Syncing your iPod Touch with iTunes on your Mac or Windows is a no-brain job. Simply plug in your iPod, fire up your iTunes and your synchronization will be done in a minute. However, since there is no Linux version of iTunes, there is almost no way that you can sync your iPod Touch with your computer. If you are using an Ubuntu system and you don’t want to create a Windows/Ubuntu dual boot just to sync your iPod Touch, here’s a tutorial that teaches you how to sync your iPod Touch with a WinXP virtual machine in Ubuntu Intrepid.

(This tutorial was tested using a iPod Touch 1st generation. I have not tested iPod Touch 2nd Gen, iPhone 2G/3G, but I guess they should work as well.)

Ubuntu does not support .rmvb files by default. Even though you may have installed the Gstreamer codec plugin and VLC (an audio player that supposedly able to play any media format), there is still no way that you can get the .rmvb file to play. There may be many tutorials out there that tell you to configure mplayer to play .rmvb file, but the easiest and fastest way to tackle this is simply install the Real Player for Linux.

While Evolution is a useful email client for Gnome desktop, it is just not as extensible and flexible as Thunderbird. For those who are facing unpleasant incidents with Evolution and wish to migrate to Thunderbird, here is how you can do so in Ubuntu 8.10

In your Ubuntu machine, when you click on the ‘X’ (close button) on any applications, you will find that some of them will exit while some will minimize to the system tray. Unless you know the capability of the particular application, you will have to guess every time you click on the X button whether it will close or minimize. For example, in Ubuntu Hardy, I can click the X button on Transmission and it will minimize to the system tray, but in Intrepid, it will exit when I click the X button. It is kinda confusing and troublesome since what I really want to do is for it to minimize to the tray and download the torrent in the background.

For those who want to eliminate all the guess work or want to save desktop space by minimizing all the unused applications to the system tray, AllTray is the application to do it.

For those who are dealing with writing or design projects, it is common for you to come across a font that your applications cannot support. It could be a Macintosh font, a bitmap font or a open type font (otf), for some reason or another, you just can’t get your application to read it. In such cases, the best way is to convert this font to TrueType font (ttf).

Fontforge is an outline font editor that allows you to create your own postscript, truetype, opentype, cid-keyed, multi-master, cff, svg and bitmap (bdf, FON, NFNT) fonts, edit existing ones and convert one format to another.

For some of you who have setup Windows Vista as the guest VM in your Ubuntu Virtualbox, you might have some difficulties in getting the Vista guest to access the shared folder in your Ubuntu host. If you are having this problem, here is the way to mount the shared folder on your Vista guest.

When I am writing post for Make Tech Easier, I love to take plenty of screenshots as I feel they can make the explanation clearer and easier. Over the year, I have also discovered several ways to take screenshot on my Ubuntu machine. If you are looking for one, I have compiled a list of screen capture tools that you can use in Ubuntu.

Netatalk is a kernel level implementation of the AppleTalk Protocol Suite that allows any Unix/BSD system to run as a file, print and time server for any Mac machine.

While the Netatalk package is included in the Ubuntu Intrepid’s repository, the package is broken and does not work in the way it is intended to. The following instructions can help you to build, install and configure Netatalk to work in your Ubuntu Intrepid (It works in Ubuntu Hardy too).

Conky is a simple, lightweight system monitor application that can display information on your desktop and allows you to monitor several processes simultaneously. For those who like to keep a minimal desktop, but still want to have quick access to various information such as emails, weather, memory usage etc, then Conky is just the application for you.

While the installation of Conky is easy, configuring it can be a rather troublesome task. Follow this tutorial closely and I am sure you’ll master the trick in no time.

FUPPES stands for Free UPnP Entertainment Service and is a free, multiplatform UPnP A/V Media Server that supports a wide range of UPnP MediaRenderers as well as on-the-fly transcoding of various audio, video and image formats. FUPPES also includes basic DLNA support, which means you can play your audio/video from your PS3 and Xbox 360.

This tutorial teaches you how to install and configure FUPPES on Ubuntu Hardy-32bits