wider adoption, Linux will make major inroads into the enterprise, as well as in government IT. At the same time, the leaner OS will become a more attractive option for home users and in consumer electronics.

From this article.

The Linux Foundation survey found that the Linux desktop has become a mainstream desktop replacement. While many businesses use Linux as a development desktop (53.3 percent), almost two-thirds (66.1 percent) use it as a client desktop. Linux is no longer just an operating system for the technically inclined.

It also is an operating system that its users have near complete trust in. Seventy-six percent believe desktop Linux is absolutely ready to for mission-critical applications, while 17.3 percent believe that desktop Linux is probably ready for even the most important business jobs.

The desktop Linuxes being used in businesses are a familiar list to DesktopLinux readers. The Ubuntu family of Linuxes, with 55.2 percent, came in on top. No. 2 was the Red Hat family Red Hat Enterprise Linux/Fedora/CentOS, with 51.3 percent. The Novell SUSE group SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop and openSUSE took third place with 32.9 percent.

So if you still haven’t considered Linux on the Desktop, now is the time to give it a hard look. If you have already tried and hitting some road blocks, write to me. I would be happy be of help.

From CIO.com

A group of die-hard OS/2 users are petitioning IBM—again—to release the operating system’s source code as open-source. The question may not be whether IBM wants to do so… but if it can. Not, I expect, that IBM will actually say this out loud.

This is definitely a good thing and I sincerely hope,  IBM can really pull this off . But I see the following challenges that IBM has:

While in talk with a senior executive at IBM, he said that OS/2 was written along with Microsoft, and that could face some legal hurdles.

Also after SCO sued IBM for putting code in Linux, the elephant is wounded. Well not exactly wounded but bruised 🙂 and they may not want to risk another litigation.

And how relevant will it be today? When Linux is gaining so much momentum on the Desktop.

If the most critical businesses can run Linux why all the other businesses can’t?

Read more on how the New York Stock Exchange is moving to Linux.

As per this article:

Open source software’s presence will increase from approximately 10 percent of key enterprise on-premise software in 2007, to between 15 percent and 20 percent by 2010.

Why is Open Source so Disruptive?

• An ability to customize and use the software code to whatever extent required and useful, and
• Reduced dependence upon software vendor technologies, license schemes, and maintenance/support requirements.

Benefits can include:

• Reduced time and costs for development;
• Improved reliability based on massive, repeated testing and tweaking; and
• An increasingly broad base of technologies and skills that effectively further reduce the costs of development, as well as the costs of maintenance, support, and associated software requirements.

Now you can save tons of money by setting up your own Home phone system using a PC, Linux, Skype and some off the shelf hardware. You can put an Old PC to some good use!

Read More.

From this article:

Market research firm ABI Research, in a late August press announcement entitled “Linux to Be the Fastest-Growing Smartphone OS over the Next 5 Years,” predicted a compound annual growth rate “in excess of 75%.” By 2012, this growth rate means that Linux will “account for nearly 31% of all smart devices in the market … representing more than 331 million cumulative shipments over the same period.”

From a PC World Article.

The Bhutan government liked its first taste of Linux so much that it has come back for seconds, releasing an updated version of its Debian-based operating system that it launched last year.

Dzongkha Debian Linux is a Debian-based Linux operating system built in and for the national language, Dzongkha. It can be easily installed on any PC or used as a Live CD.

Many people ask me if they should switch to Vista. After talking to many organisations which have tried to switch to Vista, I now know why Linux is a better option.

Organisations find that Vista’s hardware requirements is huge and you don’t get any great additional functionality so why spend so much more? The cost is not only in the software upgrades but expensive hardware upgrades. Often the PC may not be upgradable at all and would require buying a new PC.

This is a good opportunity to try Linux on the Desktop. Linux is mature on the desktop, hardware requirements are much lesser and yes now Linux too has all the eye candy that excite end users.

To know more, read this nice article: Five ways Linux is better than Vista

What common between award winning airlines such as Emirates, Singapore Airlines and Cathay Pacific Airways? They won the awards for the best in-flight entertainment system.

And guess what? Their in-flight entertainment system is powered by Linux.

Some other airline in-flight entertainment systems powers by Linux:   Qantas Airways, Delta and Continental.

These are the invisible Linux which touch people’s lives but you don’t see it.

Read More.