Are you starving for information or “really new news”? Why don’t you try to use wordpress.com as search engine? This feature, normally not well-known by many people, let you to dig deep into all the blogs hosted on wordpress.com. Just type a keyword and you will be able to find related news into all the posts or comments in just few seconds. Easy to use and reliable for all that people (like me) who still believe in blogs as ideas incubators. 
Sopcast represents one of the most popular technologies for live TV streaming, being based on the famous p2p system. However, until recently, there was no version of this software for Ubuntu and Linux in general. But now every single user can enjoy live TV right on their desktop or laptop computer with this absolutely amazing program.
In order to install Sopcast on your machine, here is what you need to do:
1. Open a new terminal. This is a classic step and is used in most of the installation processes you will encounter in Ubuntu.
2. In order to add Sopcast to Synaptic (the package administrator software integrated into Ubuntu) you will need to type the following command:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jason-scheunemann/ppa
3. The next step is related to the update of the sources list. This can be done with the following command, which needs to be typed into the same terminal in order to achieve the right effects:
sudo apt-get update
4. Now you will need to run Synaptic in order to finalize the process. This is usually done through the System menu (System -> Administration -> Synaptic). Alternatively, you can use the following simple command:
sudo synaptic
5. Look for the Sopcast package and install it. A very important step at this point is to not forget about all its dependencies. If you do not install everything, then Sopcast will not run correctly or not at all.
This is basically all you need to know if you want to install Sopcast on your machine. Whenever you need to run the player you can find it in the Application menu -> Multimedia -> Sopcast. You will surely enjoy the great variety of the channels available for every user through this system.
The following system recovery tools will be useful to you if you are facing problem of data loss or if your system is simply crashing. It is advisable to burn copies of these tools much before any disaster strikes.
Open Source and Free approach:
G4L aka Ghost for Linux is one of the system recovery tools that is mainly a cloning and hard disk and partition imaging tool. This tool is similar to “Norton Ghost”. The images created are compressed optionally and transferred to a FTP server instead of opting for cloning locally. Ideally, of the several tools described above it is advisable to use the most suitable tool for your needs. The tool that will be most useful during a crisis like a crash or server failure will be a better tool.
The Ultimate Boot CD is one of the system recovery tools which will be very helpful when you want to run CDRom-based diagnostic tools thereby consolidating as many diagnostic tools into one bootable CD as possible. Since you can now boot from USB memory devices a script you can run “Ultimate Boot CD” from USB memory stick and a script on the script on the CD will enable you to boot newer systems from your USB sticks. This is many steps ahead than many of the other recovery tools. Moreover it gives you the flexibility of booting your system with a USB memory stick.
Knoppix is one of the system recovery tools which is essentially a bootable CD with GNU/Linux software. It ensures automatic detection of hardware and supports a wide range of devices like sound cards, most of the graphic cards, USB and SCSI devices and other peripherals. It can be used as an educational CD, a Linux demo or for system recovery purposes. Alternatively it can be used as a commercial platform for software demos. There is no need to install anything on the hard-disk as the CD is capable of storing 2GB of software installed in it. Thus this tool is a truly multi-purpose recovery tool.
Proprietary solutions:
O&O Disk recovery: This software tool scans every portion of your hard-disk, digital camera or memory card for lost files. It is so effective and reliable that it is possible to reconstruct data even when files systems have been destroyed or formatted. More than 350 types of files like music formats, word documents, movie, graphics, Excel workbooks, photo and access databases can be recognized, reconstructed and restored.
SuperDuper is one of the system recovery tools makes recovery effortless as it creates a completely bootable backup effortlessly. The strengths of this software are that it is user-friendly, easy to use with a built-in scheduler that it makes backup automatically. Moreover it performs well independent of the processor that is both on Power PC Macs as well as Intel PCs. It is particularly useful when your software application with the latest update is not working or when your hard drive begins to make noise. It is also very handy when you want to restore a stable copy of your system though you do not want t lose your existing system files or cases like this. 
Several open source tools have evolved in the past and have become popular with the developers too. These tools have gained popularity not only because they come free but because of the ease to work with and the features. First let us see some code editors:
- Aptana: It is a free, JavaScript focused development environment, cross-platform and open source for building Ajax applications. It supports HTML, JavaScript, CSS languages, FTP/SFTP and has a powerful JavaScript debugger that can help in troubleshooting your code.
- Eclipse : It is an open source software framework written mainly in Java. It is an integrated development environment consisting Java development toolkit (JDK) and compiler (ECJ) for developing applications in Java. Developers can extend its capabilities by installing plug-ins such as development toolkits for other programming languages written specifically for eclipse software framework. Language packs for over a dozen languages are available.
- JEdit : It is a programmer’s text editor which has many hundreds of man-hours of development behind it. It is a java-based solution and a cross-platform product which can work on many operating systems like Windows, VMS, UNIX, OX/2 and Mac OS X.
- NVU : It is a web authoring system for Linux desktop users, Macintosh users as well as for Microsoft windows and is a competitor for similar products like Dreamweaver and Frontpage. Nvu actually means new view and makes managing a website very easy. Now even people without knowledge of HTML or technical expertise can create web pages and manage a website.
- Quanta Plus : It is a web development environment with a lot of features and is highly stable. Quanta has a vision of achieving maximal user extensibility through the best architectural foundations, best, efficient design and natural use of code.
We shall see other tools in other posts.
Amazon’s Kindle a popular portable e-book reader device, lately made Kindle for PC application that allows you to download and have books on your computer rather than having a portable e-book reader device. There’s only Kindle Windows version but the nice thing is you can have this application in Linux.
This is tested in Ubuntu 9 running Gnome. You can use different version of Linux, but first you must have Wine HQ installed to you computer. Then download the EXE file of Kindle for PC application in Amazon.
Install this with Wine HQ software loader and proceed to the normal installation, the same thing that you do in Windows environment.
Note:
- At your first run you won’t see anything at all
- Configure Wine first and add Kindle for PC as an application and make it run in Windows 98 mode
- If it won’t work, change to other mode
- When it opens successfully you have to input you Amazon email add and password to register the software.
But, please, don’t forget that if you prefer open source software, you can directly use Calibre, a powerful free software we posted a while ago.
We decided to begin this year publishing our semi-new Facebook Page and to re-stylish, just a few, our right side bar. We hope to meet you on Facebook and, again, Happy New Year!
In 2007, when Prism was launched, there were some enthusiastic reviews about this application. Then the widget era began and Prism popularity decreased. Anyway, Prism is still a powerful application for all that people who desire to run their more often used web application saving RAM and CPU resources. Prism, based on XULRunner, is multi platform, easy to use and very flexible. To use it on Ubuntu you can launch the Terminal and type:
sudo apt-get install prism
or using the Synaptics Package Manager (System —> Administration —> Synaptics Package Manager). Then go to Applications —> Internet —> Prism and a small windows appears. Now, fill in all the required information: the web application URL, the name you prefer, settings and do not forget to click on the Desktop shortcut option. At this point you will find a new rough icon on your Desktop with the name you chose. The first time you use it, with the right mouse button click on it and go to Properties —> Permissions and Allow executing file as program. If you want to change the icon you have to click on it (with the right mouse button), go to Properties —> Basic and choose your favorite icon clicking the icon on the upper left corner. If all are steps are annoying for you, it is possible to use Prism as add-on for Firefox. In this case, on Firefox, go to Tools —> Add-ons —> Get Add-ons and type Prism on the search bar. You will install Prism as a simple add-on for Firefox. Now, you can automatically generate a Prism application just clicking on Tools —> Convert Website to Application when you are in the web application page.
On Windows or MAC we suggest to download the standalone package directly from the official web page or install Prism as Firefox add-on following the same steps we described for Ubuntu. If you use the Prism standalone package you have to decompress it in your favorite location. For Windows users: when you set up a new Prism application, try the tray menu option but do not forget to click on the Desktop shortcut or you will not be able to find again the application after you close it.
In my experience, Prism is really useful with all the Google web applications, with Zoho services and Pandora. Try and enjoy it!
Many on line email providers don’t allow you to use their accounts with POP email clients such as Thunderbird 3.1. To solve this “matter” we have a couple of possible solutions: FreePOPs and WebMail. Today, we will discuss about Webmail that we tested on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and Windows XP. WebMail is substantially a Thunderbird’s add-ons but it is not featured by Mozilla. Using this add-on you are able to manage Yahoo, Hotmail, mail.com, GMail, Libero, and AOL email accounts. The installation is similar in Ubuntu and Windows; on both, you have to install the core WebMail add-on and restart Thunderbird then you can add all the other components (Yahoo, Hotmail, etc..) you prefer. Then you have to modify the Thunderbird server settings following the instructions provided by WebMail:
POP
Server Type : POP
Incoming Server: localhost
UserName : username@domain
SMTP
Server Name: localhost
UserName : username@domain
Do not forget to set the Connection Security to None.
Only on Ubuntu, you need also to manually modify the incoming and outgoing ports because when you use Thunderbird through WebMail on Ubuntu, you will have a “could not connect to server local host; the connection was refused” message. This problem can be easily solved substituting the default ports on both WebMail add-on and Thunderbird ports:
- Thunderbird —> Edit —> Account Settings. Highlight the account you want to manage and go to Server Settings. There you can modify the POP Server Mail port setting it to a number bigger than 1000 (in my case I put 1250). Then go to Outgoing Servers and Edit the SMTP account you want to modify (I changed the default port to 1025).
- Thunderbird —> Tools —> Add-ons —> WebMail —> Preferences and put the same port numbers you have set on the previous step.
All this because ports below 1024 seems to be blocked on Ubuntu (if you know why, please post a comment).
For security, restart Thunderbird and it will immediately download and send your emails. Last but not least, if your on line email account is not supported by WebMail, do not forget to try FreePOPs.
We need to apologize to all of you because we promised weekly posts and then we took quite a long hiatus. We didn’t mean to be gone for so long, but life got strange, and so on and so forth. But now we are back, and we would like to apologize with all you.
On a more positive note, though, we just checked our reader’s statistics, only to see that we still have almost 200 daily readers. And, believe us, we are shocked! Thanks for waiting our return, everybody.We decided to change something on our blog. First of all we will not duplicate our posts in the Linux and Freeware pages but we post them just in the homepage. In this way, we will have some posts in English and other in Spanish… it is not orthodox but…. why not? We dare!
We would like to know what you all think of the blog so far. What would you like to read? Leave us plenty of criticism in the comment sections. And, you will see a weekly post, starting Monday!
