by Peter
When you want to share a slideshow, document, application or your entire desktop with several people simultaneously, what do you use? Microsoft’s Live Meeting (formerly NetMeeting) and WebEx are probably two of the most well-known commercial solutions.
In the open source world, VNC and its many variants (RealVNC, TightVNC, UltraVNC, Chicken of the VNC, etc.) also get the job done. But what about an open source and free (as in beer) hosted solution that’s like WebEx? That’s what Dimdim is all about.
Dimdim provides a web interface where you can host a meeting and others can join it for desktop sharing, chat and video and audio transmission. There’s no cost, but also no guarantee of uptime. However, all is not lost. Dimdim also offers a paid service with a 99.9% uptime guarantee and additional features for a flat $99 per year per virtual conference room.
If you’d rather not have your transmissions go outside the office, you can run the Dimdim software yourself. Again, this is free if you run the open source version or a fee for the enterprise version. See the Dimdim Editions chart for comparison.
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by Peter
Want to use video chat but don’t want to have to download and install more software on your computer? With TokBox, now you don’t have to.
This relatively new site (still beta, of course) makes use of Flash to enable you to do video and voice chat with your friends right from a web page. The video quality is a little grainy but that’s supposed to be fixed soon with Flash 9.
It’ll be interesting to see how much traffic they can handle as more people start using it. In order to avoid issues with firewalls, all the video and audio goes through TokBox’s servers so that’s going to be quite a lot of bandwidth. Just think YouTube times two!
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by Peter
Just saw on the Official Gmail Blog that IMAP support is being rolled out for free. Now I’ll be able to keep my mail clients synced up from different locations in addition to using the web interface.
The new feature is being rolled out over the next couple of days. Look for the “Forwarding and POP” tab in Settings to change to “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” to know that you’ve got it.
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by Peter
As I mentioned the other day, I upgraded one of my systems from Kubuntu Feisty Fawn to Gutsy Gibbon and had to fix some quirks with Compiz Fusion. Another anomaly I had was the appearance of wide white borders around application menus as well as the K-Menu in KDE. It appeared as though the menu shadows weren’t being rendered properly.
Fortunately, the fix for that was quite easy. Instead of the default KDE window decorator, gtk-window-decorator, use Emerald. The package can be found in Adept. After installing it, run emerald –replace to turn it on without having to log out. To adjust settings and customize the window decorations, go to Settings in the K-Menu and run Emerald Theme Manager.
So far, I’m liking Compiz Fusion. It hasn’t crashed and it’s very fast. I don’t notice any performance penalty as compared to using the regular 2D desktop. Granted, the 3D animations are just eye candy but they’re fun.
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by Peter
Last month, I posted about the free VirtualBox virtualization software and how you can use it to run various operating systems on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X (Intel CPU version) computers. Virtualization is also handy for quick and painless operating system evaluation purposes.
There are many Live CDs available today spanning a plethora of distributions of Linux, some Unices and you can even create your own Windows live CD. However, using them usually requires burning the ISO to a CD or DVD. Although media is cheap these days, it’s still a waste to burn discs just to try out things you may never continue using.
With VirtualBox, you don’t have to burn any discs to try things out. Simply follow these steps:
- Download the ISO file for the operating system you want to run. Verify from the description/help files/documentation that it is a bootable image (i.e. doesn’t require a boot floppy).
- Start VirtualBox and create a new virtual machine with enough memory for the operating system you’re going to try out.
- There’s no need to create a virtual hard drive for this machine if you’re using a Live CD/DVD since everything will run in memory. However, if it is an installation disc, then you will need to create a virtual hard drive large enough to install the operating system.
- Assign the ISO file to the virtual CD-ROM drive of the virtual machine.
- Start the new virtual machine.
Not only does this method reduce waste by avoiding the creation of plastic coasters (wasted CD/DVD media), it boots faster than a CD/DVD drive and your computer system is isolated from anything that may go wrong in the operating system you’re trying out.
So, now you’re all set to go play. Report back on the cool new operating systems you find.
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