linux and freedom

The curse of being an early adopter

2010-04-29T01:21:00.000-07:00

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

2010-01-16T07:28:00.001-08:00

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.

testing

2010-01-15T19:33:00.001-08:00

testing

Ubuntu wireless problems - No LED

2010-01-15T19:17:00.000-08:00

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

2009-06-24T00:21:00.000-07:00

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

Here's my steps

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

if you want to integrate your svn repo with netbeans , and use it from netbeans to maintain projects here is the link for doing the same

Ubuntu System freezes, ext4 , Carmic and wireless

2009-06-11T06:22:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-10T14:05:00.000-07:00

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.

notables, -- I sometime use Video Downloader for downloading flash content because I do not have amazing bandwidth, for instance I am not able to see Mr.Gosling's Toy show just for this reason. and also Greasemonkey.

Ubuntu compiz problems

2009-06-09T12:20:00.000-07:00

With my recent ramblings with Ubuntu , I just got something strange, I am a big Ubuntu fan because I really like there hardware support , and my findings are not baseless, in the times of edgy , Ubuntu was the only system which work perfectly on my P4 Intel machine , the bigwigs like Suse(no sound) and Fedora(No network ) failed me back then , I was lone Ubuntu user at that time in my batch and now more than 80% use it, so I may say that I am an early adopter in terms of demographics, that said , I never had any problems with either compiz or beryl , I heard several fables but they seem like myth to all of us, until an hour ago , On my freshly installed jaunty I just tried to enable Effects since UX was slightly breaking in none mode for some reason, I never use Extra setting because really they're just extra, not of any use for me, but when I enabled Normal effect what I got si some flashes, and a dialog box , saying effects cannot be enabled on my system , for heaven's sake this is my most advanced graphics machine up-to date(I never had any chance of using any graphics card because I am not much of a gamer or designer of any sort for that matter) , that said I turned my fate to the hands ubuntuforums and they did not disappoint me , this thread solved my problem, basically we override a blacklisted entry , for some reason my laptop's driver for graphics is blacklisted in jaunty , it may cause some potential problem but we can always refer to forum, and for that matter here's a cool tool to check your system compatibility with compiz, here's my system's output

Ubuntu wireless woes, back to Jaunty

2009-06-09T07:11:00.000-07:00

For a fairly long time (3 months to be precise) i was hooked to Windows Vista not by choice , but due to lack official JavaFX support available on linux , since last week before JavaONE, that problem phased out, We have official supported SDK's available for linux, so it's time for me to get my Jaunty installation back(yes I was on Jaunty during the shift , although that was Alpha version), so I grabbed Ubuntu ISO from their site, created a bootable pen drive using unetbootin(I have a previous post on how to do this) , and after my several failed attempts to get my net working on live CD(I still can't figure why this happen , perhaps my ISP have a problem with this mode , or my modem which is a 2 years old defunct model, had lost it's glory), I figured, what the hell , lets have a fresh install, I did it , next came the herculean task getting my net working , pppoeconfig did not worked, my ISP is BSNL , a public- sector ISP which entails them to defy us of any help in terms of support , documentation or anything to be found at hte right place, that sat aside little bit of search helped, few site offered nothing but suddently I got my LAN connection working , that said , I cannot sa how it worked , the auto cannection did not worked for me so I created a new connection abruptly named 'Wired Connection 1' by Ubuntu with all the following settings,

and I suddenly it flashed with a notification , saying I am connected, good , now I have net connected to figure out wireless woes, but for my luck I had configured my modem for wireless when using windows and it worked nice enough there, I had WAP encrypted connection(I am a bit skeptic to share my limited bandwidth since it is very limited(30 kBps as of now)) , I roamed a little on WWW, no luck still , then I configured my auto Wireless connection as per connection settings as of lan and setting Wireless security to WPA and WPA2 personal (that is what I used in Wireless) , entering my keyphrase , and plugging out my ethernet cable , and voila! I got wireless access, now I can lay anywhere in my house and work silently on my jaunty box, I downloaded and.or installed few softwares , Netbeans JavaFX bundle, Java SUN Development kit , a few of firefox addons (addblock plus etc., ) installed and thought now I am good to settle, suddenly update-manager popped-up suggesting a 56 Mb update , this was low as compared to fact that 2 months have passed since the release of jaunty , I only do important updates,(the default one now) and closed my laptop lid and go to sleep, in morning I woke-up good to see my laptop shut down due to expiration of battery, opened my laptop and got no wireless , but a message -- device is unmanaged , connected my ethernet cable and stumpled upon this post from the source which rescue me more than I can count -- the ubuntu forums , This is the link , the experience was good, this might be a surprise but I had more trouble working my wireless for Vista then here, but that was because I had to also configured my modem for wireless access, but screw all of this I have a working net an fully configured and working ubuntu.

OpenSolaris First impression

2009-04-24T10:42:00.000-07:00

with recent climate changes in Sun's atmosphere I predicted that either their beloved opensolaris platform will be doomed in favor of Oracle's crappy(in comparison and pun intended) unbreakable(ha... ha,.. shitty choice of name , I'll soon launch Linux 'the one') or it'll completely replace it, since oracle is smart enough I predict the latter( and I am veryyyy bad at predictions)
Since Sun released JavaFX only for win/mac so my only connection with Linux from past December (precisely December 4 , the day version 1.0 of JavaFX SDK 1.0 was launched) is two instances of Ubuntu Jaunty and opensolaris installed inside virtualbox, now I figured it's time to try opensolaris, the feeling as a beginner are mixed here are bullet points

coming from ubuntu background , installer is much like Ubiquity, so comfortable there, installation was a charm.
everything work out of the box except for sound but maybe I am too lazy to enable sound in virtualbox(I took 3 days to do that in ubuntu)
Now came the big part I browsed the software list , I am a GNome guy(KDE whatever I just want Firefox as my default browser) and WTF there is no songbird , I heard it is the default player in solaris maybe I am wrong but nowadays (for some 6 months or 0.7 release whichever is earlier) songbird is my default player in XP , Vista(yeah I am bound to it , it comes preinstalled) and Linux
I am behind proxy and that is big issue with some distros , not for this, I set proxy with my username and password in the network proxy dialog and also addded it through command line http_proxy,(in my case both were needed, later learned first one is required for DNS lookup and latter for everything else)
mplayer is not present in default repos and there is nothing like additional repos(enlighten me ) so I followed the post from opensolaris ignite april issue ,downloaded the source changed the con
it is taking gazillion seconds to do just stuff , but console information show their is lot of stuff going on , hope I could understand it (imposibble, if I paste that information here blogger will block my account for large consumption of storage, and what somebody is saying IBM and SAP)
still going on
still.............................
finally
Ok. gmake install want me to be superman( no it's superuser)

using sudo it says I am not in the list of sudoers , well I should be one 'll fix later , lets do this as root
that was quick
I was creating share folder to transfer movie between machines to check mplayer and VBox stopped working (Vista's fault)
30 second later I am back on track
configuring share folder is too much work for now , I'll transfer file through http protocol
well there is some activity , console showing playing video but no sound and video io error so can't say let's figure out
this bugged me in my starting days of ubuntu and I figured it out , let's try that here

Oh!! not that , wrong button press , here's the real pic

update:after 2 hours, wasting my time in watching movies, brianleonard tweeted me this link which I had earlier but this time really followed it, I missed the font part and that seemed to messed up the whole display, now it is working in gmplayer too, here is a pic to show you just that
yeah , I have to take this photo twice because in first photo video suppresses the gui of mplayer.

Conclusion: all in all it was a pretty sweet first encounter(oh no that large conlusion)

Why I start to stop hating and get neutral

2009-04-16T12:12:00.000-07:00

I sort of have a hate - hate relationship with Windows - perhaps because of the mighty status it has which mean the company obviously is not always using fair means to make its ends meet, but it also provide a lot of innovation , bringing Desktop to common human reach and providing cutting edge technologies like .Net etc., but being a Java fan-boy since my 12th standard , i simply didn't care , I like Sun though probably because they maybe not the best business organisation in the world but somewhere down the line their developers have some say in their business strategies(maybe I am wrong but let me live in my matrix until some Morpheus give me a red pill), today I realised it's been more than 50 days of me not using Linux, I typically(always ) use Ubuntu because back in the days of version 6 and year 2006 it was the l=only distro that work in my system (a fairly old P4 box) out of the box, and I really liked it, was the only one in the batch using it because nobody wants a CD install (it's too lean for my innocent classmates), now is a different story more than 80% of them work with ubuntu (perhaps because they can't figure out how to start network in Fedora or Suse), and just received feed from the janitor that JavaME SDK 3 is released whatever that means , let me find out. will continue later....

Graphical Recovery Mode

2008-09-10T17:57:00.000-07:00

Brainstorm is showing a long awaited idea marked as implemented and I just found out that it is quite, impressive by it's details for a novice users, the details read

When a user currently boots into the 'recovery mode' from GRUB, they
are presented with a command-line interface with complete root
privileges and no introduction. This is just not user-friendly by any
definition.

With the introduction of bullet-proof X in 8.04, it should be
possible to launch some sort of gui no matter what, so how about
creating a guided recovery app (in the style of 'ubiquity-only') that
goes something like this:

Welcome to the Ubuntu Recovery Helper.

-If you booted into this mode because booting Ubuntu normally doesn't work, press continue.

-If you have booted into this mode by accident, you can reboot your computer and choose the option to load Ubuntu normally.

-If you are an advanced user and would like to go straight to the command-line, press Advanced.

[REBOOT] [ADVANCED] [CONTINUE]

If they press continue:

-If you know approximately what is wrong with your PC, select it below and press Continue.

-If you don't know what is wrong, press I Don't Know.

[]Graphics Card or Monitor

[]Hard Disk

[]Sound

[]etc.

[BACK] [I DON'T KNOW] [CONTINUE]

Selecting Graphics Card or Monitor would launch the X.org
configuration utility, with the additional option to 'Autodetect any
display hardware changes' (runs "sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh
xorg-server" or whatever the exact code is). Selecting I Don't Know
would launch the same prompt that the hardware database thingie uses,
and when an error is reported would go to the appropriate item from the
list above.

I'm not going to go through the entire thing, but I'm sure you get
the idea. At the moment, Windows recovery mode is just an admin
desktop, and Ubuntu is command-line. We're currently behind, but
implementing something like this would put us years ahead. It would
also make a great 'important feature' for 8.10 (like compiz-fusion was
for 7.10).

the idea is marked implemented on sep-3 08 adn will be available from intrepid, what about the next Alpha, let's keep our fingers crossed

PlayDeb Launched

2008-09-10T17:29:00.001-07:00

much awaited playdeb is launched , for the uninformed Playdeb is a repository by the fonders of getdeb project to provide central repository for installing games in ubuntu.following is a screenshot of the same.

this is the screenshot of the website: the website has nice UI

to add the repostory follow these instructions on the page.

Attention : if you are an update freak, as I am then you might have a newer version of apturl then the specified one, so downlaod package apturl will show error during insallation, if it says so don't install it.

see the red line, if it is there , click cancl and head straight to step 2,

warning Intrepid users, : try to manually add the deb line into the repo and change teh distro line to hardy(as given on teh website), intrepid repositry seems down at the moment.

Thanks to bsnider, Intrepid ,more problems

2008-09-10T15:07:00.000-07:00

recently, I got troubled in my intrepid install twice, making my system unbootable

case 1:

graphical problem in intrepid, making blurry graphics, and always resetting monitor and card settings to generic mode.

solution : reconfigure xorg through dpkg adn then perform a flea power reboot
courtesy: bsnider from #ubuntu+1 channel at irc.freenode.org

case2:

edited /etc/environment which made intrepid unstable with following message " your session lasted less then 10 seconds...." during logon . messing up $PATH variable.
I am not sure but I rather modified he path variable completely rather than appending it.
solution: wipe out all the lines from /etc/environment file except first line and set permission of /tmp directory, and free osme space in file system(anything could solve the problem.

JVM problem in intrepid aka UBUNTU 8.10

2008-09-10T11:19:00.001-07:00

Today I tried to made a simple (very simple servlet) and for this I have to compile a java program, but then I found out that my system is not recognizing javac command,

This is not hard jsut install sun-jdk 6 , at least this is what I thought , formy Intrepid box , since it's it still is in alpha so I expect this kind of this weird stuff, never mind , sudo update-alternatives --config javac shows there is is only one javac option so no alternative ,
whereis javac return /usr/bin/javacwhich is ofcourse a symbolic link so I do ls -ls *ac in directory /usr/bin and it returned that link points to /etc/alternatives/javac
Doing all of this again reveal that this is also a symbolic link to /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/bin/javac whic is openJDK's javac, I ls the above directory and there is no javac present, so only resort as it seems is installing openJDK and update-alternatives --config javac
but I want to install sun-java (only a personal choice, but both are fine, openJDK is finer due to open angle ) so I just set sudo update-alternatives --set javac /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/bin/javac
and all done I am happy again.

Mark shuttleworth announcing Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty jackalope

2008-09-09T08:55:00.001-07:00

As we approach the launch of Ubuntu 8.10, it's time to create space for
future plans, and so I'm writing to introduce you to The Jaunty Jackalope.

Jaunty, the code name for what will most likely become Ubuntu 9.04, will
be the focus of our efforts from November through to April next year. We
will be gathering forces in Mountain View on 8th - 12th December to
survey the upstream landscape and finalize Jaunty plans, enjoying the
excellent hospitality of Google and Silicon Valley's abundance of talent
and innovation. The Ubuntu Developer Summit is the social and strategic
highlight of each release cycle and it would be a great pleasure to
welcome you there. Jono Bacon has written up a
http://www.jonobacon.org/?p=1278

guide to sponsorship for those who
would have a substantial amount to offer at the Summit.

The Warrior Rabbit is our talisman as we move into a year where we can
reasonably expect Ubuntu to ship on several million devices, to
consumers who can reasonably expect the software experience to be
comparable to those of the traditional big OSV's - Microsoft and Apple.
The bar is set very high, and we have been given the opportunity to leap
over it. It's a once-in-a-lifetime chance to shine, and we want to make
sure that the very best thinking across the whole open source ecosystem
is reflected in Ubuntu, because many people will judge free software as
a whole by what we do.

There are some specific goals that we need to meet in Jaunty. One of
them is boot time. We want Ubuntu to boot as fast as possible - both in
the standard case, and especially when it is being tailored to a
specific device. The Jackalope is known for being so fast that it's
extremely hard to catch, and breeds only when lightning flashes. Let's
see if we can make booting or resuming Ubuntu blindingly quick.

Another goal is the the blurring of web services and desktop
applications. "Is it a deer? Is it a bunny? Or is it a weblication - a
desktop application that seamlessly integrates the web!" This hare has
legs - and horns - and we'll be exploring it in much more detail for
Jaunty. We have already laid some foundations for weblications in the
online services discussions that took place in Prague, but since we
fully expect those services to ship in 9.04 the discussion will be that
much more intense in Mountain View.

Those bizarre-but-fearsome antlers might well remind one of the
intricate pattern of collaboration between developers in a distributed
version control system. So it's fitting that Jaunty will see us move all
of Ubuntu into Bazaar. For the first time, any developer will be able to
branch any Ubuntu package with a single bzr command, publish their
changes, and perhaps even publish builds of that package in their own
Package Archive. We will also make the developer community structure of
Ubuntu much richer - in addition to MOTU and core-dev, we are
introducing ways for developers to participate in specific applications,
either at the package-upload level or at the version-control level.
Whatever your level and specialisation of interest, we'll make sure that
you can participate accordingly.

December's UDS is likely to be packed full of interesting people and
ideas. I very much look forward to seeing everyone there. "There he
goes! That way!"

Mark

source: ubuntu -devel -announce mailing list

intrepid weird

2008-09-06T15:50:00.001-07:00

When i select normal settings in system>preference>appearance>visual effects
from none my system GUI turn upside down, It's not a 180 degree rotation but a mirror reflection ,

observe the two screens , i dont know what to do except reporting this bug

but apport seems to not submit any kind of report so I filed the report to launchpad, I have no problem with this bug because changing settings to none recovers from it but , what if someone want to use compiz??

this is reported as bug #267269 in launchpad.

How to upgrade forom gutsy to intrepid and Ubuntu 8.10 Alpha 4 first look

2008-09-06T08:14:00.001-07:00

with the release of intrepid alpha4 I was temted from severall days to upgrade my current hardy to intrepid Ibex, but since alpha word is sometimes scary, so be it, I opened my shell
and fired up the upgrade command for the upgrade manager

sudo update-manager -d

here -d is for development release, the update manager willl show if any new distribution even the development release is available, note that they are very much less stable as compared to stable release

now your update manager will start and queries the ubuntu repositories for any development release and any other normal task

it shows my system is up to date and there is a new distribustion release available, if we had not used the -d option this message will not appear, click on the upgrade button and a new window will pop-up showing you the release note , read it if you want or else move forward
and click upgrade.

now a window will show up showing 3rd party resources to be disabled, if you have third party resources enabled , I have plenty of themin repository,if you do not have third party resources enabled no pop-up will show up so next screenshot may not be there in your upgrade.

you can click close, there is nothing to worry, you can always enable the either by manually editing sources.list or through Synaptic GUI

the next screen will show you what is to be removed , how many new packages are to be fetched , it's nice to knwo these stats just for fun

i f you click on the details , package list can be seen, this list is somewhat comprehensive and boring , but to know what's new in the new release , it's nice place to have a look, if you had skipped release notes

click on start upgrade, and your upgrade process will start .

next several screens were part of upgradation process chronologically

The upgrade took place in 6 stages

Preparing to upgrade : here server is queried for changes.
Setting new software channels : The repositories are arranged to point to right direction.
getting new packages : packages are downloaded.
installing the upgrades : the downloaded packages are intsalled.
Cleaning up : cache is cleaned and obsolete content is removed to save space
Restarting up : just like windows stuff, but hey! we are upgrading to a new distro so this is not a big deal.

in the last two screen terminal option is accesible and it show the differences between the two , the second screen just do the stuff, but the one with terminal showing will show you what's going on behind the hood.

This all stuff will take a while, in mycase it takes slightly more than 3 hours, , from night 1 to 4, in the meantime I had some snacks completed few chapters of netbeans API and watched a movie, that's the joy of linux, in all of this my network manager crashed, but that is understood because system files are going in and out in the meantime , so this message might pop-up several times just click Ok each time or let it be there , it will not interfere in your upgrade process since it will appear during 4th step and at that point update - manager had downloaded all required stuff from the internet.

some more screens

in the cleaning up process following window will appear , it serves as a message that obsolete message are to be deleted.

click details to see list of packages to be removed.

click remove to carry out processes,

It removes the old kernels and other stuff, sit back and enjoy the show

for the informed , it'll ask you several times to replace some files especially configuration files, and it is up to you how important are your current configuration settings, it asked me for smb.conf and I replaced the original version because I had not much edited the file except sharing some of the directories, and I prefer editing the file over breaking the system altogether with old versions considering the fact that I am risking lot by using alpha release.

just do what you want to and remember that network pop-up will keep occuring , so ignore it, during installation your network will stop working but it is OK , all your computer will work for sure.

after a while it will ask for a reboot(at least it did in my case).

save your work and click restart Now button, and that's it you will now be greeted with new Intrepid installation with grub listing development release kernel, boot from the first in the list, this is pretty much for today I'll post about my experience after reboot in my next post..!!

Change your NTFS / windows drive label via linux

2008-09-06T05:07:00.001-07:00

In my current ubuntu machine suddenly music stops playing after a reboot, adn I figured out that it is the issue of my library, My music library was on a NTFS drivewith label NEW LABEL, and there was another drive on my system with the same label , so whenver I rebooted ubuntu append one of the drive (randomly) with _so they would be mounted on

/media/NEW VOLUME
/media/NEW VOLUME_

if I am lucky then my music collection directory is mounted without _ but nobody can be lucky forever not certainly me, so with help of IRC guys i figured out a way to counter this, just install the program ntfsprogs

sudo apt-get install ntfsprogs

it'll come up with a program called ntfslabel, now type ntfslabel on console to check response, if, it is installed , it's help would appear, otherwise a messsage saying, command not found or program not installed will appear, ,
Now type this on command line,
unmount all your ntfs drives,(I hope u know how to do it)

sudo umount <drive directory>

after unmounting your drives type this on console,

sudo ntfslabel -f /dev/sda5 <newlabel>

in your case /dev/sda5 is the drive you want to rename,and new label is any valid string, I supplied books.

sudo ntfslabel -f /devsda5 books

use with caution since we are using -f flag so it'll forced to do it, but this gets the work done.

Getting Along with install of OpenSolaris On VirtualBox

2008-09-05T06:41:00.001-07:00

Just grabbed a image of opensolaris 2008.5 from its website, I want to try something new , since now I am completely on linux and open to discoveries, got to install virtualbox
but got problem with virtualbox, , if you too got it can be solved by,

install virtualbox and run it as a superuser
if 1 dont work remove virtualbox-ose version ( if u r using one) and install the current deb package non-free(GNU sense , moneywise it's free) , get it from here (link would open in a new window) so downlaod nad continue reading
if above two doesn't solve your problem , then I am not qualified enough or there might be a bug reported asin this case.

my virtual box settings were these

FYI ramesh is not my name, I am Vaibhav , I simply used Ramesh as machine name because I am weird

now I started machine, and menu to install opensolaris appeared I just hit enter(when there is a popup , read it, you will figure out what to do)

now this window appeared

notice the dots , the processing is going on,
next screen will be

i select 41 because I do that all the time,US - english,because it's what everybody else told me my keyboard is, and it works, just hit enter , it is also default

next it 'll ask for language selection , in my case it is english - 3rd option , which is also default

so I just hit enter, man I love this, hit enter and just do it, although sometimes this kind of hurry in my case resulted in full system reinstall but that's a long story
coming to the point
next screen ask for opensolaris login
and as i thought of possible username it jsut booted intothe GUI, so far so good no work on my part..
but my system is suddenly slow , maybe because 2 X running simultaneously,
wait for a while and your screen will have several transitions
first a load screen

then a license will appear

and after some time you'll be greeted with the desktop nice shiny ,and totally working...

my machine is PIV so I am unsure whether it 'll run the OS and that's the beauty of live cds you can try before really installing,
since it is established that the system is capable of bearing with the OS we 'll continue discovering

here's the clean view of desktop

now let's observe the desktop the first icon is

opensolaris-2008-05 -- that's the CD, (in this case the CD virtual image or ISO)
Device Driver utility -- to check your drivers are fine up and running
the third one is the firefox with documentation set as the homepage.
install opensolaris -- this is what we are looking for.

click on device driver utility to check, whetehr your system is suitable for OS,
mine is fine on clicking I got the following screen

it shows two problem one is audio driver missing, but a virtual machine can do fine without it and second is something of ACPI, I'll ignore it for the time and continue with the business

click on the 4 th icon-----install OpenSolaris

next screen is a welcome screen , good for firstr rime user , nice to see someone is thanking you for no particular reason, well there is a reason and a good one- whcih you'll discover as you evolve into this wonderful world

just click on next and move on
next screen will be different in different context , mine is

consider that the whole installation is a 7 steps procedure and this step is something like partition manager, since I am using virtualbox and given entire disk so my screen is clear not full of many choices,
consider these warning , it says partition table doesnot exist , fine, why should it, I just created a virtual raw partition 5 minutes so ignore in this case,beware this is most crucial stage if you considering a system install( not the virtual one) , but in my case it is OK, I will use second option which says use entire disk

This warning in the pic above is also because of the same reason as i mentioned earlier, never mind, click Next

and you will be greeted with a nice world map to select time zone-similar to ubiquity in gutsy times

for the uninformed ubiquity is ubutu installer and gutsy is ubuntu 7.10

select your time zone from the map, this is good method because in some casses a person might not know his timezone as compared to GMT or UTC, but one can surely locate his/her location on graph , I selected my location for india time zone just click on appropriate blue-green(that is surely dull blue) dot , my screen look like this after selection
yours may be different depending on the location

click on next and following screen will appear

this is kind-of redundant, it asks for locale, I thought they ask it while booting up live CD but never mind, jsut a single click for us

the Next screen is most important but i think you are quite familiar with this stuff , if not here's a small guide

Root password is like god mode for *nix based system, it authorizes you to tinker with anything on your system , so it must be something safe and that you could remember, remember GOD MODE.
confirm your godliness, this is the confirmation that you entered in root password is not mistyped, a loose kind of turing test implementation.
Your name is what your friends , relative or whoever know you call you by, since it is registered with system properties and may be used by system application to address you sometimes so , entered something respectful, your fist name is a good choice, however you could enter anything without breaking anything.
Login Name is something you should use for normal time , it is equivalent to humanness in computerworld, you could do lots in this mode but for certain things you want god's(read root) permission.in my case I used vinu. They require you to enter it less then or equal 8 characters.
The next two fields are password to authenticate your login name i.e., someone else is not using your name , and gain access to your system, both must be identical. enter something hard enough for others to guess and easy enough for you to remember.
ComputerName is what you want to call your computer, it'll appear over network with this name, in my case I used Vrindavan, you could enter anything, opensolaris is default.

The following is default user screen --

and this is after I entered my choices

Click on next and summary of your wizard selection will appear, warning is standard.

Just click on install , the installer has collected all information required to carry out the installation.

the installation will start

The installatallation is user friendly, with the live CD approach , it's much esier to try the new opensolaris 2008.5 , the installer is pretty straight and user friendly, similar to ubiquity and quite simple, however the static image during installation is quite boring, they could get a presentation stuff something more intuitive during installation. the installer will do several stuff, copying live CD content , carrying installtion scripts, parting the disk , to prepare for the solaris. the installer will take a while , sit back , do a little surfing, remember you are on a live system, and you could do it even if you are carrying out a system install.

.........waiting installtion to finish, I have a slow system, I know.,.,.,..............!!!!

waiting......................
waiting....................EATRAX OFF the hook playing...blah blah blah....34%
waiting......................Atlantis the lsot empire 2 ...blah .... 45% still transferring live CD contents....................still waiting movie ends 78% blah ......

and the time continues , it is taking a hell lot of time, I am getting bored, my system is super slow, I am feeling sleepy ,it's 11 in the morning, adn should go to bed,

I woke up, and somebody screwed up my system and I hav to go through whole procedure again, but never mind, I got to the point above finished my installation, this time it was, fast (god knows why) , my system is really strange,

click on reboot button,
it will instantly reboot,superfast,

and since CD is still inside tray(in my case virtual CD and virtual tray), a menu appear that we saw at the start of this document, but that is redundant, select third option Boot from hard disk

now our installed GRUB will load and present you with installed OS options, since I installed single OS on my virtual hard disk , it will only show Opensolaris , the system we had jsut installed

just press return key, or if you are lazy enough like me , wait for the counter to finish...

you will see the following shell, just dont worry, it will ask for your credentials , enter your login and password

after entering your username and password,(mine was vinu and *****) you will be presented with GUI login, that is a bit of redundacy introduced into the login procedure

enter your credentials again, and wow, you are into a full fledged solaris system...

now head on to this blog entry for hands on experience with opensolaris

O'Reilly views on future of publishing

2008-08-07T20:53:00.001-07:00

O'Reilly: The future of publishing is a reinvention to discover what it has always been. A lot of people think of publishing as printing books on paper, paper between covers, those objects in bookstores. I always thought that publishing was about, first of all, understa nding what matters, figuring out how to gather information and then gathering readers who that information matters to. There’s a kind of curation process. What the Internet has done is bring us new methods of curation. A lot of publishers are fighting those models. Instead of saying, ‘This is new stuff that helps us do what we do better. That’s why I love Adrian Havarvarte(check), maker of a python toolkit called Jango. Because he talks about computer programming as journalism. How can you augment what journalists do with computer programming? How can you augment what publishers do with these new tools? That’s really one of the key things we’re trying to get at in this conference. It’s not about putting words on paper, it’s about reading the slush pile. Look at Digg, they basically found out how to harness the community to do that. Google learned how to harness the community to do that. That’s what page rank is. They figured out how to automate things that publishers used to do manually. You used to hire a bunch of college students to read all of these unsolicited manuscripts, find the one that was the great one that you would bring to the world. Well now, we have these new, better ways to find these things. How do you gather a community around it? How do you tell a story? If you look at O’Reilly, we realized that we’re in the meme business. We’re in the community business. And that’s why we don’t just publish. We organize conferences, we do early-stage venture investing, we do online publishing, we publish magazines, we have events with thousands of people. Our biggest event is Maker Fair with 45,000 people. We identified a community and an emerging trend and gave it a name. Everyone was like, ‘look at what’s really happening, we want to be part of that.’ That’s a publishing process, even though the product is a reinvention of the county fair. It’s just as much a publishing product for us, coming from our core-competency as publishers, as the book or the magazine.

10 tricks for Linux administrators

2008-08-03T07:41:00.001-07:00

Lazy Linux: 10 essential tricks for admins
read here

article written by Vallard Benincosa for IBM

source IBM developerworks

Cron explained for job scheduling

2008-08-03T07:38:00.001-07:00

Linux tip: Job scheduling with cron and at

You need to run a job at midnight when system usage is low, or you need to run jobs daily or weekly, but you would rather be sleeping, or enjoying life in some other way. Other good reasons for scheduling jobs include letting routine tasks happen automatically, or ensuring tasks are handled the same way every time. This tip helps you use the cron and at capabilities to schedule jobs periodically or at a single future time.

Linux® and UNIX® systems allow you to schedule jobs in the future, either just once, or on a recurring schedule. This article, excerpted from the developerWorks tutorial LPI exam 102 prep: Administrative tasks, shows you how to schedule jobs periodically, and how to run a job at some future time.
more

This article was written on 18 Jul 2007 By Ian scields for IBM

source: IBM developerworks

2008-08-01T14:39:00.000-07:00

Inside the Linux boot process

The process of booting a Linux® system consists of a number of stages. But whether you're booting a standard x86 desktop or a deeply embedded PowerPC® target, much of the flow is surprisingly similar. This article explores the Linux boot process from the initial bootstrap to the start of the first user-space application. Along the way, you'll learn about various other boot-related topics such as the boot loaders, kernel decompression, the initial RAM disk, and other elements of Linux boot.

for more refer the link

source: ibm developerworks

New Linux file system in development: Tux3

2008-08-01T07:33:00.000-07:00

New Linux file system in development: Tux3 « /home/liquidat

While there are many file systems like ext3, Xfs, Jfs and others are available for Linux it currently lacks a modern, new age file system: especially features like versions and writable snapshots are hardly available. On the other hand, other Unixes do have such file systems: OpenSolaris and some BSDs have ZFS, and DragonFly BSD has HAMMER.

To fill this gap the Oracle’s Chris Manson started the development of Btrfs a year ago. Now Daniel Phillips also announced that he is developing a new file system, Tux3. The general aims are indeed close to the general aims of the other mentioned file systems.
Also, Daniel is not new to file system development. Years ago he announced Tux2 as an improvement to ext2 but without journaling. However, that file system never started off due to patent reasons.

The question is of course which file system will make the run: Tux3 is still at the beginning, while Btrfs could see a first beta in the next months. But there are still rumors that ZFS might be released under the GPL, and Hammer could also be implemented for Linux.
Either way, exciting times for file systems on Linux are ahead

source:liquidat.wordpress.com

whats this

2008-07-14T05:50:00.001-07:00

The equation of life

2008-06-19T03:29:00.001-07:00

Gmail - FW: Human Equations - vinu76jsr@gmail.com

Equation 1

Human = eat + sleep + work + enjoy
Donkey = eat + sleep

Therefore,
Human = Donkey + work + enjoy

Therefore,
Human - enjoy = Donkey + work

In other words,
Human that don't know how to enjoy = Donkey that work
============ ========= ========= ========= ========= ===

Equation 2

Men = eat + sleep + earn money
Donkeys = eat + sleep

Therefore,
Men = Donkeys + earn money

Therefore,
Men - earn money = Donkeys

In other words,
Men that don't earn money = Donkeys
============ ========= ========= ========= ========= ====

Equation 3

Women = eat + sleep + spend
Donkeys = eat + sleep

Therefore,
Women = Donkeys + spend

Therefore,
Women - spend = Donkeys

In other words,
Women that don't spend = Donkeys
============ ========= ========= ========= ========= =====

To Conclude:

From Equation 2 and Equation 3
Men that don't earn money = Women that don't spend.

So, Men earn money not to let women become Donkeys! (Postulate 1)

And, Women spend not to let men become Donkeys! (Postulate 2)

So, we have?
Men + Women = Donkeys + earn money + Donkeys + spend money

Therefore from Postulates 1 and 2, we can conclude,
Man + Woman = 2 Donkeys that live happily together!

Microsoft sent goodwill cake to firefox team

2008-06-18T20:46:00.001-07:00

They knew Firefox 3 was coming so IE baked a cake | NetworkWorld.com Community

They knew Firefox 3 was coming so IE baked a cake
Submitted by Microsoft Subnet on Wed, 06/18/2008 - 6:39pm.

In what is becoming a traditional gesture of goodwill, the Microsoft IE team sent Mozilla a cake in honor of shipping Firefox 3, reports Ars Technica. The IE team apparently sent a cake to Mozilla in 2006, too, following the release of Firefox 2. Collaboration between the two teams to ensure both browsers equally follow standards isn't as easy as cake -- but it is sweet of the IE team to make this effort.

The only relief was however, the cake is not poisoned.

How to install ubuntu linux from usb drive

2008-04-15T08:56:00.001-07:00

I found this solution in from ubuntuforums.org and I hope it works fine for you

first Download your Ubuntu ISO image.
this should work with pretty much any version of Ubuntu (provided it’s the LiveCD and not the alternate CD,
Download the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool. It does a much better job of formatting USB drives than the built-in Windows format command.Use it to format the USB drive using the FAT filesystem.
Download syslinux and find the syslinux.exe file under the win32 folder. Copy it to your Desktop.
Open up a command prompt, either by selecting it from the Start Menu or typing “cmd” into the run command.Change to your desktop folder [cd Desktop] and run the command [syslinux -ma f:] (replace f with your USB drive letter)(this wold made a file named like ldlinux.sis in your flash drive).
5.Mount the Ubuntu ISO through any iso mount utility like nero image drive or poweriso virtual drive or burn the image to a CD.
Copy all of the files from the mounted image or CD to your USB drive(you should copy hidden and system files also).Don’t just drag the files over as Windows will miss out some important hidden and system files and if you do first go to folder optioans and check the settings to show hidden and system files.
Now on the USB drive itself, move all of the files from the /install and /isolinux folders to the root of the drive (you can drag and drop this time). Also, move the vmlinuz and initrd.gz files from the casper folder to the same place.
Rename the isolinux.cfg file to syslinux.cfg, and edit the file so that the /install and /casper references are all removed (so /casper/vmlinuz becomes /vmlinuz, etc.)Eject the USB stick from Windows, insert into the PC which is to have Ubuntu installed, and boot! You may need to change the boot device in your BIOS. Press enter at the boot: prompt, and you’re away.
PS:here root folder means your USB's rootdrive (f:/ in my case).
courtesy:edajai from ubuntuforums

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how to upgrade from gutsy to hardy

2008-04-12T15:23:00.001-07:00

Today I visited ubuntu site and saw the ubuntu counter, that moment I realized -hardy release is around the corner and I should now upgrade my gutsy to hardyso that i will not have slow speed ubuntu servers download problem that was there last year during the release of gutsy, the developer community suggsted then it is safe to upgrade to next distribution few days before the final release release date to beta version because that beta is almost complete and normal update manager will than easily update you to full release, here are my next few steps which may result in a nice how to to upgrade from ubuntu gutsy to ubuntu hardy

I used the shortcut of run in ubuntu i.e., Alt-f2(you can type the following commands in regular shell but do it with sudo or in superuser account) then on the popped up window I typed sudo apdate-manager --devel-releases ( ps:I m not sure it is release or releases but because currently my system is updating I cannot crosscheck).
this will pop your update manager and if not than you should try above command with sudo prefixed.
now the update manager will load its package list and make sure it show you that your system is up-to-date.if not than first update your system before following because it is strongly suggested by official ubuntu community documentation,I really dont know what will happen if you dont do it.
when you make sure that update manager show that your systme is up-to-date click on the check button (it's a button with check written over it).
before the next step make few checks

your root partition have 2 gb of free space if not than free your space because hardy had to download 1.5 gb in my system, yours may be more or less.
if you cant free the space than delete the contents of folder/var/cache/apt/archives except the partial folder (because it is essential for apt to function properly) , it might be over 1 gb based on how much you downloaded additional packages form the repostories(remember this step is only to free up space ,if you have free space than no neded to do this).

when the check is finished there will be a section which shows distribution update, use it and upgrade will start, now sit back nad relax because it will take an awful lot of time and will ask you few questions(in my case msttcorefonts package did not get installed but it is ok for me it never did get installed before).
after say 6 to 12 hours your system will get updated (at this time mine is in its 13th hour and it is not even half so dont believe me).
restart your system and enjoy your MR.hardy

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install sun java in your linux box

2008-04-11T03:50:00.001-07:00

I have a problem when everytime I have to install linux on my ubntu box,I have to let synaptic to download and install sun-java jre and netbeans and believe me, here it takes a lot of time, almost a day so based on some website I have downloadedsun sun-java-6 tarball and created the debian binary from it, You can download it from here jsut double click and gdebi will install it and other dependencise,this is sun-java-6update 3 release. Then you can easily install netbeans for linux and enjoy your development ready computer

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flock for ubuntu

2008-04-10T09:34:00.001-07:00

I recently have lots of problem to install flock in ubuntu the default method given in their site left me to configure flock each and every time I started it but for me flock is essential because of all of its social services and stuff which really make blogging a breeze but then I found out the getdeb site getdeb.net
You only have to download the flock .deb file form there site and your system will search for additioanal dependencies and apt will download it and have a entry of flock under application>internet>flock
and flock is ready to go.finally I got up my blog running smoothly.

why this blog

2008-04-10T09:27:00.001-07:00

I started this blog to store my small knowledge of this subject into some kind of web repository to share with th guys like me,These kid of blogs are really helpful because for any linux novice they provide a tremendous support platform, The greatest how-tos come from bloggers around the world and they really work for me and for any other person.

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