Several years ago the Utah Department of Environmental Quality estimated that by 2004 more than 300 million computers would be considered obsolete, generating well over 1 billion pounds of lead, 2 million pounds of cadmium, 1 million pounds of chromium, and 400,000 pounds of mercury. Municipal incineration is the largest point source of dioxins into the US and Canadian environments and among the largest sources of heavy metal contamination of the atmosphere. Of course the year 2004 is long gone, and these horrible numbers have undoubtedly been far surpassed in spite of efforts such as corporate trade-in programs.

Why do people toss their computers? That’s simple; given the computer industry’s unending performance advances there is a widespread perception that you can no longer DO anything worthwhile with your old computers. This dangerous assumption is simply not true.

Do you really need Giga-everythings to get your work done and have your fun? Microsoft seems to think so. I remember when 128 Megabytes was a lot of memory. Of course I also remember when “Why would anyone ever need more than 640 Kilobytes of memory?” was the official party line expressed by none other than William Gates III himself.

I’m told that Damn Small Linux requires only 50 Megabytes of disk space, a 486 processor (do you remember what that is?) and 8 Megabytes of RAM. If you want to browse the Internet, you’ll have to move up to 16 Megabytes of RAM and use the Dillo browser. The popular Firefox browser requires additional memory. Frankly, I wouldn’t use such an underpowered computer for moderate or heavy Internet usage. But you can run Linux commands and learn how operating systems work on such computers. And you can play a multitude of games.

For every individual trying to resuscitate a 486 computer there are dozens trying to know what to do with an old Pentium such as my Pentium III 450 Megahertz computers with 128 Megabytes of memory purchased in 1999 or more powerful computers purchased several years later. Without extensive upgrades many of these computers won’t run Windows Vista and may not run Windows XP. But they will run Damn Small Linux or other Linux versions alongside a full range of today’s applications. Let’s put them to work, learn Linux, and do our bit saving the environment.

We next see how Linux lets you control the computer, “obsolete” or not.

Author: Levi Reiss
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Programmable Pressure Cooker

Heres what my list looked like: 1) Write this column; 2) Browse the Web; 3) Get new software and install it; 4) Download files; 5) Play music and video files; 6) Burn CDs; and 7) Print my documents.

Of all these, the first was the easiest. Ubuntu comes with OpenOffice.org 2.0, an excellent personal productivity suite that works much like Microsoft Office, with its own word processor, spreadsheet, database and presentation programs. It reads and writes files in MS Word, RTF and a variety of other formats, so sharing your files with colleagues who use Windows or Mac PCs wont be a problem. Unlike earlier versions, too, the program seems to load and run much faster.

OpenOffice.org 2.0 seems to run much faster now. I open up XMMS to listen to some music while I work.

Browsing was just as easy. Ubuntu lets you take your pick from several Web browsers, including Firefox. I experienced some glitches initially with YouTube the videos were playing without sound but that worked itself out after I rebooted the system.

For Windows users, downloading and installing new software on Linux can be rather daunting. Wheres the .EXE file? What do you do with the downloaded file (called a package, in Linux)? What file do you run? Fortunately, Ubuntu takes care of most of these problems for you. A program called Synaptic Package Manager takes care of finding new programs and installing them for you. These are sorted by program types, but the sheer number may be overwhelming. When I ran Synaptic Package Manager, it happily reported that there were more than 18,808 programs available, only 1,221 of which I had installed.

Downloading music and videos? Check. My favorite BitTorrent client, uTorrent, isnt available on Linux but KTorrent, which works much the same way, already comes with Ubuntu. I put the program through its paces and found it held up quite nicely against my trusted file-sharing utility.

To play music and videos, Ubuntu comes with a number of multimedia players. For MP3 files, I like XMMS, which looks like WinAmp. Downloaded AVI files wont play properly on the default Movie Player, but installing VLC Media Player (using Synaptic) will take care of that.

Burning CDs proved to be trickier.

Ubuntu is smart enough to detect a blank CD when its inserted and will ask if youd like to burn a data or an audio CD. If you choose data, it will open a window into which you can drag files youd like burned. Burning a data CD in this manner is simplicity itself, but it might be a bit too simple. The program, Nautilus, doesnt even tell you how much disc space youre using.

If you choose to burn an audio CD, Ubuntu will start a program called Serpentine, which enables you to add audio files to an audio CD compilation. The puzzling thing is, Serpentine will not accept MP3 files by default! All is not lost, however. You need to install the LAME encoder for the Gstreamer package (gstreamer0.8-lame), again using Synaptic. Once youve done that, Serpentine will burn your MP3 files into an audio CD without a hitch.

Serpentine burns an audio CD.

Burning a VCD from AVI files is even trickier. In very broad strokes, youll need to install K3b, a CD burning program, and a package called VCDimager, and tell K3b where its located. Youll also need a command-line program called FFmpeg to convert AVI files to MPG, which is the format that K3b uses. Sounds complicated? It is, but its doable.

Finally, I wanted to print documents on my Epson Stylus C50 inkjet printer. Simple as it sounds, this last task almost stumped me. Even though Ubuntu detected my printer and said it was using the correct printer driver from a program called Gimp-print, my C50 kept spewing out garbled, unreadable text. Hours of online research about Gimp-print only confused me further with what seemed to be gobbledygook. Many sheets of wasted paper later, I remembered a snippet of information from a mailing list. It was written before the C50 driver was available and suggested that the driver for an earlier Epson model, the C44UX might work. I went to Ubuntus printer setup utility and told it to use that driver and voila!I was finally able to print. Frustration faded away and a sense of satisfaction set in. I had survived the weekend without Windows.

Author: Chin Wong
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Canada duty

The problem with Ubuntu might be that it does not have all the required libraries in place. This is easy to test. All you have to do is try to install “liblzo1″. If you are using a Debian based system, like Ubuntu/Kubuntu, then you can install it through the command like with the following command:

sudo apt-get install liblzo1

If you do not want to use the command line, you can install the library through your favorite GUI application such as KpackageIt (in Kubuntu) or Synaptic.

If you have not tried installing XBMC before or have an old version, simply run this command (via the command line) to add the XBMC officially unofficial PPA’s:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc/ppa sudo apt-get install xbmc-standalone xbmc liblzo1

If you have a problem install XBMC because of the missing “liblzo1″ package, you can download it from the following places. For x64 bit computers use the first link, the a regular 32 bit system use the second:

http://packages.ubuntu.com/jaunty/amd64/liblzo1/download

http://packages.ubuntu.com/jaunty/i386/liblzo1/download

Install that package first:

sudo dpkg -i liblzo1_1.08-3_amd64.deb or sudo dpkg -i liblzo1_1.08-3_i386.deb

If you are not comfortable with the command line, you can simply click on the file to install it through the built in GUI package installers (these usually come standard with most current Linux distributions).

then do:

sudo apt-get install xbmc xbmc-standalone

This will now finally install XBMC in Kubuntu Karmic 9.10 without issue at all. Enjoy XBMC goodness!

Author: Piotr Krzyzek
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Cellphone news