If you install sendmail on your desktop and have not configured your system correctly you will very likely come across this problem. Ubuntu boot up slows down considerably and stops for a long time at the "Starting Mail Transport Agent (MTA) sendmail" line. This is because sendmail is trying to resolve your host and times out failing to do so. You can fix this problem easily by making a few changes in to yours hosts file.

Rar used to be a favorite compression format when the compressed files were to be split into multiple pieces to fit into legacy external storage devices like Floppy, Zip disk, CD etc. WinRAR is a popular GUI application that can rar and unrar files in the rar format. If however you come across rar files that are split into multiple parts then you can extract and combine them as follows

Got Atheros AR242x 802.11abg Wireless device and have problems to make it work with Ubuntu? I had this same issue while i was trying to install Ubuntu in an ASUS netbook. Finally i got it working though. Here is a detailed post on how to install Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01) driver in Ubuntu and get it to work.

The latest KDE 4.2.4 is released with much improved features and lots of bug fixes. Some of the new features include a highly improved pdf reader, Okular and and a much versatile KMail. Improved applets,  efficient and smooth window management,  breathtaking desktop effects, etc are some of the highlights of KDE 4.2. The latest release in the series, KDE 4.2.4 is probably the last release before the official release of KDE 4.3, which is going to happen some time in the month of July/August. Here is How you can update your Ubuntu/Kubuntu with the latest KDE 4.2.4.

If you are a regular GNU Linux user there is a very good chance that you will come across emails forwarded to you as .eml files once in a while. .eml is the extension used for files saved as emails from Microsoft outlook or outlook Express. It is normally just a matter of opening these files with gedit as the files are plain text files unless they have attachments. If the attached .eml files themselves have attachments you run into the problem of actually having to open these base64 encoded attachments. The default set of applications in Ubuntu does not directly allow you to do this but there is an easy work around for this problem.

Theme your Ubuntu with quality stuff. Finding full set themes, which includes wallpaper, gdm, metacity themes etc, was always a difficult task to do in Ubuntu. But thanks to the zgegblog guys this is not an issue anymore. And the most interesting part is that, you could download it directly through Synaptic Package Manager. So it is safe and easy to install as well.

Here is a detailed step by step analysis on How to install zgegblog themes in Ubuntu. We have also included previews of some of the themes available through the blog.

The latest version of XBMC, codenamed Babylon is finally released. It has many new features and enhancements. For beginners, XBMC is an award winning Open Source Multimedia Application with eye candy and easy to use interface. Take a look at the screenshots of XBMC. All new XBMC 9.04 comes with a lot of improvements and added features. Some of the new features include support for Power PC architecture, improved FanArt support,  VDPAU hardware accelerated video decoding under Linux on NVIDIA graphics and so on.

Here are the detailed instructions on How to install XBMC 9.04 - Babylon in Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope and also further details on the application.

Firefox is a not only a choice, but a better alternative to Internet Explorer for GNU/Linux users. Windows version of Firefox is also available for download for free. But some sites may not at all show up properly in Firefox. This has nothing to do with Firefox, it is more or less an issue on part of the designers of the site itself. Since Internet Explorer does not have a Linux version, you will have to use wine to install and run Internet Explorer in Ubuntu. We have compiled a step by step procedure on how to install Internet Explorer in Ubuntu with useful screenshots.

If you happen to be one of those people who burn lot of iso's like we do through our RequestCD program then you would most probably have come across the dreaded checksum errors or md5sum errors. We used to get a lot of these and interestingly we found that we get consistent md5 checksum errors with certain iso images. We were almost sure that this had nothing to do with actual burning errors since they happened only for certain iso images. After hours of scouring the internet we found out the real culprit behind these errors and a way to really work around these phony error messages and actually verify if the iso was written correctly. We burn using either Brasero or K3B but this information can be applied to other cd/dvd burning software as well.

There has been certain issues with the recent updates of Firefox in Ubuntu 8.10. After installing all the recent updates in Ubuntu intrepid ibex, Firefox may start showing up some errors while trying to run the same. The most common error is the one which Firefox simply fails to start with an error message "Could not find compatible GRE between version 1.9b3 and 1.9b3".

Windows Media Player is a multimedia player owned by Microsoft Corporation. It is a Windows only media player and doesn't have any Free alternative. Newbie GNU/Linux users find it difficult to find a good alternative for Windows Media Player. There exist a plethora of highly efficient media players in Ubuntu like XBMC Media Center, Amarok, Smplayer, VLC etc.

XBMC Media Center (XBOX Media Center) is an  award winning free and open source media center which is also multiplatform.  It looks stunning and is also feature rich. Apart from being an excellent  multimedia player, it has of features like visually appealing user interface, playlist playback, picture viewing, some really good skins, and even third party softwares and addons. XBMC media center is released under GNU General Public License.

Even though Open Office is a really good Office suite, newbie Linux users find it difficult to migrate from Microsoft Office 2007 to Open Office. There are other options as well, like KOffice suite among others, which are really good Free software alternatives. But for those who desperately need to use Microsoft Office 2007 in their Ubuntu 8.10 desktop, WINE (Wine Is Not an Emulator) is there to help you. All you need is the latest version of WINE. We have compiled the different steps required in installiing Microsoft Office 2007.

Upgrading a working server application is always tricky. This is especially true if the upgrade had changes in configuration files and you had customizations done in your local configuration file. The recent exim4 upgrade to version 4.67-3 had structural changes in the configuration files. The suggested upgrade method is to accept all the modifications provided by the upgrade and redo the customizations. But what if you did not read the instructions properly and ended having an exim4 installation that throws out errors every time you try to start exim4.

Setting up Malayalam on Ubuntu or for that matter any other GNU/Linux distribution like Fedora, Mandriva has been progressively getting easier thanks to the wonderful effort of the free software community going by the name "Swathanthra Malayalam Computing" or SMC in short. Most of the patches and tweaks have gone upstream to the OS trunks and most distros are already Malayalam capable. A few minor tweaks are required to set up reading and writing in Malayalam in the latest version of Ubuntu 8.10 - Intrepid Ibex