How to recover grub after installing windows

If you install windows on your Ubuntu computer, you will lose the opportunity of using Ubuntu, as windows removes the os loader (grub). You can recover grub easily if you have an Ubuntu live CD.

1. Boot your computer with Ubuntu live CD
2. Open the terminal and run following command
   
3. sudo grub
4. Then you will see a prompt like grub>
5. Issue following commands
6. grub>find /boot/grub/stage1
7. then you will see a result like (hdx,y) , where x and y are natural numbers
8. grub>root (hdx,y)
9. grub>setup (hdx)
10. grub>quit
11. Reboot your machine and remove your live CD
    

Freemat - Alternative to Matlab

Matlab is a powerful tool that allows you to perform computationally intensive tasks very easier way. Also you can write C, C++, and Fortran codes in Matlab. But it is a propriety software. There are several alternatives for it. Octave is one of them. You can use octave with qtOcatve GUI, and gnuplot will support for plotting applications.
To install octave simply type following command on the console

sudo aptitude install octave
sudo aptitude install gnuplot
sudo aptitude install qtoctave


The problem with Octave is that the poor plotting capability. FreeMat is a good alternative for that. Freemat is not listed in the repositories of Ubuntu. Hence, run following commands provide the platform for installing freemat.

sudo apt-get install libqt4-dev
sudo apt-get install lsb-qt4
sudo apt-get install libqt4-gui
sudo apt-get install g77
sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev

download FreeMat Source Code (All platforms) from freemat web site


unpack
./builddeps --with-ffcall --with-umfpack --with-umfpack --with-fftw --with-fftw --with-blas --with-lapack --with-arpack --with-matio
./configure
make

sudo make install

freemat

DIA - Diagram Creating Tool

Dia is a GTK+ based diagram creation program for Linux, Unix and Windows released under the GPL license just like Microsoft Visio. Dia is available in the repositories of Ubuntu and windows compatible version is also available. Visit dia home page for more information and for additional shapes click here

Open Office 3 - released

Open office 3 has been released. Its time to upgrade. Visit http://download.openoffice.org/other.html#en-US


Installation instructions

Frostwire

Connect to gnutella? Frostwire is the way to go (So far it's the only way to go, similar to bareshare)
Download & install, They've got .deb

http://www.frostwire.com/?id=home

Go Pidgin - Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, Facebook, Skype all in one

Aptitude install Pidgin, It is in one of the typical Repos,
Add your Gmail, Yahoo & MSN accounts in it, (The Gmail chat protocol is xmpp just in case you didn't know), Btw you get new mail notification on pidgin too,


Download the Facebook Plug-in from (Its a .deb)

http://code.google.com/p/pidgin-facebookchat/

which will give Pidgin the ability to connect to the facebook chat, (You can change the status from this as well without actually going to facebook)


Download the Skype plug-in from (Its also a .deb)

http://eion.robbmob.com/

which will connect skype to pidgin, but the problem is skype has to be running, (you must also give permission to pidgin to connect to skype from pidgin) This Skype thing is a bit unstable... Yet! (I do not recommend it, it freezes Pidgin too often)

Now waste time more Efficiently :D

Skype on Kubuntu

Add line below to your sources.list

or

You can use
Adept manager -> Manage repositries -> Third Party sftware tab -> Add..

deb http://download.skype.com/linux/repos/debian/ stable non-free

then simply aptitude update & search for Skype & install