Technical Solution

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| 1 min read
Matrix Screensaver is a very popular screensaver based on the digital rain shots (moving text) in the blockbuster movie trilogy - The Matrix. This is available as a screensaver in popular GNU Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora and Debian with their default installations. But the default Matrix Screensaver that comes with these distributions contains only falling English alphabets. Now Santhosh Thottingal of SMC (Swathanthra Malayalam Computing) has modified this for Indic scripts and has made it available for everybody.
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| 3 min read
While installing Ubuntu on Laptops, one common problem that we have identified is that the mouse pointer movement using the touchpad is very slow with the default settings. We were hoping that this would be fixed in Ubuntu Hardy Heron but it still is not. Ubuntu allows for the configuration of the acceleration and sensitivity using the System > Preferences > Mouse menu but that too might not give the desired results always. Here is a sure shot way of speeding up your touchpad in Ubuntu.
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| 2 min read
Fedora team has been closely working with Swathanthra Malayalam Computing(SMC) team to get most of the SMC patches upstream and setting up Malayalam has been relatively easy on Fedora. Since most of the patches have gone to upstream fedora you don't have download any rpm other than Swanalekha (Malayalam transliterator) on your own to be able to read and write Malayalam on a Fedora 9 machine. Follow the basic instructions to set up Malayalam on Fedora 9.
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| 4 min read
Raaga.com is a very popular online music station that has a very large collection of Indian movie and classical songs. They use real media and they have a player that requires the real media player. Now the default installation of Real Media player will not allow you play music from Raaga.com and the player popup from raaga.com will stay in the 'Initializing Player, Please Wait' and 'Loading' state permanently. There is a simple work around for this situation.
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| 6 min read
We are a tech start-up firm. Our objective is to make money by developing successful web based applications for the general public. There are two ways of making money online. One is when you create a web based system and then sell rights to advertise on the website to ad-networks or directly to companies. The second is when your application becomes immensely popular and you sell the complete website to a bigger player who pays for future revenues and consolidation advantages.
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| 6 min read
We had an opportunity recently to provide support over the phone for one of our customers for installing Ubuntu and configuring Airtel broadband on a desktop PC. The Airtel broadband was connected through a Beetel 220BX ADSL modem but the instructions should work for most broadband connections where the device is a modem router.
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| 5 min read
Wordweb is one of the most useful tools for a content developer or a technical writer working on a plain old Windows machine. When somebody like that moves to Ubuntu from Windows he/she would want to have a somewhat similar functionality in Ubuntu too. In GNU/Linux there is the gnome-dictionary or the kdict application that has similar functionality as wordweb. However some minor tweaks are required to make these applications behave almost exactly like Wordweb.
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| 5 min read
We had never had to configure an Airtel GPRS internet connection on a Laptop with Ubuntu before as we never had a customer who had one such connection. We however got an opportunity last day when we installed ubuntu on a compaq presario F733AU laptop. Setting up internet access on Ubuntu is easy in itself and setting up GPRS could not have been any easier. The customer had a Nokia 9300 communicator with a USB datacable.
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| 4 min read
Blogger/Blogspot is one of the most popular destinations for bloggers both new and experienced. When you sign up for a blogger account or use your existing Google account to create a blog you will get a blog with a URL like yourblogname.blogspot.com. This is a good way to start your first blog. However as you climb the ladders of popularity in blogosphere you will want to have your own domain name like www.yourblogname.com instead of the one above. Blogspot allows for this easily through their blog management interface.
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| 6 min read
When you have more than one system with Ubuntu installed, and you have to install same or similar set of packages on all your PCs, you can save on a lot of bandwidth if you had some ways of sharing the downloaded packages and updates. There is an easy way to do this in Ubuntu. This is done using apt-cacher a proxy server for your package repositories. It is very easy to set up and configure apt-cacher on a PC with Ubuntu inside your LAN.
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| 6 min read
Blogger/Blogspot allows its users to edit the complete layout of the blog page through its 'edit template' feature. This gives the blogger full control over the layout of their pages and gives the kind of flexibility that you can get from any custom systems. The default blogger templates do not give links for social bookmarking from the blog pages. In this article we explain how to add social bookmarking links and buttons in your blogspot/blogger blog.
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| 4 min read
Recently we came across a virus in one of our customers computers. The system was brought in with the complaint that it was running very slow and internet access was too slow to be of any use. We scanned the system with AVG and as was expected found a slew of viruses which AVG removed successfully after a complete scan. All but one - a file named startdrv.exe located at C:\Windows\Temp\startdrv.exe. AVG could not delete the file, neither could we delete it manually from Windows.
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| 3 min read
We are happy to announce total support for Ubuntu for users across India. We have been successfully offering this to our customers in Trivandrum for the last one year and we would like to extend it to all Ubuntu Users in India. Our technical team will assist you over the internet either via chat, telephone or ssh to troubleshoot your Ubuntu related issues.
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| 2 min read
Ubuntu 6.10 had complete multimedia support including mp3, video cds, dvds. This was taken out in 7.10 because of license restrictions on the decoders and their incompatibility with the GNU GPL under which Ubuntu is being released. Enabling multimedia support for formats requiring non-GPL codecs in Ubuntu 7.04 was a pain. This is now child's play in Ubuntu 7.10
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| 3 min read
We install Ubuntu on all systems manufactured at our firm. In addition to the default set of applications that come with Ubuntu we normally install other applications depending on the type of end user and the nature of their requirements. Selecting and installing these applications manually using synaptic takes a lot of effort. With this in mind we have created a script to install these additional packages.
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| 5 min read
One of the supposed limitations of Linux touted by the opponents of this wonderful operating system is again its supposed hardware incompatibilities. This is far from the reality but it has to be stated that there are indeed some hardware that are not fully compatible with Linux. If you happen to accidentally buy a computer that is not fully Linux supported or one that has to be configured manually and if you are not fluent in Linux you might find it very difficult to get your hardware working in Linux. But not anymore, we are proudly offering our computers built with fully Linux compatible hardware and pre-installed with the latest release of Ubuntu.
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| 4 min read
A general issue faced by many of our customers is that they forget the administrator password which is required to login to the computer. Without this password, there is no way a normal user can gain access to the computer system and its contents. Most of us will end up formatting the hard disk or installing a fresh copy of Windows as a remedy. As a result, we make an unwanted payment for the service provider for both formatting and installing Windows. There is always a remedy for gaining access to the computer system without formatting or installing new copy of Windows.