Ubuntu and other Linux distributions have proven to be really useful when Windows stops working. Versatility, portability and speed are among the many advantages of having a bootable OS in a USB flash drive. These installations can help fix problems in Windows operating systems, such as viruses, errors in the registry, etc. They can also act as an “emergency operating system”  when Windows fails, providing an alternate OS you can boot from to extract your files from the affected computer.  Booting from USB flash drives does have one drawback: older computers won’t have this capability. Fortunately, it is becoming less common to find computers that do not support booting from USB. In this tutorial I show you how to create a bootable Ubuntu USB flash drive from Windows. To accomplish this, we are going to be using a utility called Unetbootin.

Ubuntu is about to release its stable version of 11.04 Natty Narwhal. It is interesting to see how many of the expected features will not be included. Some of these new features seem to have now been postponed for the next release cycle due to delays, security concerns, etc. In this article we will have an overlook at Ubuntu 11.04 new features. We are including some screenshots as well, so you can get a better understanding of how this new version has changed. We are going to take a look at what’s included, what’s not going to be included anymore and why this version is causing so much buzz in the IT community.

ISO images are great when you want to backup your programs, just in case something happens to your precious delicate CDs. They are also handy when cloning CDs or DVDs. ISO is a standard format, not proprietary to any company or commercial entity. This means virtually all CD/DVD burning software can burn it. ISO images can also be mounted as virtual CDs, making it unnecessary to burn them to CDs. This not only saves us money but also time, since mounted ISO images run about 10 times faster than a regular CD or DVD. For these reasons ISO has become the most popular image format in the web. In this tutorial I will show you how to create an ISO image of an existing CD or DVD.

Haven’t you ever wondered what the best file compression format is? Here at GeekyProjects we try to answer this question. We have performed a test of three popular compression formats; 7zip, Rar and Zipx. The test is not overly scientific or comprehensive, but it shows clear differences among these popular formats. Winrar and Winzip were used to compress the Rar and Zipx formats respectively, 7Zip was used to compress the 7zip format. The tests were done in a computer with a 2.53ghz core2duo processor and 4GB of memory. Before we start we must define what the term “Best” means in this article. “Best” simply means the format that compresses the most. In our opinion, the most important characteristic  a compression format should have is its ability to compress. Compression speed and resource consumption are also important, specially if you are compressing large files, however, differences in time, CPU and memory were not significant enough in our tests to be influence our results.

This is the scenario: You turn your computer on one day, Windows starts booting and after a while you get a blue screen of death, or you get a message telling you that Windows won’t boot because a certain file is missing. What do you do now? The logical solution will be to take the hard drive out of the computer, make it an external drive and connect it to another computer via USB. Well, providing that your computer’s hardware is in good condition (e.g. your memory is good, your motherboard is functioning properly, etc.) and your partition table is fine, there is a better solution. You can extract all your data to a USB flash drive or to an external hard drive using a LiveCD without ever having to touch the computer’s hard drive.

VirtualBox Virtual Machines give users the ability to run operating systems virtually. This gives us the advantage of being able to run a different operating system than the one installed on the host computer.  As a result, some incompatibilities may arise; this is where Guest Additions come in. Guest Additions, make everything run smoothly. They provide better integration with the host operating system, adding features like mouse pointer integration, ability to share folders between the host and the virtual machine, better video support, time synchronization, shared clipboard, etc. In this tutorial I will show you how to install VirtualBox Guest Additions on a Windows 7 Virtual Machine.

Wouldn’t it be neat if you could transform your old Windows XP SP1 installation CD into the latest Windows XP XP3?. Downloading and installing SP3 usually takes more than an hour and if you are in a hurry to get your computer up  and running, or in a rush to return a computer to one of your clients, an extra hour can mean the world to you. How about creating your own custom made Windows XP installation CD and loading it with the latest “Service Pack 3” (sp3), so you do not have to waste time downloading and installing it every time you format your computer?   It can be done; the technique is called “Splipstreaming” and the process is easier than you think. In this tutorial I will teach you how to build your own customized Windows XP CD and add SP3 to it.

Nowadays that the Internet has become faster, image files such as ISO, NRG, etc., have gained popularity. CD Images save companies money, giving them the possibility of offering large programs to the public, which otherwise would have to be burned in CDs or DVDs and mailed to you. Once downloaded, there are two ways you can have access to the software inside these image files: Burning them to CDs or DVDs or mounting the images. Mounting an image is good when these ISO images are designed to run within operating systems. For example, an office suite package (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, etc.) that you need to install. You can just do so by mounting the image as a virtual CD. However, many ISO images are operating systems themselves, such is the case of LiveCDs, Linux Installation CDs, etc. These have to burned. In this tutorial I will teach you how to burn an ISO image file using my favorite free image burning software: ImgBurn.

A couple of days ago, I wrote an article that described how to connect from a Ubuntu computer to a Windows Computer using the “real” remote Desktop. Now I will describe how to do the inverse: How to connect from Windows to Ubuntu using Windows remote desktop (the real one as well). As I described in the previous article, Ubuntu’s Remote Desktop is nothing more than VNC, which is very slow and cumbersome compared to the real Microsoft Windows remote desktop.  It can be made to work in a Windows machine if you install VNC, however, that is not the ideal solution specially if you have to work with it often. If you are used to Windows Remote desktop speeds, VNC will just drive you crazy. Fortunately there is a solution. To connect from Ubuntu to Windows we use “rdesktop“, and to connect from Windows to Ubuntu we are going to use “xrdp” which is basically the remote desktop protocol for the xwindows environment.

Creating image transparency in The Gimp is very handy, specially when you are a web designer. Image transparency is specially useful in websites where you have backgrounds with patterns; it makes blending these images a lot easier. If transparency is available the image will have to be created using part of the website’s background as its own and would have to be then positioned with accuracy so that it blends following the website’s background pattern. This, as some of you may know, is very hard to achieve. In this tutorial I will teach you how to make transparent images in formats such as gif, png and bmp, using what is undoubtedly the best free and open source image editor: The Gimp.