Thursday, December 21, 2006

MY FC5 Crashed

Well , seems this is the first time linux hates me. I have seen lots of problems with linux but most of them are generally a software not installing coz of failed dependencies or some file system error which a fsck will solve without any major issue . But this time it really screwed me .

The reason why it crashed is simple . "Improper Shutdown". Was in a hurry when mom shouted the n th time to have breakfast that instead off the normal shutdown , switched off the power button . But never realized that will lead to the tragedy. Next time the comp never booted and even when i tried to boot in single mode , it just displayed two linesof error ( which i donn remember now , one of those lines had something about journal ) .

Tried hard to rescue my files but in vain .

Lost lots of work coz of this crash :( :( , like

1. Files related to the hacking contest i planned to conduct. Though i have the files uploaded in website , they are not the latest and anyway lost the mysql db )
2. Spider SMS ( not exactly. The prev night sent the code to prasanna , so almost got the files except for the todo and some other files )
3. ByteCode . A single web page which i managed to design for bytecode . Had to start again
4. Glug-t site . Set of web pages designed for the Gnu Linux User Group- Trichy :(
5. Spider site . A few extra features for the Spider site .
And ya all the downloads i did :( .
6. A patch written for ldtp as an extra option for ldtprecord

So learnt a few lessons from this crash

1. Always shutdown the comp.
2. It is better to have your /home and /var in a seperate partition
3. Backup the files every now and then in a seperate partition
4. Backup myqsl regularly

So one good thing about the crash is that now i have installed Ubuntu and recording can be done in that even if it is gnome 2.14. And i certainly like apt-get than yum . Hoping the get the repo's soon :)

ACM Regionals @ Coimbatore

The ACM ICPC 2006 Regional Contest was held on December 16th & 17th , 2006 at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, coimbatore, and our team ( me , evo and vasu ) was one of the top 50 teams selected for the onsite contest .

The travel to coimbatore was really weird this time. This is the second time i am going to coimbatore (last time with Manas ) and never knew where amrita is :( . To make things worse , the train stopped at thirupur coz of some technical fault . Had to travel from thirupur to coimbatore by bus and then from there to amrita . As usual was late by a few hours and missed the tour of the contest :( ( actually it does not matter since it was Day1 ).

Then after meeting evo and vasu there ( OMG , they were discussing some problem already ) , we went for the "grand" campus tour . The cook book said "Campus Tour - Teams and coaches tour the plush greenery Amrita University Campus, campus facilities" . But it turned out to be one of the worst tour . The guys who came with us for the tour were so "dumb". They used to show us a basketball court and say "This is our basketball court " . As if we all thought it is a football court. Anyway another sad part is that the "greenery" we expected in amrita is nowhere to be found . Bad that this time the contest is during hols :( :(

After lunch had the first practice session . We were able to solve all three ( though presentation error rapped us and the guy who seems to answer our doubts is one of the dumbest i can ever find. We used to ask him , what is the presentation error . Our output seems to be fine and he used to reply "Yes, there is a presentation error." ) . And anytime our Codelabs is far better than mooshak. Our Codelabs has a better interface than the mooshak , since codelabs is not a single web page and hence one can predict what will happen if the page is refreshed ( unlike in mooshak you have to remeber your last action )

After dinner , had the second practice session and this time we did not get one question :( . Anyway it was total fun being with vasu and evo around . Especailly vasu always had some funny stuff to tell us.

Day II
Break fast at 6.30 :-( and i got up at 6.40 ( One of the difficult thing for me to do :( ) . Contest started at around 8.00 PM and ended at 1.00 PM. We were able to solve three problems and ended up 23 rd . The final standings can be viewed here . Planned to start early but had to wait for the certificates .

The problem set can be found here

Came back to chennai the next day.

Saturday, December 09, 2006

Phobia


As usual, was jobless at home with a new broadband connection , so chumma timepassing when i found this site

So some of them which i might have now or can develop any time is .

Agliophobia- Fear of pain.
Agrizoophobia- Fear of wild animals.
Altophobia- Fear of heights.
Decidophobia- Fear of making decisions. //Err , cant decide :)
Didaskaleinophobia- Fear of going to school. //Very rarely , on bio pracs days, not now
Dystychiphobia- Fear of accidents.
Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia- Fear of long words. // this word itself makes me scary
Iophobia- Fear of poison. //ofcourse who is not
Nosocomephobia- Fear of hospitals.
Ochlophobia- Fear of crowds or mobs.
Ophidiophobia- Fear of snakes. (Snakephobia) //who is not afraid of snakes
Papyrophobia- Fear of paper. //Just the exam papers , nothing else
Parasitophobia- Fear of parasites.
Pathophobia- Fear of disease.
Peladophobia- Fear of bald people. //yeah all my profs are bald
Philosophobia- Fear of philosophy.
Polyphobia- Fear of many things. // ???
Scolionophobia- Fear of school. // not now but 3 years before "yes"
Phobophobia- Fear of phobias. //After seeing the long list certainly "yes"

Hey come on, what happened to all those important stuff ,
Phobia of exams
Phobia of attendance
Phobia of getting caught in class
Phobia of teachers

Seems a lots is still missing in the list :)

Geek Toons

Checked out some of the geek toons in geek.com ,
Some of my fav here ;)







Monday, December 04, 2006

Foss.in 2006 at Blore

Date :: 23 Dec 06 Time :: 4.00 PMPlace :: Cisco Blore

Shagan and evo has already mentioned to me about the great speed at which you can access net at cisco , but i have never taken them that much seriously . But when i sat in shagan's comp to surf net , MY GOODNESS , was really amazed by the network speed there . Just to test the download speed , started a fc6 download and it downloaded around 7-10 MB in 15 seconds . Shagan later told me that this speed is bit slow and i could have got better speed if i had used wget for downloads :O. Then shagan went to play tt with his friend ( no need to mention that the friend is a female and tt was just a lame reason for kadalai ) , while i went blore central (just to kill time, had no intention of purchasing anything there).

Date :: 24 Dec 06Time :: 10 AMPlace :: IISc Blore

Somehow i got up early ( 8.30 ) , managed to catch a bus to IISc and reached there at 10.00 AM. Taggy was already waiting for me there .The event is supposed to start at 10.00 AM with an opening ceremony by Atul Chitnis. This guy though never spoke tech , spoke really well . With few do's and dont's like switching of mobile, asking questions etc etc , he finished his speech at 11.00 AM ( remember he started at 10.30 AM )

Next was the speech on Linux and the art of minimalist development by Suparna from IBM. One of the topics which we wont understand anything is the kernel and unfortunately she is a kernel developer. But topic on what she spoke is simple. It is actually about keeping things simple, solving problems in a clever way etc etc . Though we could grasp these concepts , the examples she gave went wrt kernel over our heads :(

Next speech is by Noor from Wipro . He spoke about something called sUSBix. Though i dont remember much about his speech now few points which i noted down in my notebook says suspend2 JFFS - Journaling Flash File SystemHis speech is about working from the OS booted from a pen drive and then we can carry the pendrive to anywhere and using the pendrive there so that all you need to carry when you want to port your work from office to home or home to office is just a pen drive. The advantage he mentioned is that since the root and swap are present in the pendrive itself , you need not reopen your applications and other stuff once we put it in standbymode. Say if i had opened gedit at home , when i use sUSBix and boot the comp at office , i will have the gedit opened . This is really a big advantage . Some of the todo's of this project are like increasing the portablity between two comps of totally different type , etc etc

Then was the speech about "Writing as SMS Service with Free Software". Actually i was a bit interested in this because i thought something from this can be useful for spider sms, but it turned out that he spoke about something very basic which smsd already uses for sending sms. He showed a demo of sending a message if the delivery is success and getting a web page in sms.

Next was the OpenJDK - Opensource Java . I actually slept in this session . So you could guess how boring it will be for me. Then next lecture was also not interesting ( atleast their topics were not intersting ) that we went for a small walk outside IISc . We planned to bunk the next hour ;) though we decided to stay just for the Secure Linux programming

It was 5.00 PM now , the topic was "Secure Linux Programming" , by Jaimon Jose from Novell. The slides he showed us was good and had nice content , though it would have been better if he had got more examples on them or atleast explained about them in depth.He actually spoke about (rather showed slides for )Buffer OverflowInteger Overflow Race ConditionTemp filesDynamic Memory etc etc He gave a nice link for Linux Secure Programming ( http://dwheeler.com/secure-programs/Secure-Programming-HOWTO/)
Thats it for the day . We could not take more . We bunked the next hour about "Solving the fundamental structural problem of the free software movement" and i came home ) .

I was actually tired after those long long lectures . Since it was a long time since i have listened to a lecture properly (classes are either for sleeping or sending messages , infact anything other than listening) . So slept early .

Date :: 25 Dec 06Time :: 8.30 AmPlace :: Shagan's Home

Just now got up . This means i am going to miss the first speech . Actually i wanted to attend the first one ( coz it is about KDE and not kerenel ) but now it seems impossible. Finally managed to get a bus and reach shivajinagar bus stand at 10.00 . Given some one hour to travel from shivajinagar to IISc , i can reach there by 11 and atleast attend the PHP5 Rasmus ( the guy who wrote PHP ) .

But seems Murphy's laws never fail .
What i did from 10.00 to 12.30 in shivajinagar can be explained as

for (count=0; ; count++) {
Ask someone which bus goes to IISc .
If that @$$ does not know which/what IISc is curse him 100 times and wait for someone else
If he says to wait in some lane , go to that lane and wait there
After 10 mins , ask someone there and surely he will point me to some other lane.
Go to the new lane.
if ( count > 50 ) {
for every 5 people you ask hereafter , say "fsck" and proceed }
if (count >100 ) {
for every 2 people you ask hereafter sak "fsck" and proceed
}
}

Inbetween this one of the drivers who told me that the bus will go to Indian Institute of Science , droppd me at Indian Express .
All i could is curse more and more and somehow went to IISc at 12.50 .
Then attended the speech about "Hacking the Slug" by Sudhakar from Google .Actually we never knew anything about what he is going to say before the speech . He showed us the Slug , a device which can be used as a firewall , proxy server etc etc . He showed a demo how it can be used .

Next was "Makefiles" by Sulamita from Brazil. She was really tensed when she spoke about makefiles ;) . Taggy was feeling bored coz one could not talk anything interesting with makefiles. I knew Makefiles was really a vast topic and she did cover something which will make one write Makefiles upto a decent size. All i have explored with Makefiles is to add a new file to be compiled in ldtp and that was simple . Search for any one of the files already present and add the new file to the list you see. But writing make files from the scratch is something i just hope i never have to do .

The topics after this were a bit boring or something which we have never heard at all . So we decided to bunk the next two hours ( bunking the last speech has become a habit and we did this the next day too ;) ) . Taggy came home to shagan's home today and we went out for dinner. Went to garuda mall, had dinner there [ ofcourse shagan payed ;) ] came back to home late.

Date :: 26 Dec 06Time :: 10.00 AMPlace :: IISc Blore

Atleast today reached IISc on time .
First one was "Impact of Indian Copyright and Patent Law on FOSS" by Sunil Abraham . We actually thought that the speech will be boring and no tech , but the interactive session was really good . People actually came up with various doubts which this guy was able to answer properly.

Next one was the Webmarker by Natarajan from Yahoo . This one was also good and interesting .He explained to us how the webmarker was done , algorithms was used in that , the webmarkers that were present before this one was released , the problems with this webmarker etc . This one was really interesting , coz the way he showed us the demo and discussed the problems in the webmarker was good. Actually people who were listening suggested some nice ideas and hacks which can be incorporated into the Webmarker to make it better.

Next one was "Ten Tips To Turbocharge The Team: Getting Smaller User-Groups Moving". I attended this just to get some nice ideas for GLUG-T. The speaker gave some good links and also answered properly during the interactive session.
Some of the key points which i got from his speech are.1. Maintain a proper mailing list . The more active the mailing list is , the more active the glug is .2. Have a proper FAQ page somewhere so that the topics/problems which were discussed earlier need not be discussed again for the newbies again.3. More number of glugs is always better.

After lunch , had a two hour session on "Writing KDE Applications" by Aaron Seigo. This guy was really cool who explained us about how to write applications in KDE4. Actually it was very similar to GTK except that here you have OOPS concepts, so you have classes for everything. He explained about the filedialog and other classes.

Then was the Tutorial Session on LDTP . Met nags and Casanova here . Here was one session where i knew almost everything what the speaker is going to speak. Casanova spoke for an hour or so. He explained about from the basics, i.e what library ldtp uses , how it works . He showed a demo of ldtp with gedit and a demo recording too. Maybe he could have shown more demos and extended the session a bit.
Even today we bunked the Closing Keynote and the Closing cermony and came home early.

Thursday, November 23, 2006

foss.in




FOSS.IN is one of the world's largest and most focussed FOSS events, held annually India. Over the years, it has attracted thousands of participants, and the speaker roster reads like a "Who is Who" of FOSS contributors from across the world.

FOSS.IN/2006 will be held on November 24-26, 2006, at National Science Symposium Centre of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India.

Do check out the other details at foss.in

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Saturday, November 11, 2006

Fscked up coz of coding :P

Sometime back, taggy showed me Google code search where one can search inside the source code.
And not surprisingly , the first thing he searched in source code was for "fsck" , "bitch", and "porn" .
Actually both of us were not surprised with the results. Taggy infact went to the extent of creating a graph to compare the occurence of these words in the source code. :)

Seems the coders and getting more and more frust when there code does not work and they show all their frust in their source code . Maybe a grep for "fsck" will give more shocking results :P.

If you wann to see the stats of the occurence , check out taggy's blog here

Some of the strange and nice things which i saw in the search were

1. sofia-sip-1.11.8/libsofia-sip-ua/su/sofia-sip/su_wait.h
88: #define SU_WAIT_CONNECT (FD_CONNECT)
#define SU_WAIT_ERR (0) /* fuck this shit */
#define SU_WAIT_HUP (FD_CLOSE)

2. linux-2.4.33.3/lib/vsprintf.c
8: /*
* Wirzenius wrote this portably, Torvalds fucked it up :-)
*/

3. CGI.pm-3.23/t/lib/Test/More.pm
381: else {
# Can't use fail() here, the call stack will be fucked.
my $ok = @_ == 3 ? ok(0, $name )

4. twisted/names/authority.py
239: ORIGIN = line[1]
elif line[0] == '$INCLUDE': # XXX - oh, fuck me
raise NotImplementedError('$INCLUDE directive not implemented')

5. includes/htmlarea/plugins/SpellChecker/spell-check-ui.js
36: }
// we should use innerHTML here, but IE6's implementation fucks up the
// HTML to such extent that our poor Perl parser doesn't understand it

6.HTTP/Request.php
613: // magic quotes may fuck up file uploads and chunked response processing
$magicQuotes = ini_get('magic_quotes_runtime');

7. Guppi-0.40.3/src/libguppidata/guppi-data-tree.h
40: should be treated as *read-only*. If you change them, you could
really fuck things up. */
typedef struct _GuppiDataTreeNode GuppiDataTreeNode;

8. Acme-Scurvy-Whoreson-BilgeRat-1.1/lib/Acme/Scurvy/Whoreson/BilgeRat.pm
59: ($backend && $backend->isa("Acme::Scurvy::Whoreson::BilgeRat::Backend::$params{language}")) ||
die("For fuck's sake, the fucking backend's fucked");

48: die("Read the fucking manual you shitwit and at least use the constructor right!")
if(!$class || join('', keys %params) !~ /^(language)?$/);

9. directory_administrator-1.4/src/main.c
48: // diradmin_user * fuck = NULL;
83: gtk_widget_show (mainwindow);
// fuckyou ();

10. src/libstdc++-v3/testsuite/27_io/ofstream_members.cc
88: bool test = true;
const char* strlit01 = "fuck war";
const char* strlit02 = "two less cars abstract riot crew, critical mass/SF";

Ofcourse i cannot copy paste all the 32,600 search results here :)

So do i swear when i write code ??
Of course i do , even i am a programmer right. While testing the sms code for the spider server, it used to creash often. Though i found out that i have not read the mysql manual properly , this is the source code i wrote to find the error.

cout << "Mysql Connected Successfully\n ";
update_query = Query("INSERT INTO hari_feedback VALUES ('','a','b','c','d','e','f')");
cout << "INSERT INTO hari_feedback VALUES ('','a','b','c','d','e','f')";
cout << "Query Returned " << update_query << endl;
if (update_query == NULL ) {
cout << "Fuck\n";
}

mysql_affected_rows (&sqlHandle);
if (pid == -1)
{ cout << "Query Failed\n";}
else
{ cout << "Success\n";}

And ofcourse a ls in the /tmp folder in the nosip folder shows this

fileXo1MAJ
fucku.py
fucku.xml
fuckyouman.py
fuckyouman.xml
fuckyou.py
fuckyou.xml
gcalc.py
gcalctool_log.xml
gcalctool.py
gcalctool.py~
gcalctool_run.xml
gcalctooltemp_log.xml
gcalctooltemp.

Seems even i am fscked up sometimes when it comes to coding :P

Friday, November 10, 2006

Bug in blogspot.com ;)

Check out this image :)


Dont you find something strange with the edit buttons over there ????

Ubuntu vs FC

I think the fight is never going to end . The only topic the whole glugt seems to discuss for the past one month ( or even more than that ) is UBUNTU or FEDORA.

Fedora Supporters :
Gcdart, Sahil , Verma
Ubuntu Supporters
Evo, Donatello and me ,

I have no clue why i support ubuntu. I have never had any big problem with FC , though the only feature which attracted me towards ubuntu is
apt-get dist-upgrade
I had a chance to use ubuntu ( for the first time ) when i was in Novell, Blore. There internet was never the problem . So installed the breezy base and a simple apt-get distupgrade upgraded my system from breezy to dapper. I cant think of something like this for fedora. Though the installation cd always comes with an upgrade option people do go for a fresh install .


Had a small chat with gc regarding the bootup time comparision of ubuntu and FC, finally googled for the comparison , Though i did not get that i got a better one from here.
Some of the details i got from there is


Fedora Ubuntu
GENERAL FEATURES Fedora Core is a community distribution sponsored by Redhat. Fedora Core is a general purpose system - it does not concentrate on one specific market. Fedora Core is innovative (adopts a lot of bleeding-edge software) and secure (includes great security tools like SELinux). It is suitable both for home users, programmers and the corporate server. Ubuntu is usually described as Debian for newbies. It is based on Debian Unstable and offers some Debian compatibility, adding a lot of features to make the system more friendly for new Linux users. Ubuntu installer is very automatic. After the successful installation, the system is mostly confugured. Ubuntu package selection is very wise and non-redundant, providing one app for a single task. The desktop is very clean and looks consistent. Installing Ubuntu is a great way to have a Debian system with minimal knowledge required.
Random screenshot fedora - desktop ubuntu - desktop
TECHNICAL INFO
Supported architectures i386, ppc, x86_64, sparc (via Aurora Project), alpha (via AlphaCore) amd64, i386, ppc
Minimal hardware requirements For text mode: 200 MHz Pentium-class, 64MB RAM, 620MB HDD
For graphical mode: 400 MHz Pentium-class, 192MB RAM, 620MB HDD
For text-mode: 24MB RAM, 450MB hard drive
For graphical-mode: 64MB RAM, 1GB HDD
Software freedom status Free as in freedom.

The distribution is not officially recommended by FSF probably only due to not enough vocal declarations about the free software (Fedora tends to prefer the term “open-source”).

Mostly free, but includes some proprietary drivers
INSTALLATION
Installer - overall (8) Very mature installer, offering features both for beginner and expert users. Contains most of the features a modern OS installer should have. The only flaw can be install speed and no separate expert mode. (8) Since Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake), a graphcal installer is available with the Live-CD edition. The installer is fast and asks a minimal number of questions. It’s one of the easiest Linux distros to set up for a newbie user.

Ubuntu alternative text-based installer is based on the Debian Sarge installer. It adds a few new screens in expert mode, and removes a few in novice mode, to make it even simpler to install the system with default setting. And the defaults is: latest Gnome with a selection of GTK software.

Package selection (9) Present. Single packages can be selected (ald dependencies resolved) (2) Not available. You can however install additional packages before running the Live-CD installer (graphically or using apt-get). Every package you install before running the main installer will appear in your final installation.
Predefined package groups (9) Very well-thought package grouping. All package groups incude packaes installed by default and optional ones. The default installation is a desktop system with GNOME. (2) Desktop or server installations are available. No package group selection.
Expert mode install (7) No special “expert mode”. Most of the screens (e.g. partitioning) include “advanced” options for non-standard configuration. (8) Expert/Beginner and kernel 2.4/2.6 choices.
Graphical installer (9) Graphical (anaconda) or console based installation. (6) Available since Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake). The older text (dialog-based) installer is also very simple and suitable for most cases as well.
Installer speed (6) Reasonable speed of the installer. (6) The Live-CD installation is pretty fast. The installer only asks a few questions and then copies the entire Live-CD image to the disk, configuring the hardware and the boot-up menu.

The legacy (alternative) installation process is rather slow. Default installation took 35 minutes on 1.6Ghz, 1GB RAM laptop. On the same machine, Yoper has been installed in 13 minutes.

CONFIGURATION
Graphical system management (7) Many graphical configuration tools (mostly GNOME-based). Most system-wide operations can be performed without the need to open the terminal window. (5) Ubuntu does not provide a disto-specific Control Panel app (like in SuSE or Mandriva). Still, a few Ubuntu-specific tools has been added to the default Gnome desktop: the update notifier, update and installation manager (similar to Windows’ Add/Remove Software app), an applet to mount disks, a NetworkManager for wifi support, Beagle Search integration and more.
Console-based system management (5) Some console tools provided, including network card configuration (netcard-config), etc. (8) Very good package configuration tool - debconf - from Debian project.
PACKAGE SYSTEM
Number of packages (7) Package numer is better than openSUSE, but not as big as Mandriva or Debian. There are however lots of alternative sources of packages, like Freshrpms.net, etc. Recently, with versions Fedora Core 4 and 5 and the arrival of Fedora Extras project, the number of alternative software repositories grew considerably. (8) Except for base Ubuntu packages (built and supported by the Ubuntu team), there are official but unsupported repositories: universe and multiverse. It all sums up to over 10,000 of Ubuntu specific packages. Using alternative sources from Debian or its derivatives is not recommended (and usually not useflu).
Package management, automatic dependency resolving (6) The famous Redhat dependency hell is almost over with the arrival of yum (the default package manager) and apt-rpm (the alternative one). (8) Dpkg, APT and aptitude - Debian package management tools are among the leading GNU/Linux tools for software management. Installing software in Ubuntu is simple and troubleless, and certainly much more pleasurable than in most distros using the RPM format. Only Smart package manager is considered superior to APT (however, it can be used in Ubuntu as well).
Graphical package management tools (7) Fedora Core 5 provides yum based graphical tools such as Pirut for package management and Pup as the
updater. Fedora Core 6 provides an update notifier called Puplet.
There is Synaptic (a frontend to APT) and other similar tools available as the alternatives.
Previous Fedora Core releases (FC4 and earlier) included the old up2date application for package management and a desktop Alert Icon.
(8) Synaptic - a graphical frontend to APT - a software installation and update tool, very useful if someone likes to click rather than type. Also, an “Add/Remove applications” program is delivered, which is much simpler and more straightforward than Synaptic, but allows to install only the most typical desktop apps.
EFFICIENCY
System boot-up speed (5) Average boot-up speed. The boot-up scripts written properly. (6) Thoughtful services selection and default configuration make Ubuntu boot faster than Debian. It’s getting better with each release, but there is still some room for improvements.
System responsiveness (5) Acceptable speed and responsiveness, although there are no special optimizations for either desktop or server use. (7) Quite responsive system. Working with Ubuntu is fast and effective. Much better than default Debian installation. Technically, packages (except for the kernel and libc) are compiled for 486, but with Pentium III (or higher) optimizations.
STABILITY/SECURITY
Popularity (7) Very popular distro. For many months locates around 1-5 place on the DistroWatch rank. (8) Ubuntu got extremely popular during the previous year and places currently takes the first place in the DistroWatch rank.
Security focus (8) SELinux is included in the default install. Fedora Core offers a whole bunch of extra security features like Exec-Shield, Compile Time Buffer Checks, ELF, Data Hardening, Restricted Kernel Memory access and more. (8) All of the key security packages (including kernel package) are being updated daily, so if someone updates the system regularily, he/she should not worry about security much.
Stability and maturity (6) Fedora Core stability is comparable to similar distros like Ubuntu or openSUSE. There are many efforts to make the software testing within Fedora Core even better by implementing an automated test system. Will Woods is currently leading this project. (7) Ubuntu is based on Debian, which is one of the most stable and mature distros available. Still, Ubuntu comes with fresh software and instabilities may occur.
INTERNATIONALIZATION
Does the installer support multiple languages? (8) Fedora installer is pretty well localized. (8) Ubuntu installer is translated into 40 languages which makes it one of the leaders in this area.
Internationalization is one of the Ubuntu project priorities.
Is the system localized after installation? (7) System speaks the language selected during the installation process. Of course not all apps are well-translated, but Fedora-specific ones usually are. (7) The installed system is localized. The only problems may occur with QT-based apps. QtConfig app can fix this problem when installed.
Is manual system localization easy? (8) Additional localization procedures are easily available (docs, FAQ-s) (5) If something does not work, we should make friends with dpkg-reconfigure tool which makes it easier to change the package configuration without the need to mess up with the configuration files.
APPLICATIONS/NETWORK
Support for restricted formats (4) Fedora is a community distro devoted to Free Software thing. No support for non-free formats is available by default. Fedora Wiki entry Forbidden Items explains the reasons for this and offers possible solutions. If you need restricted formats for some reason or don’t care for the FSF philosophy, don’t worry. You can still install all the packages from third-party repositories like rpm.livna.org. (5) Ubuntu is a community distro devoted to Free Software thing. Almost no support for non-free formats is available by default. If you need restricted formats for some reason or don’t care for the FSF philosophy, don’t worry. You can still install all the packages from the multiverse repository (no officially supported but hosted at ubuntu.com). The Restricted Formats wiki entry describes the Ubuntu policy and the multiple ways of getting support for non-free packages. Using EasyUbuntu - a graphical non-free software installer is another good option here.
Sagem DSL modem support (4) No eagle-usb packages. Kernel source and manual module compilation is necessary. (4) Eagle-USB has been available as a Debian package since version 4.11 (Warty Warthhog). Unfortunately, the support for Thompson modems got worse and worse with every release. Now, it’s not posiible to install the modem without kernel recompilation…
Alcatel DSL modem support (4) Like in Sagem, installation process is totally manual.

A speedtouch.conf script (tested with FC2 and FC3) can be also downloaded from http://speedtouchconf.sf.net/ to make the process automatic.
(5) Speedtouch modem installation is not fully automatic. Package “speedtouch” is responsible for firmware loading. Still, we have to copy the driver manually. Manual configuration is also a must.
Wireless support (7) Good WiFi support. Native drivers are well supported (clickable installation). Ndsiwrapper is available for Windows-only cards. (8) System automatically detects wireless connections (adequate icon appears on the desktop). Of course, other debian tools for handling wireless cards are also available.

Each system gets a mark from 0 (min) to 9 (max). In most cases the description precises the mark. A question mark (?) means that we do not have any information about certain feature.




Note :: Have edited the post from FC5 to FC after reading the first comment. Think comment is posted by a FC supporter . :) . Anyway i have not seen Edgy till now, still downloading the repos (seems it is some 14 GB for i386 ) . And not yet explored FC6. I just hope i find enough time to explore both FC6 and Edgy .

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

rm -rf * :-O



Went home for diwali hols and the moment i entered my room , the first thing i did is to switch on the comp. I have already taken a resolution that no tech , no php , no linux for the next 5 days [ resolutions are meant be broken , you know :) ] . So instead of booting the comp in linux , i booted the comp in windows ( i had no clue what i was going to do in windows ) .

My sister had stored a few harry potter movies which i was in no mood to see.After some 5-10 minutes of arbit clicking , i decided windows is not for me :-). I noticed a folder called books which was the only useful thing for me in my comp apart from the linux. But reading a book will make me break the resolution. Though reluctant , i started with the "Unix Haters Book". When i started , i never had an idea how great the book will be .

The book will make anyone hate unix ( this includes linux also ) and i am not an exception. That too even after the first chapter , i started to realize the drawbacks [this is a better way to say hate :-) ] of shell , the most powerful and the tool which i liked the most in Unix or Linux.

So here is the details of the first chapter in short. It mostly blasted a singlr command "rm". Now i realise the deadliest command one can ever type is "rm".

The first thing i liked in the book is the way they described unix.
“ Who would have thought it: Unix, the hacker’s pornography.”
I have no clue why the author mentioned Unix as hacker's pornography , but i seriously liked the guts of the author to say something like this . I did realize that this book is good after reading the foreword ( very few books can do this ) . After reading the first chapter , the author made sure that whenever i type rm , i will surely remember this book.

The first chapter started with the quote saying
“Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix. I
don’t think that this is a coincidence.”
—Anonymous

Another chapter said this
The most horrifying thing about Unix is that, no matter how many
times you hit yourself over the head with it, you never quite manage
to lose consciousness. It just goes on and on.
—Patrick Sobalvarro
The attack on “rm” gave many real life-horror stories .
“rm” Is Forever
A series of exchanges on the Usenet news group alt.folklore.computers illustrates our case:
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 90
From: djones@megatest.uucp (Dave Jones)
Subject: rm *
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers2
Anybody else ever intend to type:
% rm *.o
And type this by accident:
% rm *>o
Now you’ve got one new empty file called “o”, but plenty of room
for it!
Actually, you might not even get a file named “o” since the shell documen-
tation doesn’t specify if the output file “o” gets created before or after the
wildcard expansion takes place. The shell may be a programming lan-
guage, but it isn’t a very precise one.

In my comp i got a file named o , seems the output file gets created after the wild card expansion takes place.

Here is the next real life story
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 90 15:51 CST
From: ram@attcan.uucp
Subject: Re: rm *
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
I too have had a similar disaster using rm. Once I was removing a file
system from my disk which was something like /usr/foo/bin. I was in /
usr/foo and had removed several parts of the system by:
% rm -r ./etc
% rm -r ./adm
…and so on. But when it came time to do ./bin, I missed the period.
System didn’t like that too much.
Unix wasn’t designed to live after the mortal blow of losing its /bin direc-
tory. An intelligent operating system would have given the user a chance to
recover (or at least confirm whether he really wanted to render the operat-
ing system inoperable).
The third case is really really important and a dangerous one .
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 90 10:40 CST
From: kgg@lfcs.ed.ac.uk (Kees Goossens)
Subject: Re: rm *
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Then there’s the story of the poor student who happened to have a
file called “-r” in his home directory. As he wanted to remove all his
non directory files (I presume) he typed:
% rm *
… And yes, it does remove everything except the beloved “-r” file…
Luckily our backup system was fairly good.

Now i stopped reading the book. I realised that i will surely start a Windows User Group , Trichy if i complete the book. :P .

Monday, October 16, 2006

Waiting for FC6 . : -(



The whole sun lab is waiting for FC6 . People even wann to add a cron so that the download starts at tomorrow 6 pm automatically . I saw the pre release version in balli's comp and MY GOD !!! . FC surely rocks . Some of the nice features which my friends told me are .

1. In built XGL features with no need for drivers and other requirements . The first thing balli showed me in his comp is XGL. So FC6 is surely going to rock .

2. Yum speed increased. Seems the whole yum in re written in C. Though i donn know whether this is true or not , but this will be a great feature if implemented . Currently yum in fully in python and it is a bit slow :-( .

3. Faster boot up . Seems they have made the readahead early process better. So this maybe the reason for faster boot.

Here is the techinical details of the new features of FC6 which i read in a article from fedorasite.

Installer improvements

Fedora Installer in Fedora Core 5 started using the Yum API, and now in this release we have an easy way to access Fedora Extras and connect to custom repositories--even during installation. This makes it much easier for users to access a larger base of useful software packages. Plus, system administrations can now heavily customize their deployments of Fedora using their own custom yum repository using Anaconda or kickstart. Anaconda now uses the Squashfs filesystem to compress and store more software in the images. It also supports IPV6-based networks better, and you can install from Firewire and USB storages devices. Fedora Core 6 is also the first mainstream distribution to add support for Intel-based Macintoshes

Performance boosts

If there is a single major "feature" in Fedora, it would be the extensive performance improvements that this release carries throughout the distribution. Fedora Core and Fedora Extras have been entirely rebuilt on a new glibc that takes advantage of precomputed hash values to boost the performance of dynamic linking very heavily. GNOME 2.16 has a number of performance improvements, including better login time, bonobo speedups, and faster rendering of non-Latin scripts and Cairo graphics. Plus, Nautilus and file chooser saw some improvements, and Evolution IMAP underwent some backend changes. KDE 3.5.4 has a number of new optimizations, as do system-level libraries such as the CUPS printing service and the fontconfig library.

Yum 3.0 increases the performance of the package manager drastically with a new metadata parser written in C. The codebase has gone through a major revamp with a large number of API changes to make yum a better foundation for building applications. These speed improvements reflect on Pirut and Pup, as well.

Desktop effects

Red Hat has been working on AIGLX through the Fedora Rendering Project, and while we did have it as an optional experimental repository for Fedora Core 5, it has now gone through a number of changes to provide easily enabled desktop effects in your Fedora Core 6 desktop. What have Fedora Core 6 development teams been up to? Here's a few of the things they accomplished:

  • Unveiled AIGLX as a community-oriented incremental approach to providing a framework for compositing desktops.
  • Merged AIGLX framework into Xorg. It is now available as part of Xorg 7.1 release and will be included in Fedora Core 6.
  • Xorg has an improved dynamic configuration mechanism and compositing extension is now enabled by default.
  • Changed the OpenGL-based compositing window manager Compiz. It will now work on top of AIGLX and has been tweaked to work better with Fedora.
  • Installation of Compiz by default in Fedora Core 6. You can enable it by clicking on the appropriate checkboxes in System=> Preferences => Desktop Effects. With capable hardware it will just work without having to configure anything or even logout of the system.
The results are pretty impressive. While some of these effects are pure eye-candy, others have a more practical value--providing a more physical and tangible feel over application windows and virtual desktops. Not to mention the fresh DNA-themed desktop background and the new, more welcoming Firefox browser splash page.

Here are some of the nice backgrounds for FC6. They are really great .





Adobe Photoshop CS2 on Ubuntu !!!

This HOW-TO covers up the whole process of installing Adobe Photoshop CS2 on a Ubuntu box in a few simple steps. This method has been tested only on Ubuntu, but it should work on any other linux flavor.
-What you need?

* A fresh install of Ubuntu Dapper + all the updates
* A Windows box with a fully installed and activated version of Adobe Photoshop CS2

- Fire up a terminal session and type the next commands;

TIP: Instead of using apt-get, you can install them with the Synaptic Package Manager located in the System/Administration menu

1. $ apt-get update

2. $ apt-get install wine and then type “yes”

3. $ wine /*To create the wine file structure*/

4. $ apt-get install recode and then type “yes”

- Then you need to copy all the necessary files from the Windows box;
5. Copy the whole Adobe folder from “c:\Program Files\” to “/home/YOURNAME/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/”

- Now you need to export the registry keys of the Adone Photoshop CS2;
6. In your Windows box, type “regedit” in the command-line and export the whole “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Adobe/” to “adobe.reg”, then copy it to your your Ubuntu, convert it to ascii with “$ recode ucs-2..ascii adobe.reg”. Afterwards, type “$ wine regedit adobe.reg” to run it with wine.

7. That’s it! Type “$ ./wine –winver winxp “[path to Photoshop]/photoshop.exe” or create a launcher and enjoy Adobe Photoshop CS2 on Ubuntu ;)

Saturday, October 14, 2006

Spider SMS up and running


Hope the banner speaks the whole stuff. The spider sms is up and running .

When i started the work , thought the work will be easy and will be done in a two or three days but :-( so many seg faults ( though i have seen more seg faults in my ldtp work ) and handling mysql queries from C literally rapped me . :-( . The work took a long time more than i expected that i had to give the work to spider juniors also . Finally the work is done now . Hereafter we will have a few modifications here and there to make the system work better.

So how does the spider sms work . Hope the following explains everything


Well , now that spider sms server is working fine , ( with a few glitches here and there ) , one can access the time tables , his/her bunk scores and many other nice features using their mob ( for free of course ).

I am happy that i took up this work and finished it ( though is was manas's idea ) . Had a good experience working with juniors . Had to make sure that they are happy with the work they do , that the work is being done , that they get to learn new stuff and of course that they feel that the work is fun etc etc . This is the first work in spider done as a team . All other work are individual efforts . Working in a spider team is as usual FUN .

Now no need to run to the bit room ( next roomie ) to find out the first class. I can as well use spider for this job ;-).

Sunday, October 08, 2006

Linux Users on the Rise :-)



The graph shows the details clearly . :-) Hope i dont have to fight again with my frds saying linux is best .

Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Check this out ;)

#define MAGIC "2acghilmoprs.@782C65173D5A1409B"
#define _(p,o,q) (t o#p[0])?(q)
#define __(p,o,q) _(p,o,t-q)
int main(){int t, i; for(i=17;i>0;i--)printf("%c", MAGIC[(((t=(MAGIC+14)[i-1])=='_')?62:_(.,==,63):_(@,==,64):__(a,>=,'a'+36):__(A,>=,'A'+10):(t-'0'))]);}

Sunday, July 23, 2006

Meet GNU/Linux Week

Was pretty busy last week . Infact i was so busy that for the whole week that during this whole week i
1. Never called home .
2. Never entered ldtp channel .
3. Never did the work which made recording module wait for one week.
4. Never had a good sleep ( used to go to bed at around 2 .00 AM )

The reason is Meet GNU/Linux.

The response for the event is pretty good though a few people felt that we should have taken in a better manner . Few people wanted the course duration to be two weeks :O

Some of the feedback worth putting here are

the classes were awesome...

thu class good...
linux seems to be a really good OS...
wud surely like to use it in future too..

The class is too good,.....
i am afraid of PYTHON for last one year ...
i thought its some big language,.. but now i feel its too easy ,.......

u guys teach pretty well.. hats off to that..!

Well there was lots which said that the classes are good and i donn wann to paste everything here :P
Planned to organise one more week of the classes . No idea how i am going to manage that , that too with evening classes started :( .

Hoping to do better next week :)


Wednesday, July 12, 2006

My Final Demo

Well , this is something which i should have blogged the moment after we finished the demo to parag but that day i have been quite busy packing things , travelling from blore to chennai and then to trichy

The demo went fine , and all the details can be read from taggy's blog. I am not going to write how the demo went , rather what i felt during that time.

Well , as usual i came late that day at around 11 , and taggy told me that parag already came twice asking for a demo .
All i could think Oh My GOD, what a start !!! :P
Then we called parag for the demo and he asked us to show compose mail with an attachement. Of course taggy was showing the demo and i was explaning . I never knew i had a demo phobia but after the "WONDERFUL" first demo , certainly i realised that i am bad (in fact too bad ) in demos.

To make things worse , parag edited the python file and made the file attachement choose a different file . All i was thinking is about varadhan's warning about 200% ( he made a math mistake there , there is nothing like 200% :P) sure about the thing to work , threatened to throw us out of window if record did not work ( though he was not serious or was he? ) , and what not .

Somehow we recorded and had the script in front of us in the shell while discussing things with parag. I checked the script line by line and did a small playback in my mind. I was not able to do this and answer parag at the same time. Then parag asked us about the playback :O

Well it did take sometime for the log and and otherstuff , and since we had a time delay of 1 in our shell , things were a bit slow , it took some 5 seconds to open the compose box and i think i almost skipped my beat at that time :O. But the playback was perfect and parag mentioned that looked real neat :).

Then he asked us a few questions and gave us a few pointers to work upon :) . The same day we got a evolution jacket from parag and were working on improvements in the recording.

The old saying goes "All is well that ends well ". So a great demo , a nice jacket and above all , a working record script -- certainly i cannot ask for more :)

Thursday, June 29, 2006

RECORD is WORKING :D


Ask me one question
Will RECORD work perfectly ???
I will never say YES :)
The milestones in development of record are
=>Totally screwed up first demo .
=>Blasting review by varadhan after the first demo :( where we had no answer for any of his questions :(
=>Partial output in the next demo .


And finally there is one soul which says record is working fine and in fact mentioned that it is a great job :P

""" nags, sp2hari, taggy: till now, the record works very perfect! what a great job! """

I still think lavi is lying :)

We have no clue how it worked .
We were expecting a lot of feedback like this :P
1. Hey it gave a seg fault
2. My comp hanged , i had to reboot again
3. I had to kill at-spi-registry (varadhan wont accept this i suppose ) to stop recording
4. Hey i got a empty python file ,
and lots and lots

All the above things happened when we showed a demo to Dr. Harinath . Surely that might have been one of the worst demo in NOVELL history :P

But varadhan said a first demo is always likely to fail and asked us to make lots of changes within two days .

Second demo went fine with no major issues . except for the compose message :( .

We know where the bugs are in the current record script . Luckily lavi did not notice them now i think .
I am sure soon he will file a bug against the recording :) .

Ok hope this is enough for now . Have to get ready for the bugs :P. Got to check it in ubuntu :)
Here taggy is asking me how record worked fine ??? . He is pretty sure that it will fail and he is surprised to see the record work fine :P

Tuesday, April 11, 2006

about:mozilla

Type about:mozilla in your url bar.

Your will see this

And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced.But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird. The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them. For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror.

from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15

Dont know why but i liked this one.It symbolises many things in life and it all depends how you interpret it :).

Now dont think i am talking about the funda about the life blah blah blah .......
I was just mentioning about how firefox has conquered ( yes it has ) IE .
IE is one of the worst products from windows . As such windows sucks but IE is worse :).

Tomm have sem pracs so will see later . Bye Bye