So yeah that actually happened! I’ve always wanted to publish a book and thanks to Apress publishing – that is a reality now. The book is titled “Practical Docker With Python: Build, Release and Distribute your Python App with Docker” and is targeted at people who are new to Docker and want to containerize their application (with an example Python chat bot). The book starts with a brief introduction to containers and Docker, guides you on how to get started with Docker before diving into deeper topics such as Docker Networks, Volumes and Compose.

About 2 weeks ago, Wakoopa announced that they will be shutting down their social network soon & focusing on “Corporate Research”. Unfortunately that day is here. Just received an email stating that as of today, you can grab an export of your data. This is what they have to say about the export The export is a CSV file containing the following columns: application name, subcategory, category, the number of seconds you’ve used the application in the hour, the hour you’ve used the application in, the date of the usage, the operating system and your user id.

I’m a huge fan of Chrome & pretty much loved whatever changes Chrome team have done to the browser since it’s inception. This change, however, is probably the first annoying thing that I’ve run into.

Few days ago, after the latest dev channel update, all the extension icons on went missing. I initially thought all my extensions got wiped out. However, after heading over to chrome://extensions I realized that the update had a new “Show button” feature next to the extensions list and they had been set to hide all :|

Sauber F1 Team – World Premiere: Cutaway F1 Race Car – YouTube. The Sauber F1 team has this video of a F1 car spliced right in the middle, showing us all the components that make up a F1 car. OF all the years that I’ve been watching Formula 1, I think this is the first time I’ve seen such detailed info about a F1 car. What’s fascinating to me is the driver’s(Sergio Pérez in the video) sitting position.

I first spent weeks arguing on a bugzilla that the security policy of requiring the root password for changing the timezone and adding a new wireless network was moronic and wrong. I think the wireless network thing finally did get fixed, but the timezone never did – it still asks for the admin password. So here’s a plea: if you have anything to do with security in a distro, and think that my kids (replace “my kids” with “sales people on the road” if you think your main customers are businesses) need to have the root password to access some wireless network, or to be able to print out a paper, or to change the date-and-time settings, please just kill yourself now.

Q: What does Linux need to be if its going to be a real contender to Windows? What are you guys doing about that? A: It needs support from the major players. Personally I think we need to lure: Steam Adobe (all their stuff) Autodesk (all their stuff we don’t have) We also are going to need to increase the buy in from hardware vendors. Nvidia/AMD/Intel all need to care about 2x what they do right now about.

This is a place to find information about some of the more fundamental algorithms used in computer science. This information is widely available on the net, but hopefully the way it’s presented and discussed here will resonate with you. via simple algorithms. Very nice illustrations of every step of various algorithms.

However, there’s one thing I always thought could be drastically improved in many open source projects: The User Experience. When I ask a not-so-techinal friend why they don’t use some open source project instead of commercial one many say that “it’s because ugly”. […] Designers are scared of developers. Developers speak a foreign language, they are like aliens. Developers don’t package their source code in .zip files, instead we use some scary thing called version control.

ln -s d1 d2 # Am I the only person who gets this the wrong way round every fucking time? Similar to most people who have posted there – I used to still get it wrong every time. It’s become a habit for me to do a man ln or ln –help before I execute this command : Great tip here though: but then I finally found out about the relationship between ln and cp

Unity Gnome Shell OS X Launchpad Manish{#aptureLink_mCbyylmV5l}‘s tweet about Gnome shell being usable resulted in this impromptu conversation and comparison. I know all three are in development – but this how it looks currently. Gnome-shell looks way too cluttered, Unity’s icons seem to be too big while Launchpad seems to have gotten the right balance.

Due to the continuous demand for downsizing both our installation media, as well as the install footprint, we looked for packages which we should eliminate […], but also for stuff that users generally don’t need and won’t miss. IMO package changelogs very much fall into the latter category, so they were very high on the “first against the wall” list. Changelogs are of course a valuable developer tool, but for those it is usually less important to have them available locally, as long as there is a convenient method to access them.

You must’ve heard enough number of times about Ubuntu 10.10 “Maverick Meerkat” being released{#aptureLink_NJkWyum11e} today, so I won’t bore you with the details. What I would like to highlight is that AskUbuntu{#aptureLink_dXd1efcd0B}, previously known as ubuntu.stackexchange.com, was also launched today. For the unknown, Stack Exchange is collection of sites focusing on Question & Answer style, instead of the traditional forum discussion style. As an active participant in couple of Stack Exchange sites{#aptureLink_TpvQs0A2kR}, it’s good to see one dedicated to Ubuntu, and I must confess, the site looks fantastic.

We tested every major release of Fedora from Fedora 10 “Cambridge” through the most recent Fedora 14 “Laughlin” Alpha build. […] Up for testing was a Lenovo ThinkPad R52, Lenovo ThinkPad T60, and a Lenovo ThinkPad T61. _After 4 pages and a bunch of graphs which make no sense _ From these battery power consumption results from the past five Fedora releases using three different notebooks, it does not appear that the power performance is vastly improving — or at least just not in the past two years for the selection of hardware we used.

Richard M Stallman was in Bombay recently{#aptureLink_ezdj5ZajHB}, as I found when Aditya Sengupta{#aptureLink_G3xUyHaQjg} tweeted if anyone had questions{#aptureLink_ISHBjxViqn} for him. I asked Sengupta if there any plans to record the sessions and upload them, Sengupta said he’d have to check and come back. Few days after the event, Sengupta sent me an @reply saying that the videos had been uploaded, so thought I’ll post it here for easy reference.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. This picture{#aptureLink_ZLuYVKGOuU} speaks for itself. Yes, its fugly. What the heck are those 3 bloody orbs ?

It seems Oracle is hellbent on destroying whatever good Sun had done to the Open Source Ecosystem. The latest product to get the axe seems to be none other than the Flagship Virtualization program xVM VirtualBox. [….] All tests show that VirtualBox 3.2 lacks any semblance of stability, crashing any operating system running on it randomly. VirtualBox 3.1.8, using the binary-only release for Linux, works like a charm. It is also apparent that VirtualBox 3.

If you check the latest versions of IronRuby, IronPython or the Dynamic Language Runtime you will see that Microsoft has now relicensed the code from the Microsoft Permissive License to the Apache 2 License via Microsoft Licensing Changes for IronRuby and IronPython – Miguel de Icaza.

Couple of days ago, there was a huge debate (argument ?)  between Matt Mullenweg  – developer of WordPress and Chris Pearson – developer of Thesis premium theme over twitter which then extended to Mixergy.

Crux of the argument is the disagreement amognst the two over the licensing terms. Matt believes that Thesis should adopt GPL{#aptureLink_Q1kNtLltNY} which as Wikipedia states:

The GPL is an example of a powerful copyleft license that requires derived works to be available under the same copyleft.

Chris, on the otherhand disagrees with this. The full transcript of their discussion is available on Mixergy, here are some quotes which I found interesting:

Recently, I bought a pair of those new Western Digital Caviar Green drives. These new drives represent a transitional point from 512-byte sectors to 4096-byte sectors. A number of articles have been published recently about this, explaining the benefits and some of the challenges that we’ll be facing during this transition. Reportedly, Linux should unaffected by some of the pitfalls of this transition, but my own experimentation has shown that Linux is just as vulnerable to the potential performance impact as Windows XP.

A whole linux distro, Slackware based I believe, to train you in the dark arts. This distro is deliberately insecure, containing out of date packages, mis-configured apps, and loads of training material. It comes as a live dvd download, so you can run it up as and when you want to practice your skills. via Damn Vulnerable Linux. Will be interesting to check it out.

I’ve been using openSUSE for quite some time now, but this is definitely the first time that I’ve noticed this ( though probably because I tend to use zypper or the 1-click install rather than entering YaST). Edit: Output of zypper lr -u http://pastebin.com/awfeBeLP Output of zypper se -s -i -t pattern http://pastebin.com/DJc8HsLG Output of zypper sl -d http://pastebin.com/LxLREddG Edit 2: Andreas Jaegar{#aptureLink_6hGvH0hOns} comments on the above: Found it: The pattern is part of Mono Community pattern.

Top 10 Totally Amazing Wallpapers Made Using Inkscape Amazing stuff. via Top 10 Totally Amazing Wallpapers Made Using Inkscape | Tech Drive-in.

Well it’s no secret that I’m a music fan and love to keep my music organized, and neatly tagged. ( Well, if you didn’t – now you do ). I’d posted quite sometime ago on how to keep your music well tagged and organized{#aptureLink_3xJl5k39gE}, so there’s pretty much no way that my files wouldn’t be tagged.

Of course, there exceptions here and there but majority are tagged. So I was rather surpised today when Amarok , during playback wasn’t showing any metadata. To verify – I installed id3v2, a CLI tool to view/edit ID3 tags for mp3 files using zypper and – guess what- it showed the meta data correctly.

I’ve become mesmerized by Linus’ speeches. I’m currently scoping out on the speeches done by him (Interviews, maybe OK but I’m looking for his epic speeches in particular ). If you know of any, please drop a comment so that I can add them.

OK, OK You don’t exactly win anything, but just for fun – can you identify the icons ? Really, shouldn’t be that much difficult ;)

Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” released, but reception hasn’t been spectacular. Poll on Ubuntu forums indicates that ~ 39% of users have had problems they could not fix{#aptureLink_w7mk4Gj53R}. Upgrading from{#aptureLink_o93sno8FFY} Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope to 9.10 Karmic Koala. Installing nVidia drivers{#aptureLink_cSXrJksL0x} (v190.42) in Ubuntu KDE 4.3.3 released{#aptureLink_oXTbIbKNeA}, brings in few bug fixes. Experiencing Sabayon 5{#aptureLink_9hqyejQU50} //personal note: must try it soon. First GNOME 3.0 development release available{#aptureLink_Dr8Kjty26c}.

Been a while since I’ve composed a post, work’s taken a toll on me and leave me with very little time :( 

Rather having no updates at all, decided to post some links which I found interesting and made for good read. So here we go!

Couple of days ago, Veetrag informed me that YAPodcast will covering Linux as the topic for this week’s podcast and asked me if I could join. Naturally, I agreed(how can I refuse!). Anyways so here it is: YAPodcast 14: Linux for beginners: Download it. Do drop your comments and feedback, they would be much appreciated.

The holidays are upon us :) ‘t is the season to be jolly, and Wade Olson has come up with some amazing Christmas wallpapers with a distinct KDE flavour.

Installing Linux software through repositories is the safe bet. In respect with Ubuntu, there are many software in Intrepid Ibex which I feel is crap. For eg: the “Hardware Drivers” does not have drivers for older kernels. On the other hand, there are many software (like Brasero, Transmission,Totem,VLC etc.) in Hardy that needs update, which the Hardy repositories have not provided till now. To bridge these gaps, I would like to provide you all with the repositories of Hardy and Intrepid.

NOTE: Please think twice before installing software from other Ubuntu version repositories. It may screw up your installation

HARDY HERON REPOSITORIES:

I have provided the older ones and two updates, just in case for those people who will want to install the older versions of software.

Codeweavers’ CrossOver software, which allows you to run Windows programs on your Linux and Mac machines, has a Lame Duck offer in which for today ONLY they’ve put up unlocked builds of Codeweavers’ CrossOver for Mac and Linux, and are allowing you to download them FREE OF COST. Make the best use of this opportunity, head over to Codeweaver’s site or use these Direct Download links Download CrossOver Mac Pro

In my previous posts, I’d mentioned about Canonical’s Ship It program, which sends Ubuntu disc for free to your door step, Fedora’s Free Media program, which ships Fedora media wherever you it shipped. .I’d also mentioned Oracle sending their Oracle Unbreakable Linux for free(though to date I haven’t received them). Now, Sun Microsystems joins the list of vendors offering free media. Head over to this page and fill in the form and request for your OpenSolaris CD.

By now, you must’ve heard of Ubiquity. If not, well read on! Ubiquity is an add-on to Mozilla’s extremely popular Firefox browser. Ubiquity allows you to do things – say search for something, get the latest weather updates, book reviews, so on and so forth, just by typing the commands into the Ubiquity input box – rather than by going over to address bar, typing the URL for each individual site, etc.

Dropbox – the awesome online file-storage, and syncing utility finally gets a Linux client! The developers have been promising a Linux client since day one and though it took them a while to get it – it’s finally here!

It seems the past year has been the season of re-invention of menus. The traditional KDE style menu was majorly redesigned and revamped to give the Slab aka Kickoff menu.

The next style of menus comes from Cole Anste, who’s put forward and implemented his version of Don Hopkin’s version of the Pie Menu.

Images depicting the various menu-styles

A lot of you out there must’ve read Linux Hater’s Blog, a blog with (some valid) rants about what’s wrong about Linux. John M Anderson ponders over what made him shift from Windows to Linux and here’s some of his choice quotes

You just bought built a brand new computer and want to install the brand spankin’ new Windows Vista Ultimate, you plop down $300, and away you go! What does $300 get you? A bare minimum operating system with nothing but MS Paint and Media Player.

Anyone who’s worked on Linux must’ve come across a fair share of ACPI-related problems – lockups, standby problems etc. Some of the “solutions” is to disable ACPI support by passing the noacpi parameter during boot-up. So why is ACPI so problematic under Linux?

The creator of the Linux kernel, and some of his choice quotes “Software is like sex: it’s better when it’s free.” “Microsoft isn’t evil, they just make really crappy operating systems.” “My name is Linus, and I am your God.” “See, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux, you have to be a sneaky bastard too.” “The Linux philosophy is ‘Laugh in the face of danger’.

Enjoy a Better Web Sounds like a good deal, right? All you have to do is get Firefox 3 during Download Day to help set the record for most software downloads in 24 hours – it’s that easy. We’re not asking you to swallow a sword or to balance 30 spoons on your face, although that would be kind of awesome. By the way, the official date for the launch of Firefox 3 will be posted soon – so check back!

While hanging out in #IndiaTwits, Shyam aka codelust brought to my attention of this post in Kragen hacks Mailing list. So I’m installing an OS on my laptop, and for whatever reason, the Debian Etch install disk thought it would be a good idea to initialize the whole disk to random data *before* rather than *after* the rest of the install. Writing to the whole disk takes a long time — a few hours — and so I’m left with the Debian netinst environment to play with.

In order to optimize the YaST partitioner module for openSUSE users the user experience team decided to conduct a small survey to figure out how you deal with hard disk configuration. The survey contains some basic questions and its results will directly influence the redesign for the partitioner module. The survey will be online until 28th May 2008 and the results will be published on openSUSE.org as soon as possible.

It gives me great pleasure to announce that my good friend, Kunal Gautam has launched a blog on Linux, “Linux For All – Making Linux usable for all from newbies to techies“. Kunal is a gem of a person, is well versed in all the latest techonologic trends and I’m proud to say that he is one of the persons who I’ve convinced to make a shift from Windows to Linux and is extremely happy with it.

Via – TechThrob

After few months of server downtime, Ubuntu Live Stats is operational again! The main idea behind this project is to reflect the enormous activity Ubuntu has on all fronts. Simply put, Ubuntu Live Stats gathers data from every source they think is interesting – ie, from forum, both English as well as other languages, bugs from Launchpad, ideas from Brainstorm, new and also security updates and updated packages, all combined into a single website.

Korneliusz Jarzebski, the autor polishlinux has posted a neat article on visual changes in KDE 4.1. Amongst new features include an option in the taskbar to Show tasks from the current screen only, ability to resize Kickoff menu. Kwin also gains the Coverswitch effect, which is a visual effect similar to Cover Flow in Compiz Fusion and in MacOS X(and one of the neatest effects, I might add). Marble, the geography app also gains a new view & the maps can be watched using Globe, Flat and Mercator views.

The good folks over at Free Software Magazine got bored writing regular articles on free software. For some chuckles, they decided to research on some easter eggs. Here’s what they found. What is it with cows and GNU/Linux? Let me answer my own self-serving question and show you some varied and slightly bizarre examples of human randomness. Assuming you are running under Ubuntu from a terminal type: apt-get help | grep -i super This APT has Super Cow Powers.

andLinux is a complete Ubuntu Linux system running seamlessly in Windows 2000 based systems (2000, XP, 2003, Vista [32-bit only])   andLinux uses CoLinux as its core which is confusing for many people. CoLinux is a port of the Linux kernel to Windows. Although this technology is like VMware or Virtual PC, CoLinux differs itself by being more of a merger of Windows and the Linux kernel and not an emulated PC, making it more efficient.

For all those people who miss Amarok badly while on Windows, well fear not, your dream has come true….almost. With the release of KDE4.0 which uses Qt4 framework, which has been GPL’d and available for Windows and MacOSX, a lot of effort has been put in to port KDE4 for Windows, which allows Amarok to be run under Windows as well. At the moment, just a tech preview has been released, and you can get the steps required to install Amarok under Windows over at KDE techbase.

If you’ve ever followed KDE 4 development then you’ve probably heard about Marble. Marble is a virtual globe which displays the earth. So Marble can be used as a nice digital replacement for your desktop globe at home where you can look up places. But wait! There’s more to it: Actually these days Marble can also display flat maps (thanks to Carlos Licea), can show different “map themes” and can serve as a Qt4-widget as well as an application!

Being a Linux user can be really funny. You just go =)) reading few ignorant Windows users’ comments on How Linux is crap bla bla bla. Today’s source for making me laugh comes by way of Christopher Dawson’s article on ZDNet on Why Linux Will Not Displace Windows(a rather nicely written article, though). The best thing about such articles are the comments written by, let’s saw, rather “well informed” users.

Let’s take a couple of examples.

Virtualization is a concept most likely you will be familiar of.

Take an example. Consider PSCX. It’s an emulator, which allows you you to play PS2 games on a PC right? That’s basically virtualization at work. Virtualization is a fancy name for emulation. Virtualization software allows you to virtualize a machine, create a “virtual” PC – you can do anything on the virtual pc as you can do on a normal PC – Install an OS, run applications, compile applications, surf the web, the applications are limit less. So why virtualize you may ask?

Well that depends on what you want to do. If you’re a developer, wanting to test cross-platform applications(ie, applications that will run across multiple OS) virtualization provides you to do so without the hassles of actually installing the required OS.

Some terminology:

Brandon over at LinuxFUD has posted about the top 10 list of themes used by anti-Linux FUD campaigners. He states, The following is my Top 10 list of themes used by anti-Linux FUD campaigns. This list is based on observations made over my years of following the Linux market. The ranking loosely correlates to frequency of usage and is somewhat subjective at best. Understanding each pattern will help you recognize a nicely-prepared piece of FUD when you encounter it.

While browsing through TuxMachine’s articles, I read this article. Budding people interested in creating a Distro, make sure you read this.

One of the core principles of open source development is “freedom”. As such, there are few limitations for developers and end users to take the work of others and move it into a direction they deem better. This has led to a proliferation of Linux distributions, remasters and scores of applications that sometimes are hard to distinguish from other

distributions, remasters or applications. It’s not an ideal situation but somehow quality material always seems to stick around, while the rest sinks back into oblivion.

Another core principle is perhaps “respect”. Freedom is never an absolute. You can fork a distribution or an application, but you don’t have the freedom to remove or change the underlying licenses. You respect that. Why this introduction?

The case of Ultumix

One of CHIP-India’s forum members, Sujith Poojari had posted a link to 25 Top 3D games for Linux. Some of them I’ve already played like Armagetron Advanced, BZFlag, Sauerbraten, Scorched 3D, TORCS while some others unknown to me, such as Racer(been playing it recently, good graphics! controls need refinement though), PlaneShift etc. So enjoy these games and have a blast!

Armagetron Advanced

Armagetron is a multiplayer game in 3d that attempts to emulate and expand on the lightcycle sequence from the movie Tron. It’s an old school arcade game slung into the 21st century. Highlights include a customizable playing arena, HUD, unique graphics, and AI bots. For the more advanced player there are new game modes and a wide variety of physics settings to tweak as well.

With the first release of KDE4 framework, KDE 4.0 just few days away — as the above counter shows, the next few articles will have a look at some of the features new to KDE 4.0

In case you’re still wondering what the KDE4 hoopla is all about, then keep reading. KDE4 is the next-generation of the immensely popular K Desktop Environment. KDE seels to fulfill the need for a powererful yet easy to use desktop for UNIX and Linux workstations. The aim of the KDE project for the 4.0 release is to put the foundations in place for future innovations on the Free Desktop. The many newly introduced technologies incorporated in the KDE libraries will make it easier for developers to add rich functionality to their applications, combining and

connecting different components in any way they want.

KDE4 introduces and updates many of KDE’s core components, notably a port to Qt 4. It will contain a new multimedia API, called Phonon, a device integration framework called Solid and a new style guide and default icon set called Oxygen. It will also include the new desktop and panel user interface tool, called Plasma, which will have support for desktop widgets, similar to SuperKaramba or Apple’s Dashboard widgets. The port to Qt 4 will facilitate support for non-X11-based platforms, including Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. One of the overall goals of KDE 4 is to be more easily portable to different operating systems.

Couple of days ago, Mozilla released the second Beta for the third version of their immensely popular browser, Firefox. Now generally I stay away from beta versions of software, but when Subbu told me it’simproved a lot over the first beta, I just rushed to download it & try it out.

Let’s have a look at the new features of the Second Beta:

Consider this: You’re sitting infront of your desktop, with the login screen infront of you. However, you can’t seem to recall the username/password combo. Frustrating isn’t it? Here’s an application which is a fit solution for the problem: Revelation.

Revelation is a password manager application, mainly designed for the Gnome desktop. (This doesn’t mean however that you won’t be able to used in other desktop environments such as KDE or Xfce, it’s just that you won’t be able to enjoy the full features package.) It stores all your sensitive data in an encrypted XML file, protected by AES encryption which you can access using a master password. Basically, if you decide to use this program, the master password will be the single one you’ll even have to remember from now on, for the rest of your (online) life.

Features:

When I got my Dell Inspiron, the first thing that I wanted to do was install openSUSE 10.3 on it. After all openSUSE has been serving me well all these years! Because of time restrictions and office workload being too much, I couln’t do it. So when the weekend arrived, I decided to install it!

             Since I dont have an Internet connection, downloading it was out of the question, so I had grabbed a copy of last month’s Digit magazine which had a Bootable openSUSE10.3 version on it. Initially I was weary, especially with the partitioning and the bootloader settings(I’ve done this lots of times, my hesistation was because of Dell MediaDirect occupying the first partition of the HDD. But then I just threw all fear and caution out the door, inserted the DVD and booted up my laptop.

             The green “Welcome” openSUSE splash screen is just awesome and put me in the right mood. After clicking on next couple of times, I ran into trouble. The installer’s partitioning tool informed me saying the NTFS partition could not be resized, as there were inconsistencies in the filesystem and informed me to do a file system check.

In an interview with the IT news magazine, InformationWeek Linus Torvalds speaks on where Linux is heading in 2008. He says that he is very gung-ho about solid-state drives, expects progress in graphics and wireless networking, and says the operating system is strong in virtualization despite his personal lack of interest in the area.

Here’s an excerpt of the interview:

“Penguin Pete” gives 10 reasons as to why the command line is far better than GUI. And yeah, I do agree with him. Something as simple as installing as application is a lot easier! I mean c’mon tell me, which is better, telling someone to type “sudo apt-get install xxx” or “Click on the Button, Click on system, click on utilities, click on install” etc. Wouldn’t you agree? I prefer the command line way–not because it’s geeky, because it saves you a lot of time!

Here’s his reasons:

• Keying is faster than mousing.
• It’s easier to both give and get help.
• Repetitive stress injury comes from the mouse, not the keyboard.
• Commands are standard where GUIs are not.
• Commands are more powerful.

Penguin as logo/mascot for Linux was discussed first in early 1996 by several people in the linux-kernel mailing list. The idea of such mascot came from Alan Cox first. Among many other suggestions made by different people there were parodies of other operating system logos, sharks or even eagles.

At some point Linus Torvalds casually mentioned that he was rather fond of penguins and it stopped the debates at once.

The first person called the penguin “Tux” was James Hughes who said that it stood for “(T)orvalds (U)ni(X)”. Tux was designed for a Linux logo contest.