How good would it be if your iPod or your favorite portable MP3 player can support FLAC format? Unfortunately not. If you have a bunch of FLAC music files that you want to bring along in your journey, the best way is to convert them into MP3 format. Luckily, this is an easy task in Ubuntu, using SoundConverter.

XBMC Media Center is an award winning open source media center application for Xbox, Linux, Mac and Windows. Calling it a media center is really understating its capability since it is in fact an ultimate hub that supports almost every audio/video format and codecs available. It also comes with slick interface and include features such as playlist playback, picture viewing, audio visualizations and so on.

Installing applications in Ubuntu is getting easier and easier. First there is the command line interface, next is the Synaptic Package Manager, followed by Gnome Installer (Add/Remove). Now there is Appnr, a web based tool where you can search and install applications directly on your Firefox.

Let’s face it, with a large bunch of files/folders/playlists/documents etc all over the places in different computers, USB drives, various Web servers, it can really be a tedious task to get everything synchronized and put them all in places. Conduit makes it simple for you to do so.

Conduit is a synchronization application for GNOME. It allows you to synchronize your files, photos, emails, contacts, notes, calendar data and any other type of personal information and synchronize that data with another computer, an online service, or even another electronic device. There is no command line required. You are good to go as long as you know how to drag and drop. Follow along as we show you how to install and configure Conduit in your Ubuntu machine.

Once in a while, you may want to do some maintenance on your Ubuntu machine and clean up unnecessary files that are chunking up large storage space in your hard disk.

Here are 8 ways that you can use to clean up your Ubuntu:

In Ubuntu, the Archive Manager (or file-roller) has make it easy for anyone to compress and zip up a file or folder, but if you have a large file, say 20Gb, and you want to back it up to the CD/DVD, you will find that no amount of compression can you reduce the file size to fit into 1 CD/DVD. In such case, it is a better solution to compress and split the large file into several smaller files and store them separately. This also applies if you want to share a large file on a file-sharing site. Splitting the compressed file into several smaller files will make it easier for others to download.

Image by Chris.JP

Previously, I have talked about the way to play playstation game in Ubuntu. For those who are a fanboy of Super Nintendo (SNES), I didn’t forget about you too. Here is how you can play SNES game in Ubuntu Hardy.

There are several popular SNES emulators for Linux, namely: ZSNES, SNES9X, BSNES, SNEmul. We will be using ZSNES because it is the best among the rest and works great in Ubuntu.

If you have files that are bigger than 4GB in size, you will find that you can’t back them up to your external hard disk, even though it has 1TB of storage space. The reason being, when you first bought the hard disk, it is pre-formatted with FAT32 format, and in case you don’t know, FAT32 has a 4GB file size restriction. This means that it can’t store files that are bigger than 4GB in size.

A good way to overcome this is to reformat the external hard disk to NTFS format. NTFS does not has a 4GB file restriction and can be accessed easily from Windows, Mac and Linux (with the help of NTFS-3G).

eCryptfs is a encryption application for Linux that you can use to encrypt your files/folders and prevent others from viewing it. eCryptfs does not require its own partition. You can easily create a dynamic encrypted private directory on your Home folder that will shrink or grow in size according to the files you add to it. Whatever files you place in the private directory will be encrypted and safe from the public eyes.

The Ubuntu team has released Ubuntu 8.10 Alpha 6 for testing. This will be the final alpha build for Intrepid Ibex before we see the beta release.

What has changed in the backend?

This alpha 6 release is shipped with the latest Gnome 2.23.92, which is a testing and development series for the upcoming Gnome 2.24. Hopefully, we can see the 2.24 in action in the beta release of Ubuntu Ibex. Other new stuffs include the new Linux kernal 2.6.27 and the X.Org7.4 which is said to have better hardware support and can allow the great majority of users to run without a /etc/X11/xorg.conf file.

Samba 3.2 was also found in Intrepid Ibex with clustered file server support, encrypted network transport, IPv6 support, and better integration with recent versions of Microsoft Windows clients and servers.