Create, edit, extract, convert, compress, encrypt, mount CD image file!!!

PowerISO is a powerful image processing and file compression tool, which allows you to create, extract, compress, edit and convert ISO/BIN image files, and mount these files with internal virtual drive. And most of all, the compressed files can be used directly without decompressing.

• Support ISO, BIN, NRG, IMG, DAA, …
• Open, Create, Edit, Extract ISO File…
• Compress, Encrypt, Split ISO File…
• Integrated with internal Virtual Drive…

Main Features :

• Support almost all CD/DVD-ROM image file formats (ISO, BIN, NRG, IMG, DAA and so on). Note: DAA (Direct-Access-Archive) is an advanced format for image file, which supports some advanced features, such as compression, password protection, and splitting to multiple volumes. It can be handled directly just like other formats, such as ISO, BIN, etc.
• Supports on-the-fly burning.
• Supports UDF image file.
• Create image file from hard disk files or CD/DVD-ROM.
• Edit an existing image file.
• Can edit and burn Audio CD image file.
• Extract files and folders from image file.
• Convert image files between ISO/BIN and other formats.
• Make bootable image file, get boot information from bootable image file.
• Make floppy disk image file.
• Optimize files to save disk space while saving image files.
• Mount image file with internal virtual drive. Even if the image file is saved as DAA format, the virtual drive can handle that format directly.
• Support shell integration, such as context menu, Drag and Drop, clipboard…
• Supports command-line parameters.
• Can open XBOX image file.
• Supports multiple languages

Supported operating systems :

• 32-bit Windows: Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003, Windows Vista, Windows 2008, Windows 7
• 64-bit Windows: Windows XP, Windows 2003, Windows Vista, Windows 2008, Windows 7

Playing Windows games on Linux is not really a difficult task. Most gamers are reluctant to migrate to Linux because they have this misconception that Windows games cannot be played on Linux. How wrong they are. If you are one of those avid gamers that I mentioned above, here are 4 ways that you can play Windows games on Linux.

1) Wine

The obvious way to install any Windows applications on Linux is via Wine. At the time when WineHQ released the stable 1.0 version, it has already supported more than 200 Windows games. Before you install any games on Linux, you can first check out Wine AppDB whether your game is already supported in Wine.

2) PlayOnLinux

PlayOnLinux (POL) is a python based script based on Wine code. It is a useful tool that aim to help Linux users run Windows games on Linux without having to go through the scary command line interface. The main features of POL lies in its ability to allow each application to be installed within its own wineprefix. What this means is that one can easily install/modify/remove Windows games without affecting the systems or other applications. POL is open source and has a strong community support on their POL forum. Being a python script, it is not limited to any Linux distribution. Whether you are using Ubuntu, Fedora or Gentoo, you can find installation and usage instructions on the POL site.

3) CrossOver Games

CrossOver Games is an addition to the popular CrossOver series. Unlike other CrossOver products, which are aimed primarily at office productivity applications, CrossOver Games focuses on the stability of installing Windows games on Linux (and Mac OSX). As the same as PlayOnLinux, CrossOver Games provides a click and install method that makes it simple for anyone to use. The latest version of CrossOver Games has already tested to work with more than a hundred Windows games, including the popular World of Warcraft, Half-Life2 and Counterstrike.

CrossOver Games costs $39.95

4) Cedega

Formerly known as WineX, Cedega is a proprietary software from Transgaming Technologies specifically designed for running game written for Windows under Linux. Being a proprietary product, users must subscribe to Transgaming membership to enjoy the full functionality of Cedega.

As a fork of Wine, Cedega strength lies in implement the Mircosoft DirectX API on Linux. Installation of games using Cedega is make to mimics the experience that Windows users have. You insert the disc, run setup.exe, wait for the game to finish installing and finally enjoy your game.

I hope you enjoyed this article

Why? Well, you see, you can run many Windows games and applications directly in your favorite Linux distribution, without installing Windows. That magic is made possible by an application called Wine. (The name is recursive for Wine Is Not an Emulator.)

Running Wine is very simple. Because it is already in your distribution’s repository, all you need to do is install it using your distribution’s package manager. But installing it is just the beginning. You have to configure it.

But even that is easy because most people running Wine configure and manage it using a graphical frontend, of which there is just a few in active development. In this article, I will list the graphical interfaces that are still in active development.

Note that not all Windows programs will run on Wine, and even some that run will not do so without one or more minor or major issues that will need fixing.

There are four graphical interface still in active development. They are: Winetricks, PlayonLinux, WineGame, and Q4wine :-

• Winetricks – This is the best of the frontends. It was a lot more fun to use than the others. Its most important feature is that it makes it easy to install trial or demo applications without you actually having the applications or games. It does that by downloading and installing selected applications from the program’s website. This is its startup interface.

And this is a partial list of available applications. Those that show “download” in the “Media” column are automatically downloaded and installed.

That was how I installed World of Warcraft (WoW). This is a screenshot from a test installation.

• PlayonLinux – Offers a simple to use interface, but does not have the automatic download-and-install feature of Winetricks. What it does have, however, is a very active community.

• WineGame – This will probably not be in your distribution’s repository, but you may install it by following the instructions here. I did not have much success working with WineGame, but that should not stop you from trying it. The image below shows the main interface.

• Q4wine – This a Qt4 interface for Wine, and runs on Linux and FreeBSD, which likely means that it will also run on PC-BSD. Like PlayonLinux and WineGame, Q4wine did not work as well as Winetricks. A few of its features are:

1. Can work with different versions of wine simultaneously
2. Makes it easy to extract icons from PE files (.exe .dll)
3. Autostart icons support

This image shows the startup view of Q4wine.

And this, shows the Programs tab. You may view more screenshots here.

I hope you enjoyed this article

To this:

To get there, we will have to install just one application, just one, with some dependencies. So launch a shell terminal and type the following command: sudo apt-get install cairo-dock. If you do not like working from the Linux command line, call the Software Center (Applications > Ubuntu Software Center), and search for  cairo-dock. Your search results should match the ones shown in the image below. Click on the Install button and sit back and watch the installation begin. It should not take more than a few minutes.

After the installation, whether from a shell terminal or the Software Center, you will find two entries for Cairo-Dock in the menu. The first is accessible from Applications > Accessories > Cairo-Dock (no OpenGL), and the second from Applications > Accessories > GLX-Dock (Cairo-Dock with OpenGL). The GLX-Dock entry comes with more effects. Before launching Cairo-Dock, it is first necessary to remove the lower panel. That, in my opinion, is the best location to put it, or the best location to place the main one. So right-click on the lower panel and select Delete This Panel. Now you can start Cairo-Dock.

This is the default theme. If the default theme is not to your liking, there are more than a dozen themes you can choose from. To sample other themes, right-click on the dock and select Cairo-Dock > Manage themes.

Cairo-Dock’s theme manager allows you to sample all available themes without activating them.

I hope you enjoyed this article

A 320 GB 2.5′ hard disk purchased for this tutorial cost US $45. Enclosures tend to be very cheap. The one I bought cost about US $7. At 5′x2.75′, the whole unit can fit comfortably in any pocket. You can use it to clone your Ubuntu 11.04 installation that you carry along with you. And with the USB connection, you can use it on any computer that can boot off a USB device.

To start, connect the disk via the USB cable to any computer and boot the computer using an Ubuntu 11.04 CD or DVD. At the disk partitioning step, select “Something else.” Doing that and clicking on Forward will take you to the installer’s advanced partitioning tool, which you are going to use to configure the partitions for Ubuntu 11.04.

If the computer you are using has only one hard disk, the external drive you are attempting to use will be detected as /dev/sdb. The “b” shows that it is the second disk detected by the system. The task now is to select the disk and configure the partitions for Ubuntu.

By default, Ubuntu’s installer configures two partitions – the first for /, the root directory, and the second for Swap. When creating partitions for installing any desktop Linux distribution, my recommendation is to create the following four partitions:

• /boot, the boot partition. This is where programs critical for booting the system will reside.
• /, the root directory. The bulk of the programs used for running the system will be installed here.
• Swap, unformatted disk space for use as virtual memory.
• /home, the partition where your home directory will be located. In the course of using the system, files and folders you create will reside in various folders here.

To begin configuration, select the free space as shown, and click on Add.

The first partition will be for /boot. When setting up an LVM-based system using an Alternate Installer ISO image, the default disk space allocated to /boot is 258 MB. However, only about 22 MB of that is used, so anything thing between that size range will do. For this tutorial, the default will be used. The mount point will, of course, be /boot. The default file system is ext2. OK.

The second partition will be for Swap, disk space that the computer may use as virtual memory. The suggested size for Swap is 2000 MB. Select “swap area” from the “Use as” dropdown menu. OK.

The third partition will be for /, the root directory. The default journaling file system on Ubuntu 11.04 is ext4. You may stick with it or choose another journaling file system available. The installer recommends a minimum of 4.4 GB for Ubuntu 11.04, but on a new installation, less than 3 GB of disk space allocated to / is used. Note that as you install additional application after installation, disk space used will grow, so be generous here. I think 10 GB should be more than enough. OK.

The last partition will be for /home. The file system is ext4, and you may allocate all available disk space to it. OK.

All the partitions have been configured. Before clicking Install Now, you need to change where GRUB, the boot loader, will be installed. By default, it will be installed in the MBR of the computer’s internal disk. But that is not what you want. You want to install GRUB in the MBR of the external disk. So, under the “Device for boot loader installation” section, click on the dropdown menu, and select the entry that matches the external disk that you just partitioned. Once that is done, continue with the rest of the installation.

After installation, test the system by booting the computer from the disk. You may use this as a mobile clone of your Ubuntu 11.04 installation.

I hope you enjoyed this article

If you’ve ever had an email inbox clogged with attachments from friends or coworkers, you’ve probably experienced an inbox slowdown or run up against its storage limit. Maybe you’ve  send or receive large files through email, but the system wouldn’t even allow your oversized attachment to be delivered. Web services that let you avoid these problems have arrived on the scene, and some of them don’t require any tech-savvy skills and won’t cost you anything. Here are the 10 best file hosting services for you and your friends.

Mediafire

Upload up to 10 files of up to 100MB each at a time, unlimited storage. Allow to link to files from your MySpace page, your blog, or forums, upload an unlimited number of files to share with friends and family or storage, use folders to easily share groups of files or create galleries for all your images. No registration necessary and no software to install.

Box.net

Up to 1GB of storage of files up to 10MB size each. Store your documents on Box so that you can access them from anywhere. Share photos on your blog or website, and more.

Filedropper

Filedropper is amazing. It offers yet another free file sharing service, but with a 5GB capacity, no registration requirements, and a theoretically unlimited download period, this one may be a standout.

Badongo

Badongo is an exceptionally neat file host, and I would most certainly rate it as one of the best. As a unregistered user, you are allowed to upload up to 4.8GB a day and as a free, registered user, 12GB a day. To make it similar to Filedropper, Badongo allows users to upload files of a maximum size of 1GB. When you register with Badongo you even receive an account that stores all of your files of course, but also allows users to create picture albums out of the pictures they store. This brings even more wonderful features to this awesome site.

zSHARE

It offers unlimited downloads, and you can upload files up to 100 MB. The service is completely ad-financed so there isn’t any premium service.

ADrive

ADrive is a free service and the 50 GB of space is currently the most you can get as far as free offerings (most others offer just 1-5 GB for free.) There is a 2 GB file size limit, but very few people will have files that exceed 2 GB. To put that in perspective, high-resolution digital photos are only about 2-6 MB each.

MyFreeFileHosting

MyFreeFileHosting has an interface similar to MediaFire’s. It includes the option to send an notification email to someone to tell them of the upload, tags to categorize the file, etc. Of course, after one uploads the file, links are given to allow for download and distribution. The maximum file size allowed is 100MB.

Windows Live Folders – Skydrive

Windows Live Folders shows a great deal of promise. It could be a good option for smaller organizations who can’t support a VPN or use Windows’ built-in file sharing, and it may end up competing with other media sharing options. At present, you get 500MB of free storage with it, and it always displays how much you have left at the top of the window. The maximum file size you can upload right now is 50MB.

DropBox

Dropbox is a free service that lets you bring your photos, docs, and videos anywhere and share them easily. Dropbox was founded in 2007 by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi, two MIT students tired of emailing files to themselves to work from more than one computer.

Today, more than 45 million people across every continent use Dropbox to always have their stuff at hand, share with family and friends, and work on team projects. We’re looking for more great people to join us, so if you’re excited to help simplify life for millions of people,by providing 2 Gbs of free space.

RapidShare

RapidShare is at the moment the most popular file hosting service in the world. Downloads are generally fast, and you can find virtually any kind of file on RapidShare. However, the download limits are very strict.

FileCrunch

FileCrunch ups the ante on most of these services’ maximum file size from 100MB to 250MB. Very similar to YouSendIt, it’s really just web storage that generates links to download your files. There’s no limit on storage and downloads, and it supports download managers and accelerators.

Thats it for now, enjoy these file hosting services. Got any suggestions or feedback, leave a comment and we will be back in touch with you.

WordPress has to offer two choices: hosted or self-hosted WordPress. While, the self-hosted service implies a manual approach, requiring setting up, keeping and managing ourselves the WordPress Software, the hosted WordPress is conducted by WordPress most qualified coordinators. In the next lines, I’ll try to expose each choice’s benefits and drawbacks as they present themselves.

WordPress Hosted – WordPress

First, I’ll have to point out the simple and quick steps that you have to follow to install the application. Secondly, you won’t have troubles with any updates, because the program will run them automatically. Unfortunately, it’s more inflexible and it obliges us to choose a domain, unlike the self-hosted WordPress.

Benefits:

• No cost – there were no costs implied, the only thing I needed to proceed was my e-mail address
• Programmed updates – every time a new update is ready to use, the program will run it automatically.
• Simply to use and install – I only needed to follow three simple steps: make an account, pick a subdomain and select a theme and that was all.

Drawbacks:

• No profit – more exactly, it’s impossible to use the blog as a way to earn money from displaying advertisements, as they are controlled and forbidden.
• Domain constraint – to my surprise, I discovered that the blog can only wear this given name myblogname.wordpress.com
• Fixed amount of space – I’ve also discovered that it’s also possible not to have enough space to unfold
• Determined number of themes – As I’ve started I’ve noticed a really poor number of themes, there were only 75 possible choices
• To sum up, I consider it a bad choice if you want a blog or a website that can allow you mobility and freedom of choice.

Self-Hosted WordPress

For self-hosted WordPress, I needed the software, a chosen name for my domain and a bit of attention at what new versions ready to use I could find on the internet. I was glad to see that it offered me all the freedom of choice I could seek and also the possibility of earning a couple of bucks or even more. Thus, a self-hosted blog gives a wide range of personalized options to earn an extra income.

Nevertheless, it offered me the capacity to supervise my own blog without any limitations, giving me the total control of managing my own page.

Benefits:

• Income – It gives me the possibility to earn money from selling stuff or from any application that could produce an amount of money.
• Design – Total freedom on choosing a theme appropriate to what your blog wants to express, from simple to more superior ones, depending on how much we afford to spend.
• Total control – I could design my blog as I’d imagine it, enjoying the no restrictions policy and the complete range of options offered me at each step
• Tools that optimize your search – It allowed me to gather every single information in order to order my pages
• Personalized Domain Name – I could choose freely my own domain name, making it easier to be find and to make an impression with it

Drawbacks:

• Complicated to install – I needed first to get the WordPress software and only after that I could proceed on setting-up my blog
• No programmed updates – In these days when blogging is more than a trend, more and more updates are available in order to make WordPress a better application for everyone who uses it. Unfortunately, the self-hosted WordPress doesn’t have programmed updates, thus obliges us search the new and improved versions in order to install them.
• Charge – I had to pay for the software that allowed me to self-host my blog and also I was recharged for the domain after a period of time.

1. SquareServe.com

• Free Unlimited cPanel Web Hosting
• Unlimited Disk Space + Bandwidth
• Unlimited Features – MySQL Databases, Email Accounts, Addon Domains + more
• Choice of using free sub-domain or use your own domain
• Amazing Support + Friendly Community

2. Up4.net

• Unlimited Space
• Unmetered Bandwidth
• cPANEL, PHP, AUTO INSTALLER
• NO ADS

3. T35.com

• Disk Space Unlimited file size limits & ads
• Bandwidth  Unlimited file size limits & ads
• Footer Ad
• Websites & Domains permitted =  1
• Scripting PHP w/ limits

4. Hostultra.com

• Unlimited Bandwidth
• Unlimited Webspace
• Domain Hosting
• PHP, FTP

5. Unlimitedone.com

• Unlimited Bandwidth
• Unlimited Disk Space
• Unlimited Hosted Domains
• 99.9% Uptime
• Cpanel with Fantastico
• 24/7 Support

6. Crystalserve.com

• No Ads
• CPanel and Softaculous
• Unlimited Storage
• Unlimited Bandwidth
• 1 Domain

7. Orangeserve.com

• Free Unlimited cPanel Web Hosting – Instant Activation
• Unlimited Disk Space + Bandwidth
• Unlimited Features – MySQL Databases, Email Accounts, Addon Domains + more
• Choice of using free sub-domain or use your own domain
• Amazing Support + Friendly Community
• Regular Backups

8. Unlimitedtree.com

• Free Unlimited cPanel Web Hosting – Instant Activation
• Unlimited Disk Space + Bandwidth
• Unlimited Features – MySQL Databases, Email Accounts, Addon Domains + more
• Choice of using free sub-domain or use your own domain
• Amazing Support + Friendly Community
• Regular Backups

9.  Urhostz.com

• Unlimited features, including Addon Domains, MySQL Databases, and more
• Including Softaculous full 144 script auto installer
• Choice of using your own domain or a UrHostz.com subdomain
• Support forums with fast response and a great community
• Secure signup and client area

10. Monkeyserve.com

• Free Unlimited cPanel Web Hosting – Instant ActivationUnlimited Disk Space + Bandwidth
• Unlimited Features – MySQL Databases, Email Accounts, Addon Domains + more
• Choice of using free sub-domain or use your own domain
• Amazing Support + Friendly Community with regular Backups

Hope this post was helpful to you guys, For more such tips and tricks be a regular visitor of xHelpHub.

Looking at the feedback I’ve got from my previous article about building a self-hosted WordPress blog for free, and from personal experience, I can tell that good free web hosting services are hard to find.

Sure, you can get tons of results from search engines. But most of them turn out to be more annoying than useful. In the end, the results that we can count on are those which come from peer recommendation.

So, to help readers with their web-building experiments (and for my own future references), I tried to compile a list of good easy and free web hosting services. Many of the entries are readers’ recommendations, others are the remainder of the search engine results after filtering out the unqualified ones.

The Survivors

Here are the ones that still stand after the showdown.:) In no particular order, of course. I’ll only mention the disk space and monthly data transfer for quick comparison purposes. Please refer to each service provider’s website for the full list of features as they will be too long to list down here.

Zymic

Gives you:

• 5 GB disk space per account with unlimited account per users
• 50 GB of monthly data transfer

XtreemHost

Gives you:

• 5.5 GB disk space
• 200 GB of monthly data transfer

Hosting-Engine

Gives you:

• 150 MB disk space
• 4 GB of monthly data transfer

Host-Ed

Gives you:

• 150 MB disk space
• 4 GB of monthly data transfer

Freehostia

Gives you:

• 250 MB disk space
• 6 GB of monthly data transfer

PhpNet

Gives you:

• 350 MB disk space
• 15 GB of monthly data transfer

000Webhost

Gives you:

• 1.5 GB disk space
• 100 GB of monthly data transfer

Footnotes

I hope this list can help you start your first (WordPress) blog or website (or park some of the domain names that you have).

I’m sure there are more options lurking somewhere out there, but these are the best that I could find within a few days of searching.

I also found out that some of these services don’t last very long. Many of the links that I found are dead. I guess that’s another side of free services that can’t compete with paid ones.

If you know of other good alternatives, please don’t hesitate to share using the comments below.

A blog is a layman-friendly variation of a website, and having a blog is one of the many ways to state your presence in the virtual world. While there are many hassle-free blog services out there that will take care of everything except automatically blog for you – like Blogger and WordPress, nothing can beat a self-hosted blog in the terms of customization and self pride.

The problem is, the process of building your own self-hosted blog is (almost always) not free and is considered complicated. So most newbies will choose the easier path and never give themselves a chance to experiment.

I personally believe that experience is the best teacher (and that you should never consider yourself a cool person if you’ve never tried to “build” a blog).

So, if you are in an adventurous mood right now and willing to take up the challenge, I’ll show you how to easily set up a free WordPress blog site.

Some of you might ask, “Why WordPress?” I could go on and explain how cool it is, how it has grown from a simple blogging platform into an advanced CMS (Content Management System) and still stay simple and free, how you can expand it into virtually everything by adding plugins and themes; but to save you the time, I’ll just go with “Why not?”

Getting your own domain name

The first step in our little project is obtaining a domain name. But with zero budget, you shouldn’t expect to be able to snatch a dot com – or any other popular dots like org, net, name or tv. For this experimental purposes, we’ll go with a less popular but free alternative.

The free service that I always use for quick and free domain names is www.co.cc. This service will provide you with 2 free domain names (with .co.cc suffixes) for personal use. (But that doesn’t mean that you can’t register for more with different email addresses. Wink!)

Visit the site and search for the availability of your chosen domain name(s). I’ve registered xHelpHub.co.cc for this article so you can’t claim that one.

If your chosen name is available, please check whether it’s available for free because there are names which are not free. Then continue with the registration.

If you’ve been here before, you can log in with your account. Newcomers click “Create an account now“.

After completing the registration process, you need to set up your domain. This step should be done within 48 hours or they will delete the domain. So click the set up button now.

Finding yourself a host

To be able to set up the domain, you need a webhost. So, we’ll postpone the domain set up process for a while and find ourselves a webhost first. I stumbled on a service which provides free webhosting without ads called 000webhost. You won’t get premium features, but 1.5GB of disk space and 100GB of data traffic per month should be sufficient for our project.

Sign up for free hosting with your registered domain name from the previous step, and you’ll get the DNS addresses needed for the domain set up – both in the confirmation email and in the website. Armed with that information, we are ready to go back to our postponed task.

Please note that the host set up process could take a long time (up to 24 hours). So be patient here and refresh the page often.

Setting up the domain

Back at the “Manage Domain” page, choose the number one: “Name Server” option and write down these values:

• Name server 1: ns01.000webhost.com
• Name server 2: ns02.000webhost.com

Then click “Set Up“, and you’ll go into another waiting game.

Installing WordPress

After the host and the DNS settings are active, we can log in to the cPanel to install WordPress. You can log in using your email address and password.

Find the Software section inside the cPanel and choose Fantastico, then select WordPress and provide the admin name with the chosen password. The Fantastico installation script will make the WordPress installation easier by automatically building and linking the database for you.

You have to decide where you want to install WordPress. If you leave the sub-folder blank, then WordPress will be installed in the root folder: your domain name and you can access it using –> http://www.your-domain.co.cc. But if you put name in the sub-folder, then WordPress would be installed in that folder and accessible via http://www.your-domain.co.cc/foldername

Customization and Final notes

You can customize your WordPress installation using plugins and themes and upgrade it to the latest build via FTP. The details of the FTP is available in the welcome email and in the cPanel. I won’t go into detail here because discussing that topic would require another one or two more articles.

With all that said and done, I have to emphasize that the free domain name and free hosting service will only go that far: as an experiment tool. If you want to do this seriously, you have to go with the paid service as they will provide you with more necessary bells and whistles.

But let me share one last trick here: you don’t have to settle with the price that web hosting company offer you. You can get a far cheaper price by applying for a web host reseller account. Normally, this kind of account is not opened to the general public and also not free. But I found one which is free for everybody to join called Resellers Panel. (The link will put me as your referrer, but you can go directly to their website if you want)

By applying to become a reseller, not only you can get the cheapest price for domain names and hosting but you could also start your own business by reselling the service with the market price.