Prakash Advani's Blog

Right after CES, Asus has announced a 7″ Tablet for US$ 150 called MemoPad. Here are the features.

• 1 GHz Single core processor: Wondermedia WM8950 (VIA)
• 1 GB RAM
• 7″ Screen with 1024×600 screen
• 16 GB memory with SD card slot
• MicroUSB
• WiFi Only

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Root Transmission: the ONLY app that allows you to root other phones straight from your own device!

Inspired by Kos’s p2p-adb hacking toolkit (http://hak5.org/episodes/hak5-1205), this app is a pleasant, easy way to root other phones while away from your computer! Just two buttons, Root and Unroot! Connect the cable and root away! It couldn’t be simpler!

Even has its own terminal window so you can see exactly what’s going on while your phone does its thing!

You will need a ROOTED device capable of USB hosting (USB On The Go), a USB OTG cable and one-click root scripts for the devices you wish to root.

Get it here.

The Lego Mindstorms EV3 is the first major revamp of the Lego Group’s programmable robot kit since 2006, and the first to run embedded Linux.

Unveiled at the CES Show in Las Vegas yesterday, with the first public demos starting today at the Kids Play Summit at the Venetian Hotel, the $350 robot is built around an upgraded “Intelligent Brick” computer. Lego swapped out the previous microcontroller for a 300MHz ARM9 processor capable of running new Linux-based firmware. As a result, the kids-oriented Mindstorms EV3 offers far more programmability than the NXT series, which was last updated in 2009, says Lego.

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Netflix is at it again, this time showing off its homemade architecture for running Hadoop workloads in the Amazon Web Services cloud. It’s all about the flexibility of being able to run, manage and access multiple clusters while eliminating as many barriers as possible.

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Samsung announced an 8 core! yes an 8 core ARM processor which may power the Samsung Galaxy S4

Rather than a single eight-core chip, it has two quad-cores inside – one being a quad-core ARM Cortex A15 and the other a quad-core Cortex A7. The Cortex A15 deals with the tough stuff but passes off the easy tasks to the Cortex A7, or they can both be fired up to really show off. This means it’s strong enough to provide all the power you may need, while at the same time being smart enough to conserve energy when it can. If you’re wondering just how much difference the Exynos 5 Octa and other big.LITTLE chips will make when used in a device, ARM’s CEO Warren East said he expects “twice the performance and half the power consumption” compared to today’s best offerings.

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Just when you thought, notebooks were dead and tablets where the future. Samsung has released the Chromebook, which may appeal to a new category of users. This product was the best sell on Amazon for Christmas.

I have been looking at light mobile devices which I can carry instead of a full fledged laptop, and I haven’t found one so far that meets my requirements. I need something which is light weight and has a good battery life. Essentially looking for something which can do Email and take meeting notes with presentations sometimes. Tried a tablet, but missed a proper keyboard. Besides I also wanted it to run Ubuntu, Thunderbird. Lets see if the Chromebook fit the bill ?

Here is what I liked about it.

• Extremely light weight, 1.1 Kgs or 2.5 pounds
• Dual Core ARM A15 processor (Samsung Exynos 5 Dual) gives better performance than Intel Atom.
• 0.8 inch fan-less design
• HDMI port and HD video playback
• USB 3.0 and USB 2.0
• Dual band WiFi
• SD Card slot
• 6.5 hours battery life, my Intel based laptop gives 2 hours battery life on a 6 cell battery. This one claims 6 hours with a 2 Cell!
• 100 GB space for 2 years on Google Drive.
• Yes you can run Ubuntu, however has some issues.
• Good value for its price of US$250, 3G is for $330.

What I don’t like.

Has only 16GB storage, although you get 100 GB of google drive free

Hope it had a full fledged OS like Ubuntu, which allows you to run more offline applications. This device is designed in such a way thats it’s always connected.

ChrUbuntu: Ubuntu for Chromebook.

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The team behind the Samba file, print, and authentication server suite for Microsoft Windows clients announced the release of Samba version 4 yesterday. This version includes significant new capabilities that offer an open source replacement for many enterprise infrastructure roles currently delivered exclusively by Microsoft software, including acting as a domain controller, providing SMB2.1 protocol support, delivering clustering, and offering a virtual filesystem (VFS) interface. It comes with Coverity security certification and easy upgrade scripts. The release notes include details of all changes.

Notably, this includes the first open source implementation of Microsoft’s Active Directory protocols; Samba previously only offered Windows NT domain controller functions. According to the press release, “Samba 4.0 provides everything needed to serve as an Active Directory Compatible Domain Controller for all versions of Microsoft Windows clients currently supported by Microsoft, including the recently released Windows 8.”

Samba 4 can join existing Active Directory domains and provides all necessary function to host a domain that can be joined by Microsoft Active Directory servers. It provides all the services needed by Microsoft Exchange, as well as opening up the possibility of fully open source alternatives to Exchange such as the OpenChange project.

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While ARM is gaining a lot of momentum, the challenge with ARM until now was that every architecture is very different from different vendors and requires a separate kernel and entire OS stack.

With Linux Kernel 3.7, this has changed for the better.

ARM’s problem was that, unlike the x86 architecture, where one Linux kernel could run on almost any PC or server, almost every ARM system required its own customized Linux kernel. Now with 3.7, ARM architectures can use one single vanilla Linux kernel while keeping their special device sauce in device trees.

The end result is that ARM developers will be able to boot and run Linux on their devices and then worry about getting all the extras to work. This will save them, and the Linux kernel developers, a great deal of time and trouble.

Just as good for those ARM architects and programmers who are working on high-end, 64-bit ARM systems, Linux now supports 64-bit ARM processors. 64-bit ARM CPUs won’t ship until in commercial quantities until 2013. When they do arrive though programmers eager to try 64-bit ARM processors on servers will have Linux ready for them.

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From PC World.

Ubuntu is a widely popular open-source Linux distribution with eight years of maturity under its belt, and more than 20 million users. Of the roughly 5 percent of desktop OSs accounted for by Linux, at least one survey suggests that about half are Ubuntu. (Windows, meanwhile, accounts for about 84 percent.)

The timing of this latest Ubuntu release couldn’t be better for Windows users faced with the paradigm-busting Windows 8 and the big decision of whether to take the plunge.

Initial uptake of Windows 8 has been unenthusiastic, according to reports, and a full 80 percent of businesses will never adopt it, Gartner predicts. As a result, Microsoft’s big gamble may be desktop Linux’s big opportunity.

So, now that Canonical has thrown down the gauntlet, let’s take a closer look at Ubuntu 12.10 to see how it compares with Windows 8 from a business user’s perspective.

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Over €10 million (approximately £8 million or $12.8 million) has been saved by the city of Munich, thanks to its development and use of the city’s own Linux platform. The calculation of savings follows a question by the city council’s independent Free Voters (Freie Wähler) group,

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Urge your city to save money from taxes, its your hard earned money.

Apple may be considering switching from Intel processors to ARM chips used in iPhones and iPads for its range of Mac personal computers, said a media report. Published in Bloomberg, the report cited three anonymous sources who said Apple believes that the processors used in its mobile devices will be robust enough to power its line of computers. Intel chips have been used in Mac computers since 2005, while ARM’s processors have been used in iPhones and iPads since their respective launches in 2007 and 2010.

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After installing Ubuntu 12.10, the first thing I wanted to do, was to disable reverse scrolling – you scroll down and it scrolls up! This is also called natural scrolling by Apple. Don’t know what is natural about it 🙂 but may be natural for Apple users.

Open the terminal and edit this file using any editor and edit the .Xmodmap in your home directory for example:

 gedit .Xmodmap

Here you would seet his:

pointer = 1 2 3 5 4  6 7 8 9 10 11 12

You would note that in the sequence of numbers 5 and 4 are interchanged. Change it back to the sequence..

pointer = 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Now you are done, logging out and in should do the job.

If you have Ubuntu Tweak installed. Just go to Tweaks-Miscellaneous and you would see an option to toggle Natural Scrolling on/off.

At Netflix we need to be able to quickly query and analyze our AWS resources with widely varying search criteria. For instance, if we see a host with an EC2 hostname that is causing problems on one of our API servers then we need to find out what that host is and what team is responsible, Edda allows us to do this.

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HTC has upgraded the One X with One X+

• It now has a 1.7 GHZ quad-core processor
• 64 GB Memory
• 2100 mAh battery to give you upto 50% more usage

If you are using HTC One X, then there is not much for you. If you are planning on buying the HTC One X, you should buy the One X+

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Google Nexus range has announced the Nexus 10 which beats the iPad 4 in display resolution, where is what is cool:

• Dual Core 1.7 GHz processor vs iPads 1.4 GHz Dual Core
• 2GB RAM vs 1GB on ipad 4
• Display resolution: 2560X1600 300 PPI vs 264PPI of iPad
• 10″ Display vs iPad’s 9.7″
• Weight 603gms vs iPad’s 662 grams
• 8.9mm thickness verses iPads 9.4mm
• 5MP camera with 1.9 MP rear camera
• WiFi
• Pricing start at $399 vs $499 for iPad

Google is claiming this to be highest resolution tablet in the world. This model is WiFi only model, if you need 3G, you need to wait for the 3G model to get released.

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Ubuntu 12.10 is here. With this release there is no CD image only DVD image which is 800 MB in size. Torrent is preferred method for me.

Have fun 🙂

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• Quad-core 1.5GHz Snapdragon S4 CPU
• 2GB of RAM
• 4.7″ Display
• Sealed battery which can’t be changed or replaced.
• 8GB  or 16 GB of internal storage (which won’t be expandable as no microSD slot)
• Price of US$ 399 (no contract or locked)

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Developed in conjunction with the Stanford Mobile Inquiry-based Learning Environment (SMILE) program, the SMILE Plug is a cloud computing server that supports a wide array of SMILE learning applications.  the SMILE Plug creates a micro-cloud within a classroom that is controlled by the instructor, creating a secure, private, and robust classroom connection for up to 60 student

Key Features.

• Price  US$30
• Wi-Fi support for 60 clients creates a classroom micro-cloud for up to 60 students
• Easy Deployment and management means simple plug and device pairing for teachers
• Optional rechargeable battery back-up, this is ideal for situations where the electrical power source is inconsistent
• An open platform, which makes it ideal for developing or porting any additional learning applications
• SMILE Server provides access to more open source SMILE learning applications
• High-performance with low power, ideal for always-on computing tasks
• Debug support via external debug board

Specifications

•  512MB of RAM
• 512 MB onboard storage
• 2GHz single-core Armada 370 SoC
• 802.11 a/b/g/n Avastar WiFi chip
• 2 Gigabit Ethernet ports
• 2 USB 2.0
• microSD slot
• Linux based

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Boris Renski is co-founder of OpenStack integration consultancy Mirantis and he says every enterprise he’s worked with so far has been interested in OpenStack because they view it as an alternative to VMware. The board’s vote earlier this month has now muddled the differences, he says. “If OpenStack isn’t an alternative to VMware, then what the hell is it?” Renski says.

VMware’s entrance into OpenStack has been part of a whirlwind of news during the past few months for the virtualization company and Renksi’s comments may reflect some tension between the two camps.

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An IHS report has estimated that 10.3 million Ultrabooks shipped (not sold) worldwide in 2012, a considerably change from their original forecast of 22 million sold this year. 2013 should be OK, though, right? Wrong. IHS is expecting sales of 44 million in 2013, down from a forecast of 61 million.

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