This tutorial shows how you can import Outlook Express emails, contacts, and account settings into Mozilla Thunderbird and Evolution. This is quite useful if you want to switch from Windows to Linux but don’t want to lose your mails and address book. The procedure should be similar if you use Outlook instead of Outlook Express.

Source: Howto Forge

~LC

LinuxMCE is a free, open source add-on to Ubuntu including a 10′ UI, complete whole-house media solution with pvr + distributed media, and the most advanced smarthome solution available. It is stable, easy to use, and requires no knowledge of Linux and only basic computer skills.

Version 1.0

Media & Entertainment
• 3D alpha-blended GUI optimized for displaying on a TV and using a remote control
• Media browser presenting all content on all devices in the home on a 3D rotating cube
• Plug-and-play detection and aggregation of network storage and DMA’s
• Built-in NAS providing centralized backup and whole-house media server
• “Follow Me” Media, each family member’s media follows him/her through the house
• Automatically controls all existing av devices, like TV’s, Stereo’s, etc.)
• Many control options: mobile phone, webpad, pda, phone

Smart Home
• Home Automation: Control lighting, climate, security, camera surveillance, and more
• Communication: Phone system with auto-attendant, voice mail, call forwarding/routing for VOIP and POTS lines
• Security: Uses your existing home alarm, surveillance cameras, lights, phones and tv’s to notify you on your mobile phone of any security alerts with the option of reseting the alarm or broadcasting your voice in the house over the tv’s

LinuxMCE Wiki- with screenshots

Source: LinuxMCE

~LC

70sstar writes “A 1-1/2 hour recording of Bill Gates addressing a crowd of university students in 1989 was recently found and digitized, and has been circulating in some IRC channels for the past few weeks. The speech has found a permanent home on the web page of the University of Waterloo CS Club, where the talk is reported to have taken place. Gates covers the past, present, and future of computing as of 1989. While the former two might be of interest to tech historians, the real fascination is Gates’s prediction of computing yet to come. Like the now-legendary ’640k’ remark, some of his comments are almost laughably off-target (‘OS/2 is the way of the future!’). And yet, by and large, he had accurately, chillingly, prophesied an entire decade or two of software and hardware development. All in all, a fascinating talk from one of the most powerful speakers in CS and IT.”

Technorati tags: Humor, News

Source: Bill Gates Talk From 1989 Surfaces

What is the key innovation of Spring? The breakthrough technology presented last January during the Solutions Linux event in Paris: Metisse, an innovative window management technology. Unlike the widely known 3D-accelerated desktops with the “cube” effect and other visual enhancements, Metisse offers an innovative way to manage windows: only the windows move, making the possible variations endless! Metisse is not a 3D-accelerated desktop but a Human-Computer Interface (HCI) technology that revolutionizes the user experience.

Source: Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring: Here Comes The Spring

What do you do with an old computer? Say, a 386-generation PC running Windows 98 that hadn’t been patched in years, with a 20-Gbyte hard drive most likely infected with all manner of viruses, spyware, and other maladjusted programs? Sure, it could go to the landfill, or you might be able to get a tax deduction from donating it to a local school. Or, using a Linux-based operating system, you could turn it into a functional desktop, browser, and e-mail client, and put it back to work.

Source: How To Revive An Old PC With Linux

Recently I managed to install Ubuntu on my laptop(IBM Thinkpad Cel 1.4Ghz 256 MB RAM) , which was a very fast machine when I purchased it three and half years back , however things in computers change very fast and now it was a slow moving machine for today’s resource hungry

applications . Now Ubuntu did work well on this machine however things weren’t as zippy as they should be Open Office took a lot of time to load,Viewing PDF files with descent amount of Graphics and in descent quality took some time , and working on multiple applications simultaneously wasn’t easy , and on using resource hungry applications like 3D games or playing encoded video files or encoding videos the system virtually stalls.
So I decided enough is enough , I wasn’t going to spend money buying new hardware but I decided to try some lightweight alternatives to the common applications and use them for my desktop work and here is the applications that I found useful and instructions on how I installed them on my laptop.
Most of the application are available in Official Ubuntu repositories (Some of which have to be enabled inside the Synaptic Package Manager ) so installing them should not present any problem .

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