Tutorials

Ever since ADSL has been an affordable option here in Australia (not that long really) I've sourced quite a few movies online.  These days I get most of movies from ZML in *.avi format.  This is great for watching and storing on the computer, but what if I want to create a DVD from the *.avi video?  The following tutorial will go through some simple steps to get a variety of video formats converted into DVD images in Ubuntu.

It's incredibly frustrating for those of us who use Microsoft's webmail applications under Linux.  To begin with, when Microsoft started their Live Mail application it only supported Internet Explorer, so no Linux.  Secondly, Hotmail and Live Mail do not allow users to connect to the mail server via POP or SMTP so to check your email you need to manually pull up a browser to see if you've received any mail.  In the following tutorial I explain how to download your Hotmail or Live Mail emails using Ubuntu 8.10, Evolution, and applications from the repositories.

While I was away from this site I was forced to use another computer that kept getting a particular error whenever Firefox (version 3.x in this case) attempted to download updates for the installed add-ons.  The browser correctly identified when an update was available but when it attempted to install the update the following error was returned:

Download Error -228

I scoured Google for a solution and nothing seemed to work.  There are plenty of users with this issue but not many solutions and no options to follow if the proposed solutions don't work.

The official solutions from Mozilla, none of which worked for me, are:

This week my Internet connection was shaped to 64k during on-peak times.  This means that from 12:00 PM until 2:00 AM I can't really download anything without it causing a major headache.  This led me to wonder if I could set up the bittorrent client that comes with Ubuntu to automatically execute only during the off-peak times (from 2:00 AM until 12:00 PM) in a fairly intuitive manner.  I don't want my torrent downloads slowing down my on-peak net usage!  I've figured it out and the following describes how I achieved it.

To begin create a new Directory in your home directory called 'torrents'.  To do this from the terminal type:

Ubuntu Hardy Herron has been released for a week now so I decided to give it a shot on my notebook and try it out.  This is by far the best Ubuntu version yet and was the simplest to install and configure of all the versions that I've used in the past.  My notebook, a Compaq Presario V3118AU has had a few issues with Linux in the past so I was a little weary about installing it over my Gutsy install (which was working fine).  Well I had no need to be concerned, everything went fantastically well.  The following is a brief documentation of my install.

SETUP: