Derek Cordeiro's Blog

Broadband/adsl in OpenSolaris

2009-01-03T18:47:00.001+05:30

There are a number of blog posts about setting up broadband in OpenSolaris but not any single source got me online. The following is a summary of what I did to get online. vfe0 is my via rhine network interface. Replace with your own(use ifconfig -a to find out)

echo vfe0 >> /etc/ppp/pppoe.if
touch /reconfigure
shutdown -i6 -g0 -y
ls /dev | grep ppp The output of the above command should be sppp and sppptun
grep sppp /etc/name_to_major Output should be: sppp 146 sppptun 147
Create the config file.
Add the username/password entries to pap-secrets and chap-secrets.

Step 6: The configuration file, /etc/ppp/peers/myisp : sppptun # what device to use plugin pppoe.so # initialize the connect "/usr/lib/inet/pppoec INTERFACE" # connect string user "USERNAME" # username noauth # Do not make the other side authenticate itself noipdefault # Let them give you what IP they want to give you noccp # No compression defaultroute # add an appropriate default route #---------------------------------------------------------------------------- To find out what to put as INTERFACE above, execute "sppptun query". For some systems, it should display INTERFACE:pppoe and INTERFACE:pppoed. On my system it outputted softmac0 instead of vfe0. I just added softmac0 as INTERFACE in the above myisp file. Step 7: you need to add username/password entries to /etc/ppp/pap-secrets or /etc/ppp/pap-secrets. To be safe add the following entry to both the files. "USERNAME" * "PASSWORD" "USERNAME" above is the same username specified in the myisp file in Step 6. and password is your password. To connect, execute "pppd call myisp".

Are Women really better than men?

2008-12-10T18:47:00.000+05:30

A snapshot of something I saw in the local daily:

Well, I'm not disagreeing, I'm just questioning how it can be generalized that if someone is good at one type of DIY, she is better in all DIY activities. And isn't this a stereotyped opinion? Well, men are many times (over)confident, but that is the way society has treated men. If and when women are considered better than men, will they become (over)confident just like how men are today? And over to the article, this just proves how not to easily believe a woman when she tells you that she's still a virgin :) I've chosen my words as carefully as possible, lest I be called a chauvinistic !@#$%^&.

Converting Gutenberg text to beautiful pdfs

2008-12-07T18:44:00.001+05:30

Many of the Gutenberg texts are available as pdfs on manybooks.net, and although these may sufice for many users, I prefer well formatted texts. The pdfs from the above site are generated using some software like htmldoc and although this isn't a bad thing, I don't like the types or the text justification.

There is a very nice utility to convert Gutenberg ASCII texts to pdfs which use latex as an intermediate format. The utility that I am referring to also can convert to html. The software is called Gutenmark. It is a cross platform smart application that uses wordlists and is smart enough to convert text tags like _text_ to text. It is quite a change to see an installer like in the windows world run on Linux. A screenshot of Guitenmark is shown below.

The process is as simple as add files and click the right arrow. You get latex source code which you can be processed using a latex distribution(miktex or texlive or tetex). As an experiment, I modified the latex source to process it with ConTeXt just to learn and test my skills.

Pride and Prejudice and Project Gutenberg

2008-12-06T21:44:00.000+05:30

Last night I was watching "The Marine" which was yet another lame attempt at movie making by the WWE, I switched to Zee Studio which was playing Pride and Prejudice. Half way through, they decide that they want to switch movies!!! They just stopped it, showed more than a dozen ads and switched to some other movie. It was the most outrageous thing I've ever seen(I remember watching Doordarshan years back when they actually had 15 minute breaks for ads, and although they cut short a lot of the film, they atleast showed the ending).

Today I got a copy of Pride and Prejudice which turned out to be a different one but very similar none-the-less. After all the "poopular" movies I've seen recently, this is a refreshing change. I really enjoyed it.

Knowing that the text "Pride and Prejudice" is a very old book, I went to gutenberg to find myself a copy. They have 3 audio book editions and 1 ebook which has plain text, html as well as pdf formats. Seeing that the pdf was generated using latex, I went to search for its source code which I could not find. Later I managed to find a very interesting resource to create very attractive pdf ebooks from gutenberg texts, which will be the subject of my next post.

I just realised that I may find reading these old books well worth my time instead of only thinking and reading about technology.

Stay safe in GMail

2008-11-27T09:49:00.000+05:30

There have been a lot of security issues with GMail in the past few days. It is better to take some precautions before your account has been compromised.

First and foremost, it is better to use https instead of http. In lay man terms, s means secure. To make sure that you are always using https, login to GMail and go to your settings. Look at the bottom-most setting:

Now make sure that Always use https is selected as above and Save Changes.

Another precaution would be not to store passwords in the browser and not to check the "Remember me on this computer." when logging in to gmail. If you think that you have logged in with this setting on other computers, you log out from those browsers as follows: Look at the footer in your gmail, i.e. right at the bottom. You will see something like "Last account activity: 1 hour ago on this computer. Details" as shown below

Now click on Details and you can log out of all other sessions using the window that appears. You can find out more about this feature here.

Stay safe, don't let your account be compromised. Oh, and please use a good password.

Wikibooks, ebooks, latex - An Idea

2008-11-23T22:55:00.000+05:30

Recently I came a cross a free service to convert a live journal weblog into an ebook. There is a similar service for wordpress. There was a service for blogspot too, but is no longer in action. And the beauty of it is that they use latex to create the ebooks. The sample I downloaded listed all the entries cronologically.

A couple of days back I realised how well wikibooks.org is organised, some books may help most computer users. I wonder if there is any service or software to convert these mediawiki entries into an ebook, preferably using (La)TeX or a similar quality typesetting system.

I downloaded some of the e-Magazines from the freesoftwaremagazine website. And I got to say, the pdfs look pretty bad. If I'm guessing right, they convert html into pdf using htmldoc or something. I just hope I don't come across such a solution when "googling" for it. I had read about how river-valley technologies typeset a telephone directory(kerala) using free software. The entire story can be read on the tug.org.in website. Maybe someone will come up with software to convert mediawiki entries into ebooks/pdfs(If only it was something I could do...).

GMail themes: Not the best gmail feature yet

2008-11-21T10:11:00.000+05:30

GMail themes have been released for almost everybody. It was anounced on the gmail blog two days back. Although it looks nice on the gmail blog, many of the themes are hideous. One of the themes I found ok is in the screenshot below. I think that IMAP/POP and some Lab features like random sigs are so much more useful.

Maybe gmail required some interface changes as the drab old interface was getting a little boring. But hey, boring is better than fugly. One thing that was a bit odd though: they changed my theme without me making any changes. I think they could have let it be on the classic theme and notified me instead of changing it and notifiying me(as they did with orkut).

Some themes make use of your geographic location and change during the day. Its quite similar to the default background in Fedora 8/9 which changes colors based on the time.

I just hope that they offer some additional good looking themes in the near future unlike the blogspot(blogger) themes which are long dead.

Netbeans 6.5, the only IDE you need

2008-11-20T09:38:00.000+05:30

Netbeans version 6.5 is available for download. Now at around 245MB, it includes support for Java(Se/EE/ME), Ruby, C/C++, PHP and more. UML is now available from the update site/plugins manager. This is the first release featuring PHP in the combined bundle. And even with an increase of ~50MB, the IDE is as quick as ever. The screenshot below shows that APIs of popular services like deliciuos, Twitter, google, flickr, facebook, etc are well supported.

It is a little sad that there is no plugin to use intel compilers as there is for the eclipse IDE(CDT). There are some really cool advantages of netbeans:

If you just want to develop C/C++ applications and do not need support for any other language, the download is just 23Mb! On the other hand, Eclipse CDT is around 68 MB.
There is an inbuilt GUI designer for Java.
Glassfish/Tomcat are included in the bundle which is great for Java web developers.
Javascript is supported and there are a lot of demos/screencasts demonstrating the same.
A lot of screencasts/docs which is an added bonus considering that the application is quite intuitive.
No system dependencies. For eg, it was not easy to get SVN working with Eclipse 3.4 on older Linux distros as svn 1.5 was required on the system. Netbeans on the other hand worked out of the box and I'm fine on CentOS 5.
I found that installing plugins is a breeze. In eclipse it takes a lot of time checking if there is enough space and dependencies which can be frustrating.

There are some disadvantages though:

Not many 3rd party plugins: eg: no intel C++ support, no google android support.
Updating the software can sometimes have problems: updates may not get installed and it may keep prompting.

Netbeans looks better than ever with support for major languages, the only thing that it needs is 3rd party plugins and support.

Typesetting Software

2008-11-16T11:30:00.000+05:30

How many typesetting software are there really? If you google for a while, you will come across sites and articles mostly relating to LaTeX. I found a few and just decided to make a note.

TeX -- the original system whose hyphenation/line-breaking algorithm have even been used(in the past) in commercial products like Adobe's Indesign.
Latex --- A macro system written to make TeX easier and more functional. It makes use of a lot of packages to give it added functionality. One very good "class" is memoir class. This is one of the best typesetting systems available and is widely used by journals and publishers.
ConTeXt --- Another macro system but with a different goal. This systems is more or less self contained, i.e. it does not make use of packages and has a vast amount of inbuilt functionality. It is rapidly being improved and every few days sees improvements. Many splendid interactive pdfs have been generated using ConTeXt.
ANT --- Don't know much about this system as I havn't compiled it yet. ANT stands for ANT is Not Tex. It is inspired by TeX and uses a similar syntax.
lout --- Quite different syntactically, this software is another interesting system. Its design document itself is available for download on its wiki. A lout document has a lot of '@' symbols.

Is there any other good typesetting system(not DocBook please) that compare to the above?

Solaris 10 10/08

2008-11-15T19:03:00.000+05:30

Solaris 10 update 10/08 was released somewhere last month. It boasts of a a lot of new features especially root zfs(arguably the best filesystem around) as well as virtualization tools. Having used Solaris developer in the past, I thought I would give it a go.

The ISO is around 2Gb and an additional 600+Mb companion CD. I have a partition layout as below:


Disk /dev/sda: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1        3647    29294496   83  Linux
/dev/sda3            5472        5596     1004062+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda4            5597       38913   267618802+   f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5            5597       14106    68356543+  83  Linux
/dev/sda6           14107       26264    97659103+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda7           26265       38913   101603061   83  Linux

Well it did not look like this before I installed. I had an extra linux partition sda2 which I deleted and used for Solaris. The install went fine.

I was a bit taken aback after rebooting: It comes with some good utilities including but not limited to StarOffice 8, RealPlayer 10, Java Media player... but no compiler; The companion CD has gcc --- version 2.96. I was pretty surprised... a bit shocked. Then I rebooted and booted with my default hard disk, the one that has Windows on it(my old hard disk, 40Gb). It gave me a grub error. That was odd.

I used the centos disk to rescue my very important CentOS installation. I was in for a shock. The partition table was badly screwed up! it changed my sda1 start cylinder to 2 from 1 above and removed any logical partitions with one Extended DOS partition. Now all my data is located in the extended partition. I was horrified.

I tried one rescue boot cd through which I tried unsuccessfully to regain my partition table(one tool scanned the entire disk sector by sector and gave me useless results). One of the other tools suggested me to use Partition table doctor. I installed smart boot manager and rebooted into Windows successfully. Downloaded a copy of Partition table doctor and within a few minutes it had properly scanned the disk and successfully restored my partition table. It did not detect the Solaris though, which I don't plan to install until I can setup a separate hard disk.

My partition table is here as a result of this disaster. Just incase some OS decides to do something bad, I have a backup of the table right here in this blog. Oh and even if I wanted to review this updated version of Solaris, I need to install via-rhine drivers for my NIC as well as sound card drivers.

Just in case you want to install Solaris on an x86 system, BACKUP YOUR PARTITION TABLE(and if possible, your data too)

SAH: Super Affiliate Handbook

2008-11-01T22:44:00.000+05:30

I must admit that I don't usually bother with books telling you how to get rich. But today I read the Super Affiliate Handbook(SAH). Normally I tend to notice the formatting, the software used to generate the document and the typefaces used in the document. But this book does while it tells. There are a number of resources linked from the book: most if not all used some sort of affiliate id. While I have a habit of looking at the URL while before I click, I clicked a few links from within the book even though they were affiliate links.

Affiliate links are not bad: Its just that there are a lot of scams on the internet: you don't know when a link is going to be malicious. Many times clicking a link and signing up to some service results in a whole load of spam. In other cases others have received messages from your ID without you having a clue. And since I did open a few links, I found they led to all legitimate sites. Quite surprising :)

There are many blogs on making money online. They always tell you the same thing in slightly different ways. But those reading such blogs don't end up making any money. I had a friend who signed up to google cash cows. He did as instructed and copied some crappy website hoping to make money. He paid for those resources and he got nothing. He wasn't much of a internet freak and I cannot blame him for falling for it. How can a strategy such as copy pasting some junk to a free host make you any money? There is one important fact that many such people miss: Content is king. If you don't have a good content or strategy to get people to read and you cannot convince them, no ones ever going to click on anything.

The ebook is very clear on such things. It takes a list of myths such as "Affiliate marketing is easy" and "Make a fortune overnight" and gives a more realistic view. Maybe this book is what you need to get started in making money online, but maybe not. Check it out anyway and decide.

Debian Lenny on Blu-Ray discs?

2008-10-21T20:14:00.000+05:30

Just read on distrowatch.com newsletter that Debian Lenny will be available for all supported architectures as a set of 25Gb Blu-ray discs. A single architecture will fit on a single Blu-ray disc, i.e. a total of 13 Blu-ray Discs. I remember using woody(3.0) with 7CDs and 3.1 with 2 DVDs(14CDs), but 5 DVDs is a lot of discs. I just wonder if anyone will really download as well as use all those packages. And knowing that debian doesn't release new versions that quickly, think of all of those old obsolete packages that you install only to find that it misses feature X.

And if I'm told that Debian is stable and secure and perfect for a server/corporate environment, who needs all those 25,000 packages there anyway? I doubt you will be playing some game like torcs on a server.

Although CD and DVD ISOs are also available and installing from a single CD should work well, I just wonder who they are targeting with Blu-ray Discs. Maybe I'll google "people who have no internet access but have Blu-ray drives".

Which Linux distro?

2008-10-20T15:06:00.001+05:30

Although I don't need windows, I observed that while I kept changing from one Linux distribution to another and spending more time installing, testing and setting it up as per my needs, Windows XP sat there like a reference system.

I realize that because there are such a large number of Linux distributions, the thought of having a better, quicker or more functional system is always a temptation. Another problem inherent with linux distributions is that they are either unstable(bugs) or they are dated. And to worsen things, sometimes new versions of the same distribution have many more bugs.

Take for example Ubuntu 8.04: I was using Ubuntu 7.10 and was quite happy with everything. Then came along 8.04 with a tag "LTS". The assumption: The LTS version would be well tested and I would have better newer software with newer features. -- Wrong, I had many Issues with the release which I won't list now, many of them got fixed with 8.04.1. I had infact reverted to Ubuntu 7.10 only to find out that newer versions of some software like vlc were only available for 8.04.

Another issue with linux distributions is the packaging system. If you have tried Adobe AIR, you very well know that it works well only on systems with .deb or .rpm package managers. At that time I was using Archlinux which was perfect but I could not get to test any of the AIR apps.

So what did I do to overcome all these issues? I installed CentOS, added rpmforge and pp-contrib. pp-contrib is disabled by default but I enable it for some packages like qt-4.4 or lua-5.1. RPMForge does a great job updating apps like vlc(currently 0.9.4), flash plugin and other multimedia and non-free appls. I also have java jdk6u10 and netbeans 6.1 installed manually. I have also installed openoffice-3 and SunStudio12 which I downloaded separately from the respective websites.

I also have a test distribution installed side-by-side in a separate partition which is currently Ultima. I did have a bunch of issues with Ultima which multima did a terrific job in fixing.

To summarize, the problem:

Linux distributions include the latest and greatest of packages available, many of them are not yet fully functional or have not been sufficiently tested. example is KDE 4.1 included by all major distributions which although is getting close to feature complete is not yet there. Ultima and PCLinuxOS 2009 however stick with KDE 3.5
Newer versions of the same Linux distributions sometimes resolve issues but sometimes add more problems. For example my alc-662 sound card did not require module parameters before kernel 2.6.18. Fedora 6 kept updating kernels and what 5.1 that used to work stopped working.
New applications change the behavior of the system: PulseAudio introduced in major linux distros is IMO odd. If you switch to a terminal(ctrl+alt+F1...), the audio app running on your X11 display will pause. Similarly SELinux like features can cause CD burning to fail.
Commercial/Free applications may only support rpm and deb. Other package management tools are not supported.

My Solution:

CentOS, well tested and not the latest software by all means. Some extra software repositories add such missing functionality and features.
Large release cycles. It will take a long time before a new version of CentOS will be released and even a longer time for the next major release to come out.
No pulseaudio and hence no wrappers required to handle flash audio, just as an example.
It uses rpm, it is the closest thing to Red|-|at that you can get.

As far as KDE vs Gnome wars are concerned, I use and prefer Gnome over KDE. I really don't bother with changing my icons and wallpaper all that much. For me eyecandy is just a distraction. I just have to wonder how people have the time to bother with all those things, does it really help them get their work done?

Hence I can safely rely on CentOS while I change distros on my test partition and on the other PC. I may want to use Windows again... maybe when Windows 7 is out?

VLC media player 0.9

2008-10-12T18:49:00.002+05:30

VLC is one of my all time favorite apps and the only video player I need. There are formats that it does not support like realmedia's .rm and .rmvb, but I don't bother with those formats anyway.

The 0.9.x released a few months back is already in its 5th incarnation. This release features the Qt UI widget toolkit. Now don't ask me why: I have to wonder why they switched from wxwidgets -- the new interface does't look all that complex to have warranted a change in toolkit, although it does look better than before.

So why am I writing about the new vlc? There are some features that I really liked.

Shoutcast Radio -- The number of sources, i.e. categories/genres and hence the stations are huge. This I mention because many of them are hidden in apps like itunes.
ShoutCast TV.
PodCasts

There are some things that irritated me though:

The version 0.9.3 use to crash easily on CentOS/rpmforge . I started to associate vlc with stability which no longer holds. Maybe change to the new toolkit have lead to more issues?
When playing media from shoutcast stations, I found that after changing a lot of stations, the playlist seemed to get stuck and became unresponsive. VLC 0.9.4 had to be restarted to gain back control of the shoutcast playlist.
The preferences dialog(simple) looks pretty big(on linux) without a way of resizing it. It would not be usable on a 800x600 resolution.

On the whole, VLC 0.9.4 is more than worth a download, it really blows other media players far behind.

P.S. rpmforge really rocks... the best rpm repo for CentOS and updated pretty frequently.

Ultima Linux 8.4: Ultimate headache

2008-10-05T15:53:00.005+05:30

After a long time I decided to download a 64-bit distro -- Ultima comes either on a single CD for 32-bit or 64-bit or a single DVD with both the CDs and more combined.

It is also after a long time that I have a headache after installing and trying to set up a linux distro. Although there are some positive reviews of this version of Ultima, I wonder if they really installed it or just ran it live.
Everything looked fine, I liked the idea of a distro without any of the eyecandy which is all too common these days. KDE 3.5.10 is associated with better stability while using less system resources. Looking at the list of packages, the distro appears solid.

It could not detect and create a working xorg.conf. After manually editing the xorg.conf file suitably, the desktop looked just fine and rock solid. I decided to install.

GRUB fails to install. No matter what filesystem, I just don't get how grub will install without the stage1 and stage2 files. I used my existing grub which was already installed to another hard disk and started Ultima.

The pppoe-setup script would not work. After editing a wrong path to pppd, the script worked. But pppoe-start would not. Just timed out messages and nothing else.

I recommend everyone to download a copy of Ultima: You won't have to lie about a headache anymore(try it only when you need the excuse).

Note: The same issues may be non-existant in the 32-bit version of Ultima

P.S.(i) I found it pretty sad that they don't mention what is the difference between the packages included in the CD and the DVD
(ii) Although I should have mentioned my PC specs, I have omitted it because it is generic hardware which has little or no problem on all major Linux distributions and the problems look more or less hardware independent.(For eg, grub files, or pppd path)

X100P FXO Card

2008-10-04T20:41:00.003+05:30

Got to test a X100P FXO card to interface asterisk PBX with POTS(Plain Old Telephone Service). The card looks much like a modem with 2 RJ-11 ports.

After downloading the drivers and installing them, the darned thing did not work. There is a good troubleshooting manual from novavox which does mention the problem I faced(infamous -5 error as mentioned on page 6 of installation-issues):

Failed to initailize DAA, giving up...
wcfxo: probe of 0000:00:0c.0 failed with error -5

Another message was

NOTICE-wcfxo: WCFXO/0: Unknown DAA chip revision: REVB=0

'lspci -v' shows the expected "Communication controller: Motorola Wildcard X100P". The problem seems to arise due to IRQ sharing. But even after disabling every peripheral(Parallel, serial, sound, vga interrrupt, lan), the BIOS did show a IRQ of 5 assigned to the card. Linux 'cat /proc/interupts' however did not list interrupt 5(which it used to do when peripherals were enabled).

I tried passing kernel parameters like acpi=no and acpi=noirq and noapic, but all in vain. Also notable is that with different combinations of peripherals enabled, sometimes IRQ of 5 or sometimes 11 was allocated to the card by the BIOS.

Some forums also confirm that keeping the card 1-2mm higher than normal, i.e. not pushing the card entirely into the PCI slot solves the issue sometimes.

I just gave up without trying too much: Even if I did manage to set it up, I have nothing to gain except the possibility of learning how to configure and use Asterisk. Mostly I would have been tempted, but not this time.

Have you tried anything with Asterisk VoIP and/or interfacing it with your normal telephone line? Or is asterisk used in your school/college/office?

Software Freedom

2008-10-01T15:15:00.002+05:30

Software Freedom day is celebrated worldwide on the 3rd Saturday of September¹. But in Goa, it was celebrated at BITS Pilani, Goa Campus on the 27th(or was it a 2 day event?).

I have heard people define Free/Open Source Software time and again. There are endless discussions about which Open Source license is the best. One thing that should be known to all: Open Source Software is here to stay. Open Source even mentioned in textbooks e.g. Software Engineering books like Object-Oriented and Classical Software Engineering by Steven Schach. But what is the easiest way to adopt Free Software on your Desktop PC?

If you already use GNU/Linux or *BSD or Solaris, you already have a whole lot of free software already installed. You probably have very little non-free software. The only thing you can do to contribute is to help others(could be help new users, or help developers, etc). If you use Microsoft Windows or Mac, follow some easy steps.

Use Free Software as much as possible.

Firefox /Chrome/Flock for browsing.
OpenOffice for good quality formatted text documents/spreadsheets/presentations.(at the time of writing, OpenOffice 3.0 RC3 is available)
extra: Check out the openoffice extensions like the template packs I and II
Pidgin for Instant Messaging.
Thunderbird for email.
Free Developer tools like Eclipse , Netbeans together with MinGW /MSYS and free libraries like wxWidgets (If you know MFC, it is an excellent choice).
Java is mostly Free software, use it.

The most important thing though is not to discourage others from using it.(This goes out especially to fanboys who are pretty narrow minded). Sometimes I've heard people say that Linux sucks. I cannot disagree or agree -- Linux is far from perfect, but nothing really is perfect.(The same people say that Vista is awesome--I think Microsoft will not completely agree with that).

I keep wondering why...

2008-09-17T20:45:00.000+05:30

Why gnome guys make every element/widget so huge/bloated/ugly
Why there are only 2 or 3 compact themes for Gnome while there is a bigger listing for Firefox
Why VLC 0.9.2 seems slower than 0.8.6(Is it due to change to Qt from wxWidgets?)
Why every newer release of a software product almost always breaks something
Why even though CPUs have changed from 200MHz to 3+Gz, everyone seems to be doing the same old thing, with new difficulties and probably the same level of productivity or even less
Why ubuntu suddenly decided to change my SATA drive device node from sdc to sda and thus rendering a grub reinstall a royal pain
Why Adobe can deliver Reader and now AIR(beta) on Linux whereas others just don't bother
Why there are people who hate a particular software without using it(Vista fanboys hate All other systems, Linux fanboys hate other systems too, OS X fanboys are just ridiculous)

LXDE -- Really nifty

2008-09-15T23:56:00.002+05:30

Earlier a linux user had to settle with either a heavy weight Desktop environment like Gnome/KDE or a lightweight window manager like icewm/wmaker/blackbox. Then came XFCE and although it isn't as big as KDE or Gnome, it isn't as fast as a window manager.

I just tried LXDE. It is really fast and is quite easy to use. For eg, Drag and drop features are not available. But it does look pretty cool. A screenshot for another thousand words :)

Sorry for the 16-bit color, can't afford a decent supported graphics card.

Kubuntu 8.10 alpha5: A few screenshots & a rant

2008-09-11T02:41:00.000+05:30

Some screenshots of Kubunu 8.10

Kubuntu checks time servers to update system clock on fresh install

Still in the alpha stage, KUbuntu 8.10 is quite promising. Since KDE 4.1 is much more usable than the previous versions, it does make sense to try Kubuntu. If you take a look at the Ubuntu features/changelog, they mention a "eject button". Atleast a switch from Ubuntu to Kubuntu would be much more different.

Some points that I noted:

Not all the applications on the system use KDE 4 and hence some of them look different(KDE3 look). This is because some of the applications havn't switched to KDE4 or the KDE4 versions are unstable.
The GRUB "safe graphics" option does not seem to be doing anything useful. On one AMD Sempron machine with VIA Unichrome graphics(unsupported, openchrome driver + dri causes screen to freeze), the option safe graphics did absolutely nothing. I had to pass "single" to the grub options, edit the "/etc/X11/x.org" file to select the vesa driver.
On an Intel 845, enabling of effects causes KDE to crash. Any subsequent login is not possible. This behaviour is very odd considering the fact that it should only make changes to configuration only on confirmation. Deleting ~/.kde seems to be an easy way to be able to login to kde again.
I simply don't like Adept. The update manager is simply odd. I wanted to select all updates but I couldn't seem to find any way to do so. A screenshot is posted below.

Adept update-manager does not have a "upgrade-all" option

Note: On a C2D intel 946 m/b, kubuntu seemed to work pretty well. Effects work without issues.

Browser Wars, which browser is really better?

2008-09-07T14:34:00.002+05:30

It may have taken one day for Google Chrome to get 1% share of the browser market. But does it mean that the numbers will keep rising? I have tried using all the available browsers on any platform I use but I find that there are positives and negatives with each tool. To me this 1% marketshare is just the number of people who either got the chrome buzz or clicked on the link given on google.com.

Statcounter among others are talking about how Chrome has essentially eaten into the Firefox market share. But think about this, Do you really use firefox because it is fast or because google funds mozilla? I know that Firefox is by no means fast, but the extensions like scribefire, twitterfox, delicious bookmarks, stumbleupon keep me hooked. If you have read the wikipedia entry on Chrome, you will have noted that it ships with a security hole(in webkit) which is alerady fixed in Safari. Now don't get me wrong, I just mean that if it is security that makes you choose Chrome, are you sure that Chrome is the right choice? As of today, the only reason someone would choose Chrome is because of its spead. Features like rearranging your tabs are also possible with Opera.

As some users have mentioned, Chrome does tend to utilize more memory. Now that may be because every tab runs as a separate process, but a question that comes immediately to my mind: Does your "other" browser crash a lot?

And for the users who are hooked on to Opera widgets/Firefox extensions or use Mac OS X or Linux or any other Operating system, it does matter anyway. IMO Firefox is so bloated because of XUL, and without XUL UI management was difficult. How will Chrome behave on different platforms? For that matter, how does one make Gtk look good and keep it fast?(the futures linux version of Chrome will use gtk)

I am still a firefox(sometimes opera) user on all platforms. I will have to wait and watch(for both linux chrome and Firefox 3.1)

Chrome Browser keywords instead of URLs

2008-09-04T15:18:00.004+05:30

I am a long time Firefox user and have become used to typing in "wikipedia" instead of "en.wikipedia.org". If I want to visit the N96 page on gsmarena, I type "gsmarena N96" and it takes me right there. I don't have to visit gsmarena.com first and then navigate to the N96 page.

But Chrome handles it in a different way. It takes you to the Google results page. I decided to change the default search engine in Chrome.

Adding GooG as the default search engine.

The required URL has to be "{google:baseURL}search?{google:RLZ}{google:acceptedSuggestion}{google:originalQueryForSuggestion}sourceid=navclient&ie={inputEncoding}&gfns=1&q=%s" (without quotes).

Alternatively, you can duplicate(copy paste) the existing search and make two changes below:

change "souceid=Chrome" to "sourceid=navclient"
add "&gfns=1" before "&q=%s"

Now visit mail.yahoo.com by typing yahoo mail, browse the web smarter.

Note: If you are using Chrome or Safari or any webkit/khtml based browser, you will have to use the alternate method as these browsers just don't seem to know how to wrap text.

Google Chrome Web Browser

2008-09-03T09:01:00.005+05:30

Google Chrome is yet another browser for Windows. The Windows user has a choice between Internet explorer, Opera, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari and now Google Chrome. Only Firefox and Chrome are Open Source Software. But what does Chrome do that the others do not? Google has listed some features. Frankly speaking, only a few features had an impact on me: Crash Control is one of them.

Crash Control: If you check task manager, you will see a process for every tab open. If a website loading in any one tab creates stability issues, only that tab will crash and you will not have to restart your browser and restore your session(probably have it crash once more). I wonder which website can crash Chrome for me to test...

New tab page is also an interesting feature. But if you don't have multiple logins in Windows, all users will not find this feature interesting. Why would your dad want links to fashion if he is only interested in the share market or news?

Dynamic tabs does not appeal to me---I just don't like using the mouse too much, neither do I keep too many tabs open: After all can read only one page at a time!

The Incognito mode is quite useless. If you want to use new tab page, you are most likely going to have a separate Windows user. If your windows account is already protected, why use something more: you gotta be paranoid.

The other listed features have little or no sense, as I have always had most of the features I need. In fact, bookmarking in Flock(Firefox mod) is also a "star". If you close your Firefox download manager, you can see the status in your status bar, so "simpler downloads" is nothing new. In fact there are firefox extensions that can have the same effect.

Some screen shots of Chrome

The Chrome Installer: It is an online installer.

It imports your previous settings and passwords

First run screenshot. It does allow you to change your search engine: Some kind of good PR stunt?

What exact does Chrome do that the other browsers don't do? Why switch to Chrome? Are the list of features impressive enough?

On the positive side, the browser has a nice and simple user interface. It makes browsing the web a better experience. I found it to be quick and rendered pages well(so far). Maybe it is safer too. But it is not yet a browser ready for mass adoption: For eg, it does not detect XML(RSS/ATOM/whatever) feeds of a website. Neither can it parse these feeds correctly. For example, try the Distrowatch feed. It works well under IE 7, FF 3. In fact both these browsers detect the feed too(Although I don't have Safari or Opera installed, I am quite sure that they do a good job on this front).

Help -> About reveals a lot about Chrome: It uses khtml/webkit, the rendering engine of Apple Safari but with Googles V8 javascript engine.

One more thing, although open source, the browser has yet to be ported to Mac and Linux. Until there is a Linux release, I wont be a Chrome user -- I rebooted into windows only to test it.

Just a Javascript performance comparison using the V8 benchmarks(Click to run it on your system):

P.S. Thanks to DP's twitter feed I even looked at Chrome and V8.

3G networks in India

2008-08-30T22:27:00.002+05:30

Vodafone and Airtel have supposedly launched 3G in India with the iPhone 3G plans. While the cost of the iPhone3G(Rs. 31K) is itself a huge investment compared to elsewhere in the world, I wonder what speeds are available(some phones support 7mpbs+ while others ~236kbps). What are the other services provided? Video calling? Some kind of mobile TV? There is hardly any information on the exact set of features available. Airtel advertises for email and web: you can get that with EDGE or even gprs, so what are they really offering?

Alternative Blogging scripts: Dotclear 2

2008-08-24T22:25:00.000+05:30

Dotclear was released earlier this month. The new version that has been in beta for a long time has finally been released. It boasts of a radical changes, the backend interface, the functionality, etc.

One of the most noticeable changes is language support. Version 1 used to have French all about the templates: The slick and shiny themes shipped with dotclear are shown below. Not a trace of French.That to me is a real improvement, but the odd thing is that the dotclear website is now complete French.

The default theme.

Alternate theme bundled with dotclear.

The script now has more features builtin than other popular scripts. These include:

Multiple blogs -- Multi-user, multi-blog, like b2evolution.
Pages -- You can add "about me", "copyright", "disclaimer" pages which you cannot using b2evolution
Media Manager -- Manage your photos
Categories and tags.
Widgetized templates. Very similar to wordpress and blogger widgets.
More plugins and themes available at dotaddict

Dotclear Dashboard

Dotclear supports Pages similar to wordpress.

Without a doubt, there are some disadvantages.

dotclear and dotaddict websites are in French.
The backend interface could be improved.

In summary, if you know even a little bit of French, it is worth it. You can import from wordpress and from XML feeds. There are also a page to configure features like clean URLs etc.