My thoughts on Tech & FOSS

Posts in category Reviews

Amarok 2.1 is out & Installing Amarok 2.1 on Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty

Jun7th
2009 13 Comments Written by Sathya

I was catching up on some feeds yesterday, and this piece of news caught my eye -Amarok 2.1 released. Being a long time Amarok fan ( heck Amarok itself was catalyst to make me use my SUSE 10.0 use full) time – I read the article with great interest.

Amarok 2 users would know that Amarok 2 series is a shadow of its old Amarok 1.4(“Amarok Classic” self) – and quite a few people still prefer Amarok classic to Amarok 2 – primararily because of Amarok’s missing support for visualizations, equalizer amongst others. I don’t use equalizers – and as for visualization – well don’t use that either.

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Linux version of World of Goo is out – Download the free demo

Feb16th
2009 12 Comments Written by Sathya

Being a gamer – I’m always on the lookout for new games – while I do enjoy some of the “big-name” games – there are few of those little known games which are fantastically awesome. World of Goo is one of those.

World of Goo – in a nutshell can be described as a extreme-physics-added version of Lemmings. Basically you have to “guide” the “goo-balls” to the specified pipes – seems easy, well that’s where the Physics & levels come in. The levels aren’t the straight forward ones, you have to build bridges, towers by “Connecting” the goo balls from one to other.

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Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex Review

Nov27th
2008 4 Comments Written by Bharath

I was very curious about Intrepid’s release. I just could not wait! I even pre-ordered the CD but downloaded the DVD without patience. I have not-so-fast a connection when it comes to downloading a DVD. In spite of it, I just downloaded. I even allocated HD and swap space for that and was just waiting to install it.

And what horrors!

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Mounting and Burning .iso, .mdf, .nrg(Nero) files and CD Images in Linux in 1-click

Nov11th
2008 3 Comments Written by Sathya

A while ago, I’d written a post on howto mount CD images, such as .iso, .mdf files etc via the command prompt using the mount command. In the post, among the comments, Sumeet had asked if there was a way to do all of this without having to type lengthy commands. Well yes there is! And it can’t get simpler than this!

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[How-To]Send SMS from your Linux computer via your Mobile Phone

Oct18th
2008 10 Comments Written by Sathya

While exploring Fedora 10 Beta, I found this neat little app called Phone Manager.

The about page of PhoneManager states

Phone Manager is a program created to allow you to control aspects of your mobile phone from your GNOME 2 desktop..

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How Do Different Distros fare against each other in terms of performance ?

Sep16th
2008 Leave a Comment Written by Aditya

The guys at Phoronix have written made an intresting article, comparing the performance of the Asus EEE-PC 901 with its Intel Atom processor
Here’s some quotes from the article

Late last month we published our preview of the ASUS Eee PC 901 and we shared our plans for a number of benchmarks using this netbook with Intel’s Atom processor. Following our Linux desktop encryption benchmarks of the ASUS Eee PC 901 and Intel Atom N270 CPU we have a performance comparison of Xandros, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Mandriva on this low-cost netbook PC.

The Linux distributions we used included the ASUS-optimized Xandros operating system that ships with the Eee PC 901, Fedora 10 Alpha, Ubuntu 8.10 Alpha 4 with daily updates as of August 26, and Mandriva 2009 Beta 2. The Xandros OS ships with the Linux 2.6.21 kernel, X Server 1.4.0.90, and uses GCC 4.1.2. Fedora 10 Alpha uses the Linux 2.6.27-rc0 kernel, X Server 1.4.99.905, and GCC 4.3.1. Ubuntu 8.10 Alpha 4 with the daily updates still uses the Linux 2.6.26 kernel, X Server 1.4.99.905, and GCC 4.3.1. Finally, Mandriva 2009 Beta 2 is using the Linux 2.6.26 kernel, X Server 1.4.2, and GCC 4.3.1.

In some tests the stock Eee Linux distribution was running quite slow and placing far behind Mandriva, Fedora, and Ubuntu, but when it came to the solid-state disk performance Xandros had the lead. Overall though, it appears that Ubuntu 8.10 Alpha 4 had delivered the best performance on the Intel Atom architecture. These are just our initial figures though. We are still running some additional benchmarks on the Eee PC 901 to look for the best Linux OS, but it looks like it is a toss-up right now depending upon how the system will be used. With Ubuntu 8.10 now using the Linux 2.6.27 kernel, the results of the final release will certainly be different.

To read the full article head over to Phoronix

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Google Chrome – Impressions, Links And Running it in Linux using Wine

Sep5th
2008 3 Comments Written by Sathya

Much like most of Google’s projects Google Chrome was launched all of a sudden yesterday. Though it was “discovered” rather “accidentally” by one a Google insider hitting the send button containing the comic-book type images of Google Chrome’s workings(excuse me, a Google guy hitting the “Send” button accidentally? Yeah,right! (Santosh agrees with me too on this one). And the hype was unprecedented. Once the hype died down and everyone got to try – the impressions were rather more or less universal, mainly being

 

  • Its frikking fast
  • Its too basic
  • Chrome aims IE userbase rather than Firefox
  • Unless addons are brought in, most Firefox users would not switch to Chrome.
  Google Chrome is basically the best of Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, Safari and Internet Explorer all rolled into 1. You have the benefit of rendering engine – WebKit which powers Safari and Konqueror(since Webkit is a fork of KHTML which powers Konqueror), you have the equivalent of Internet Explorer’s InPrivate mode, Opera’s speed dial-like homepage, and Firefox’s addon capability(though not there at the moment).
Now what’s my take ?
Well for one, the homepage is similar yet different from Opera’s speed dial. Unlike Opera’s Speed  Dial which requires you to manually set the web pages, Chrome does so automatically based on which pages you most frequently visit –  One step better than Mozilla Firefox’s Most visited button.

Homepage

You can also search through your history pages, or open your recently closed tab pages right from the home page(Incidentally, it also shares Firefox’s shortcut for Reopening the recently closed tab – just hit Ctrl + Shift + T) and bingo!

I did like the UI – its plain, simple, and free from clutter – gives me maximum space for my web viewing purposes. Just have a look at the pic below – no irritation menu bars or huge buttons (thought the omission of stop button is unforgivable).

Chrome - Full

 

I also like the way the just 2 buttons which are placed next to address bar – these 2 allow you to configure most of Chrome’s options, and have links for openings new tabs, new windows, and the Incognito mode – which, like IE’s InPrivate mode, doesn’t store history, cookies etc of the sites visited under this mode.
Then there are also some neat touches that I like 
  • Re-sizable text boxes. – Unlike most browsers, Chrome gives you an option to resize the text boxes – perfect if you want to type some especially long sentences – say an address probably, but the default width provided was too less. Just hold and drag the handle the edge of the text box and resize
  • Popup status bar at the bottom – Again, unlike most browsers, you don’t have a fixed size status bar, eating away real estate. The status bar pops unintrusively while the page loads and then disappears. It again pops up while hovering over a link – real smooth!
  • Chrome is frikking fast – whether on pages which heavily use JavaScript or not – I suspect its because, like Opera, the WebKit rendering engine grabs and displays text first, images later – this is especially obvious if you’re using a slow connection like I am
  • Chrome seems to be localized to specific countries – For example in the Manage search engine page, Chrome offers me, in the list Choices of MSN India, Guruji, Yahoo! India and Rediff

Search Engines

  • The whole moving tab-thingy is neat! You can detach a tab from a window, and it becomes a separate window! Similarly, moving a lone window to an existing Chrome window attaches it as a tab!

Tabs Tabs detached

 

  • Chrome comes with its own task manager! You can kill any tab, or plugin. And as its been mentioned, every tab is a new process and hence even if 1 tab freezes, it doesn’t take down the entire browser – though Chrome hasn’t crashed at all for me.
Google Chrome is still in beta(the version number is 0.2.149.27) and it shows – there are several drawbacks:
  • One of the MOST CRITICAL drawback, atleast for me is the lack of RSS support – RSS is the killer, I use Firefox’s Live Bookmarks extensively, and can’t live without it. Is this Google’s way of telling we won’t give you an RSS reader, use Google Reader if you want ? Though I _do_ use Google Reader extensively, I would also prefer something like live bookmarks
  • No Addons/extensions as now, but hey, it’s still early days
  • Some pages don’t work with Chrome yet, most notably Google Analytics and Lively!
  • The save/retrieve password is bit of a miss – it suggests passwords based on domains only, and not on sub-domain, page basis
  • It may not consume memory but it _does_ eat up a LOT of CPU.

Task Manager

 

  • The options page is still simplistic, and looks like a direct rip from Firefox. And it uses IE’s proxy settings! Clcik on proxy, and it loads up the Internet settings used by IE – pushed out a little too fast?
  • And hey, WTF is it with that shitty 475kb Bootstrapper thingy huh ? 
All in all, Google Chrome has got a nice start – I will definitely be using both Chrome and Firefox – lets see what the Big G has in store for the future.
Here are some links 

 

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Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron Chronicles – A Look At Installation and First Glance

May1st
2008 13 Comments Written by Sathya

Quite a lot of people have been waiting for the latest release of Ubuntu, version 8.04 dubbed the “Hardy Heron” – primarily because it’s a LTS release. So how does the Hardy Heron stack up? I decided to jump into the Hardy Heron brigade and have a look. Is it worth the upgrade?

Read on to find out more!

System Specifications

I used my beloved Dell Inspiron 1520(Intel Core2Duo T5250 @ 1.5 Ghz, 2 GB DDR2 667 RAM, nVidia 8600m GT, Intel 3945 Pro/Wireless) for testing out the Hardy Heron.

I had a pretty bad time with Gutsy – no sound despite the sound card being detected, LCD brightness varying as if its possessed etc – these resulted with me removing Gutsy and going back to openSUSE 10.3.

Also, generally I’ve always tested the 32-bit versions of most distros. This time I decided to break the tradition and go with the 64-bit version.

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Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 3 Impressions

Feb14th
2008 3 Comments Written by Sathya

Yesterday, Mozilla announced that the 3rd beta of the next version of their immensely popular web browser, Mozilla Firefox would be available for download. I’d posted earlier on the impressive changes between Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 Beta 2. So what does the third Beta bring? Let’s have a look.

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