How To Install Android 4.0 (ICS) On Your Netbook

Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) is the latest version of the Android platform for phones, tablets, and more. Android-x86 gives everyone a way to install Android on Intel netbooks. Well I will also explain how to enable dual boot with Ubuntu.

1. Head towards Androidx86 project page and download the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. You might find couple of version, select the best one which suit your netbook. Well I prefer ‘android-x86-4.0-RC1-eeepc.iso’. Click on the file to download the iso file

2. Make your Live USB Drive bookable using UNetbootin. Well you can use other boot loaders as well. I prefer UNetbootin, as it supports all platform. Select the .iso file and make the Usb Drive bootable

3. Now Insert the Usb Drive into your Netbook and start using Android 4.0. To get the feel of Android 4.o, you can try out the Live Android-x86. To install, follow the simple steps as prompted. Its recommended to create virtual SD Card.

However you wont be able to make your system dual bootable. Well, you can achieve it. Install Androidx86 to any of your logical drive.

1. Now boot into Ubuntu and open the Terminal and type ‘gksu gedit /etc/grub.d/40_custom’

2. Which will open a text window. At the bottom, add the following line.


menuentry "Android-x86"
{
   set root='(hd0,0)'
   linux /android-4.0-RC1/kernel quiet
   root=/dev/ram0
   androidboot.hardware=eeepc
   acpi_sleep=s3_bios,
   s3_mode SRC=/android-4.0-RC1 SDCARD=/data/sdcard.img
   initrd /android-4.0-RC1/initrd.img
}

Note: * If you didn’t create virtual sdcard, remove the “SDCARD=/data/sdcard.img” part from the 3rd line (make sure you don’t remove anything else!) * The above menu entry uses “eeepc” for androidboot.hardware, but you can replace it with your hardware, depending on the ISO you have downloaded.

3. Find which partion you installed Androidx86. use the following command to find the value ‘sudo fdisk -l’
so if you’ve installed Android x86 on let’s say “sda5”, you’d use “(hd0,5)”. Update the set root value.
4. Now make the file executable and update the GRUB

sudo chmod +x /etc/grub.d/40_custom
sudo update-grub

5. That’s it, there you go. Press shift key before the GRUB loads to select Androidx86
I’m sure its possible to make dual boot with Android and Windows. Do share with me, if you have the answer.

Special Thanks to makeuseof and webupd blogs

Skype For Linux Loses Beta Tag, Gets 4.0

Skype 4.0 for Linux, codenamed ‘Four Rooms for Improvement,’ which is now available for Linux users. With this release, skype finally filled the gap with our other desktop clients. With this release Skype will likely hope that rumours of the applications demise on Linux are finally put to rest.

You will find four major changes in this release:

  1. New Conversations View where users can easily track all of their chats in a unified window. Those users who prefer the old view can disable this in the Chat options.
  2. Brand new Call View.
  3. Improved Call quality and video quality.
  4. Additional Web Cam support
  5. Improved Chat synchronization
  6. Tabbed Conversations
  7. New status icons and emotions
  8. support for new languages
  9. after all its looks fabulous (personally its much better than Windows and Mac Desktop client)

Skype for Linux 4.0 can be downloaded from the official Skype website.

How To Upgrade From Ubuntu 11.10 To Ubuntu 12.04

The latest version of Ubuntu 12.04 is out few hours back. If its a fresh installtion, you can download from Ubuntu Site or download from here

To upgrade from ubuntu 11.10 to ubuntu 12.04, follow the procedure

1. To start the upgrading process, Press ALT+F2, type update-manager –d and press Enter
Note: You can also you Terminal for the same.

2. This will open the Update Manager where an upgrade button will be visible with a message that the new Ubuntu release is available for upgrade. Click Upgrade to continue.

 

3. Shortly after continuing, Release Notes window will be visible. Click Upgrade to initiate the upgrade process.

 

4. Just before the upgrade, you will be asked to enter your password, after which the upgrade process will initiate.

5. During the process, it will list out install files, no longer needed files, no longer supported by canonical files, Remove files and upgrade files. Click Start Upgrade to continue. Update will take time depending upon your internet connection speed.


6. Once the the upgrade is complete, you will be prompted to restart your computer for the changes to take effect.That’s it you have successfully completed the process.

Geekphilip tips:
1. Make sure, you take backup of your files
2. You can cancel the download, any time you like. When you try again, it will resume from the same location.
3. Make sure, you don’t halt the upgrade process once the installation process begins.

Google Launches Google Drive

Google Drive is a file storage and sync service, introduced to the public by Google, on April 24, 2012. Google Drive is an extension to Google Docs once activated and replaces the URL docs.google.com with drive.google.com. It gives a free storage of 5GB. One interesting feature of the service is smart tagging, which allows you to tag items stored on your drive. So if you’ve uploaded a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge to your drive, the next time you perform a search for the bridge, your photo will show up along with other results. It also uses image recognition. Its also possible to share the file. Check out the video for more information.

How Linux Is Built

While Linux is running our phones, friend requests, tweets, financial trades, ATMs and more, most of us don’t know how it’s actually built. This short video takes you inside the process by which the largest collaborative development project in the history of computing is organized. Based on the annual report “Who Writes Linux,” this is a powerful and inspiring story of how Linux has become a community-driven phenomenon.

Visual Explanation of SQL Joins

An SQL join clause combines records from two or more tables in a database. ANSI standard SQL specifies four types of JOINs: INNER, OUTER, LEFT, and RIGHT. Since SQL joins appear to be set-based, its easy to explain using Venn diagrams.

LEFT OUTER JOIN: produces a complete set of records from Table A, with the matching records (where available) in Table B. If there is no match, the right side will contain null.

RIGHT OUTER JOIN: produces a complete set of records from Table B, with the matching records (where available) in Table A. If there is no match, the left side will contain null.

FULL OUTER JOIN: produces the set of all records in Table A and Table B, with matching records from both sides where available. If there is no match, the missing side will contain null.

INNER JOIN: produces only the set of records that match in both Table A and Table B.

Ubuntu One Monitoring Tools for Ubuntu

Its quite sad, that Ubuntu one doesn’t provide inbuilt monitoring tools. We need to use terminal to track those. Couple of commands like “u1sdtool –waiting-metadata | wc -l” , “u1sdtool –current-transfers” are very useful. Quite late I found two awesome Ubuntu monitoring tools.

1. Magicicada: A GTK+ frontend for the “Chicharra” part of Ubuntu One client. It allows you to connect/disconnect and see the items in the queue. You can install it with these commands in a terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chicharreros/ppa
sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get install magicicada

2. Ubuntuone-indicator: A community implementation of Ubuntu One plugin for Application Indicators. It provides an overview of Ubuntu One state and gives out useful info about file upload and download status. Additional feature such as the list of recently published files is also available.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rye/ubuntuone-extras
sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get install ubuntuone-indicator

You can add ‘ubuntuone-indicator’ to Startup Applications.

Well I prefer Ubuntuone-indicator, because its quite simple, very useful, informative and super easy.

Introducing the HUD to Ubuntu

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical Ubuntu Linux’s parent company, has announced that Ubuntu will be adopting a radical new change to the interface that will do away with the “menu” in the Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer (WIMP) interface, which has defined the desktop for the last thirty years. Shuttleworth states, “The menu has been a central part of the GUI since Xerox PARC invented ‘em in the 70?s. It’s the M in WIMP and has been there, essentially unchanged, for 30 years. We can do much better!” This new interface, which will first appear as a beta in April’s Ubuntu 12.04 release, is called Head-Up Display.

Head-Up Display, or HUD, which will ultimately replace menus in Unity applications. Here’s what you’ll see in 12.04 when you invoke the HUD from any standard Ubuntu app that supports the global menu:

Menus serve two purposes. They act as a standard way to invoke commands which are too infrequently used to warrant a dedicated piece of UI real-estate, like a toolbar button, and they serve as a map of the app’s functionality, almost like a table of contents that one can scan to get a feel for ‘what the app does’. It’s command invocation that we think can be improved upon, and that’s where we are focusing our design exploration. HUD seems to be very promising, lets wait and see.

For more information check out Mark Shuttleworth’s blog

Ubuntu TV Look in Action

“It’s an operating system and experience for your television,” said Canonical CEO Jane Silber. The company is hoping television manufacturers will adopt Ubuntu as a base for their own smart television sets. “We’re focusing on making the TV intuitive and usable again, with a single, elegant interface.”

Features

The official ‘Ubuntu TV’ site lists a features to be found in the OS.

  • Easy integration of broadcast, online services and applications
  • Modern broadcast TV experience – search , watch, record and play
  • Millions of movies and TV shows streamed over the web on demand
  • Shared-screen experience with iOS, Android and Ubuntu devices
  • Pause on one device, resume on another
  • Ubuntu One integration
  • App framework

The code is available here

Preview Any Kind Of File In Ubuntu 11.10 With Globus Preview

Gloobus-Preview is a Nautilus extension to get preview of audio, video, images, documents, code and text files. This enables sorting out junk files within numerous directories and opening different kinds of file types (such as pictures, music, video, code files etc), without requiring multiple applications to be installed on your computer.

To Install:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gloobus-dev/gloobus-preview
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install gloobus-preview
sudo apt-get install gloobus-preview gloobus-sushi

Globus Preview
Globus Preview

To Use:
Once installed, click any file and hit Space key to get an instant preview. You can open full-screen view by using the full-screen mode button present at the bottom of the screen. To exit full screen mode, hit ESC. The file preview window contains a Cog icon located at the top right corner, which provides access to preview settings. These settings enable users to keep the preview window on top, close the window and to use a GTK theme for file preview.