XMBC and Ubuntu with Desktop Effects

Ever wonder why Xbox Media Center (XBMC) gives sluggish performance on Ubuntu? The reason is you have to disable Desktop Effects. No matter how fast the PC is, and how good of a driver you may have (proprietary or not, ATI or Nvidia or anything else), XMBC does not play well with desktop effects.

Installing Ubuntu 8.10 with Vista SP1

Seems Dual Booting Vista SP1 and Ubuntu 8.10 is surprisingly easy. All I had to do was click on the start menu, right click on "Computer" and choose "manage". From there, click on Disk Management on the left. On the right, you should see your Vista partitions. right click on the one that says "OS" or whatever your normal Drive says (mines is Drive C btw). And choose Shrink volume. I chose to let it shrink to its default size, minus 1000 KB. So for example, mines gave me a value of about 47000, I chose 46000. The reason is because I need that extra 1GB space left for the swap area.

Once I had both of these areas, I left them as free spaced partitions. Then I booted into Ubuntu 8.10 Beta, loaded up the first option (Try Ubuntu without Installing). Made sure everything works (and it did thanks to Dell). Then chose the Install option from the desktop and installed Ubuntu via the "manual" partition editor. With the manual partition editor, all I had to do was select the large free space, put the mount point as "/" and change the file system to "ext3", and then chose the smaller free space, and changed the filesystem on that to "swap". Then I just let ubuntu install it, and in about 10 minutes, I had booted into Ubuntu 8.10 BETA and it's beautiful desktop :)

New Ubuntu Coming

Ubuntu 8.10 is about 11 days away from being launched. So far, I've taken my new Dell 1525 (vista sp1 pre-installed) on a live-cd session and it was beautiful to see that everything worked out of the box. I was able to turn on the beautiful desktop effects, log into my WEP encrypted wifi, use the laptop's built in web cam, and a host of other things. It feels damn good to finally be able to pop in a linux CD and have everything work. Alhumdulilah (praise be to Allah swt).


Now I'm just waiting for a guide to dual boot vista sp1 and ubuntu 8.10 without messing up my Vista partition :D

Getting rid of Windows problems the easy way

As salamu alaikum,

here's the easiest way to get rid of ANY problem windows can throw at you:

step 1: download and burn the Ubuntu ISO from http://www.ubuntu.com/
step 2: reboot the PC with the newly burned Ubuntu CD in the drive
step 3: install Ubuntu and select the option to wipe out all contents in the Hard Drive


Yup....it's THAT simple. :)


As salamu alaikum

Cracking Wifi In 15 Minutes

As salamu alaikum,

Here's a interesting video. The guy here is cracking Wifi (WEP 128 bit encryption) in under 15 minutes. The video itself is only 2 minutes (majority of the time was spent just letting the software do its magic). Definitely worth looking at for interested surfers:



As salamu alaikum

How to bypass BANS!

As salamu alaikum,

I've come across this situation alot. Usually members come on forums, have a disagreement with some of the mods or members and they end up getting banned. Sometimes, its necessary to gain entry and clear one of the false accusation or whatever they put up on the banned member.

So how do you gain re-entry to the forum? Well Forums ban people via their IP Address. So the simplest solution is to get another IP address that is not in the database of banned IP addresses for the forum. One can use a proxy to achieve this, which basically masks the person's IP address with the IP address of the proxy.

One of the simplest proxy is Hide My Ass (it's ok, you can laugh). Simply go to the site, type in the site you wish to access and voila! you've got access again (provided the IP address of that proxy isn't banned). Keep in mind, you probably won't be able to use your userID on whatever forum you've got banned from, but at least you can register a new userID and do as you please.

Keep in mind, this also works for certain other things where IP addresses have been banned.

Enjoy!

As salamu alaikum

Laptop Battery issue

question:

im having some trouble with my laptop. hopefully you can help.

the battery inside seems to be not charging as my laptop only works on the ac adapter. anything i can do to fix it?


--------------------------------

Most likely the battery is messed up. You see, after a while, laptop batteries lose their way of tracking how much power it can hold. The more you use it, the more it messes up. Most laptops these days come with a battery calibration software in the BIOS which you are supposed to use every month to calibrate the battery. This way the battery doesn't die out so quick. If your battery can't hold a charge at all, you should consider it dead. You CAN ship it to one of those companies that can fix it, but the cost is not small. Your best bet is to shell out the 100-200 USD and buy a replacement battery.

However if your battery can hold a few minute worth of charge, I suggest you try going into the BIOS and calibrating the battery fast. It's a process taht takes about 10 minutes to do but if your battery can hold a charge for up to 15 minutes or so, This might be a good option. Incase it can fix it that is. Though I don't know how successful it will be.