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UPDATE: LOOKS LIKE HOSTIZZLE IS NOT WORKING ANYMORE. THE STEPS IN THIS GUIDE WILL STILL BE RELEVANT FOR SETTING UP OPEN VPN, JUST THAT YOU WILL NEED TO FIND SOME OTHER PROVIDER.

I received a Google Music invite and as it is only available in US, I used OpenVPN on linux. Now this is a handy little trick to bypass the geographical constraints that are placed to block services on net. All this without opening the windows box to install dodgy looking services of Hotspot Shield which anyway does not work on Linux.

Ever come across "This video is not available in your country." on you tube or ever wanted to access Hulu only to be greeted by a similar message. Well then, if yes is your answer, openVPN is the solution to such sorrows.

It also comes with some other benefits such as anonymous browsing but then highlighting benefits of VPN is not exactly the aim of this post. The aim of this post is:

To configure a free VPN service that allows you to bypass country restrictions for US based sites. Keyword - US. As the site I am going to use only gives a US IP. Ofcourse if we remove the word free it opens up a range of possibilities which I will leave the readers to explore. :)

Alright, let's get on with the business:

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Let me clear the air before anyone mentions. Yes, I know it's directories and not folders and yes I know many still call these folders and this may encourage the wrong usage but my aim is to help not educate but hopefully making this the first line in post will have some educational effect :).

Right, so to start with, presented below is the problem statement:

We want to share particular folder on our home WiFi network such that all members of the family can access it using their gadget - laptop / smartphone / netbook etc. Now like a true project manager, I will scope it down by making an assumption that any gadget that runs a variant of linux - Android included. It's not to say that the solution will not work on iOS or Windows, it's to say that these operating systems are not covered but might as well work with right application downloaded.However the solution offered will make no such claims...:p. Having said that, I will actually only be covering Android in this article as for Linux on desktop, it is fairly straight forward by going through "Network" places.

Ok now to the exciting stuff:

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yEd - It's not Visio alternative, it's better.

UPDATE: PENCIL is an opensource software which is a pretty good alternative as well with a smaller learning curve and is Opensource.

I was recently looking for Visio alternatives on Linux and while Dia is good it lacks the oomph of Visio and hence not an easy sell for new and potential Linux converts.

Now good news for those open to enter the wonderful world of Linux is that any OS need not have an alternative for it to be usable to you, all it needs is the ability to let you run the software you find useful.

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Open Workbench on Linux Mint using Wine

What is Open Workbench?

Open Workbench is a Project Planning Software comparable to Microsoft Project. There are mixed views on whether it is truly open source or not but as it is considered a very good alternative for Microsoft Project and it is free to download, it is something I as a Project Manager would want to know about. After all some of my clients are going to be using this. :)

Now then, as of writing this article Open Workbench is not available from the well publicised sitewww.openworkbench.org which seems to be down. Instead it is available for download fromhttp://www.itdesign.de/en/products-solutions/open-workbench.html

As you will find that the installer is an exe and the product is made for Windows platform and requires Java Runtime Environment, we will need to either use Windows in virtualbox or Wine. I am going to cover below the steps for installing the software on Linux using Wine.

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Recently someone asked this question to me and after some search on Google I came across mentions of PDFedit, Scribus, flpsed, Gimp, PDFMod and even the openoffice plugin for importing PDF and I tried all of these. PDFescape is probably a good solution but is only online and limited to 30 pages in it's free avatar. If your aim is similar to the one stated below, these tools are way too complicated (PDFedit), limiting (PDFescape) or ineffective (rest of them).

So, Let's start with the usual what was my aim question.

Aim:

To be able to highlight and put his own annotations, highlights and comments in the lecture notes that he gets from his college lecturers in pdf and be able to print the amended notes from any platform. (Linux / Mac / Windows.)