sudo apt-get install 915resolution

(if it can’t find it, you need to type this in and remove the “#” from in front of all the addresses that are listed at the end of each paragraph, save and close)

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list 

restart the machine.  When you get back to the login page, you’ll notice the logo is round…no more headaches!

While you’re at it, Skype has an install for just about any distro, so head on over and pick up Skype too!

You can easily make these two applications automatically sign in when you log on.  Click System > Preferences > Sessions.  Click the ‘Startup Programs’ tab.  Click ‘add’, type the word ‘gaim’ (no quotes) and click OK.  Now click ‘add’ and type the word ‘skype’ (no quotes) and click OK.  Click ‘close’ and you’re done!

For someone who is used to the ‘Network Connections’ folder in Windows, networking in Ubuntu isn’t fun. I worked on trying to connect to my home wireless network for about 90 minutes before I found the right combination of settings on Google that let me get online with WPA, and made it easy to manage multiple networks. For anyone who needs to admin several networks, this is a mandatory feature that Edgy doesn’t natively have.

Here’s how to get a very easy-to-use networking utility in Edgy:

• Connect to the internet via the RJ45 (ethernet) port with a wire. Make sure you can get to Google, etc.
• Click Applications > Accessories > Terminal (don’t get scared)
• type the following and hit enter
  • sudo apt-get
• enter your password and hit enter
• now copy and paste the following block into the terminal window and hit enter. (Note: if it says it can’t find the packages, type in ‘sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list’, remove the “#” from the addresses at the end of each paragraph, save and close)
  • sudo apt-get install wpasupplicant
    sudo apt-get install network-manager-gnome network-manager
    sudo gedit /etc/network/interfaces
    (press enter to make the last one go)
• a file is now open. get rid of anything that doesn’t have ‘lo’ in it. Save and close.
• Enter this into the Terminal:
  • sudo gedit /etc/default/wpasupplicant

  a file is now open. Type in:

  • ENABLED=0
• Save and close.
• Paste this block into the Terminal. The machine will restart. Don’t forget to come back!
  • sudo touch /etc/default/wpasupplicant
    sudo reboot
    (press enter)

OK, so now you’ve got two icons in the top bar, one is the old ‘two monitors’, and the new ‘bars’ icon. Right-click the ‘two monitors’ one and remove it, you won’t need it. Now left-click the bars and configure your networks!

modified from DebianAdmin

Also,  if you’re a network or server administrator, and you want to use the machine names to remote into servers, you’ll notice it doesn’t work in Ubuntu.  WINS isn’t enabled by default.  Luckily, it’s simple to fix. Open up the Terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and type this in:

sudo gedit /etc/nsswitch.conf

Where it says ‘hosts: files dns’, add “wins” on, so it says ‘hosts: files dns wins’.  Save and close.

Now give the terminal a:

sudo apt-get install winbind

You should be able to connect via machine name now!  I find this a lot easier than asking people to look up their IP address, we name our machines by asset tag, which makes remote administration a snap!

The extension is still very early in development and needs more effort to further its progress. However, it could go a long way to help the spread of ODF. Currently it handles OpenDocument text files, in the future it will handle the other types too. It is released under the LGPL/GPL. This ODFReader Firefox extension makes use of an XSL file.

]]> http://blog.geeklimit.com/2006/11/06/odfreader-firefox-extension-for-reading-opendocument-files/feed/ 1 http://blog.geeklimit.com/2006/09/26/top-ten-torrent-sites/ http://blog.geeklimit.com/2006/09/26/top-ten-torrent-sites/#comments Tue, 26 Sep 2006 06:16:02 +0000 taoski http://geeklimit.com/2006/09/26/top-ten-torrent-sites/ Renald Ebert has done an excellent comparison of the top 10 most used BitTorrent sites on the Internet.

• BTJunkie
  
• BitTorrent.com
• Bushtorrent & Torrentreactor
• isoHunt
• Meganova
• Mininova
• The Pirate Bay
• Torrent Portal
• TorrentSpy
• Torrentz

As the best of them all, he chooses BTJunkie (which I have discovered and started using recently) due to the large number of torrents indexed and added each day.

You can read his report, complete with pretty graphs, over at his blog page, CompareBT

So I decided to look elsewhere, and an application that complies with SIP. The answer for me lies with Gizmo Project, which has an excellent VoIP client, supporting Linux as well as Windows and Mac. The only major thing that lacks for the time being is the mobile platform support, which I would love to see in future being developed and released, as I am currently running Skype on my HP hw6510 communicator. The exception being the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet support.

Gizmo is based on common principles for VoIP clients, using your internet connection to make calls to other computers. And now with Gizmo the new All Calls Free plan makes calls FREE between registered, active Gizmo Project users in 60 countries around the world. I was really happy to see that Russia is supported for landlines as well as mobiles, but sad to not notice India in the list. I guess the reason lies with the rules in Indian telecommunication industry, regulated by DoT. Another feature missing is the Video support, which latest Skype has, but for me it’s not the main criterion.

When I tried installing Gizmo around six months ago on SUSE 10, I wasn’t able to run it for some strange reason. After noticing an info on Gizmo from Moosy’s blog, with little tip, I was able to install Gizmo flawlessly on SUSE 10.1 using the OSS library provided by Gizmo Project. Unfortunately, with ALSA I had problems. Here are simple steps that you need to follow for Gizmo to be up and running on SUSE 10.1

I am running SUSE 10.1 x86_64 platform, with Gizmo 1.0.0.18 being the latest available version.

1. Go to download section and download two files provided specifically for openSUSE distribution

• libsipphoneapi – the OSS version
• gizmo-project – the client itself

2. Install the following required dependencies from SUSE repositories or CD/DVD

• expat
• expat-32bit
• openssl-devel
• openssl-devel-32bit
• curl-devel

3. Now we need to create a soft link to libexpat.so.0 in /usr/lib/ folder

# cd /usr/lib/

# ln -s /usr/lib/libexpat.so.1 libexpat.so.0

4. Once the above mentioned dependencies are installed, install the downloaded files from Gizmo project

# rpm -ivh libsipphoneapi-oss-0.78.20060112-1.suse.i586.rpm

# rpm -ivh gizmo-project-1.0.0.18-1.suse.i586.rpm

That’s it. Now you will find a shortcut to your Gizmo application in your KDE -> Internet menu. Once launched, register a new user, or if you are already registered, log-in using your username and password. One small problem I noticed while registering was that I wasn’t able to register with username specified as EazyVG, which I usually use, and intead had to use longer EazyVGSip as username.

I know there are more SIP compliant clients available, such as openwengo, but for the time being I will settle with Gizmo and hope to see better support for Linux users from them.

Hope you will find this small review and Howto helpful. Be sure to check out our new All Calls Free calling plan, and if you want you can call me on my mobile @ +seven ninetwosix threefivenine doubleseven doublesix.

Enjoy and tnx to Moosy blog for the tip

3 browsers in the same year get major updates … which one you are using and planning to use, is the question.

- Ziff Davis

Big changes have or are about to occur in three well-known browsers: Internet Explorer is finally being updated, with version 7 in its third beta and almost ready to roll out the door; Firefox is also ripening an upgrade beta for its Version 2.0—it’s in beta 1; and finally Opera, which has a devoted but smaller following, has recently come out with Version 9.0.

Related: A first look on Firefox 2 Beta from MacWorld and a review on Opera 9 from Ravi. Don’t ask me to look for review on IE7 … guess you know why. ]]> http://blog.geeklimit.com/2006/07/20/which-of-newer-browsers-is-a-better-choice/feed/ 16 http://blog.geeklimit.com/2006/06/29/now-free-x1-enterprise-desktop-search/ http://blog.geeklimit.com/2006/06/29/now-free-x1-enterprise-desktop-search/#comments Thu, 29 Jun 2006 19:52:25 +0000 E@zyVG http://geeklimit.com/2006/06/29/now-free-x1-enterprise-desktop-search/ Time for Windows users to rejoice!

X1 Technologies has released its X1 Enterprise Client (formerly X1 Desktop Edition), previously $US75, for free download.

X1 Enterprise Client is a full-featured desktop search application aimed at organisations and enterprise use, with a focus on information security.

It indexes an extraordinary 370 file types including many not generally supported in desktop search apps, such as Adobe Indesign, Microsoft Access databases, vcard files, and more. It also has support for all the regular formats and programs you’d expect: emails, files, documents, attachments, pictures, music files, tasks, and calendar items.

One of the slickest features of this desktop search tool is its ability to preview almost any file type immediately on search.

X1 has close ties with Yahoo. In fact Yahoo Desktop Search is a stripped-down, Yahoo-branded version of X1, with some bundled indexing of Yahoo web services. The company has made the Enterprise Client free of charge thanks to an ad-revenue sharing deal with Yahoo.

This new release is freely available from X1 Technologies’ website.

Give it a try and compare it to other good desktop search utilities, such as the famous Google Desktop, and later let us know your thoughts on it by posting your comments below.

]]> http://blog.geeklimit.com/2006/06/29/now-free-x1-enterprise-desktop-search/feed/ 3 http://blog.geeklimit.com/2006/06/18/enable-activex-for-firefox-mozilla-and-netscape/ http://blog.geeklimit.com/2006/06/18/enable-activex-for-firefox-mozilla-and-netscape/#comments Sun, 18 Jun 2006 10:43:52 +0000 E@zyVG http://geeklimit.com/2006/06/18/enable-activex-for-firefox-mozilla-and-netscape/ ActiveX is a Microsoft web based plugin. It is Component Object Model (COM). Active X is a downloadable program that allow user to do many things.

ActiveX Features

1. Active X scripting is used in Microsoft internet Explorer to provide language-independent script handling capabilities 2. Active X documents supported by Active X means you can use the browser to view any Microsoft software application with that applications native toolbar, menu and other interface elements. This is also advantageous because you can use existing documents on the Internet without having to save them to HTML format.
3. Active X controls are the features that made this research interesting. These are actual software components embedded in web pages that run in the browser. If you visit a web page that uses, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer will automatically check to see if you have the needed control installed, if you do not, it installs it using their Authenticode.

Grab the extension from here.

To install it:

1. If you have Mozilla or NS 7.0 you may click to install it otherwise download it to disk (note this server might serve it as text/plain in which case shift click to save it straight to disk). This is an XPInstall file (a zip file with an .xpi extension).
2. If you downloaded the file, manually unzip the contents and copy npmozax.dll, nsIMozAxPlugin.xpt and MozAxPlugin.class into your plug-ins folder, e.g. “c:\program files\Netscape\Program\plugins”.
3. If necessary copy the msvcrt.dll & msvcp60.dll to your windows system folder (system32 for 2000/XP/NT systems)
4. Restart Mozilla/Netscape and verify that the plug-in has been detected by browsing to the URL about:plugins. The Mozilla plug-in should be listed.
5. Try testing the plug-in here with the Microsoft calendar control.

Credits
Mozilla ActiveX Control
C# Corner Pros and Cons of ActiveX and DHTML Controls

]]> http://blog.geeklimit.com/2006/06/18/enable-activex-for-firefox-mozilla-and-netscape/feed/ 6 http://blog.geeklimit.com/2006/06/14/accessing-my-home-linux-desktop-using-freenx-from-my-new-office/ http://blog.geeklimit.com/2006/06/14/accessing-my-home-linux-desktop-using-freenx-from-my-new-office/#comments Wed, 14 Jun 2006 16:31:48 +0000 E@zyVG http://geeklimit.com/2006/06/14/accessing-my-home-linux-desktop-using-freenx-from-my-new-office/

Yups, it’s my second day at work. I got a new job, for which I was interviewed last week, and as it seems all went well. It’s an investment consultancy company and I am positioned in Business Development Department, the heart of the structure as was described to me. Nops, I am not working as some IT guy here, though I will surely, with time, advice and recommend on what and how we should organize, in regard to software, and hopefully to make them switch to more alternative open source tools wherever possible. I am more into marketing and business development side of the company. It’s a respectable organization with nice team and people and hope to see myself here for sometime.

The reason I decided to write this is as I sat behind my desk, Windows greeted me. What else can you expect. All the desktops are running Windows, plus think couple are Macs. And on top of that the antivirus application, in this case Kaspersky, was expired, so I downloaded the free version of AVG Anti-Virus from Grisoft, which also has a free version for Linux. As I started missing my SUSE desktop, last night I decided to install FreeNX server on my home computer, which was quite easy. FreeNX is a free software (GPL) implementation of NoMachine’s NX server. And this post is indeed written by launching my Firefox browser that is on SUSE which is running on my home workstation

I am simply amazed how fast this Terminal Server and Remote Access technology is. It’s nearly same as if I was sitting behind my desktop at home. Compared to other such products, and I have tried few on Linux and Windows, NX is much much faster and it has the support of SSH and SSL enryption as well

Sadly I wasn’t able to hear music that is located on my computer, neither watch video ’cause of very low frame rate

Soon: A Howto to follow on installing FreeNX on SUSE Linux 10.1 and some information on available free NX Clients from NoMachine.