The case for updating ubuntu if you are a 12.04 or 12.10 user

I am a user of Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) user and have been getting the usual prompts from canonical to upgrade to 13.04. Well on paper both look almost the same. So I decided to try out the latest Ubuntu named Raring Ringtail. So I took out my old but still trustworthy acer laptop (The specs are core2duo 2ghz and 4GB RAM) and updraded my linux distro. 

Well first look it looked the same but onceI clicked on the Unity icon I discovered a new set of snazzy icons. I was impressed as it gave a premium feel to the whole GUI (think apple). The laptop did respond a trifle better and over a period of few days noticed the resource usage and memory usage was improved . But then I was still facing the system errors which were a common feature in Quantal Quetzal. Some things never change so much so for being snazzy as an APPLE. But anyways I liked the latest iteration but as a general user didn't find much of improvements when it came to Quantal Quetzal.

Now comes the key question to upgrade or not? Well if its work we are talking about I would still stick to the 12.04 precise pangolin release just for the fact that it has a 5 year support cycle while Quantal Quetzal has a 18 month update cycle while the latest Raring ringtail its just 9 months. So no more security patches for raring Ringtail while precise Pangolin smokes out all the competition to all the other releases. When it came to choose between Precise Pangolin and Quantal Quetzal I was happy to upgrade because Quantal Quetzal provided way much more in terms of eye candy and some fancy packages but after the upgrade I had realised that precise Pangolin was a real good release with less memory and CPU utilization as compared to Quantal Quetzal. Well the eye candy does come at a cost.

So my verdict If you are on Precise pangolin then its a no brainer to update to the Raring Ringtail update but if on the Quantal Quetzal well its a 50-50 split opinion to upgrade or wait till september for the next iteration.

How to use external HDD or a Pen drive across the major OS' like Windows, OS X and Ubuntu without formatting ?

This post arises from my initial struggles of using a MAC ( At the time of writing I have managed to blow up my macbook pro and back to  linux system and an occasional Windows user). I always had a ntfs partition on my HDD's and also my pen drive because one fine day I realized that the FAT32 file system which is so popular can't handle files of sizes greater than 4 GB. Yes i know that's atrocious in this age of blue ray and HD videos. So I converted all my disks to NTFS. All was hunky dory till I met my nemesis.

I got my MAC and transferred loads of file from windows and linux to my new sweetheart. After I decided I needed to create backups of some photos and other mundane stuff and to my utter shock I couldn't write anything on my HDD. I panicked thinking my HDD's are dead and with that my data gone. But I again plugged in my HDD to the old faithful Linux system lying in the corner. and to my surprise it was working just fine. I went back to my mac (yes I am ungrateful but you got to admit mac looks cool and the hardware is the best optimized for the software) and fired up my browser and looked at the issue. NTFS being a windows proprietary file formatting system was despised by Apple and Apple used something called HFS file system . And we all know that Linux also uses ext4 file journalling system. And HFS file systems were not supported on windows . I was sad at the turn of events and then saw complicated solutions to enable ntfs mounting on MAC and they were highly unstable.