It's incredibly frustrating for those of us who use Microsoft's webmail applications under Linux.  To begin with, when Microsoft started their Live Mail application it only supported Internet Explorer, so no Linux.  Secondly, Hotmail and Live Mail do not allow users to connect to the mail server via POP or SMTP so to check you email you need to manually pull up a browser to see if you've received any mail.  In the following tutorial I explain how to download your Hotmail or Live Mail emails using Ubuntu 8.10, Evolution, and applications from the repositories.

We'll perform the following steps using the graphical user interface as much as possible.

The following tutorial was written for Ubuntu 8.10 but should function on any supported version of Ubuntu and most current Linux distibutions.

This week my Internet connection was shaped to 64k during on-peak times.  This means that from 12:00 PM until 2:00 AM I can't really download anything without it causing a major headache.  This led me to wonder if I could set up the bittorrent client that comes with Ubuntu to automatically execute only during the off-peak times (from 2:00 AM until 12:00 PM) in a fairly intuitive manner.  I don't want my torrent downloads slowing down my on-peak net usage!  I've figured it out and the following describes how I achieved it.

To begin create a new Directory in your home directory called 'torrents'.  To do this from the terminal type:

Ubuntu Hardy Herron has been released for a week now so I decided to give it a shot on my notebook and try it out.  This is by far the best Ubuntu version yet and was the simplest to install and configure of all the versions that I've used in the past.  My notebook, a Compaq Presario V3118AU has had a few issues with Linux in the past so I was a little weary about installing it over my Gutsy install (which was working fine).  Well I had no need to be concerned, everything went fantastically well.  The following is a brief documentation of my install.

SETUP:

Today I stumbled accross a site that offered Real Media files, something I haven't encountered in a while.  Further, these .rm files needed a codec that is closed source to operate.  Never mind, I thought, I'll just apt-get RealPlayer for my distro.  As it turns out, however, RealPlayer is not available for Ubuntu Linux x86_64 archetucterues.  The following short tutorial will illustrate how you can install Real Player 11 on Ubuntu Linux x86_64 bit systems. (This will also work for most Linux distros and not just x86_64 bit systems).  This process is conducted within the terminal so I'll present all of the steps for those unfamiliar with command line arguments.