Opera 10.60 Review

Browser!! The most important piece of software on your computer. It is your window to the world of the Internet. There are many browsers in the world. For e.g. :-

• Mozilla Firefox.


• Internet Explorer.


• Safari.


• Google Chrome


• Opera.

But, there is one which stands out among them. Its called Opera. It is currently, the fastest browser in the world.

Opera is the pioneer in the browser arena. It was the first browser to introduce tabbed browsing, the first one to implement mouse gestures, the first one to have a built-in torrent client & the only one which has a built in e-mail client. So, lets take a look at Opera.

Tab Management :-

Tabbed browsing was the feature that was first implemented by Opera. Now, Opera 10.60 takes it to a whole new level. Check out the screenshot.



Tabs are beautifully managed in Opera 10.60. Right click on the tab-bar & you can select the position of the tabs on any corner of your screen.

Speed Dial:-

Speed dial is another mind-blowing feature that was implemented by Opera. This feature allows you to assign up to 25 websites on the speed-dial screen. Speed-dial can also be assigned as the homepage but it automatically opens when you open a new tab or a blank window. Shortcuts for the first 9 speed dials are assigned as Ctrl+1 to Ctrl+9 so that you can easily access the tabs. Here’s the amazing screenshot of my desktop :-

Mail Client :-

Opera has a built-in email client too. It supports POP3 & IMAP mail. If you have your mail account on GMail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail or AOL then it automatically downloads the required settings for the mail. You only have to select weather you want POP3 or IMAP. If you’ve your mail on another mail provider you can also manually assign the settings.  Its very helpful to surf the web in one tab and check your mail in another. Check out the screenshot :-

Misc features :-

• In built torrent client.


• Download manager.


• Awesome Javascript engine (Carakan).


• Content Blocking.


• Superb javascript handling.

Performance :-

What can I say, check out the marvellous Presto engine in its full glory :-



According to the above benchmark, it demolishes every browser in the market today.

Pros :- Superb tab management, awesome javascript engine, built-in email client.

Cons :- Very less plugins.

Rating :- 5/5.

Download link :- www.opera.com

The Cousin (s) experiment

Early this year, my two cousins got new computers. One of them got a laptop & other one went for a desktop. One of my cousin, who got a laptop, is a second year computer science engineering student. The other one, has just completed his high-school.

The laptop was taken without my advice and unsurprisingly it sucked. But still, it makes a good general purpose laptop. The configuration of the Dell laptop is :-

Processor	Intel Pentium Dual Core T4200
RAM	2 GB DDR2 @ 667 MHz
HDD	250 GB 5400 RPM
Screen Size	14.1” 1280x720 resolution
Graphics	Integrated Intel GMA
Price	Rs. 35000

Considering the price this laptop is not bad, but still, it is not good either. It was shipped with FreeDOS. My cousin, who has no knowledge about any operating system came to me and asked me to install an operating system on it.

Lets come to my second cousin, who just cleared his high-school. His dad called me and asked me to build a nice PC under Rs.25k. I was initially going for AMD Athlon II X2 250 & AMD 785G chipset. But the demand was so much high of this platform that we were told to wait for 7 days. So, I decided to go with the following configuration which was available on the spot:-

Processor	Intel Pentium Dual Core E5400 @ 2.7 GHz
Motherboard	Asus G31
RAM	2 GB DDR2 @ 800 MHz Kingston
HDD	Western Digital Blue 500 GB SATA II
DVD Writer	Sony DRU 870 S
LCD	AOC F19 18.5” 1366x768 resolution
Cabinet & PSU	Zebronics Bijli with the default PSU.
Graphics card	Integrated

I decided to install Fedora 12 on both of the systems. There were many advantages of doing so, mainly :-

• FOSS products.


• No headaches about viruses, spywares, adwares etc.


• Built in superb OpenOffice.Org suite.


• Low resource usage.


• No need of drivers (except for the Broadcom wireless in laptop).


• Integrated IDE & development tools.


• No need of defragmentation or disk cleanup.


• Delta RPMs, which reduce the size of updates upto 80% (95% in some cases).

The installation was a breeze. I chose ext4 as the default filesystem on both computers. I created the following partitioning scheme on the both systems :-

• / – was allocated about 25 GB on both machines.


• /home – around 30 GB on the laptop & 40 GB on the desktop.


• /movies – for storing movies. ext4 was again chosen.


• /music – for storing music, again ext4.


• /data – for storing miscellaneous data.

The only thing which I had to do was to grant permission to them to mount the filesystems and to install the updates. That’s it nothing else.

The installation went super smooth. Everything was detected out-of-the-box. I had to install few multimedia packages like gstreamer-plugins-bad  & ugly along with other multimedia features. They both were familiar with VLC Player though, so I installed that too. Oh, and I chose GNOME as the default user environment. The webcam was detected by Fedora & was working flawlessly via cheese. Brasero was doing a nice jobs in burning the data discs, music was perfectly being managed by Rhythmbox & Banshee.

Its been about 5 & a half months. I’ve never, ever done any kind of repair on those two computers. Every gadget in their home is working flawlessly with Fedora 12. More over, I even visited my cousin's college to instruct his teacher & his seniors on Fedora 12.

I just want to say that, if you have a cousin or a relative who is new to computers, then try installing any flavour of GNU/Linux or PC-BSD. You’ll be amazed how well people adopt it. There are people who still believe that you’ve to learn commands to work on a GNU/Linux computer. Both of my cousins can’t even copy files via command line, yet they are working on their systems since last 5 months without my supervision.

VirtualBox 3.0 review & Ubuntu installation

I'm a lot into virtualization. I tried different apps on different systems. At first I tried VMWare Workstation on my old computer which had a Pentium IV processor & 768 MB RAM. But to truly experience the power of VirtualBox, you will need a fairly powerful system. Here are my recommended specs :-

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 or higher


• AMD Athlon X2 5600+ or higher


• 2 GB RAM (4 GB recommended)


• 100 GB or more hard drive space


• Direct X or OpenGL enabled graphics card or onboard chip.

Virtualbox supports hardware-enabled technologies such as Intel VT & AMD-V. To see wheather your processor supports virtualization or not you can download CPU-Z. Enclosed is the screenshot of CPU-Z of my system which clearly shows AMD-V being listed under the Instructions tab.



I'm using Windows 7 has the host OS as lot of guys want to install GNU/Linux but are afraid to do so. So I'll be instructing on how to install Ubuntu under Virtualbox.

To install Ubuntu under virtualbox, we need to go through the following steps :-

• I assume that you already have the Ubuntu disc image or CD. If not then please download it from www.ubuntu.com relevant to your processor architecture still 32-bit is recommended.


• Install Virtualbox on your OS. Windows & Mac OS X users can download and install it via visiting www.virtualbox.org. GNU/Linux users can get it via installing it from their package-manager. FreeBSD users can compile it via the ports manager.


• Now either copy the disc-image of Ubuntu on the HDD (recommended) or just pop in the CD in the optical drive tray.

Rest of the tutorial is explained in the screenshots.

VirtualBox Homescreen.



Now as we click on the Next button, we’re presented with the OS selection screen.

Here, Select Linux from the dropdown menu & then select Ubuntu. If you’re using 64-bit release then select Ubuntu 64-bit.



Now we come to the hardware allocation part. Follow these simple steps :-

• When asked about the RAM, allocate about 1/3rd RAM of your system. 512 MB should be enough if you don’t intend to multitask.


• Allocate about 10 GB of space. Generally, the HDD image is stored in your C:\ drive or the partition where the OS is installed. But you can & you should move the location to elsewhere on your disk partition.

Now we need to add a disc image to the installation. See the screenshot for more details.



The feature can be opened via clicking on the CD-DVD device’s section.

The, those using CD image can add their image by clicking on the Add button. Those using physical drive can just add their device via the CD-DVD device.

After this, you can start the installation of Ubuntu.

Installation of Ubuntu :-

Installation of Ubuntu is a piece of cake. You just need to follow these steps :-

1. Select Install Ubuntu.


2. Then, select your time-zone.


3. Select your keyboard.

Partitioning is not a big matter of concern if you’re installing GNU/Linux in a virtualized environment. However, you might need to get familier with it as you’ll need some knowledge while installing GNU/Linux natively.

The partition scheme of GNU/Linux contains mainly three things :-

• ‘/’ – This is the root partition. Here your OS is installed. The default file-system in modern distros is ext4.


• /home – This is the home folder. Here you can store your music, movies, documents etc.


• swap – This is called swap space of virtual-memory.

If you’re installing it natively, then I suggest that you should give about 10 GB to / & then rest to your /home partition. Swap should be around 1.5 times the size of RAM upto 2 GB. If you have more than 2 GB RAM , then just allocate the size of your RAM to swap space.

Returning back, here is the screenshot of partition screen. I just selected Erase & use entire disk. Then, you just need to answer some questions more like your name, password & computer name. Then finally click on install and sit back & enjoy.

After the installation, reboot the VM & you’ll be presented with the Ubuntu desktop. Now, we just need to install one more thing called “Guest Additions”. This will greatly boost the performance of Ubuntu.



Select the Install Guest Additions as shown in the picture. Then, navigate to your home folder and navigate one last command.



To install this module, just copy :-

• VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run if you’re running a 32-bit version to your home folder.


• VBoxLinuxAdditions-amd64.run if you’re running a 64-bit version your home folder.

Then, Open Terminal from Applications > Accessories > Terminal. Then execture the following command :-

sudo sh VBox (and then press tab, it will auto-complete)

Then just reboot. After rebooting, you will see that you can easily navigate between the host & guest OS. If you need seelmless integration with the host OS, then press ‘Right Ctrl & L’ your desktop will then transform.

Overall, VirtualBox is highly recommended. You will see that it doesn’t even eats the RAM that is allocated to the Guest OS unless you’re heavily multitasking on it.

Verdict :- Highly Recommended!!!

Enabling AVIVO Video converter’s full functionality in Windows 7

I was a long time NVIDIA user. This summer, a month back I switched loyalty to AMD and got their once flagship, ATI Radeon 4870 1 GB for as little as Rs. 9500. Initially I wanted to go for Zotac GTX 260. But it was priced high, about 1.5k more than the ATI counterpart.

The performance of the card is awesome in games. But I use the card in other fields too such as converting videos etc. Earlier, I use to encode videos using Badaboom converter which is designed on CUDA for NVIDIA. It is a mind blowing product and is worth the $20 price. Every one who owns a NVIDIA graphics card should spare some money for it too.

Then, I started converting videos with the help of ATI’s built-in AVIVO video converter. It used to give me a lot of headaches as it was unable to decode the AVI, MP4 & MKV files. It used to give me ‘Unsupported File Format’ error. Then I found a solution. Just follow these steps :-

1. Install Shark007 codecs from http://shark007.net/ relevant to your architecture.


2. Then, download Codec Tweaker from http://www.codecguide.com/windows7_preferred_filter_tweaker.htm.


3. After that, start Codec Tweaker & un-select everything that is played via Microsoft. Select FFDSHOW instead.


4. Disable Media-Foundation, it is the primary culprit.


5. Start AVIVIO video converter via Advanced Mode's drop down menu.


6. Make sure you select Enable Acceleration.


7. Enjoy.

If you want more control over the ATI card then I suggest that you download A’s video converter from here.

Update :- As of March 1st 2011, A's Video converter is no longer available.

Regarding performance, just see the table below.

Source File & Size	Conversion Time	Final Size
175 MB TV Show	1:20 min	70 MB
700 MB Movie	5:26 min	423 MB

Check it out. Its worth the shot.