Technical Solution

Even though Open Office is a really good Office suite, newbie Linux users find it difficult to migrate from Microsoft Office 2007 to Open Office. There are other options as well, like KOffice suite among others, which are really good Free software alternatives. But for those who desperately need to use Microsoft Office 2007 in their Ubuntu 8.10 desktop, WINE (Wine Is Not an Emulator) is there to help you. All you need is the latest version of WINE. We have compiled the different steps required in installiing Microsoft Office 2007.

Upgrading a working server application is always tricky. This is especially true if the upgrade had changes in configuration files and you had customizations done in your local configuration file. The recent exim4 upgrade to version 4.67-3 had structural changes in the configuration files. The suggested upgrade method is to accept all the modifications provided by the upgrade and redo the customizations. But what if you did not read the instructions properly and ended having an exim4 installation that throws out errors every time you try to start exim4.

One of the most important aspects of any website is its look and feel. If you create a website that does its job well but does not look good, it is bound to become a failure. On the other hand if you create a exceptionally good looking website which too does its job it is more likely to succeed. Every web application project requires you to design the website. Why spend too much time and effort in doing this when you can go ahead and buy a readily available design. This is what our new website - OSS Themes - offers you.

Do you find your custom DNS server entries being deleted after every reboot or after every disconnection? Do you use DHCP but still want to use your own DNS servers? Do you want to use OpenDNS and ignore the DNS servers provided by your ISP? Well here is how you can do this on Ubuntu. This solution applies to Ubuntu but might very well work for other distributions of GNU Linux as well.

Disabling the USB storage device is of prime importance if you are running a firm with a number of PC's with Windows operating system. The chances are high for a PC to get infected through the USB device, especially when the installed OS is Windows. We have compiled the different steps required to disable USB storage device in a Windows PC. Two cases are under consideration here. 1: If the USB storage device is not installed on your computer and 2: if the USB storage device is already installed.

We had a query from one of our customers to help them migrate their local mail server to Google Apps. They wanted to do this because they did not have the sufficient in-house capability nor have the funds to get paid external capability to support an internal mail server. One hurdle that they were facing was that they had around 40GB of mail left on the local mail server that they wanted to migrate to the new mail accounts they created on Google Apps.

Recently we had to provide support on a Red Hat Server where there were hundreds of users and the user directories organized into hierarchies. Normally we change to a users directory using cd ~username. We had some extra time on our hands and wanted to play with the /etc/passwd file and tried to use awk to do the same thing. The following one liner will do this the hard way :-)

If you use GNU/Linux as your development environment then you inevitably has to use the find command at some point of time. A very common need while developing web applications is to search for the occurrences of a given string in files, very often with different extensions, under a given project. The command 'find' is a very powerful search utility that can be wielded according to our convenience and can be used in this scenario.

We install Ubuntu on almost all systems built at Zyxware. One common request we have heard from our customers was for a simple printed user manual that they can use to learn and start using Ubuntu. We have been guiding people to the web to learn the ins and outs of using the operating systems but this does not always work very well. As a permanent solution to this problem we are embarking on an ambitious project to create a print ready Ubuntu Manual. As the first step towards this we have created a website dedicated to compiling content that can go into the ubuntu manual. You can check out the ubuntu manual site.

We had recently been involved in a project to set up a Conference Management System for an International Conference to be conducted in Kerala sometime later this year. We had zeroed in on Pentabarf as the solution we were going to base the system on. Pentabarf is a Ruby on Rails solution that has been used for the last couple of DebConfs. Pentabarf as such is an excellent system, being a system created by programmers for programmers, but it heavily lacked in documentation both on their site and on the world wide web. We however managed to get it installed on Ubuntu with Apache, Ruby on Rails and FastCGI. We are sharing the installation instructions for Pentabarf on Ubuntu here