Chromebooks Phenomenon
You might not have noticed it but Chromebooks are one of the hottest selling notebooks in the market. Yes, even Amazon’s two of the top five best selling computers More »
Choosing the Right Linux
There is no right or wrong Linux. All are equally good. What differentiates one from the other is how you plan to use it and the context in which it is being More »
The Vibrant Open Source Smartphone OS Market
The mobile OS market is only getting more awesome with each passing year. There are new players on the horizon challenging the might of Google’s Android and Apple’s iPhone. And almost all More »
Higher Demand for Linux Talent
A recent survey by Dice and Linux Foundation reveals that life for a Linux Professional has never been better. There is more demand for this hard to find talent resulting in higher More »
Ubuntu for Tablets – Let the Freedom Rule
Today, in a grand unveiling, Ubuntu founder, Mark Shuttleworth announced the arrival of Ubuntu for Tablets. Well, the news itself is no news until you realize the potential of what Ubuntu is More »
Chromebooks Phenomenon
You might not have noticed it but Chromebooks are one of the hottest selling notebooks in the market. Yes, even Amazon’s two of the top five best selling computers in the past 100 days have been Chromebooks. Trumping both Apple’s Macbooks and Microsoft’s Windows 8 laptops made by Toshiba, Dell and HP.
What gives?
Chromebooks are powered by a highly customized version of open source Linux built by Google. It is an OS that facilitates hosting content online aka the cloud. As the name suggests, it is a customized version of Google’s extremely popular Chrome browser with access to thousands of native apps.
Five Essential Plugins for WordPress
There are literally thousands of plug-ins for WordPress platform. But every WordPress site requires certain essential plugins. We recommend the following:
- Akismet: Akismet is a wonderful spam filter for comments on your site. It is highly effective against spammers trying to flood your site with irrelevant information.
- Hupso: It is an easy to use social share button. It allows your viewers to easily share your site articles on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and other popular social sites.
- Jetpack: Jetpack is probably the most essential plugin created for wordpress. It allows users to get statistics of the site (daily usage, popular articles etc), create a basic mobile site interface dynamically, automatically share content on Facebook, Twitter and other popular platforms, track subscribers to your site via email and many others.
- Quick Cache: If your site is hosted on a shared server, this plugin will really come in handy. It dynamically improves your site’s speed and performance by caching popular pages.
- PollDaddy: Sooner or later, we all try to create a poll on our site. PollDaddy is probably the easiest and very well integrated plugin for WordPress.
Choosing the Right Linux
There is no right or wrong Linux. All are equally good. What differentiates one from the other is how you plan to use it and the context in which it is being used.
Say, if you want to tinker with some cool Linux derivative for fun, then by all means, install any and enjoy to your fullest. But if your motives are a bit more serious and you want to use one as your standard desktop, or have an ambitious plan to support multitude of computers running a single version of Linux then you might want to do some thinking before selecting the right Linux distribution.
The Vibrant Open Source Smartphone OS Market
The mobile OS market is only getting more awesome with each passing year. There are new players on the horizon challenging the might of Google’s Android and Apple’s iPhone. And almost all of them are based on Linux and are designed around an open source philosophy.
Just like the Linux desktop, they will all surely inspire many derivatives with interesting designs, wonderful UIs and innovative hardware specifications.
Currently, Ubuntu is ranked number one on the open source desktop environment by a long margin. Currently enjoying over 20 million active users. It has also inspired countless derivatives, some of them are extremely popular themselves, like Linux Mint, with the user community.
Higher Demand for Linux Talent
A recent survey by Dice and Linux Foundation reveals that life for a Linux Professional has never been better. There is more demand for this hard to find talent resulting in higher than average salaries and perks.
The jobs for Linux professionals are not just for System Administration of Linux powered servers. Rather there is now a growing demand for software coders, Data Center Management including Cloud computing, e-commerce businesses and software programmers for embedded systems.
Ubuntu for Tablets – Let the Freedom Rule
Today, in a grand unveiling, Ubuntu founder, Mark Shuttleworth announced the arrival of Ubuntu for Tablets. Well, the news itself is no news until you realize the potential of what Ubuntu is offering. One user experience across all interfaces i.e. desktop, smartphone, tablets and TV.
That seems quite a bold move by an open source driven company. Especially considering Apple, Microsoft and Google are still struggling to get their OSes to work seamlessly across all sets of devices. So far with mixed results at best.
Linux Inside Your Smartphone
Chances are the cell phone in your hand runs on some variant of Unix or Linux. Yes, even your Blackberry.
It is no secret that Ubuntu Linux is developing an OS for the smart phone. So is Firefox. The leading browser of the world is building an open source Linux powered OS targeting low end smartphones. But they are not the only ones getting Linux onto smart phones and into our hands. Many telecom vendors including Nokia, Samsung, and Palm (now defunct WebOS) too have had Linux powered phones. Some were a success and others a dud.
How to tell if your Computer is 64 bit?
Modern computers are all 64bit. Barring a few netbooks. But if you have an older system like a Pentium 4 or even Core2Duo or equivalent, you might have a 64bit system. Majority of those were 32bits but some were built for 64bit architecture.
If you want to find out if your PC/laptop is 32bit or 64 bit, do the following in Ubuntu:
- Start a command line Terminal
- Type the following command:
lscpu
Install Ubuntu on Windows Surface Pro
Microsoft’s Windows Surface Pro has been recently released and already Linux pros are booting Ubuntu and other Linux distributions on to it. After all, why not? It would be fun to carry my Ubuntu in a tablet form rather than on an old PC.
Surface Pro comes with really powerful processor. Unlike other tablets, it actually boasts an Intel Core i5 processor with 4GB of RAM. Pretty powerful for a little machine. The display is 11″ inches with a sweet 1080p HD graphics. Not really Retina quality as on Apple’s iOS devices but pretty good anyways.
LibreOffice 4 Review
LibreOffice has been around for over two years and finally we have a new version which fully branches itself away from its OpenOffice roots.
I must say, the software looks cleaner, faster and amazingingly simple to use. There are no confusing menus rather a simple interface, and all the goodies we want right in the front.
This release has very few cosmetic/UI updates but really a major core rewrite of the whole software application suite. Originally, it was a derivative of Openoffice sharing many million lines of code. But most of it has been rewritten from scratch and rethought by some 500 developers worldwide to improve and optimize the whole software experience. Truly a global open source collaborative effort.
