Prakash Advani's Blog

Its a nice experience to get completely non-techy users to switch to Linux, specially your own folks. The main advantage is that if they often call you for computer problems then they won’t call you as often.

Hardware rarely fails, its the software which is a problem. With viruses and spyware infecting  Windows PCs all the time, switching Linux is a great choice.

Read this nice article for more reasons.

One more reason to use Linux, if you aren’t already.

From a CNet article.

“Microsoft has begun patching files on Windows XP and Vista without users’ knowledge, even when the users have turned off auto-updates.”

Wow. Updating Windows without your being aware of it? And after telling it not to? That’s what spyware does. It’s what the bad guys do. And now, it’s what Microsoft does.

There’s a saying in the computer security field that if a bad guy gets physical access to your computer, it’s not your computer anymore. If Microsoft can silently update Windows against our will, whose computer is it?

Interesting!

“The mobile wireless routers on board the company’s “Connector” employee bus system, made by Seattle-based Junxion Inc., use the open-source Linux operating system”

Read More.

There is a lot of invisible Linux that touches your life but you don’t see it, Linix powers  routers, Tivos, several other devices and services as well such as Google and Gmail as well.

One of the SUSE experts pointed out that Linux is reserving space which can be reclaimed by using the following command.

tune2fs -m0 /dev/hda5

Where /dev/hda5 is home directory.

Type mount to see which is device for the home directory.

Type df to see the free space before and after running this command.

Note: This space is been reserved so that it can be reclaimed in case of bad blocks. So reducing this may give you some free space but at the cost of some redundancy. So do this if you are running out of disk space and if your computer data is not very critical.

I have tried this on SUSE Linux and it worked, should also work on other Linux Distributions.

Want to move up in life quicker? Linux is the answer.

Read this article:  Leveraging Linux to sell yourself.

Microsoft Windows Vista is collecting all kinds of data from your computer and sending it to back Microsoft. Is anyone concern about their privacy? Read this article.

What common between high traffic Web 2.0 sites such as: Digg, Flickr, YouTube and Wikipedia? They all run Linux.

Read more and get the script if you want to verify this on your own.

15 Great open source project to watch.

Linux is already running on cellphones, laptops, desktops, servers, mainframes and even super computers! And Now  …

NASA  tests Linux for spacecraft control

Way to go!

OpenMoko is an Linux based phone which is like iPhone but half the cost. This is expected to be launched in October and is going to be fully open. In fact its also going to come with a screw driver!

Read More.

Research carried out across web sites shows Linux/Apache has less downtime and yields faster websites than Microsoft/IIS. Something we always knew and the reason why Linux is the Number 1 operating system for the Web but now data to support that.

Read More.

MovableType (also know as just MT) used to be the leading blogging software. It was very good, source code was available but wasn’t in an open source license.

When I wanted to setup a blog, everyone said use MovableType. I asked if there was anything that was under Open Source, and my friend told me there is WordPress, not as good but under GPL.

At that time the difference between WordPress and MovableType was huge. MovableType was this hugely popular blogging tool, while WordPress didn’t even had 10% of the features.

I decided to go with WordPress, even thought it didn’t have everything that I needed. I had a belief that the very fact that its open source, people will improve it and it will get better over time.

Today WordPress is hugely popular and considered to be the best and hardly anyone talks about MovableType anymore. This has now compelled Movable Type to go open source. Is that too late? Better late than never! Lets see how this goes, but for now I think WordPress rules and will continue to do so for a long time to come.

This is a list of top 10 open source applications for the enterprise users.

Read this article.

Looking for a Dreamweaver alternative that’s free, open source and runs on Linux? NVU was one such project, now there is an unofficial bug fix release. Check it out.

KompoZer

Did you know that Shrek 3 was developed on Linux? Yes and so was the original one! Read the article below for more.

DreamWorks Animation “Shrek the Third”: Linux Feeds an Ogre

Good Linux phones are finally becoming a reality..

5 Cool Linux-Powered Phones

Microsoft  want people to pirate their software, so they can get locked into their proprietary software and then they can get them to pay for it.

Microsoft business group president Jeff Raikes feels about software counterfeiters. “If they’re going to pirate somebody, we want it to be us rather than somebody else.”

Sounds like a drug peddler, you first get them addicted and then keep milking them.

Read More.

Firefox, the fastest growing browser now has 25% market share.

Way to go, Firefox.

Palm has released a mobile companion which runs Linux. Its more like a sub-notebook which is light weight and designed to do email. Palm prefers to call it a mobile companion cause they wanted something that would work seamless with their smart phones. When people use smart phones, they often find the tiny screen of the smart phone a limiting factor and Palm hopes to fill the gap with this product.

Palm recently announced that their next smart phone will be Linux based. Expected to be released the year end and I am eagerly looking forward to that!

Nice article.

Five crucial things the Linux community doesn’t understand about the average computer user