Awesome Techs

Well first let me make it clear that, I am not using wine or any other syncing tools for Linux. I am actually using Virtual Box.

So First install the non GPL version of Virtual Boz in you linux. Then just install Windows Xp in this Virtual Box. You can read the article for setting up Virtual Box Here.

After setting up windows XP properly install itunes 8.2. You can download Itunes 8.2 from here.

Then Plugin your Ipod or Iphone to your system. Then for your guest to recognize the ipod/iphone you will have to make a change in the Virtual Box. In the virtual box guest window frame, You can see a USB icon. See the Pic below.

Right Click that icon and select the ipod/iphone Now If you open the itunes in The guest OS you will see the Ipod/Iphone is connected status.

Now if you need all the Music /  Video / Picture files to be accessed by from Windows XP, you need to create the shared folder in Virtual Box settings. For this select the Devices and Shared Folders from the top menu in the Guest Window. Then add the Muic/Video/Picture folder there.

Now for the ease of use, you can map these as network drives. For this Just right click on the “My Computer” in Windows XP and select Map Network Drive, and then browse to the shared “vboxsvr” folders. Also select a suitable Drive name. Now you can see you favorite media folders as Drives in your My Computer.

If you have done till this, you can just use the iTunes as you were using it in the Windows Machine.

Editing the boot menu in Grub version 2 is a little bit different compared to Grub version 1. The problem is Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 comes with Grub 2. That means a fresh install of Ubuntu 9.10 changes your old grub to version 2. And version 2 of Grub dont have menu.lst. Menu.lst is the file we have to edit if we want to change something permanently in the bootmenu.

Instead of menu.lst Grub V2 uses grub.cfg. The path normally is

/boot/grub/grub.cfg

NOTE: you can use the grub-mkconfig utility to generate a grub.cfg file for you. Other operating systems can be detected and will be added to the configuration only if os-prober is also installed. os-prober is currently only avaible in Debian and Ubuntu.

GRUB 2 uses new bashish scripting language that is used to build menus. At startup file grub.cfg will be read and executed.

Please note that partition numbering has been changed to start from 1 (in grub legacy it started from 0).

Example menu entrys can be found in docs/grub.cfg in the source or in the Debian/Ubuntu package in /usr/share/doc/grub-pc/examples/grub.cfg.

Here is an simple example:

# Timeout for menu
set timeout=10

# Set default boot entry as Entry 0
set default=0

# Entry 0 - Load Linux kernel
menuentry "My Linux Kernel on (hd0,1)" {
    set root=(hd0,1)
    linux /vmlinuz root=/dev/hda1
    initrd /initrd
}

# Entry 1 - Chainload another bootloader
menuentry "Chainload my OS" {
    set root=(hd0,3)
    chainloader +1
}

PS: The improper editing of the file grub.cfg can leave you with an unbootable system.

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Google demonstrated a new prototype of the technology , which can translate the text from any given photo. Well Google Goggles is Google’s experimental Android visual search application.

Google’s Blog Post about this said,

You may wonder what’s happening in the background. On the simplest level, this prototype connects the phone’s camera to an optical character recognition (OCR) engine, recognizes the image as text and then translates that text into English with Google Translate.Right now this technology only works for German-to-English translations and it’s not yet ready for prime time. However, it shows a lot of promise for what the future might hold. Soon your phone will be able to translate signs, posters and other foreign text instantly into your language. Eventually, we’re hoping to build a version of Google Goggles that can translate between all of the 52 languages currently supported by Google Translate — bringing even more information to you on the go.

BBC News reported that, Microsoft has launched the latest iteration of its mobile phone operating system, called Windows phone 7 series.

The software has a redesigned user interface and incorporates many Microsoft services such as Xbox LIVE games and the Zune music service.

The software was introduced at an event at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

BBC News Said.

The new version have lots of new features. Phone Windows 7 will have a completely new user interface that resembles that of the Zune. The software use a new interface called ‘live tiles’. But the sad news is it does not support Adobe Flash at the initial launch.

“Microsoft and Adobe are working closely together. While the newest version of Windows Phone won’t support Flash at initial availability, both companies are working to include a browser plug-in for the full Flash player in future versions of Windows Phone. More details will be shared at Microsoft MIX next month,”

Adobe said about the issue.

Symbian now have a new version. All these days iPhone and Android devs were all over the news, doing something and Symbian & Nokia people were standing by just watching whats going on. The wait is over today as the newest verion of Symbian was revealed at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona, Spain. Well this is not the only good news. The good news is the features of this new operating system.

• UI that’s three times faster.
• UI which runs at a super smooth 60fps.
• Better multitasking.
• Added support for multitouch on capacitive screens.
• Integrated online music store support.
• HDMI output capabilities at full HD (1080p) resolution.
• A new graphics architecture which takes advantage of hardware acceleration.

All these feature may make symbian to match up with the iPhone Os and Android. The latest version is named Symbian^3, or S^3 for short and is expected to be completed by the end of March. The first devices featuring S^3 should start shipping from Nokia in the third quarter of this year.

See the video by Nokia here:

Atlast firefox for mobile has released. Moving right along from the release candidate, Firefox Mobile has arrived in 1.0 form on phones like the N900 that run Maemo. It’s got add-ons, an AwesomeBar, desktop syncing through Weave, and plenty more to recommend it. We just wish it could work on more devices.

Image from jkOnTheRun.

Firefox Mobile’s features are listed and explained at a helpful Mozilla page, but to see what Firefox Mobile looks like in action, check out mobile-obsessed blog jkOnTheRun’s screenshot tour. You can also see the thinking, and a few action shots, of Firefox Mobile in Mozilla’s own video, ported by the folks at the Android and Me blog to YouTube:

Via [LifeHacker] Via Firefox for Mobile Now Available on Nokia’s Maemo Platform! [The Mozilla Blog]