Extract rar files using archive manager in Ubuntu

Ubuntu archive manager does not extracts rar files by default.

To enable this install the package "rar"

Via Console:

sudo apt-get install rar

Now rar archives can be created with compress context menu in Nautilus or extracted with archive manager from Nautilus context menu.

Similarly to create/extract archives with Archive Mangaer/Compress Context menu's install "p7zip-full". This package has additional compression algorithms such as Zip64, CAB, RAR, ARJ, GZIP, BZIP2, TAR, CPIO, RPM, ISO and DEB archives
Via Console:

sudo apt-get install p7zip-full

The above works on Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid, Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty, Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala. They might work on previous versions as well.

How to upgrade from Ubunty Jaunty 9.04 to Karmic Koala 9.10

• I recently tried upgrading Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty to the latest Beta version of Ubunty 9.10 Karmic Koala. The final release will happen in a week time( Oct 30,2009 )

Following is the screen shot of the process followed:

• Press Alt+F2 and launch the update manager" "update-manager-d"
  

• You should see the following:

• Click on upgrade. Confirmation dialog is shown:

• Click start upgrade:

• The upgrade installs the packages:

 

 

 

• Upgrade finally finishes:

After restart you have the upgraded system with Ubuntu 9.10.

 I also did a fresh install as I wanted to try the latest GRUB. Shall review the Koala in next post.

Google thinks if you are from India you can read Hindi!

I wanted to  reset my password on Youtube. See the confirmation mail sent by them:

 I just had India as the country in the profile.

I didn't expect this from Google! They though all Indians read Hindi. I thought they understood the Indian market well :(

Nook or Kindle 2

Barnes & Noble unveiled Nook Ebook reader competing against Amazon Kindle!

See the Product comparison chart for Nook vs Kindle here. Complete Tech specs here.

At first look , I'll settle for Nook rather than Kindle. Let's wait for further reviews.

Now I am happy with Twitter: The Lists feature

I hated Twitter for not having the lists feature earlier. At last, twitter has introduced the Lists feature. Now it is very easy to categorize and prioritize the profiles you follow! 

Chennai House Property tax Water tax online

Property tax:

• To pay Property/House Tax online or to view the status of the payment use this link in Chennai Corporation Civic Services.

Water Tax:

• To pay Water Tax : CHENNAI METROPOLITAN WATER SUPPLY AND SEWERAGE BOARD

Digit best Buy and Best Performer: October 2009

In Digit October ,2009 issue there were reviews on Laptops, Cameras and computer mother boards.

I am just giving the details on the Best Buys and Best Performers suggested by them with their indicative prices.

Laptops:

Apple Notebooks:
Best Buy: Macbook Pro 13'' - Rs 74,000/-


Gaming Notebooks:
Best performer: Alienware M17x - Rs 1,39,000/-
Best Buy: MSI GX620X - Rs 73,000/-

Laptops upto Rs40,000/-:
Best Buy: Acer Aspire 5738Z - Rs 30,999/-

Laptops between Rs40,000/- and Rs60,000/-:
Best Buy: Acer Aspire 5738G - Rs 40,999/-

Laptop High End:
Best Buy: Dell Studio XPS 1640 - Rs 65,900/-

Laptop- Low power ultra compacts:
Best Buy: Acer Aspire 3810T - Rs 31,999/-

Laptop UptraCompacts:
Best Buy: Dell Studio XPS 1340 - Rs59,000/-

Laptop Corporate Notebooks:
Best Buy: HP Probook 4410S - Rs 40,000/-
Best Performer: Sony Vaio VGN - Rs 1,49,000/-

Cameras:

Best Performer: Canon Powershot SX200 IS - Rs22,995/-
12x Optical Zoom, 12.1 Mega Pixels

Best Buy: Samsung ES55 - Rs 8,990/-
3x Optical Zoom, 10.2 Mega Pixels

Mother Boards:

AMD Integrated Graphics Mother Board:
Best Performer: ASUS M4A785TD-V EVO - Rs 6,700/-
Best Buy: Jetway PN78VM2-LF - rs 2,975/-

AMD High End Graphics Motherboards:
Best Performer: ASUS M4A79T deluxe -  Rs 14,850/-

Integrated Graphics Core 2 Duo Boards:
Best Buy: Jetway I43GM1-HG - Rs 3,300/-
Best performer is also the same above.

Intel Discrete Graphics Core 2 Duo Boards:
Best Performer: ASUS P5Q3 Deluxe WiFi @n - Rs 17,900/-
Best buy: Biostar TPOWER I45 - rs 7,950/-

Intel Core i7 Motherboards:
Best Performer: ASUS Rampage II Extreme - Rs 17,850/-
Best Buy: Biostar Tpower X58 - Rs 12,500/-

Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

Normally, I used to do a fresh install of Ubuntu every 6 months when I get a new version. This time, I am going to try an upgrade after the official 9.10 is released in 15 days time. Now the beta build is available for testing.

There are some interesting features to look out for like Upstart, Empathy IM:

Upstart

As part of our boot performance work, we have now transitioned to Upstart. If you are testing on your primary machine, we strongly suggest having an Ubuntu 9.10 LiveCD available, or creating an Alpha 5 USB startup disk before doing an upgrade. This will allow us to help you recover in the case that something goes wrong during the boot of your system after upgrade. We request that all bugs affecting the performance or functionality of boot be tagged with ubuntu-boot in Launchpad.

Boot Experience

We've done some work on improving the overall look and feel of booting the system. Please open bugs with the tag "ubuntu-boot-experience" on any messages you see flashed after grub loads and before the new Ubuntu Splash screen (xsplash) displays. If you have trouble catching them before the splash screen loads, you can also check vt1 or dmesgoutput for copies of these messages. We also accept photos or video attachments if that's easier, however please make sure the text is readable.

Software Center

Ubuntu 9.10 Beta includes the Ubuntu Software Center, replacing 'Add/Remove' in the Applications menu. We kindly request users to try it out, and report any bugs they find.

GNOME

Ubuntu 9.10 Beta includes the latest GNOME 2.28 desktop environment with a number of great new features:

• 
  
  
  
  
  Empathy has replaced Pidgin as the default instant messaging client, introducing the Telepathy framework.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• The gdm 2.28 login manager is a complete rewrite compared to the version in earlier Ubuntu releases, permitting a more integrated login experience.

Application development with Quickly

Quickly makes it easy for developers to make new applications for Ubuntu, and to share those application with other Ubuntu users via .deb packages or personal package archives.

Kubuntu

Kubuntu 9.10 includes the first Kubuntu Netbook release, Social from the Start and the latest KDE packages. See the Kubuntu technical overview.

Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud Images

Ubuntu 9.10 Beta includes images for common use on Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) and Amazon's EC2. You can try out the latest Ubuntu 9.10 server image instantly on EC2 using a preconfigured AMI, or download an image and put it into your own Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. For information on using UEC images on Amazon EC2, see the EC2 Starter's Guide.

Ubuntu One file sharing

Ubuntu 9.10 Beta ships the Ubuntu One file sharing service by default, providing tightly-integrated file synchronization of your computer with other computers and the Ubuntu One network storage service.

Linux kernel 2.6.31

Ubuntu 9.10 Beta includes the 2.6.31-11.36 kernel based on 2.6.31.1. The kernel ships with Kernel Mode Setting enabled for Intel graphics (see below). linux-restricted-modules is deprecated in favour of DKMS packages.

hal deprecation

Ubuntu 9.10 Beta's underlying technology for power management, laptop hotkeys, and handling of storage devices and cameras maps has moved from "hal" (which is in the process of being deprecated) to "DeviceKit-power", "DeviceKit-disks" and "udev". When testing Ubuntu 9.10 Beta, please be alert for regressions in those areas and report any bugs you find.

New Intel video driver architecture available for testing

The Intel video driver has switched from the "EXA" acceleration method to the new "UXA", solving major performance problems of Ubuntu 9.04. Ubuntu 9.10 Beta also features kernel mode setting by default on Intel hardware, which reduces boot-time flickering and dramatically speeds up suspend/resume.

ext4 by default

The new "ext4" filesystem is used by default for new installations with Ubuntu 9.10 Beta; of course, other filesystems are still available via the manual partitioner. Existing filesystems will not be upgraded.

If you have full backups and are confident, you can upgrade an existing ext3 filesystem to ext4 by following directions in the Ext4 Howto. (Note that the comments on that page at the time of writing about Ubuntu's use of vol_id vs. blkid are out of date and are not applicable to Ubuntu 9.10 Beta.) Maximum performance will typically only be achieved on new filesystems, not on filesystems that have been upgraded from ext3.

GRUB 2 by default

GRUB 2 is the default boot loader for new installations with Ubuntu 9.10 Beta, replacing the previous GRUB "Legacy" boot loader. Existing systems will not be upgraded to GRUB 2 at this time, as automatically reinstalling the boot loader is an inherently risky operation.

If you wish to upgrade your system to GRUB 2, then see the GRUB 2 testing page for instructions. See also theupstream draft manual.

Some features are still missing relative to GRUB Legacy. Notable among these are lock/password support, an equivalent of grub-reboot, and Xen handling.

iSCSI installation

The iSCSI installation process has been improved, and no longer requires iscsi=true as a boot parameter; the installer will offer you the option of logging into iSCSI targets if there are no local disks, or you can select "Configure iSCSI" in the manual partitioner.

Putting the root filesystem on iSCSI is now supported.

AppArmor

AppArmor in Ubuntu 9.10 Beta features an improved parser that uses cache files, greatly speeding up AppArmor initialisation on boot. AppArmor also now supports 'pux' which, when specified, means a process can transition to an existing profile if one exists or simply run unconfined if one does not.

New profiles

In addition to the above changes to AppArmor itself, several profiles were added. Enforcing profiles for ntpd, the GNOME document viewer (evince), and libvirt are enabled by default. Complain mode profiles for Dovecot are now available in the apparmor-profiles package. A new profile is provided for Firefox as well, though it is disabled by default. Users can enable AppArmor sandboxing of their browser by running:

$ sudo aa-enforce /etc/apparmor.d/usr.bin.firefox-3.5

Please see the SecurityTeam/KnowledgeBase for a full listing of readily available profiles in Ubuntu.

Libvirt

Libvirt now contains AppArmor integration when using KVM or QEMU. Libvirtd is configured to launch virtual machines that are confined by uniquely restrictive AppArmor profiles. This feature significantly improves virtualisation in Ubuntu by providing user-space host protection as well as guest isolation.

Uncomplicated Firewall

The Uncomplicated Firewall now has support for filtering by interface and egress filtering when using the ufw command. Documentation for ufw is also improved to help users better utilise the ufw framework and take full advantage of Linux netfilter's power and flexibility. See UbuntuFirewall#Features for a full list of features.

Non-eXecutable Emulation

Non-eXecutable (NX) memory protection, also known as eXecute-Disable (XD), has always been available in Ubuntu for any systems that had the hardware to support it and ran the 64-bit kernel or the 32-bit server kernel. The 32-bit PAE desktop kernel (linux-image-generic-pae) now also provides the PAE mode needed for hardware with the NX CPU feature.

For systems that lack NX hardware, the 32-bit kernels now provide an approximation of the NX CPU feature via software emulation that can help block many exploits an attacker might run from stack or heap memory.

Blocking Module Loading

To block the loading of any further modules after boot (generally for servers with unchanging hardware), the/proc/sys/kernel/modules_disabled one-way sysctl flag now exists to add another layer of protections against attackers loading kernel rootkits.

Position-Independent Executables

Building on the work done in Ubuntu 8.10 and 9.04 to proactively protect Ubuntu from unknown threats by using strict compiler flags, more applications have been built as Position-Independent Executables (PIE) to take advantage of theAddress Space Layout Randomisation (ASLR) available in the Ubuntu kernel.

In addition to the growing program list, PIE programs are now also built with the BIND_NOW linker flag to take full advantage of the existing RELRO linker flag. This results in PIE programs having fewer places in their memory that can be controlled to redirect program flow when an attacker attempts memory-corruption exploits.

Opera mini 5 beta

If you use Opera Mini, it's time you try out Opera Mini 5( currenly in beta )
The new opera mini 5 is superior than the current version. It has support for tabs,speed dials, in place editing,password manager.

The main feature I love is the improved user input for typing. In older versions, we need to use the editor of the phone to key in the inputs. Now it can be done without leaving Opera Mini interface. The search has also been revamped for better experience.

Chrome is now more colorful with new themes

Chrome has new set of themes by Artists apart from the themes by google.

Google Wave

Finally, got my Wave invite from a Twitterer Ahmed as I posted many requests on Frienfeed / Twitter.

The problem is, I am not sure what to do with it, as I can't invite any of my friends. Also, I feel Google has to come up with some 'really' useful apps over the wave, rather than being a IM/Mail Collaborator. Otherwise it will not be used by anyone!