Go green!!

I am moved by watching Al Gore fame "The Inconvenient Truth". Movie nicely reveals facts, figures and potential dangers of Global Warming. Must watch for any rational human being.
Thereafter we (me and my room mates) have been discussing seriously about the issue. We are just experimenting with simple strategies to save power. I am just listing out few simple ideas which came out from discussions. We are trying to practice these.

• If computer monitor is not in use then turn if off. "Not in use" means if you are listening song, going away for tea brakes, leaving for the day from office or shutting down the machine. If you are a computer lab in-charge, run a cyber cafe then you have more opportunities.
• Vehicle Sharing/Pooling. Cars/Bikes can be easily shared with colleagues living in same area or en-route while traveling to/from office.
  
• Traveling by public transport. Avoiding unnecessary travels. Walking for short travel distances are simple and nice way to reduce pollution.
• All time hit "Put off unnecessary lights"!!
• Say No to Bulbs.
• Reducing non veg consumption.
• Don't use polythene if it can be avoided.
• Quit smoking or at least reduce it.
• Putting off Hording/Banner's light after 11 PM. (Anybody from municipal department ?)

One radical idea is to avoid Marriages in summers, winters and nights. This will save enormous amount of power consumption through ACs, Fans and Lights in marriages.

Let us see how far we'll go.

Evolve to become Thunderbird

Share Evolution's mail with Thunderbird!

This trick intends to share the e-mails between Evolution and Thunderbird email clients.

Steps.

1. Install Thunderbird from here or use your personal package installer e.g. yum, synaptic etc. :).

Please back-up your mail data before trying below tips. To back-up do

cp -rf ~/.thunderbird thunderbird_backup

2. Launch Thunderbird and create folders or folder where you want to keep shared data. For example I created "work" folder under Inbox.

3. In my case suppose I want to keep evolution's work folder shared with thunderbird..

4. Now go to thunderbird's Local Folder directory which normally resides in your home directory under your profile's path. Mine is

cd ~/.thunderbird/i4hj1uue.default/Mail/Local Folders/Inbox.sbd/

4. Inbox.sbd may not exist untill you haven't created folder in Thunderbird

5. Make a soft link to evolution mail data files which normally resides in your home directory. My evolution's files are at ~/.evolution/mail/local/Inbox.sbd/

rm work

ln -s ~/.evolution/mail/local/Inbox.sbd/work work

7. Restart Thunderbird. All your evolution's work folder's mails should be appearing under work folder!!

8. You may use Evolution or Thunderbird on your wish. All the mails in the work folder will be visible in both.

If you want to import all evolution mails to thunderbird then link your Thunderbird's folder to Evolution's Inbox. i.e.

ln -s ~/.evolution/mail/local/Inbox

9. I guess you got the trick. Now you can choose what to share what to not!!

10. To import address book. Please read this.

11. If things are working well now then you can remove the back-up.

Live USB

This article will show how to create Live USB stick with Ubuntu Hardy Heron. Read more on live USB.

Requirement: USB bar > 700 MB. Any working Linux machine.

1. Get Ubuntu Hardy iso image as per your CPU requirement (x86, AMD64 etc).

2. Format USB stick to ext2 using Gparted or fdisk . Set the boot flag too.

( If you have extra space then you may choose to create another partitions too.)

3.Mount downloaded iso as loopback from root privileges.
#mount -o loop downloaded.iso /mount_dir

4.Copy iso's content in to USB.

#cd /mount_dir

#cp .disk/ casper/ dists/ install/ pics/ pool/ preseed/ README.diskdefines ubuntu /path_to_usb/

NOTE: Please note .disk is hidden directory. Copying *.exe and isolinux is not required as we shall use extlinux as boot loader for USB.

5. Create extlinux dir in USB.

#mkdir /path_to_usb/extlinux

6. Install extlinux at USB. This requires extlinux utility on your box. If you dont have this then please install syslinux package using your package manager ie yum/apt-get/synaptic/emerge etc.

#extlinux -i /path_to_usb/extlinux

7.Create /path_to_usb/extlinux/extlinux.conf and write below content in that.

DEFAULT /casper/vmlinuz
GFXBOOT bootlogo
APPEND file=/preseed/ubuntu.seed boot=casper initrd=/casper/initrd.gz quiet splash --

Thats it!!
Now you can boot any machine which is USB boot capable from Live-USB by selecting "Boot from USB" or "Boot from ZIP-HDD" from bios boot menu.

For more info on extlinux/isolinux/syslinux bootloaders please visit extlinux wiki .