WinXp = Ubuntu

Sounds bewildering?? Those of you who know Windows and Ubuntu will be bewildered to hear this and those of you who don’t just check out the windows or Ubuntu

You might be thinking that I have gone mad that I am saying things like these but then I am saying this because of an experience I had in the HP service center in Mumbai which is located in Kurla. Shishir’s HP laptop developed some adapter problems for God knows what reasons!!!!!!!!!! So both of us after a somewhat eventful bus journey landed up at the HP service center. Shishir then duly filled up the entry forms and he was shown in to the service center engineer who was supposed to diagnose the problem.

Shishir started up his laptop and booted into Ubuntu Feisty. The guy gave a quizzical look at the screen which I am not going to interpret anymore and then duly filled in the form “WinXP” as the operating system where he was supposed to fill in the details regarding the laptop….

So much so for diagnosis……………. So WinXP == Ubuntu looks like True to him

Trying to etch Debian on my laptop

Well looks like my hard-disk is soon going to be hating me. My affair with Feisty isn’t looking too rosy. Right now I am getting Debian Etch 4.0 on my laptop while I am blogging at ease from Divya’s terminal about which she has no clue.

How come I suddenly decided to get Debian???

That’s a good question and it has many answers. First of all the excessive guification of Feisty is really bugging with strange instabilities which caused 3 crashes on my system. Time for a rock stable distro and Debian is obviously the choice.

Recently I started trying out my hand at making Debian packages and with some libraries listing their version as ubuntu12 and so on and to find the corresponding Debian version while making the packages was really becoming irksome.

Finally Debian with being the only sole GNU/Linux distro in the GNU/Linux sense was a lucrative option for a long time but Etch convinced me to get it as soon as I could. Since Etch comes out in 21 months flat which is quite timely as on schedule considering the 18 months release schedule of Debian and it also packs a punch with a lot of cutting edge recent packages as compared to archaic Debian standards. Also the look of Debian Etch and Debian itself convinced me to get it and to be honest the HBCSE fantastic link line helped me with the net install.

The next paragraph might seem a bit out of sync and flow and blah blah blah according to the technical Divya but that is because I had discontinued writing the blog entry and am re-continuing it now(after 4 days I guess). Debian Etch is working great on my laptop , the only problem is the battery time is not being detected properly and I have got to read it directly from /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/state , but then I got a 686 kernel and a rock stable and reasonably up to date system to work on.

Probably I will look into getting Beryl on my laptop and then I will answer all those people who say its old fashioned to use Debian in their own modern ways with the Freedom associated with it.

 

Debian GNU/Linux rocks and this is the last of my installation fests I hope.

 

 

 

Feisty Rocks but then it rocked me too

Feisty Fawn came out after six month long wait. A wait that was broken only by the test versions and the Herd releases. It was touted to be a super baby of a super parent which I consider Dapper rather than Edgy. I was always a vociferous lover of Dapper. I swore on “Till Death do us part” but then I ditched Dapper this summer when I checked out the cool features of Feisty specially Compiz and Beryl to be honest and the fact that there are loads of packages you can install I thought maybe why not a change. I tried out the Fesity Live cd and lo!!!!!!!!! the Desktop effects just worked out of the box…….

I couldn’t hang on to Dapper much longer now. So goodbye baby, ” I love you but then I love someone else more now.” So now I embarked upon clearing the graduating classes ie first moving to Edgy and then to to Feisty.

I had the alternate disc of Edgy…

What I did was

 

$sudo apt-cdrom add

 

Then

 

$sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

 

It took around 40 mins to get to Edgy and everything just worked on. Then I got mad when I found out I had left the Feisty alternate disc back in the hostel. So here I was stuck with Edgy till the time I was in Mumbai in TIFR where I could download the Alternate disc. So it was a week-long wait.

 

“Mumbai here I have come and Feisty I will get you” was the resolution I had when I landed at Mumbai C.S.T. But then the HBCSE link just rocks and with the amazing download speed I did a network upgrade through the Update Manager and everything got spoilt. I got a broken system which wouldn’t boot and I went in for a clean install of Feisty.

That was amazing too. The install was too smooth and also all the packages but then a known bug which was unknown to me ie, the libxine and Desktop effects combination broke my system when I installed totem-xine. I again went in for a clean install. This time the FlashPlugins bug came and destroyed my honeymoon with Feisty. And then to top it all I got a Filesystem error on the root partition. Is my Acer laptop misbehaving just after the warranty is over. I hope not.

 

This is my third installation of Feisty and if this breaks too I am going to go back to Dapper. I know it will welcome me with well open hands. I am loving my stint with Feisty with the awesome amount of packages you get and specially Beryl. Go Feisty is the bottomline with me. I also love it when Divya gets jealous of Beryl on my system while I snigger about her stability and hence old Dapper system. I also love it when I tell Shishir,Divya and Khushboo that “see you can see this package listed in my Synaptic” while they don’t have it.The look on their faces is menacing but highly amusing.

 

Feisty rocks but then it can rock you too……………………………….

 

 

Freedom Is Not That Free

On 7th June ie. Thursday I got to attend a talk that was organised by HBCSE and the speaker was Mr. Georg C.F. Greve, the President of Free Software Foundation, Europe. He has come to HBCSE for a week-long visit for a goodwill bonding mission and also to see the work going on regarding GNOWSYS under Dr. Nagarjuna G. which will act as a backend to the SELF project. The topic of his talk was Free Software and Science and it was really memorable owing to his message clarity and strong reasoning.

 

The day started off rather auspiciously. All of us knew it would be a hard day’s work for us given the fact that we would have to toil with our basic minimal Zope class but then things finally figured out within a minute. Something that we were toiling on throughout the night just sorted out in a minute when an idea of adding a pointer struck us. So much so for easy solutions. In the afternoon it was the talk that took central attention.

 

The V.G. Kulkarni Auditorium was impressive and with the audience consisting of HBCSE employees, ILUG-Bom members and some GNU/Linux enthusiasts, the atmosphere seemed expectant. The talk didn’t go formal as we expected but rather went on an informal note right from the very beginning. It started off with the definition of Free Software which consists of nothing but freedom. Here “Free as in Free Speech not Free Beer”. The domain of Freedom was very clearly and subtly specified by the following 4 words:

1. Use.

2. Study.

3. Modify.

4. Redistribute.

Just add the word “software” after these words and if all the 4 criteria are met by the software then its FREE SOFTWARE, that was the definition.

 

Moving on, the question of licenses came in which ultimately hypothetically may refer to the same ideas of Freedom despite their variety. Then it came to the concept of how Free Software is scientifically compatible and Propreitary Software is not.

Here compatibility means how it is scientifically or logically justified. Since Science deals with experimentation and study of theories and nullifying of wrong theories through experimentation, study, logic and deduction so, proprietary software which does not let us study the code and hence no methodology to check for its validity is incompatible. This was the basic argument of Georg with a lot of other points. The SELF project and Freedom in Learning where Software and people controlling the software should not control the access to knowledge was greatly harped upon.

 

Then came the questions from the audience which Georg answered in quite innovative manners and had the whole audience sometimes guffawing upon the anecdotes that he provided. It was fun all around and specially the Free Chai and biscuit after this rocked…

Then we rushed back to the lab to complete the work else we could have had a bad time.

 

BERYL ROCKS

 

Today I finally got Beryl working on my Ubuntu Feisty Acer laptop. I was a bit sceptical initially whether it will work out or not, given the fact that I had 256 MB RAM and an on-board graphics controller with the chipset but then when it worked out, it really had me ogling at the screen.

It started off with the Beryl-Manager and the red emerald on the panel. And then it was more fun experimenting with the features like adding animations where your windows vanish in flames and everywhere you expect something new but what really rocked was the 3D cube rotation with transparency. It was simply outstanding. Sadly everything is not so smooth for me right now. I tried to add opacity to the drop down menus but then they are having strange dark borders. Hopefully I will sort them out soon.

For the moment Beryl will stay on my laptop and this is my birthday gift to my laptop which was yesterday. Incidentally the warranty of my laptop expired yesterday after which I decided to go for Beryl. I am having an awesome time showing off the effects to Divya and teasing who is stuck with Dapper. Well I love Dapper too but then BERYL+FEISTY is just too good.

 

GETTING STARTED

Control over ease…….

This was something I was pondering on for a long time before making a blog. The choice was should I go for a blog on Razorblade, the GLUG-NITH server or should I go for a free blogging account on the many blogging sites available. I had my first blog up at Razorblade but then maintaining the .html from emacs became a huge problem with added css and all that. So I decided to go in for a blog and zeroed in on wordpress. With my blog finally up and running I just hope I don’t end up catching the blog-fever. Lets see what happens…………