My Blog List
The curse of being an early adopter
This is not a rant , just a food for thought , a simple observation whichI just come to realize, today seems to be the release date of Ubuntu 10.04 akaLucid Lynx and it has considerable improvements over previous versions but it simply does not work out that way, I normally run new release starting from alpha1 (Alpha 2 in case of Lucid) and although somebody transferring from Karmic will realize the drastic change in terms of performance , themes , the memenu or any other facet, but in my case I have no such feeling , I see the changes but they were more kind of gradual, in form of daily updates, or sometimes distribution updates , so when I was reading this I realized the immense improvement canonical has put to this release, Kudos.
My ubuntu linux desktop
Recently I came across 2 wonderful apps in the linux system conky and avant window navigator, and as per the general consensus, ubuntu is by far not the best looking distro in linux, but that was all fine with me , I always gave priority to performance and most of the time my compiz is turned off, today I came across this video by softpedia where they made their desktop chritmasy , and I was sold , the amount of effort that guy put was negligible as compared to the awesomeness of UI, being a minimalist I decided to give a simple overhaul to my system by just include avant and conky and the result is my desktop turned from human theme to this screenshot
here we have two conky running alongwith avant window navigator, I will update this post with steps later.
Ubuntu wireless problems - No LED
This is a continuation of one of my previous posts, as everyone agrees wireless in linux is not at par with that of windows and for obvious reasons , but I am using a Dell inspiron laptop so in previous versions it certainly worked out of the box,
In june my windows install hit with a virus, I wiped out whole of it and become first-class citizen of linux world, everything was working fine with my linux box, and with arrival of Ubuntu 9.10 as a dedicated netizen I too upgraded my system with this new version , but 9.10 breaks a lot of things and wireless is one of them , as suggested in bug-reports I enable hardware drivers and activated the broadcom wireless driver, still no light on my laptop LED, no worries since I use my laptop primarily in my hostel as a desktop computer without much use of mobility, I was content with primal wire net-connectivity, the tragedy stuck when my room's LAN-port gone all-dead, and like every other part of government machinery I knew our institute can not take care of this 30 minutes fixable problem(I am including commute time, beside replacement of hardware) in less than a week with proper administrative communication channel. The next and more feasible alternative is to switch myself to a previous version, and I did it , still no LED - but through some trial and error my wireless started working still no LED, today I read in some blog post that this LED is controlled by software, and I realized what a fool was I, lesson learned , back to Karmic.
Create local SVN repository in ubuntu
In this very short tutorial I will install a subversion in ubuntu (or Debian based linux for that matter) and create local repository of it.
I like version control, although I don't understand a large part of it perhaps because I am not experienced enough but if you want a case study just have a look at our very own WWW , there's story of people who claim it save their ass, inspired by these stuff and a small book entitled Head First Software Development , I decided to have my local repo to do this , before going forward consider these points,
- I have a special case , I am preparing for SCJD certification and require version control software to have a more organized and less error prone development environment.
- because this project is super-confidential(as per Sun Microsystem I am not allowed to share it) I cannot use my wonderful IDE(Netbeans 6.7 ) and it's integrated Kenai plugin to host it in Kenai.com, since the project there, are open(but read-only)
- keeping above point in mind I decided to have local repo for the same and with help of this wonderful book and worldwideweb I got it running in jsut under 10 minutes
fire up terminal (Application>Accessories>Terminal) or Alt+F2(type gnome-terminal in appeared box), in case you're KDE guy(no offence , KDE 4 is cool, I just like Gnome better) get your kTerminal or whatever you've for it.
in your terminal type following
sudo apt-get install subversion
this is depending on what you prefer aptitute or apt-get , do whatever you'like,you'll get a prompt to enter your user password enter it, and apt will take care of rest
after above process complete, in your terminal type this
svnadmin
for example I have my repo in ~/svnrepo directory, you can have it anywhere you want, my command will be
svnadmin create /home/vaibhav/svnrepo
In tradition linux fashion if all goes well nothing will be printed , this signifies everything goes well,
you have a svnrepo installed in you system
Ubuntu System freezes, ext4 , Carmic and wireless
Looks like lot have changed in the linux world , since my recent installation, I had lot's of problem , this is Jaunty I know, it is blazingly fast , sure though but everything is caused due to my fault, first I selected ext4 as my filesystem during installation , that said , it is fast, they say that but I dont know from my experience, I intend to use it though because notification system really looks cool , and boot time is mind-blowing , oddly enough , these number of problem whenever occured on my Windows Box , I will definitely re-install it, because I hate to hunt down Vista-forum for a fix, but I like fixing problem here, they give you some kind of control, but that is relly BS , I use it because I like it and because it is not windows, coming to my problem here is what happened,
- First since I installed Jaunty with ext4 as my file system, there are occasional system freezes , I experienced it 3 times in a day, it has something to do with movement of files , deleting etc., which triggers the freeze , the freeze is like nothing seem to work no Alt+Ctrl+Backspace just do a hard reboot, ubuntu is currently with kernel 2.6.29.x which have this bug associated with bug#330824 , and a workaround is listed there, install a latest kernel 2.6.29 or above which leads to next problem
- I never had a chance to compile kernel manually, I really never needed it, but this time I need it , it is easy though but there is utility out there kernelcheck which can automate this for you , I thought this can work for me, but few surprises were waiting , I downloaded it from it's website and installed it using standard setup.py command, it installed graciuosly, here is a link on how to do this, I did that which lead to another problem
- when I ran command sudo kernelcheck it listed an error , something about glade, xml , all in all it simply won't run , a little more digging and some help from nice folks of ubuntuforums.org I came to know that the latest version of kernelcheck had some problem with jaunty (latest version being 1.1.14) so I now I had to remove it and install it's development version, but it leads to another problem
- I am not a python programmer and google tells me that there is not a way to automatically uninstall this type of install, so I have to remove kernelcheck , but don't know since it is not installed from apt-get,
- ubuntuforums guys again came to rescue this post entails how to for uninstalling
- after uninstalling I installed latest kernelcheck which works fine, installed new kernel(2.6.30, this will take a while , maybe 2-4 hours ) everything seems good except after the reboot
- the next time I booted my system , sorry no wire-less , I have broadcom wireless integrated which come with my dell inspiron which works fine with dell inspiron but looks like new kernel messed things up , and I am stuck here, perhaps upgrading to 9.10 alpha will do some good.
Firefox Add-ons I use - and I am a noob
This post does not comprise of something revealing or astonishing, for a proper list there are many post like this on dzone or lifehacker, but most of them introduced me to new set of plug-ins, here is list of plugins I use in my Firefox - irrespective of underlying OS, and for the impatient , here is the direct link to the addon collection mentioned below
- Adblock Plus -- This is something which tops my list and I think every other list of this kind known to mankind not sponsored by google(or some other ad-network) and by far , it single handedly made me fall in love with Firefox among other things
- DownThemALL -- A download manager which really accelarated downloads, in it's early days (of my use) it blocks firefox usage of bandwidth when downloading, but now it works like a charm,
- LastPass -- I recently (about 6 months) started using this service for syncing passwords after I lost my key to xmarks (formerly foxmarks), and now this is something I use for syncing password across installation, although it is annoying sometimes but with each update(1 occured just before this post) it is becoming better and better
- twitterfox -- I used this as my primary twitter client, It is minimalist yet very functional and for me it is most productive of them all (sorry AIR clients, and I say productive not functional)
- Xmarks -- I used it as my primary bookmarks sync tool, my only browser is firefox, but it is available (like lastpass ) for other browsers too.
- DZone -- DZone is great , really great, I am a long time user of digg, and it is just what I filtered out of digg, digg have some great content , but it will most of the time overwhelm you, this addon is acts as a companion to site and makes voting really easy for digg ,Note for DZone--please make it available for firefox 3.5 beta, this is the only reason I am stuck at 3.0.X release
- Skipscreen -- for skipping annoying rapidshare etc., waiting scripts , it automates most of them and also make that infamous diggbar go.
