Alfresco

Enterprise content management vendor Alfresco, has been certified to work on the Ubuntu stack. The company’s Enterprise Edition 3.3 is now certified on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Server.

Ubuntu owner Canonical has been pushing the Linux distribution hard in the past few months so this move appears to support the growing acceptance of Ubuntu as an enterprise operating system.

Read the full story HERE

Topaz Signature Pad

TOPAZ signature pad can be easily integrate with InfoPath 2007 forms.  Russell Wright wrote a tutorial which describes the steps for creating TOPAZ signature enabled forms.

You can read the full tutorial from HERE

GRUB 2

Many duel boot system users might have faced this issue. Crashing  of windows OS is most likely to happen. Some time due to virus attack or some time due to improper shutdown of system.

When you try to restore it, you will lose boot loader. This happens because windows used to rewrite the master boot record. Need not be panic, its easy to restore your GRUB with some simple steps.

Chinmoy Kanjilal has written a simple step by step tutorial in techie-buzz.com which describe restoring GRUB.

Read the full article HERE

Emesene MSN Client

Emesene is an open source MSN messenger client. The Emesene development team is trying to replicate the functions of the official Windows Live client in a simpler, cleaner and easier to use interface.

Emesene is a cross platform client which works well with Ubuntu and Windows. It is written using Python, GTK+, PyGTK and Pycairo.

Official Windows Live Messenger features supported by the client are:
*Offline messaging
*Personal messages
*’Now Playing’ personal messages
*Nudges
*Contact list retrieval from server
*Nickname retrieval from server
*Tabbed chat windows
*File transfer
*Webcam support (still in development)
Other features specific to emesene are:
*Plugins (now playing, AES Encryption, Gmail checker, POP3 mail checker, spell checker, Youtube videos, last.fm song reporting, MSN Premium and others)
*Auto-reply
*Minimize to notification area (System Tray)
*Window and icon themes
*Emoticon themes
*Multilingual support

Emesene Main

Emesene team has recently released a new version emesene 1.6 – “mate”. The following are changes in this version.

*  Improved gui usability
* New preference window (arielj, ukblacknight, nicolaide, mehd36)
* Implemented nick and personal message roaming (pablo)
* Fixed tons of bugs all around the code (we’re too lazy to write ‘em all)

Home Page: http://www.emesene.org

You can download Emesene from HERE

Optimizing Websites

Internet is very much popular in these days. And of course it will go on increasing in the coming days. As the internet usage increases, more and more people will start building their own websites.

But most of them are not aware of the optimization techniques that must be used for  delivering good performance. They simply make a website and start adding  contents, But they give least attention for optimizing.

It is said that, a web site which take more than 5 seconds to load will be continuously losing visitors as none is ready to wait for anything in this fast lifestyle.

devmoose.com have published 10 simple techniques to optimize your website. Applying these techniques will not cost you much time, but give  much improved performance for your website.

The article describes following points:

1. Minimize HTTP Requests
2. Minify CSS and JavaScript
3. Place Stylesheets in the Header
4. Put Scripts at the Bottom of the Document
5. Make Use of a Content Delivery Network
6. Gzip your CSS and JavaScript
7. Make JavaScript and CSS External
8. Optimize Your Images
9. Preload Components
10. Use Tools to Analyze Performance

Read the full article HERE

Ubuntu Tweak 0.5.0

A new version of Ubuntu Tweak (Ubuntu Tweak 0.5.0) has been released with drastic improvement from the previous versions. The latest version has changes in sidebar and title bar and also can sync data over the internet.

Ubuntu Tweak is a small piece of software which enable even an ordinary computer user to tweak their Ubuntu desktop. It also provide an application center when you can install new software as well as add third party software sources.

Using Ubuntu Tweak you can tweak your ubuntu desktop graphically which are only possible by editing config files in default ubuntu installation.

Ubuntu Tweak features

*  View of Basic System Information(Distribution, Kernel, CPU, Memory, etc.)
* GNOME Session Control

* Auto Start Program Control
* Quick install popular applications
* A lot of third-party sources to keep applications up-to-date
* Clean unneeded packages or cache to free disk space
* Show/Hide and Change Splash screen
* Show/Hide desktop icons or Mounted Volumes
* Show/Hide/Rename Computer, Home, Trash or Network icon
* Tweak Metacity Window Manager’s style and behaviour
* Compiz Fusion settings, Screen Edge Settings, Window Effect Settings, Menu Effect Settings
* Set the Shortcuts to archive quicker access your favourite applications
* GNOME Panel Settings
* Nautilus Settings
* Advanced Power Management Settings
* System Security Settings
* And many other in process…

Home Page: http://ubuntu-tweak.com

Also watch video By webupd8.org from HERE

KDE GNOME

Plasma desktop is one of the main attractions in KDE 4 series. It enabled KDE comparable to any other Windows or Mac OSX interface in terms of beauty. But only a small percentage of  Ubuntu users use KDE . There are many reasons for that.

Though KDE is beautiful, its not that much easy or straight forward  as GNOME. KDE is fairly complex for absolutely new users.

Most of the ubuntu’s developments are primarily targeting GNOME. So people think that to get full support from Ubuntu, they should use GNOME.

And  of course some people are not using KDE just because it resembles Windows. They terribly hate Windows.

But some good portion of KDE’s beauty can be ported to GNOME. Plasma desktop is one of them.

GNOME with Plasma Desktop

In Ubuntu Forums, there is an article which describes in detail about adding plasma desktop to  GNOME. You need to install some KDE packages.  And of course you can revert back to original GNOME at any time.

You can read the detailed tutorial HERE

(Found via webupd8.org)

Linux Terminal

For a long time, Linux is known as operating system for servers and techie people. The scenario has changes a lot. Now Linux has a nice GUI, lots of quality applications that make it a viable alternative to Windows or Mac OSX.

But Linux’s desktop market share is still a tiny percentage comparing to Windows. But it really shines in Server space.

Unlike windows server version, Linux servers does not carry a GUI by default. You can install GUI for Linux server, but it not encouraged as it will be a wastage of resources. Moreover, after the server is up and running, there is no need of a GUI.

Linux amins usually depend mainly on command line interface which is more robust and useful. The only problem is the initial learning curve.

Jinoy P.George has written a list of useful Linux admin commands and it’s usage at jpgtutorials.com.

Following commands are described in detail.

cat /etc/issue, ifconfig, ps, kill, free, df, top, tar, scp, chown

Read the full article at: http://www.jpgtutorials.com/some-linux-admin-commands-everyone-must-know

Windows 7 '2010' Theme

To install the 2010 theme for Windows 7, double click on the downloaded .theme file.

Download 2010 theme for Windows 7 from HERE

Download 2010 wallpapers from HERE

(Found via techie-buzz.com)

Nexuiz

Nexuiz is one of the most popular First Person Shooter game for Ubuntu. Its an open source and freely available for Ubuntu, Windows and Mac OSX.  Nexuiz emerged after the open-sourcing of the Quake 3 engine.  It is developed by Alientrap.

The 2.5 series bring many improvements, featuring new graphics, new maps and an even faster game play. The latest version is 2.5.2, a bug-fix release to the stable 2.5 release.

TuxArena has published a full review of the latest release Nexuiz 2.5.2

You can read the full review from HERE

Nexuiz Home Page : http://alientrap.org/nexuiz