Connecting to Exchange Server from Linux

This has been one of the problems facing me every time I tried to fully switch to Linux. I can't properly connect to the corporate email, which uses MS-Exchange Server.

Currently there are two solutions available, that can provide some functionality to that area. The first, is Gnome's built-in Online Accounts (GOA); which does, theoretically provide means to access email, contacts and calendar, and make them available for the GOA-compatible applications; and the exQuilla, which is a Thunderbird addon, to connect to exchange mail servers.

I've tried the GOA, but it seems to be working randomly. It worked with some one of my accounts, but refused to work with the other, without any apparent reason. On another distro, it works with both of them, but on occasions needed to restart once or twice to connect, and gets disconnected on next boot.

On the other hand, exQuilla provides a better way to connect to exchange server for email access.

Setting up and exchange account using exQuilla is a straight forward process using its own menu item. A good help is presented to the used following installing the addon.

Although exQuilla provides a good way to connect to exchange mail servers, it lacks the calendar and contacts integration. Also, the use of Thunderbird doesn't give you a direct way to send Outlook-compatible meeting invitations or replies to meetings.

UPDATE: looks like exQuilla is "transitioning to a be a payed service". Which takes it out of my spotted services, as I'm deeply into FOSS. The hope now is for Gnome Online Accounts to get fixed, and overcome all the bugs.

Facebook's FlashCache: a Linux ExpressCache?

In a previous post I was trying to get the best of my Samsung Series 5 Ultrabook, with Linux. One of the points that I intended to research is how to implement the ExpressCache in a Linux environment.

ExpressCache, in Condusiv's own words, is an innovative technology developed by Condusiv Technologies to improve system speeds by incorporating SSD technology advances into Windows 7 systems.

In plain English, ExpressCache is a way to utilize the SSD storage as a caching layer to speed up reads and writes during applications runtime, among other things.

Now, in my search for how to implement such technology in a Linux environment, I came upon what I might call a shocking discovery, namely FlashCache. FlashCache is a, shockingly, facebook open source project that introduces the same concept and which was released on April 27, 2010. It seems that facebook, in sake of speeding up their data extraction, for obvious reasons, have developed this technique. It is open source, and it works greatly with Linux (actually, I believe it was developed for Unix/Linux).

Now, Implementing the flashcache is not hard. There are a couple of tutorials online, some of them are specifically for Ubuntu, and a nice Wiki on the Arch Linux Wiki page, but since I crave learning I'm planning on understanding the Block Cache on Linux, first, then implement that on my installation. I'll be fully documenting and blogging about it at a later time.

Sozi

A little over a year ago, I met Prezi, for the first time. For those not familiar with it, Prezi is an online tool for creating non-linear presentations. Although, the term non-linear doesn't accurately describe what Prezi has to offer, Prezi is a very good tool to produce these Flash-based presentations.

Time passed, and I didn't really use Prezi for more than two or three presentations. Probably this is because we still have the "Slides" culture, but every now and then, when I need to initiate a new presentation or renew an existing one, Prezi comes back to the front of my head. Every time Prezi pops up in front of me, I try to find some desktop tool to produce similar results, preferably Open Source (Well, I'm a Linux-only user now).

Well, today I came across this Inkscape extension called "Sozi". Sozi is an extension for Inkscape that produces animated svg's with resulting Posters or "canvas" similar to those produced by Prezi. It is pretty simple, and straight forward once you get grip of the basic concepts. A nice introductory tutorial can be found here [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOuf7w_Qesk].

Sozi official website [http://sozi.baierouge.fr/wiki/doku.php]

Installation Instructions [http://sozi.baierouge.fr/wiki/en:install]

OMG! Ubuntu! Conducts an Interesting Survey

An interesting survey results published to OMG!Ubunto! indicated that 51% of the Ubuntu users use Android devices. The survey also shows, among other interesting facts, that age of Ubuntu users ranges between 25 to 35 years old.

Although the survey shows that 75% of Ubuntu users also use Windows, it doesn't show for what applications they use it for (nor what applications they use Ubuntu for, for that matter), nor what percentage of that group uses both Windows and Ubuntu in a dual-boot setup.

All in all, the survey is interesting and very useful.

LibreOffice - IBM Symphone: Take Two!

In a previous post, I chose to use IBM Symphony as my office package, basically because it seemed to offer more features than LibreOffice. Today, I removed IBM Symphony after finding, statistically, that I use LibreOffice more often. It's been almost a month since I last open an application of the Symphony package. I'm not claiming that the LibreOffice is better, not in this stage, anyway, but I've came to the conclusion that anything in symphony is there somewhere in LibreOffice. To be frank, I'm starting to think that the Symphony implements pieces of the OpenOffice.org's code, if not the whole deal! (No, I'm not saying that I dived in the code and found anything, I'm just under such impression, given what I see on the surface).

So, today I removed the symphony, and happily got rid of the system tray icon for it.

Nevernote

I use evernote. For those who don't know what evernote is, it's a note taking "cloud", supported by a Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android, Windows Mobile and plugins for the most of the popular web browsers. It is really useful, and I haven't stopped using it ever since I found about it.

And, yes, you guessed right. There is no version for Linux. The developers, though, at evernote.com give a nice statement about how they don't have the sufficient resources to support an OS with as small share in the desktop market as Linux.

True, or false, that statement is, an open source project called Nevernote fills the gap there. The software is very good that people at evernote.com list it as a replacement or equivalent to their application in the linux environment.

You can get Nevernote from here. It is available in both deb and rpm, for x86 and x64 computers.

One thing left to say, that the application name has  changed from Nevernote to NixNote.

Moving to Ubuntu Linux - pt.01

Entirely abandoning the Microsoft Windows operating system to another platform has always seemed inapplicable. Someone like me, for instance, has been working with Windows ever since Windows 3.0. With loads of accumulated documents, software and experiences, it's really hard to start all over.

But with the Linux distributions growing more mature, I thought to give it a try and see if one can really abandon the Windows. It's been three months now, and I'm spending more than 95% of my computer time on Ubuntu, so I'm willing to say/pretend that it's a very close to entirely abandoning Windows.

Note: this experiment does not cover gaming, as I'm not a gamer, myself.

Planning

Creating a list of all the critical items in one's computer use is crucial before the starting of this process. For me, the following was the list of critical items of concern:

1. Editing MS-Office 2007/2010 documents: From my past experiences with the various Linux distros, it was never a problem dealing with the old MS-Office document formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt). Dealing with the new (.docx, .xlsx and .pptx) formats was something I must experiment with and be confident about.
2. Accessing my corporate email server (MS-Exchange Server): My company works with Exchange server [period].
3. Installing Eclipse with the Android SDK: As I'm experimenting with the Android platform these days, having my familiar IDE (eclipse with the ADK) is something I'm concerned about.
4. Accessing MS-SQL database (which resides on another server): In my work, I prepare lots of reports, mostly excel-based, that read from MS-SQL server database. It's very important for me to be able to read and modify an MS-SQL database from within my computer to produce such reports.
5. Accessing the company's VPN.

Up to the time of writing these lines, I've succeeded in the first 3 items, with various degrees, still working on the 4th item and haven't started yet on the 5th.