I was browsing the net trying to learn what’s “hip and cool” today!  Then I came across this – not so new – page (2 pages actually but who is counting!).

http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/switch_exchange.html

http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/details.html

Google seems to be trying to contest the 2 big players in the working office when it comes to office tools, emailing systems and colaboration tools.  Already offering migration tools for its services and promessing savings (quoting : “A leading research firm found that Google Apps is as little as 1/3 the total cost of competing solutions.” although not sure what the costs of support, migration and risks of running these services online is) while at the same time giving numbers of 1.75 million businesses using google Apps (not sure if this means the paid service though), google seems to be quckening its pace trying to catch up with the giants.

Google’s move to starting offering such paid services was long in the horizon, one has to wonder though how it can address the needs of business, as they are already addressed by Microsoft and IBM.

Although not the most interesting post ever, have a look at the following link :

http://alternativeto.net/

Have a look at this example:

http://alternativeto.net/desktop/activesync/

I came across a utility that might be useful to people, it does what other shareware utilities do, have a look at it, what do you think?

www.getsharepod.com

To all those wondering what La Fonera is then please have a look at : www.fon.com

To sum things up, La Fonera is a company which provides small wifi access points / routers based on the Atheros platform. These are running a firmware based on OpenWRT.  La fonera bases its business model on the idea that people from all over the world are willing to share their internet connection over wifi, to other people within the community.  Given that enough people join this community the wifi coverage of this community is enough that people who are not members of the community can pick such hot sports up, go buy credit, and access the Internet.

From the money received from these people, the person offering the Internet access gets 50% of the net income.  The concept is pretty sweet !

When the La Fonera community was being build a lot of these routers where given for free!  As the business model adapted though so did the prices on the routers.  The La Fonera routers are now on sale, but for a relatively cheap price, with their latest offering being a router capable of being a small home server able to cope with things such as downloading and sharing folders on the local network.

All the above functionality is offered with the help of OpenWRT, http://openwrt.org/ .  Unfortunately these routers are also locked down limiting their functionality for someone wanting more from their router!

As a lot of us know a lot of alternative firmware exists for routers such as Linksys ones (look around for the specific models et cetera).  Luckily the atheros platform is supported by many of those project.  The ones i was looking at that support the La Fonera router are DD-Wrt and OpenWRT.

When it came down to which one i was going to use, i decided to go to OpenWRT.  DD-WRT does come as a nice package with a web interface and all, but as DD-WRT is also moving down a commercial road, with packages for the La Fonera also being sold (unless you are happy with an older package from 2007). OpenWRT seemed like the obvious choice with a larger developer community, and no commercial routes in sight.

The next step was to flash the router with the latest OpenWRT Kamikaze firmware.  As it turns out flashing the La Fonera router is not an easy task with hacks all around the place.  After playing around for a few hours i found the easiest solution to be the following.

Visit http://flash.fonera.be/ and follow the instructions there. For the firmware images you want go to the download site of OpenWRT and download the atheros images of the release want.  In my case

• http://downloads.openwrt.org/kamikaze/8.09.1/atheros/openwrt-atheros-root.squashfs
• http://downloads.openwrt.org/kamikaze/8.09.1/atheros/openwrt-atheros-vmlinux.lzma

When using the FonFlash executable, remember that the RottFS file is the .squashfs file and the kernel file is the .lzma file.

Follow the instructions:  Start the program clicking flash, reboot your LaFonera router, wait until you get the right messages on the FonFlash program, Wait until flashing is finished.  This might take up to 30 minutes.  DO NOT disconnect your router while this is happening, you might brick it!

That’s it!Remember that in order to set the root password you need to telnet in the router, and set the password with passwd .  Any comments??

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additions!

If you need a web interface to your OpenWRT router have a look at http://www.x-wrt.org/ and http://wiki.x-wrt.org/index.php/Installation_Guide under the  X-Wrt as ipkg install (via SSH) !!

As you all know Apple’s annoying devices found everywhere, i-<devices>, aren’t excactly user friendly when it comes to accessing the device as a proper disk drive (i.e. as a usb device).  This means that you can’t find your downloaded mp3 files (legit or not, don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time!).

After going through some software copytrans seems to be one piece of software that does the job well, http://www.copytrans.net/

I haven’t tested any open source, free as in beer, software but if there are any please do let me know!

We all got caught in an awkward place where our computer is infected with god knows what malware and we can’t scan our computer with our antivirus software because it won’t work anymore (simplistic explanation of what might happen!)

There are many live cd utilities, some with a lot of utilities for resetting passwords et cetera.  If you are looking for a solution to scanning your computer for malware though, one solution is to use live CDs provided by anti-malware vendors such as the one Kaspersky is offering.  Although not commercially supported and perhaps a development stage solution for a future commercial solution, it does the job and it is legit!

You can download it by going to http://devbuilds.kaspersky-labs.com/devbuilds/RescueDisk/  download and burn it on a CD, then insert it to your CD driver, reboot, and boot from the CD

For a list of other live CDs of this category visit http://www.askvg.com/download-free-bootable-rescue-cds-from-kaspersky-bitdefender-avira-f-secure-and-others/ and try others out.

Kaspersky is running on a customised version of gentoo (r8).  one issue you will encounter here is that the boot CD will automatically pick up the IP settings of your operating system on the hard disk (or at least appears to be doing so).  To set DHCP settings on you will need to do the following:

• Go and edit /etc/conf.d/net using nano (not sure what other text editors are available)
• for dhcp settings use config_eth0=(“dhcp”)
  delete anything else in the file, save the file and exit
• now to restart the eth0 interface:
  /etc/init.d/net.eth0 stop
  /etc/init.d/net.eth0 start
  or restart might also work
• type ifconfig to view the new IP settings

Now run the update and scan!!

Remember how in Windows XP there was something called MUI and how you could change the language windows used to display messages et cetera?  Vista has a similar concept, only not available for the Vista home editions.  But fear not! there is a solution!! Check out this link!

http://www.froggie.sk/