Carry your Linux on thumb drive

In the last post, I mentioned how to carry your applications in your USB stick but it would work only for Windows. Linux fans can also take their essential on their thumb drive, rather they can get an entire operating system. They can install a complete Linux distribution on a USB drive. How? Read this post on LifeHacker

Booting Linux from an external drive with the applications and settings of your choice has never been easier after this week’s release of Puppy Linux 3.0. Like Damn Small Linux, Puppy is small enough to fit on a USB thumb drive, and like Knoppix , you can boot it from CD. Puppy can also add your favorite open source applications to the desktop and save multiple user profiles back to your writable CD or thumb drive, too. Let’s take a look at how you can take your operating system, apps, data and user settings to go with Puppy Linux.

What You Can Do with Puppy

The two main uses for Puppy Linux (or any Linux live CD) are to:

• Rescue files from the host PC’s hosed hard drive or perform various maintenance tasks (like imaging that drive)
• Compute on a machine without leaving a trace—like browser history, cookies, documents or any other files—behind on the internal hard drive

While there’s a wide range of Linux live distro’s available, Puppy Linux is a fantastic option which offers a full computing environment with rich graphical apps like the Mozilla Seamonkey suite, Word and Excel equivalents, calendar, chat and photo editors, too.

Carry your PC on a thumb drive

Every day new technologies are coming and with every passing minute our dependence on them is growing. Many people prefer carrying their laptops in their backpacks. If one is not willing to carry that load to places, he can easily get a computer to work almost everywhere. But then there is a problem. You may not always get a computer that meets your requirements.

Thanks to the large amount of memory at our disposal in pen drives, we may not need to carry a laptop place for being able to surf, word-process, read mails and store files the way we want to.

Make full use of your USB stick

Your USB stick can double as a portable computer — that too the slimmest of the world. There are a number of executable applications available for various purposes. These executable applications do not require installation and can be run either from disk or from external storage devices like a USB drive. I prefer executable applications for the ease of using them without making your computer cluttered. This allows me to have any number of applications even if I may use it rarely.

Who should one use portable applications on USB sticks?

• Who are always on the move and need to carry their applications and files along with them.
• Who need to work on several computers, maybe at home or offices, or has to keep using many computers at home and office.
• If the user account is a restricted one, allowing only limited control. In such a case one is not able to install any application of choice.

Where to find portable application to be run from USB?

PortableApps is the best place to look for portable applications. The site also gives you a convenient Portablapps Suite for easily accessing applications on your USB. This suite comes in three versions.

Standard Suite: It comes with several applications pre-installed to get started immediately. It includes ClamWin Portable (antivirus), Mozilla Firefox – Portable Edition (web browser), Gaim Portable (instant messaging), OpenOffice.org Portable (office suite), Sudoku Portable (puzzle game), Mozilla Sunbird – Portable Edition (calendar/task manager) and Mozilla Thunderbird – Portable Edition (email client).Lite Version: It includes AbiWord Portable (word processor) instead of OpenOffice.org Portable. This helps save lot of space on your stick. This should be your pick if you do not need Office Suite and a word-processor is enough for you

Base Edition : It includes just the backbone platform where you can install your own portable applications. This is the one if you want a fully customized version. You can download portable applications from PortableApps and install them on it.

You may also just download the appliations and install them in your USB drive without the PortableApps Suite. This wil, however, require you to go to the folder and click the application icon to start it. You can also install other executable versions of applications like Audacity (Audio Editor), BitDefender (Anti Virus) to run from USB.

Plug-and-play desktop

Now a days, all monitors come with plug and play facility that allows you to use your monitor by simply plugging it to your computer. There is a similar thing that will convert your pen drive or any USB drive into your own plug-and-play computer.

Install MojoPac with desired applications on your pen drive. Now whenever you plug this USB to a computer running Windows XP in an administrative account, you immediately get your own desktop on that computer.

Here onwards you can work as if you were on your own PC. Once done, you can unplug the device without leaving any trace on the host computer. MojoPac can be installed on any USB 2.0 compliant storage device.

Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron is marching closer to April launch

Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron is marching closer to its scheduled April launch. Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu operating system, has released the 5th Alpha of the next generation of the popular Linux distribution. Among other things, Alpha 5 comes with a new installation option: Users can either run and install Ubuntu 8.04 Alpha 5 using a LiveCD, or they can use Wubi to install Ubuntu to a partition from within Windows. No reboot necessary.

Ubuntu 8.04 Alpha 5 is available for download now. But since this is still pre-release software, we wouldn’t recommend installing it on your primary machine. You know, unless you like using undercooked software on your primary machine and potentially losing data.

[DownloadSquad]

Access files easily with My Documents Toolbar

My Documents in Windows is intended to be your default place to save your documents, music and videos. If you are among them who use it almost all the time for saving and accessing your documents, music and videos, you better get more control of it. By using simple tricks, you can customize My Documents folder to work the way you like. You can also get a toolbar to access you drives and folders more easily.

Get easy access to My Documents

If you use My Documents for filing documents and also storing music and videos, you must be accessing it frequently. By getting a My Documents Toolbar on you Desktop, you can save yourself of one double-click.

Get My Documents Toolbar on the Desktop

1. Drag the My Documents folder lying on your Desktop to the extreme left, right or top of the Desktop depending upon your choice.
2. Once you drag the My Documents folder to an extreme edge of your Desktop [when the mouse doesn't move any further], a toolbar will appear.
3. Just drop the folder there to get your My Documents Toolbar.

Six free disc burning applications

On its own, Windows is a good-for-nothing operating system which lacks all the essential applications that one requires on a system.
I had suggested to you in an earlier post some open-source alternatives for word processing, web browsing and editing photos. Taking it further, today I bring to you some free media burning softwares to burn CDs and DVDs with more control.

1. Deep Burner

I mention this burning software on the top because it’s there on my system. Apart from a free version, Deep Burner also comes in a paid version. But the free version is sufficient for a general user who needs to create data CD and DVDs, burn music CDs and also ISO (CD images). It lets you create multi-session discs , which means you can add some file or music to an existing CD. But this burning software does not write video CDs.

http://www.deepburner.com/ (Download Link)

Assemble a PC under Rs 25,000

This is what I found while browsing, a PC that remains within Rs 25,000. The price does not include a genuine Windows. You know better what to do, or go for Ubuntu or any other Linux or OS.

Since the last time we did this article, the shift to dual-core processors has been near-complete. Single core processors have become virtually extinct, and with prices of powerful dual-core processors dropping below Rs 3,500, you don’t need to consider anything else.

Another trend is that AMD is being replaced by a series of cheaper Intel C2D budget processors offering very good value for money. Keeping all this in mind, we present to you our latest iteration of the Rs 25,000 machine. As usual, wherever prices/specs have remained unchanged, we have simply carried the products forward.

This is the specification of the PC suggested.

Specification Table

Components	Model	Price (Rupees)
Processor	Intel E2140	2,975
Motherboard	Biostar GF7050V-M7	3,350
RAM	Kingston DDR2 800 MHz	2,200
Sound	Onboard 5.1 Realtek ALC662 audio codec	N/A
LAN	Onboard, 10/100/1000	N/A
Graphics	Onboard Nvidia GeForce 7050	N/A
Optical Drive	Lite-On LH-20A1P	1,275
Hard Disk	Seagate 160 GB	2,275
Monitor	Viewsonic VA1930WM	9,450
Keyboard/Mouse	Microsoft Keyboard and Optical Mouse Set	695
Case	Zebronics Bijli i648 (400W PSU)	1,550
Speakers	Creative SBS 370	1,200
	Total	Rs. 24,970

Read the article on Tech2.0

The Book of Mozilla

If you are a Mozilla Firefox fan one thing that you must know about is its holy book –The Book of Mozilla. If you are among those who haven’t heard about this holy book, let me tell you that these are some verse written in the style of apocalyptic literature as you will find in the Bible. Though you can not get a copy of this book in any bookstore or library, you can still read the book by typing “about:mozilla” in your Firefox. [Even Netscape will give you the same result.]

You will gets a cryptic message in white text on a maroon background.

Here is the verse that my browser gave me.

Use DVD Rip to automatically backup any DVD

Do you wish to rip and back up any DVD to your hard drive? You can easily do this with DVD Rip, a freeware Windows application that automates the entire DVD-to-hard-drive backup process. All you need to do is insert your DVD, run DVD Rip, and let it take care of the rest.

Play any music, video or DVD with VLC

Have you ever been disappointed after trying to play a movie DVD on your newly installed PC? Many people, like me, do not know on the first go that neither Windows Media Player nor Realplayer can play DVDs on their own. One needs to buy DVD players like PowerDVD or InterVideo DVD for it. But not all will buy DVD players to view DVDs on their DVD drives. They will instead use VLC Media Player.

Post to multiple blogs simultaneously

Those who maintain several blogs, with many posts being simultaneously being posted to multiple blogs, it’s a really difficult and annoying to copy-paste the same thing over and again. Alternative? WriteToMyBlog.com. It is a free web word-processor for your blog. Just compose your post and enter the details of your blog(s). The post gets published on a number of blogs simultaneously. The processor is also very good one and also allows you to post YouTube videos and images from Flickr. And a really good part of it — no registrations required.

http://writetomyblog.com/