Sugar 6.1.0 Beta 4 now available for testing

Sugar Community Edition Version 6.1.0 Beta 4
Wednesday, September 29, 2010

The fourth 6.1.0 Beta version of Sugar Community Edition is now available for testing.

Preview Sugar 6.1.0 Beta online

Sugar Community Edition 6.1.0 Beta 4 can be downloaded from the Sugar project on SugarForge.

Note: Do not test upgrading to the Beta releases on a Sugar system in production. We recommend testing on a development system.

The bugs addressed in Sugar 6.1.0 Beta 4 can be found in the Bug Tracker.

If you encounter any issues while running Sugar 6.1.0 Beta 4, please let us know by submitting a bug in the Bug Tracker. Be sure to designate "6.1.0-Beta4" in the "Found in Release" field.

Use the Sugar 6.1.0 Forum to post your questions and start discussions around the release.

The current timeline for Sugar 6.1.0 is as follows: Weekly Betas - OngoingBi-Weekly Release Candidates - Mid-OctoberGenerally Available - End of November

Recover Lost or Deleted Partitions in Linux Using TestDisk

Recover Lost or Deleted Partitions in Linux Using TestDisk: If you have a lost or non-bootable hard disk drive partition due to viruses, faulty software, or plain stupidity (just kidding), you will need a data recovery software to help you save your precious data. One of the hard drive data recovery tools that I can highly recommend is TestDisk.

TestDisk is capable of fixing partition table and recovering deleted partition. It can fix FAT and MFT tables, recover FAT32 and NTFS boot sector from its backup, rebuild FAT12/FAT16/FAT32 and NTFS boot sector, locate ext2/ext3/ext4 backup superblock, undelete files from FAT, NTFS and ext2 filesystem, and copy files from deleted FAT, NTFS and ext2/ext3/ext4 partitions.

TestDisk is designed for both novice and expert users. For those who have little or no knowledge about data recovery procedures, it can be used to collect detailed information about a non-booting drive that can then be sent to a trusty technician for additional analysis.

Although TestDisk runs in the terminal, it is fairly easy to use. There is no need to remember various commands as you will be guided with questions and prompts and will only need to use the Enter and Arrow keys to get going.

Starting TestDisk
Selecting a hard disk to scan
The next time your hard disk crashes and then just disappears or can't be booted anymore, don't panic because you can always use a hard drive data recovery tool like TestDisk.

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Create Your Own Online Backup Service With SparkleShare

Create Your Own Online Backup Service With SparkleShare: Do you want to build your own online backup service like Dropbox and host your own files or data? If yes, then perhaps you should take a close at SparkleShare. From its project website, SparkleShare is described as a syncing and collaboration tool that is designed to make sharing documents and collaboration effortless. It allows you to easily host your own service so that you are always in control of your data.

With SparkleShare, you are given an option to host your remote folder on Github, Gitorious, The GNOME Project, or on your own server.

Sharing files is as easy as drag and drop Dropbox-style when using SparkleShare. Your files are synced to your server allowing connected clients to view the changes. If you made a mistake, it is still possible to revert the changes.

The best thing about SparkleShare is that it is totally free and open-source. It is currently available for Linux and is still in Beta. Take note that it is pretty much a work in progress and some of the features are not yet well implemented. But, a lot of people are already excited about it so I'm hoping that it is being developed at a rapid pace.

 

15 Fantastic Inkscape Tutorials for Creating Awesome Vector Art

15 Fantastic Inkscape Tutorials for Creating Awesome Vector Art: Inkscape is without doubt the most well-known and perhaps the best free and open-source vector graphics editor available for Linux. It is loaded with powerful features that will allow anyone with ingenious mind create some amazing digital art.

You may have seen our collection of excellent vector clip art made using Inkscape and might want to create your own. Hence, I decided to gather several highly informative and easy to understand Inkscape tutorials so that you too could produce your very own awesome vector art.

In no particular order, here are 15 fantastic Inkscape tutorials:

* Creating Pac-Man Baddies

* Draw A Realistic Vector Guitar

* Inkscape-tastic icons

* Illustrating Chinese Dragon

* Illustrating Rainbow with Clone tool

* Create a Snail

* Sticker with Folded Edge Tutorial

* F10 Gears: Drawing the Gears

* Creating a Coffee Cup

* Illustrate A Peacock

* Creating Postage Stamps

* Create a Vector Compass

* Text and Simple Styling

* How to Create Valentine's Day Hearts Artwork

* Creating Rubber Stamp

If you know a link or two to other excellent Inkscape tutorials, you may share them with us via comment.

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10 Latest Android-Powered Tablet PCs – Can Any of These Take on the iPad?

The iPad may be flying off the shelves with more than 3 million units sold to date, but it doesn’t mean that others aren’t welcome to take a shot at unseating it.

And they certainly are trying. With a slew of Android-powered touch screen devices and tablet PCs unleashed (could someday include the Google tablet) one after another, we may yet live to see the day when Apple would need to be on the defensive.

The question is, which among the current crop of AndPads, including those that would be in consumers’ hands within the next few weeks, is likely to carve a niche for itself in the tablet PC industry? Let’s take a closer look at the contenders:

Archos Internet Tablets - Can you say master of tablet PCs? Not quite done with the Archos 5, Archos 7, and Archos 8 released in September of last year and June this year, the French company last month unveiled its latest offerings in what is getting to be a long list of Archos Android-powered tablets. The five (yes, you read that right – 5) tablet devices all come with the Android 2.2 ‘Froyo’, accelerometers, touch screens in varying sizes, and cameras, to name just a few of their features. The Archos fab five take on the first five slots of this list.

1. Archos 28
With a 2.8-inch resistive touch screen, this midget is apparently the smallest of the lot but there’s still a lot you can do with its 4G of storage, Wi-Fi capability, and a new Archos music application that supports a variety of video and music formats. Browsing on such a diminutive touch screen could still be inhibiting for a lot of people though but at a starting price of $99, it would still spark some interest especially for those who want to browse on the go but don’t want to shell out too much.

2. Archos 32
A tad bigger than the Archos 28 with a 3.2-inch screen, the Archos 32 also has double the storage with 8G and a slightly higher price at $149.99. The built-in camera allows for 720p video recording, which you can then watch on a bigger screen as the device can be hooked up to a TV. Just like the 28, you can surf the net with the 32 but again, it may not exactly be the most pleasant browsing experience.

3. Archos 43
The Archos 43 is slated to take the place of the Archos 5 and with its features, it’s a most worthy successor. Sporting a 1GHz ARM Cortex A8 processor, a camera that can record 720p video, spot-on accelerometer navigation, and a price point of about $199, it has the makings of a cool browsing and gaming buddy.

4. Archos 70
The big boys of Archos start with the Archos 70, a more responsive and more powerful version of the Archos 7 Home Tablet. True, the prices are starting to get a bit steep here with the 70 at $279 but it could be well worth every bang for your buck with a capacitive touchscreen, accelerometer, front VGA camera that supports video chat, and USB ports. At 0.4 inches thick and a weight of just 11 ounces, its lighter and slimmer design is also a plus factor.

5. Archos 101
Last but definitely not the least is the designated “iPad killer” of the 5 latest Archos tablets. This 10.1-incher is only 0.5-inch thick and 0.93-pound heavy, and comes with a 1024 x 600-resolution, capacitive touchscreen, 1 GHz processor, front-facing VGA cam, and USB and HDMI ports. It has a kickstand in the back that allows you to prop it up for viewing and typing angles most convenient for you. At a price of $300, it could well give other tablets a run for their money.

6. Samsung Galaxy Tab
The Samsung Galaxy Tab launched to much fanfare sometime last week. With its 7-inch touch display, it’s a more compact gadget than the 9-incher iPad, losing a few points on the screen size and gaining some on the portability. Powered by the Android 2.2 Froyo (upgradeable to Android 3.0), it runs on a speed of 1GHz (same as the iPad), has twice the RAM with 512MB, and provides for expandable storage of up to 32GB. No final word yet on how much this one’s gonna cost but it could be anywhere from $200 to $400.

7. Toshiba Folio 100
Not to be outdone, Toshiba has also thrown the proverbial hat into the tablet PC ring with the debut of the Folio 100. The Folio’s 10.1-inch touch screen with 1024 x 600 resolution, coupled with more-than-decent technical features under the hood (including NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual-core processor and 16GB memory) should make for a satisfying web browsing experience. Word has it though that there’s no Android Market on this device, which makes its chances of being a forerunner in the industry highly-doubtful.

8. Dell Streak
The first wave of Dell Streak tablets was officially available in stores only last month and the reviews it got were mixed at best. Sporting a 5-inch touchscreen, it’s one of those devices that fall in the “tweener” category (too big to be a phone, to small to be a tablet), although this one could actually be used for making and taking calls; that is, if you don’t mind putting such a “large” device to your ear. On the upside, it’s capable of pretty much everything you can do on a touch tablet – browse, video playback, social networking, and digital reading – on an 800 x 480 resolution. Initial units of the Streak were running on the Android 1.6 but an upgrade to Android 2.1 has been made available recently.

9. HP Zeen
Don’t look now but HP’s own Android tablet, Zeen, has been spotted in its most primal form. Tech blog Engadget was first to leak out images of the 7-inch touchscreen tablet, apparently retrieved from China, and some basic specs including 800 x 400 resolution, 4G storage, 512MB RAM, and an ARM-based processor. While it’s loaded with the Android 2.1, the applications are leaning more towards Yahoo!, plus Facebook, Barnes & Noble Nook compatibility, and other online video apps. If you think these features aren’t drool-inducing, you might be even more daunted by the package the Zeen tablet comes with: HP’s C510 PhotoSmart eStation printer. The tablet/printer combo will reportedly ship end of September.

10. LG Optimus Pad
Riding on the relative success of its Optimus smartphones, LG has decided to include its Android tablet under the same line, hence we await the arrival of the Optimus Pad hopefully by the fourth quarter of 2010. Unfortunately, mum’s still the word on the device’s hardware specs and we can only speculate on what the Pad brings to the table. In describing the soon-to-debut tablet though, LG does use the words “superior performance”, “lighter”, “thinner”, and with many “firsts.” As to whether the Optimus Pad will live up to these intriguing descriptions still remains to be seen.

This entry was written for Tech Source by John Carl P. Villanueva of Steaming Open Cup blog.

You may also check out our list of affordable Android-powered tablet PCs.

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Where to Download Free VirtualBox Images (.vdi) and How to Use Them

Where to Download Free VirtualBox Images (.vdi) and How to Use Them: VirtualBox, arguably the most popular free and open-source virtualization software for Linux is a great tool for trying other operating systems without the need for additional hardware. I utilize VirtualBox for installing and running Windows 7 as guest OS on Ubuntu, and also use it for testing other Linux distributions.

To run an operating system inside VirtualBox, you will need a CD/DVD or image installer of the guest OS so you may have to download it, and then set it up and wait until the installation is finished. If you are always in the mood to try other Linux distros or operating systems, you may find this a time-consuming process.

So what should you do to save some of your precious time? You may download a VirtualBox disk image (.vdi) file of your preferred operating system. Now, where can you download free VirtualBox images? You can go to torrent sites like isohunt.com and search for .vdi. You can also go to virtualboximages.com and virtualboxes.org where you will find direct links to tons of VirtualBox images of different Linux distributions and also BSDs. You may also use Google if you are not lazy enough.

How to use VDI file?

Run VirtualBox and start by adding a new virtual machine the way you normally do. But once you reach the “Virtual Hard Disk” part, select “Existing” to open up the VirtualBox Virtual Disk Manager. Using the VirtualBox Virtual Disk Manager, simply attach or add your downloaded .vdi file, and then finish it up. You can now start the virtual machine with your guest OS already installed, so no more waiting.

That’s about it. I hope you will find this useful.

PS. When looking for.vdi torrents, always get it from trusted torrent sites like isohunt, mininova, et. To be safe, read comments associated with the torrent file to find out if it's the real deal. Lastly, use common sense to avoid malware.

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5 Best Free and Open Source File Archivers for Linux

A computer program that merges a number of files together into one archive file, or a series of archive files, for simpler transportation, storage, or backup is called a file archiver. Archiving or packing refers to the process of making an archive file, while unarchiving, unpacking or extracting means reconstructing the original files from the archive.

The simplest file archivers just gather a list of files and concatenate their contents sequentially into the archive. For transferring a large number of individual files over a high latency network like the Internet, numerous file archivers employ archive formats that provide lossless data compression to reduce the size of the archive.

If you are looking for a capable free and open-source file archiver for Linux, you should check out this list, and then pick out the one that would suit your needs:

Xarchiver
Xarchiver is a popular GTK+2 based file archiver that is designed to be independent of the desktop environment. It is utilized in a good number of lightweight Linux distributions like Xfce and LXDE. Xarchiver supports 7-zip, arj, bzip2, gzip, rar, lha, lzma, lzop, deb, rpm, tar and zip archives, archive navigation with mimetype icons, archive comment ability and archive listing as HTML or txt. Cut/Copy/Paste/Rename actions within files of variety of archives are also supported. Password detection and protection is automatic for arj, zip and rar files.

File Roller
File Roller is a simple and easy-to-use archive manager for the GNOME desktop environment. It has a graphical user interface and can create and modify archives, view the content of an archive and files contained in the archive, and of course extract files from the archive. It supports plenty of archive files such as 7-Zip (.7z), Tar, WinAce (.ace), gzip, RAR, and a whole lot more.

Ark
Ark is an archiving tool for the KDE desktop environment that is included into kdeutils package. It can view, extract, create, and modify archives through its intuitive GUI. Ark can handle different file formats that include tar, gzip, bzip2, zip, rar and lha. If the appropriate plugin from kdeaddons package is installed, it can be integrated into Konqueror in the KDE environment to handle archives through KParts technology.

PeaZip
PeaZip is both a file manager and file archiver that supports its native PEA archive format, featuring compression, multi volume split and flexible authenticated encryption, and integrity check schemes. It also has support for other mainstream formats, with special focus on handling open formats. With PeaZip, users can run extracting and archiving operations automatically using command-line generated exporting the job defined in the GUI front-end. For speeding up archiving or backup operation's definition, it can also create, edit and restore an archive's layout.

FreeArc
FreeArc is a fast and efficient file archiver that is said to work 2–5 times quicker than best programs in each compression class (ccm, 7-zip, rar, uharc -mz, pkzip) while retaining the same compression ratio. From technical grounds, it is superior to any existing practical compressor. Features include:

* AES/Blowfish/Twofish/Serpent encryption
* FAR and Total Commander plugins
* Solid compression with smart updates
* Ability to create self-extracting archives and installers
* Archive protection and recovery

If you know of other free and open-source file archivers for Linux that I fail to include on my list above, feel free to share them with us via comment.

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5 (More) Best Web eCommerce Software for Linux

I have already featured here some of the best web eCommerce software available for Linux. However, I've noticed that I left out several other high-quality web e-commerce solutions. So, I decided to give you another round of some of the best open-source web eCommerce software that you may find useful:

Zen Cart
Zen Cart is an easy-to-use free and open-source online store management system based on PHP. Its default installation provides everything you need for maintaining a shopping cart web site. Using the administration area, you can manage products, pricing, shipping, newsletters, sales, and other important tasks. The shopping cart is set up to accept payments from any major credit card via the merchant's choice of several available payment gateway services. Some of the main features of Zen Cart:

* Multiple language support
* Multiple customer modes
* Unlimited category depth
* Multiple sales and discounts
* Multiple display modes
* XHTML 1.0 compliant template system
* phpBB integration through external module
* Multiple ad banner controllers
* Multiple shipping options

Broadleaf Commerce
Broadleaf Commerce is an open-source eCommerce solution that utilizes Java/Spring platform. It is designed to be highly-configurable and extendable, and it offers painless integration with your present database and back end fulfilment system. With Broadleaf Commerce, you can easily manage product catalogue through its user-friendly merchandising tool. Also, with it you can showcase and change promotions, designate featured products, cross-sell and up-sell featured products, customize product search, retrieve analytics and reporting, and integrate with social networking sites such like Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Delicious, etc.

Apache OFBiz
Apache OFBiz (Apache Open For Business) is an open-source enterprise resource planning system that provides a suite of enterprise applications that incorporate and automate plenty of the business processes of an enterprise including eCommerce. It offers a common data model and a loaded set of business process. Aside from eCommerce, Apache OFBiz offers a wide range of functionality that includes:

* Asset Maintenance
* Catalogue and Product Management
* Facility and Warehouse Management
* Manufacturing
* Order Processing
* Inventory Management, automated stock replenishment etc.
* Content management system (CMS)
* Human resources (HR)
* People and Group Management
* Project Management Software
* Sales Force Automation

Satchmo
Satchmo is an open-source online store management system utilizing the Django web application framework, providing a number of useful, robust, and tested features. It is highly-flexible having the ability to use any database system that Django supports including MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite, and it takes advantage of Django's power internationalization framework. Satchmo supports several different product types such as downloadable products, custom products, gift certificates, and subscription products.
Bots
Bots is an open-source EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) translator and business-to-business electronic commerce software that uses Django as a web framework. As a complete EDI translator for business, it is designed to be very flexible. Some of the features of Bots:

* Very powerful mapping
* Any-to-any-format conversions
* Very flexible by using user scripts (in Python)
* Plug-ins for easy configuration of EDI and examples/learning
* All edifact messages and X12 transactions are available
* Convert to readable/printable format ('EDI-fax')

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How to Synchronize Dropbox and Ubuntu One Online Backup Services

How to Synchronize Dropbox and Ubuntu One Online Backup Services: Dropbox and Ubuntu One are two of my favorite online backup services. They both provide safe, reliable, and easy-to-use cloud storage solutions. Their features may vary but they are all important to me, so I have installed and used Dropbox and Ubuntu One together on my Ubuntu desktop.

I have Linux, Windows, and Mac computers at home and I find Dropbox essential for quickly synchronizing files across different operating systems. Meanwhile, Ubuntu One is integrated with some of the applications I've installed on Ubuntu such as Evolution and Tomboy notes so I can't live without it too.

I find it inconvenient to maintain two online backup services on my Linux box that I decided to link and combine Dropbox and Ubuntu One so that they are synchronized. This means that whenever I made some changes or created some files on my Ubuntu One folder, it will automatically sync with my Dropbox folder, and vice versa. How did I do it? It's really easy.

If you have not installed Dropbox yet, I suggest you read this: How to install and use Dropbox in Ubuntu Linux

After installation, open the Dropbox preferences and change the default folder location or path and point it to your Ubuntu One folder.

Inside Ubuntu One, you will now be able to see the Dropbox folder. So, changes made inside the Dropbox folder will instantly be seen in Ubuntu One.

Next up, right-click on your Ubuntu One folder and click on the "Make Link" option. Move the "Link to Ubuntu One" folder and place it inside the Dropbox folder.

Your original Ubuntu One folder will now be synchronized with Dropbox, which also means you can now access your Ubuntu One folder from your other OS with a Dropbox desktop client installed.

That was a really simple trick, isn't it? But, I do hope some of you would also find it useful.

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