Recently I have came across many people asking how to install Ubuntu in a UEFI machine. Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (or UEFI for short) is a new type of firmware that was initially designed by Intel (known as EFI then) mainly for its Itanium based systems. It introduces new ways of booting an OS that is distinct from the commonly used "MBR boot code" method followed for BIOS systems. A detailed description of UEFI can be found at the ArchWiki or Wikipedia .  The installation remains similar to normal installation procedure but needs a little bit of tweaking. Having a PC with EFI firmware does not mean that you need to install Ubuntu in EFI mode. If you have a machine in which there is any operating system already installed in Legacy mode then you must install Ubuntu also in Legacy mode, unless you wish to format the system and start from scratch. If Ubuntu is the only operating system on your computer, then it does not matter, you can install Ubuntu in EF...

                          Two major problems I have experienced with Ubuntu on a laptops are heating up and battery drainage. Most of the modern day devices have the capability to save power. The drivers installed on the Ubuntu has the capability to do that also. But they are underutilized. This results in the dual problems of heavy battery drain and heating up. These two problems are interrelated and they can be solve together by doing some manual configurations. The following methods were successfully tested in three hp laptops ( The laptops used processors: AMD A10 with ATI dual graphics, i5 with Intel and ATI dual graphics and Dual Core without graphics card). 1)  The first and most important solution to the problem is TLP. (Thanks to my friend who told me about this.)  TLP is an advanced power management tool for Linux. It is a pure command li...

Microsoft Office is my favorite office application. The default LibreOffice in Ubuntu 12.10 lacks a lot of Features available in MS Office. After succesfull installation of Microsoft Office 2007 in Ubuntu 11.10 and 12.04/12.10 , I tried installing Microsoft Office 2010 in 12.10. The installation instructions for Microsoft Office 2007 in 12.10 is same as that in 12.04. To install Microsoft Office 2010 in Ubuntu 12.10,  I followed the following steps. There are few changes in the dependencies needed for 201 0 when compared to 20 0 7 . This method works in Ubuntu 13.04, 13.10 and 14.04 as well. This has been tested on both 3 2 and 64 bits successfully . This method is reported to work in Ubuntu derivatives like Mint by users through comment. 1. For 64-bit users first step is to install mesa OpenGL and the 32-bit libraries. For all except 14.04 :   sudo apt-get install mesa-utils mesa-utils-extra libgl1-mesa-glx:i386 libgl1-mesa-dev ia32-libs For Ubuntu 14.04 users t...

For Facebook 1.   Open Pidgin and select add account. 2.   In basic tab set       Protocol:  XMPP       Username :facebook username (not email address)        Resource : Pidgin         Domain: chat.facebook.com       password : facebook pa ssword        Local Ali as: sa me a s name in face book 3.   In Advanced        Connection security : Use encryption if available       untick allow  pl ain text auth over unencrypt ed streams       Connect port : 443       C onnect S erver: chat.facebook.com       File Transfer Proxy and Bosh url must be emp ty 4.  If you are behind a proxy serv er the go to proxy tab and select HTTP and enter proxy server details 5.  Then save settings. This will con...

 For Gtalk  1.   Open Pidgin and select add account. 2.   In basic tab enter your user name, domain as gmail.com and also your password. 3.   In Advanced select Use old-style SSL, connect port 443 and connect server talk.google.com 4.  In proxy tab set Use Environmental Settings 5.  Then save settings. This will connect you to the gtalk. For this to work /etc/environment should have the proxy settings. If not available then add the proxy settings to /etc/environment. It will look like this http_proxy="http://144.16.192.218:8080/" https_proxy="https://144.16.192.218:8080/" ftp_proxy="ftp://144.16.192.218:8080/" socks_proxy="socks://144.16.192.218:8080/" HTTP_PROXY="http://144.16.192.218:8080/" HTTPS_PROXY="https://144.16.192.218:8080/" FTP_PROXY="ftp://144.16.192.218:8080/" SOCKS_PROXY="socks://144.16.192.218:8080/"

To use onion routing in Ubuntu 12.04 you can use either of the following methods:  Method 1 The first option is to download tor browser bundle and extract  it. Tor can be launched by running start-tor-browser script in extracted directory. If permission is denied then run "chmod -R +x * in a terminal to add executable bit to the files. During first run, Stop tor, Set the proxy in vidalia settings and Start tor again. Once the connection is established tor browser will come automatically. This is a tweaked version of firefox. By default, add-ons and other extensions are disabled. The proxy settings and port of privoxy can be found from Edit-> Preferences->Advanced->Network->Settings. You can copy the proxy and port to any application's proxy settings to make it work behind tor. Method 2 1. Vidalia can be installed from the command line or synaptic or USC. I prefer to use the terminal for installation. If privoxy is already installed in the system the...

1. Installing dropbox in Ubuntu 12.04                    Dropbox installation is not as easy for users behind a proxy. Two major problems seen during dropbox installation are: (i) If dropbox is installed from repositories using apt-get or synaptic or usc, usually a screen appears asking for permission everytime we launch dropbox and most of the times it doesnt launch. (ii)Drobox deamon fails to download and install automatically after dropbox installation.                        The dropbox installation can be easily done as follows. Instead of installing dropbox available in repositories go to dropbox website . Download dropbox for ubuntu 64 bit or 32 bit .Now install this by opening in ubuntu software center or using the following commands: sudo dpkg -i sudo apt-get -f install While launching dropbox...