Technology. Without Error

Guess I had been paying far too much attention to Symbian (the mobile OS) that I haven’t written about anything else for a while now. But yesterday I came across a windows installer for Ubuntu, Wubi.

Wubi is just like any other windows installer, except that it installs a complete OS on your HDD, no partitioning, no geek stuff required. The best part is, when you are done with playing around with your Linux OS, you can uninstall it from your windows menu just like any other application. I always try out my Linux on USB drives fearing compatibility issues. The last time I tried it out, it was my wifi card.

Wubi’s a small executable which should take about a minute or two to download. Run, select the OS you want to install, enter a username/password for your new OS’ local account and Wubi begins downloading the OS.

I set it up to install Ubuntu Netbook Edition and then went to bed. When I got up in the morning, it was ready and waiting for a reboot. One reboot later, UNR starts installing and partitioning. Select Ubuntu at the boot menu and I had it booting up in a few seconds. Enter the username/pw and you are good to go.

The last time I installed UNR, I had a few issues getting it to recognize my wifi connection. But this time, no hassles at all. And the best thing about installing on the HDD is persistence by default! Although it shouldn’t be too hard to get persistence on your USB drive as well.  After using Wubi to install UNR, uninstalling an OS is as easy as uninstalling a program.

Another post on trying to make your desktop look different. Last time I tried putting up a tutorial on how to get your windows desktop to look like a Mac.
News of the google chrome OS sure has been a hot one on the internet and I thought it would be a great idea to dress up your desktop before Google launches their first screenshots and spoils the party. Google’s design is all about simplicity and that’s what should be the focus of their desktop as well. So I decided to give it a no wallpaper look. Right click on your desktop > properties > desktop and make sure the wallpaper is set to none. Change the color of the background to white (or maybe even blue..)
Now at the center of this desktop design is an application called the circle dock. The circle dock is just the usual mac dock with the icons setup in circle(s) (you decide on the number of circles. Make sure you familiarize yourself with the circle dock’s options/settings to ensure that you get the best of this tutorial.
There’s no installing Circle dock, so you just extract the zip file and run the circledock.exe file. Now for the Google Icons. For the most original looking Icons I recommend the Simply Google Icon Collection by tempest.
You still need to get the big chrome icon, one of which I found here. Right click on the dock and change the center icon to the chrome icon. To link up all the icons to the relevant web applications, you need to create shortcuts to google chrome applications. You create an application shortcut, by right clicking the dock icon and pointing it to google chrome’s location and make sure you put in the website address in the arguments section of the shortcut for the dock icon. For example, for gmail the argument would look like:
–app=https://mail.google.com/mail
If you need help, try creating an application shortcuts from within google chrome. Play around with the settings and you should be fine. Be advised that Circle dock is still an alpha version.
Now to extent the tabbed feature to all applications, not just google chrome, to do this download a program called WindowTabs. But windowtabs is not freeware, but the trial version allows you to group upto 3 tabs with no time restrictions or nag screens. Install Windowtabs and you’re good to go. The final version:

You’re tired of windows and all its travails and decide to look around for alternative operating systems (read open source!). What flavor of Linux do you chose, if you’ve never used Linux or any other operating system other than windows? We recommend that you try Slax on your USB flash drive or a CD. That way you’ll always have your boring Windows platform to come back to, if you ever chose to (or even if you had to!!)

Before we download Slax, lets take a look at what Slax is all about. Slax is a Linux operating system  build based on slackware linux. You can read more about it at slax.org or on the wikipedia page here. Linux as you might have heard is open source and as a result of which comes in a variety of shapes and sizes such as Ubuntu, Redhat, Knoppix and a hundred others built by people like you and me around the world.

BTW, you would find a lot of links on this page considering that this post was not written for geeks alone. We tried the Slax installation on a 4GB USB drive, although it shouldn’t be too much of a hassle running it from a 1GB USB drive either. But as always, bigger is better. Slax also gives you an option to run completely from RAM (*really fast!) although you need to load it from your USB or CD in the first place.

Head to the Slax website to download the slax installation package for the USB or the CD as you may want to. The first roadblock you may face is the installation file itself. Its available either as an ISO or as TAR package. (no! no Zip files or installers!). Most software for the linux operating system itself is packaged as a TAR package. Now a TAR package isn’t too different from an average Zip file and you can extract if you have the latest version of your File extraction software (if you run into trouble extracting it into a folder, use google!) Copy the contents of the folder to the USB drive (In case of the CD image, just burn the ISO onto any CD).

Ensure the first bootable device on your BIOS is set to your USB or CD as required. Now plug in the USB/pop in the CD and reboot. Now if everything goes fine, it should bootup to load Slax. Linux boots up on the default root account. Connect your PC to the network cable and it should pick up the internet connection just as easily. If not, click on the select IP and click ok to associate the IP with the system. Load Konqueror which is the default browser for the KDE shell(which is the desktop environment for linux; similar to what the explorer means to Windows) go and search for all those software which are available ready to use as slax modules here. You just need to download and click on the files to install them, which you would find installed in your start menu.

You can find a few screenshots here. Now come the gripes, I miss using the Wifi on the HP Pavillion laptop and no matter what, slax did not recognise my wifi card. Of course I was too lazy to pick up an NDISWrapper for my Wifi card’s windows drivers. That should make any windows driver work with Linux and the same goes for Slax.

I almost forgot the last time I blogged about windows 7. The successor to the Vista series..Now, apparently Microsoft didn’t benefit much from Vista, so they decided to copy Macs a bit more and make a more macintosh like OS.

Here are the first look pics of the Windows 7 desktop:

Now thats terribly disappointing…They try to recreate a dock bar like appearance which belongs to the Mac, but fail miserably at doing that…It looks like they made the quick launch bigger…what a joke…The start menu has changed too, but I really am not too impressed with that…and btw clicking on these icons gives a content sensitive, application relevant menu…

There are several changes under the hood…but I am a man of the desktop and you can judge a book by its cover..But, considering this is just the first look and there are changes still to come, Microsoft still might be able to make a difference..After all, when the first preview of the longhorn was released, it was nothing like the Vista we know today…

Wish to make your PC look like windows 7, atleast you can get the wallpaper here

Read the full review of the Windows 7 first look here.

Vista gives you two themes to select from, your Aero theme and your windows classic theme. But how long do you stay without getting bored? Get new themes, and install them, before that, you need to follow this tutorial.

More desktop customization, and my search for the free windows manager takes me to Styles XP. But, it is neither free nor is it available for Windows XP….So, my search continues until I find Code Gazer’s VistaGlazz. Vista Glazz lets me install third party themes, visual styles for Vista (and the best part is, it is free..)

Step 1:

Install VistaGlazz and run the program.

Now select the second icon (the one that looks like a shade card (the tick mark will be not be present until you run the program once. Follow the instructions and you are all ready to rock.

Step 2:

You can find vista themes all over the internet. I prefer deviantART for all my desktop customization needs. To illustrate, let us use the Leopard 1.0a theme by Masterhack.

Download the file by clicking on the links on the left of the page. Unzip the file after you have saved it. Copy all the files to the following folder on your hd:

C:\Windows\Resources\Themes

Click on the Leopard.theme and apply it. Done. Enjoy your new theme.

Installation of theme should make sure that you no longer need to use Objectbar as mentioned in my earlier post which lets you make your desktop look like a Mac.

This is how my screen looks like now.

Top secret Geek stuff (what, the vistaglazz app does)

It replaces three files on your hard drive (inside the windows/system32 folder) This enables you to add new themes other than the default themes which Microsoft has provided you with. These files are available for your version of windows at Within Windows

IMPORTANT:

• The theme file is a rar format (a compression format similar to zip) . You will need winrar to unrar it (thanks to Sabrina for reminding me that I need to provide a link)
• This tutorial is only for Windows Vista. For Windows XP, I guess you don’t have an option but to buy Styles XP.
• Do not try this tutorial if you have Vista Home Basic Version.
• In case you have already installed Service pack for Windows Vista, download VistaGlazz from here (instead of the link at the beginning of the post)
• There is a chance that things could go wrong and your computer could explode, implode, crash or become a black hole after trying out my tutorial. So, do it only if you know what you are doing and you are willing to take a risk.
• The author, website or anyone in this universe is not responsible for your actions after reading this tutorial, in fact, they weren’t even responsible for your actions before you read this.