Linux by Sankar San

Its been all of seven months off this blog, but get ready for its rebirth 'cuz Ubuntu has breathed a new lease of life into my Linux World! All you have to do is enter your postal address here (which is what I did) and they send you free CDs within a month! I'm impressed!!

I cannot but regale you with the exciting new features you have, which leaves Fedora way behind. 6.06 LTS (Long Term Support) was released in June '06. It comes with:

1. Firefox Version 1.5.0.3
Get Google Browser Sync to get all your settings (saved passwords, bookmarks, etc.) from Windows to Ubuntu.

2. Evolution with MS Exchange support
No more entering hajjar server hostnames/IP addresses and obscure username/password combinations to get it working. All it asks for is your OWA (Outlook Web Access) URL and your login/password and tada! Its all there up and running. What's more, the GAL (Global Address List) works.

3. Rhythmbox
iTunes-like music player which has Library, Podcasts, Sharing and even support for your iPod, from which it lets you play off everything (once you have the codecs installed, which I'll describe how to do shortly) even (I suspect) if your PC is not synced with the iPod (!!!)

The first thing you have to do after you've installed it, is to get Easy Ubuntu or Automatix, which gives you all the codecs you need to get started on MP3s, DVDs and whatnot. For this, I faced huge difficulties to configure my HTTP Proxy with Authentication. Finally, I put this in my .bashrc:

export http_proxy=
"http://(workgroup)\\(username):(password)@(proxy):(port)/"
export ftp_proxy=
"http://(workgroup)\\(username):(password)@(proxy):(port)/"

and PHEW! Its working now! Here's a screenshot by the way:


More later...