Lucid Tips

As per Windows Live blog entry HotMail is now available via POP3 to users in United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, France, Japan, Spain, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. POP3 will be enabled for other countries later on.

Using POP3 allows you to access HotMail via your favorite email client like Outlook, Thunderbird or Evolution. POP3 also makes it easier to access HotMail via your Phone/PDA.

Below are the configuration values to access HotMail using POP3

POP server: pop3.live.com (Port 995)
POP SSL required? Yes
User name: Your Windows Live ID, for example yourname@hotmail.com
Password: The password you usually use to sign in to Hotmail or Windows Live
SMTP server: smtp.live.com (Port 25)
Authentication required? Yes (this matches your POP username and password)
TLS/SSL required? Yes

Amarok is an excellent music player that uses some core KDE components (like KDElibs) and can be installed independent of KDE on Ubuntu. One issue with this however is that it does not read the system wide proxy settings from GNOME.  The proxy settings under “Settings -> Configure Amarok -> Configure engine” only work for Streaming and hence if you are behind the firewall you cannot access the lyrics service or fetch cover art from the internet. This is easy to fix.

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Virtualization allows running of multiple operating systems and multiple applications on the same computer at the same time. This can be very handy if you are doing software development and need to test your application on multiple platforms or are doing a lot of R&D and get tired of reloading the operating system and software. Virtualization is also helpful if you need to run Linux and Windows (or different flavor/version of Linux) at the same time and dual boot just does not cut it. VMWare Server from VMWare is great virtualization software and is provided as freeware. It allows you to create snapshot of the state of any particular virtual machine and revert to it easily.

Update 05/30/2009: Also see VirtualBox – virtualization alternative to VMWare

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Default installation of Ubuntu and XUbuntu do not send the hostname to the DHCP server and this prevents other machines on the network from looking up your machine by using the FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name). This is easy to fix with a few tweaks to the DHCP configuration file.

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