Monday, November 21, 2011

HelpSetMaker

HelpSetMaker is a program designed for creating help information. It is designed upon the philosophy that structured help texts should be createable in an intuitive way and with the least possible overhead

http://www.cantamen.de/helpsetmaker.php?lang=en

Saturday, November 12, 2011

Windows Drivers backup & restore

Being able to back up your windows drivers is one of the most important things you can do 

Comparison of different programs -
www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-windows-driver-backup.htm






http://www.boozet.org/dd.htm


Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Upgrading to Kubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot)

Okay so I had this question if I should upgrade from Kubuntu 11.04 to 11.10, looking around I did not see too many glowing reviews. All I did see was people facing this issue and that issue, however I finally did do the upgrade to check it out for myself.

All in all the upgrade was smooth, did it via the alternate CD. No point redoing the documentation that has already been done well. Look here for more details - https://help.ubuntu.com/community/OneiricUpgrades#Upgrading_Using_the_Alternate_CD.2BAC8-DVD

One minor issue that I did face was Muon getting stuck and not being able to complete adding new updates ("muon another package seems to be using the package system .. "). So I ran dpkg from the command line, here is the error message. I just followed running it with the configure & a option and it fixed the problem

dpkg was interrupted, you must manually run 'sudo dpkg --configure -a' to correct the problem.
I do prefer the Kpackagekit to Muon, especially the fact that KPK let me continue selecting software to install while an install was already happening.


Okay so now the million dollar question, should you upgrade ? If you believe in the latest and the best go ahead. If you are a little streched for time and have a system that you have configured & customized you probably can skip this update.

Here is a little screen shot -



Wednesday, June 22, 2011

The journey to Kubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) - Passion defined

Windows has served me well, but like all good things its coming to an end. XP was a wonderful companion, unfortunately for MS while they rested on their laurels the rest of the open source world raced past.

Four years back I started playing with linux, without the thought ever crossing my mind that - I would be relying on it more that I rely on my Windows. And last year I bought a Dell laptop that came pre-installed with Win7X64. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) it came with a memory leak already on it.

After spending innumerable weekend hours over a one year period I turned to MS tech support to help me fix the issue. The guys did their best and I do appreciate their efforts, but there is only so much you can do remotely. As they say when one door closes another door opens. In my case when the 'window' closed on me, multiple flood gates of the open source world opened up.

Of course having friends with a solid linux background did help me understand a lot of things. One of the things I'm most grateful to them is they rarely fixed issues on my PC, they merely pointed the way. I understood so much more by learning and applying these directions.

Of course like all new comers I was totally overwhelmed by the amount of choices/distros available. I played with a few distros (quite a few to be honest) these include - Knoppix, SUSE, Lindows, Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, PC-Linux (one of my favorites) & of course Mandriva.

I am currently running Kubuntu 11.04 and to be honest I'm more comfortable on this than Win7. See more here -  http://www.kubuntu.org/news/11.04-release

Another good review site - http://linuxlibrary.org/index.php/distributions/kubuntu-11-04-review/

So that brought me to this question - what is the factor that would cause a loosely knit group of geographically widely distributed developers compete and overtake MS an OS monopolistic giant ? Where MS is funding, researching, sponsoring & paying salaries to good folks to develop an OS, there is a bunch of 'rebels' who refuse to conform to the flow but instead write an OS that has better eye candy, utilize lower system resources,be more stable, have less viruses & be available for free ? I think its passion - apparently not something that money can buy. One license of Win is couple hundred dollars, one license of (K)Ubuntu priceless :)

Below a screenshot of my desktop (a mac theme),




A wise person told me that I should use the default skin that came with Kubuntu & not try to fake a Mac. But I disagree - they beauty of these themes is that they can be what you want your PC to be. After all you don't own it, not unless you tweak it.

Credits - Niraj, Chetan, Vinay, Amod,Rakesh who helped me with Linux. Ritesh who inspired me to take up this journey 4.5 years back by showing off the cool eye candy, mostly refusing to fix issues on my pc instead showing me the way & being my critic every time I hopped a distro.