It has been quite a while since I wrote here. Did not find time nor issues to write about.

I tried to install Ubuntu 10.10. The Partition Manager did not detect my partitions. It listed my entire hard disk as one “Unallocated Free Space”. I was puzzled. Everything was fine under Windows XP. Or so I thought.

My hard disk is a 60GB one., partitioned into 10, 25 and 25 GBs. My Disk Management under XP listed thus:

I’ve used find extensively and always wanted to writeup a nice post on this, but the linked post trumps my effort! Copy pasted from his blog, as the person’s allowed to do so. Also, as a general note – before using exec with the actual command, do preview it! ` —————————————————————————————— remove empty directories —————————————————————————————— find . -depth -type d -empty -exec rmdir {} \;` ` —————————————————————————————— change various file attributes

I spend quite a lot of time on Super User( my{#aptureLink_qMmmNb2Xqv} rep{#aptureLink_vjHLLfl9NA} is a testament to that I guess ;) ) – both on the site as well as the mindblowingly awesome chat{#aptureLink_yMJtbXi2I1} (if you haven’t been here, you *must* drop by).

Today a user dropped by and asked a very nice question – which went like{#aptureLink_SWcGTMa5Gf} –

I have some files that have some text in the notes fields(the tab where you put notes in the properties dialog box)… so can I output those texts with using the ls command.

Starcraft 2 [runs] under my Linux install with no issues. Since the game’s official release a few days ago I have been getting a good bit of traffic on those two pages – so I figured I would put together a quick HOWTO for getting Starcraft 2 working on your Linux distro of choice. The game runs under Wine 1.2 and/or CrossoverGames 9.1. Crossover 9.1 Starcraft 2 is listed as “officially support” and as such you will find that it has an entry in the automated games installer.

Here are our key findings: GNOME has a rhythm – there is a measurable increase in activity before release time, and after the annual GNOME conference GUADEC While over 70% of GNOME developers identify themselves as volunteers, over 70% of the commits to the GNOME releases are made by paid contributors Red Hat are the biggest contributor to the GNOME project and its core dependencies. Red Hat employees have made almost 17% of all commits we measured, and 11 of the top 20 GNOME committers of all time are current or past Red Hat employees.

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:

1: The pager I am always shocked at how few people actually use the Linux pager. It’s been around forever and has always served the same functionality — it offers the user multiple desktops to keep the desktop better organized. I employ the pager like this: With four workspaces, I dedicate each workspace to a different use. My layout looks like this: Desktop 1 is for networking tools.

A quickie:

I wanted to change the default application from Banshee/Totem for my media files to VLC ( since I didn’t have proprietary codecs installed, and VLC does). Searched all of YaST/Settings and couldn’t find where to change the default application.

Pardon me, but I don’t find it “all kinds of sexy”. More details{#aptureLink_mk6DfXhOjV}.

I had this problem with a wubi install. Ubuntu would highly pester me and drop to command shell (that of grub) without showing the boot options (Why and who knows??). I every time will have to boot by manually entering boot options (really painful). So I did this. I entered the boot command of the “recovery console” manually by finding it out from grub.cfg through the Live CD. After getting to the repair option I selected the option “Update GRUB”.

Saw this question on SuperUser : How can I add menu items to the Gnome “Applications” menu from the command line? Yet another SuperUser Q RSS Feed Notifier for Linux Seems Canonical will set limits to those who can order free CD’s via Shipit. The discs will still be made available to Local Community team members and Ubuntu contributors. And new Ubuntu users will be able to request a CD.

This is one problem that has affected me the most in my history of Linux usage, so far. Imagine, for two full years I just din’t know that the solution to this problem is so simple. Too late of me to find out. Anyway, better late than never. So the problem is, with my graphics card GeForce FX 5200, Ubuntu liveCD/post-installation boot will hang mid-way, with the boot-screen freezing or a big set of hexadecimal codes getting emitted.

So this is a short post on one pestering problem. If youre using Jaunty and find this problem then use the link that follows. When i installed Jaunty i had problems (as usual). One of them was this. First off, videos wont play in any video player. Codecs are in place, no doubt. But the player would go crashing down. Even vlc, which uses a seperate set of codecs fails :(

It’s been a while since I last used Ubuntu – I have generally shunned away from Ubuntu since Fiesty – for the main reason that I’m more of KDE guy, I never really liked Gnome, and my experience with Fiesty was rather unsavoury. You might say ‘hey you want KDE try Kubuntu’ –  Kubuntu – well I won’t get started on that. I’ve been using Sabayon and was pretty darn impressed with that. With Jaunty being due for release soon, I decided to check Jaunty, even more so after Manish{#aptureLink_LdqSI5xV6h} kept raving about Jaunty’s performance{#aptureLink_LyArR3kODf}.

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!

After a long time’s search over the internet for many days I finally figured out how to do this. Many may know this already but many may not too. And since I hate to compile programs from sourceI have found here a method that involves less of actual compiling. Since am a ubuntu user I only have tried this in ubuntu and not other distros. STEPS Install these packages: compiz-bcop

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!

In my previous posts I’d written on how to mount your partitions using the mount command. In the post I’d mentioned that you’d have to mention the partition that you want to mount by specifying /dev/device_name as part of the command. The question that would come to your mind is, How do I know which of my partition is on what device? So let me show how to find out which partition is on what device!

This could be a very useful post for people who search about and want the  new Intrepid Ibex and its NewHuman theme. There are many clones of the theme available all over the internet in websites like gnome-look.org. However there is also a way to get the original theme through the repositories.

Let’s see how we can go about doing the same.

Many, who do a dual boot with any Linux and Windows will face the problem of Master Boot Record (MBR). In easier words, one of them (Windows or Linux) wont boot after installing/uninstalling the other. This is a small guide I hope many would find it useful.

FIXING WINDOWS BOOT AFTER UNINSTALLING LINUX

Many of us may feel screen resolution as the biggest pest in any OS. If we don’t get the screen resolution we want we get real fed up with the UI (dont we?). Personally, I very much hate if screen resolution gets screwed up and also have faced a lot of problems on that.

So I thought I would make a post on the common problems I faced in ubuntu and I hope it would be useful for other distros too.

Many people would like to use windows’ softwares in linux and would also like to run games in linux using wine. Many softwares and games work pretty well and are fully functional using wine. However, people may find it difficult to digest the fact that exe icons do not get displayed. If the exe icons could be made visible, then it will reduce the need to search for the exe file and will make linux and wine more user friendly.

At the recently held Linux Plumbers’ Conference, 2 Linux developers,  Arjan van de Ven and Auke Kok, demonstrated a Linux system booting in five seconds flat. To demonstrate this, they used an Asus EEE PC using a modified Fedora and modified Moblin. In-fact the bootup was so fast that the they actually had to hold the EEE PC, as the bootup was completed well before the projector could warm up and sync.

To achieve this, they had to look up and identify what was slowing down the system, for this they used a tool, Bootchart, by Ziga Mahkovec, which displays the order of the booting sequence, which modules are taking how much time amongst other details. 

Most of the how-to’s and fixes posted here, are generally my experiences and I post them on how I went about fixing it. This particular how-to was mentioned to me by my very good friend, Bharath, who had this annoying problem of the title bars of every window crashing and disappearing when Emerald is chosen as the decorator.

Generally, I’d recommend running gtk-window-decorator --replace or metacity --replace in terminal – that generally does reinitialize the window decorators. However for Bharath, this particular solution didn’t help and he kept facing the same problem

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.

The good people over at WordPress released WordPress 2.6.2 today. And unlike the previous 2.6.1 release, this release is a mandatory release, to fix a loophole which occurs if your blog has registrations open. From the horse’s mouth: If you allow open registration on your blog, you should definitely upgrade. With open registration enabled, it is possible in WordPress versions 2.6.1 and earlier to craft a username such that it will allow resetting another user’s password to a randomly generated password.

In this day modern day, most software installations can be done using repositories and package managers. However, you might face a situation of having only the source files availalble with you – you probably would want to try out bleeding edge software, which hasn’t been packaged yet, or isn’t available in the repos yet.

So if you really want to try it out, then the only way would be to download the source files and compile them.

Contrary to what most people think – Compiling from sources isn’t that complicated – the entire process takes 3 commands.

Admin’s Note: This is a guest post by Aditya. Though this post was drafted on 1st July, my work commitments and rather bad memory prevented this post being published. Due apologies.

I know that a title is a bit harsh but I am afraid it is true.

First lets get into some technical stuff.

Dream Linux is a Debian based distro(like Ubuntu) . It has both Xfce and Gnome interface. I’m reviewing the Gnome version.

The Installation

The first screen you get after booting into the CD ask you to choose the interface(Gnome or Xfce)

It also has memtest for testing memory but the CD cant be checked for defects, which is a very important feature, since the disk has to be free of defects as it is an operating system.

I choose the Gnome interface and booted. Here’s where I faced my first nightmare. The whole thing is pretty slow. Even after booting completely. I do know that a live CD is slow as it is limited by the optical drive but this was way slower than other live C.D’s.

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.

This is a guest post by Kunal Gautam. This article is aimed at RHEL and Fedora users.

If you’ve been using Linux for a while, then you’d know how much of a pain it is to install a software which runs into dependency problems. One way of getting around this is to use a repository.

What is YUM?

YUM or Yellowdog Updater Modified is an interactive, automated update program which can be used for maintaining system using rpm. Yum is an automatic updater and package installer/remover for rpm systems. It automatically computes dependencies and figures out what things should occur to install packages.

Yum makes it easier to maintain groups of machines without having to manually update each one using rpm.

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.

Project Neon is the codename for a nightly build service for Amarok 2. Neon is intended to be used by everyone who wants to help us find bugs, keep track of development, join development or just wants to live on the bleeding edge. It is not intended to be used instead of a stable and full featured Amarok. Packages for Amarok 2 for Kubuntu are available, and packages for openSUSE should be coming up soon.

Found this article while going random browsing, the original article is from Linux.com with JC Lima reccreates it, with example. Definitely worth reading At first it did not make a lot of sense since unless you have the file open, this will not work. How likely are you to have the files you just deleted by mistake still open? Well, not very likely. BUT…if you own a shared hosting company, (or if you are the system administrator of one), you know that often someone will have poor code along with allow_url_fopen turned on, and in no time you will have hackers injecting and running scripts on your server.

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.

Now that the first beta is out for openSUSE 11.0, you can start to dig in and really start banging on the release to catch bugs before the release candidates and final release. If you’re wondering where to start, Holger Sickenberg has put together an excellent resouce to help guide testing. Holger has compiled a list of new features in openSUSE 11.0 that it would be a good idea to test to ensure that each and every feature works as planned and is as bug-free as possible.

Last week,  the openSUSE team announced the first Beta release of openSUSE 11.0! Some of the many  enhancements and features in the new release include  the incredibly fast package management (libzypp), KDE 3.5.9 and 4.0.3, GNOME 2.22.1, a beautiful new installer, live CDs and much more.

What’s New

It’s that time of the year. Everyone’s excited and looking forward to it. Ofcourse it’s the release of the next LTS version of Ubuntu, Ubuntu 8.04, aka Hardy Heron. So what’re new features expected in Hardy Heron you ask? Well here are some of them

Consider this situation. You want to know much space is available on your hard disk. No big deal, du can tell you the stats. For this open the terminal and type du -h. You will get the required details as below sathya@shaman:~$ du -h /home/sathya/Downloads 35M /home/sathya/Downloads/kubuntu debs 177M /home/sathya/Downloads sathya@shaman:~$ du -h /home/sathya/Downloads/kubuntu\ debs/ 35M /home/sathya/Downloads/kubuntu debs But this isn’t sufficient, and neither is it very elegant. You want to know how much space each file is occupying, or what’s the max filesize occupied by a file.

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.

Only three weeks after Alpha1, we’re glad to announce the release of openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 2. There are various exciting changes in there that we would like to have feedback on.    For more screenshots head over to the Screenshots/openSUSE 11.0 Alpha2 wiki page Changes since openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 1 KDE 4.0.1 replaced KDE 3.5.8 as default KDE GNOME 2.21.90 was integrated Continued work on the Installation workflow Live CDs for both GNOME and KDE CDs support German as an additional language DVDs have only OSS software Linux 2.

Almost everyone would be knowing about ASUS eeePC by now. For the uninitiated, The ASUS eee PC is a subnotebook. The eeePC is powered by a 900 MHz Intel Celeron-M ULV 353 processor, features 512MB of DDR2 RAM and uses Xandros as it’s OS and has an Integrated Intel GMA 900 as its graphics processor. The GMA 900 means that technically the eeePC is capable of running Compiz Fusion. So has anyone done this?

Yes! Someone has! Fred Welland, who received an ASUS eeePC for his birthday according to his blog, has gone ahead and installed Fedora 8 on his eeePC and has mentioned that Compiz and Compiz Fusion are running well on the eeePC.

Here are some excerpts from his Blog:

I got a eeePC for my birthday, in mid-November 2007. It is a wonderfull little machine, that is a nice compliment to my Dell Latitude D820 and various and sundry desktops. The top of this page will be devoted to how I installed Fedora 8 on my eeePC. The bottom part of the page relates my experience with eeePC in general.

Fedora 8 Install Goals

After countless days of waiting, KDE4.0, the first release of the KDE4 framework was released on Friday, January 11. Here’s an official announcement from KDE’s site: The KDE Community is thrilled to announce the immediate availability of KDE 4.0. This significant release marks both the end of the long and intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the beginning of the KDE 4 era. The KDE 4.

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.

The Ubuntu developers are moving very quickly to bring you the absolute latest and greatest software the Open Source Community has to offer. Hardy Heron Alpha 2 is the second alpha release of Ubuntu 8.04, and with this new alpha release comes a whole host of excellent new features. Note: This is still an alpha release. Do not install it on production machines. The final stable version will be released in April 2008.

Contrary to what most people think, it is possible to get all those effects on their Intel based onboard graphics. Now I’ve helped a few friends to get Compiz Fusion running on their Intel cards, and I was requested by them to post this tutorial, so here it goes.

First up, download the required Compiz Fusion packages via 1-click install; Here are the links:

[

1-Click Installer for KDE]1

1-Click Installer for GNOME

1-Click Installer for Compiz Manager

We’ll have make some changes to /etc/X11/xorg.conf as well.

Wine 0.9.51 was released today, with the following main changes: A bunch of WinHelp improvements. Better Japanese font support. A ton of rpcrt4 fixes. Several Alsa capture fixes. Improved support for screen resolution changes. Lots of bug fixes. Binary packages are in the process of being built and it may take a few days for them to appear, but the source is available now. You can find out more about this release in the announcement.

Ubuntu Gutsy has been receiving a huge amount of hype and fan fare recently, and I’ve been following Gutsy closely, from Ubuntu Fridge’s 10 Rocking Features in 10 Days to fellow bloggers and Linux users posts on Gutsy. Naturally after their Feisty launch, expectations were high(from my side). Now I’m not Ubuntu’s biggest fan(I’m a SuSE fellow, Novell haters, meh!), but I appreciate what Ubuntu has been doing for newbie Linux users in general.

I was patiently waiting for the December issue of CHIP magazine and picked it up immediately when it hit the stands, ripped apart the packaging and took out the DVD(yup, that’s right CHIP this month had a bootable DVD of Ubuntu Gutsy :D ) and started about installing it. Launching into the live environment took a good 2 minutes, uncharacteristic of Ubuntu.

We have already told you why you need to shift to linux now we tell you how to shift to it

We have choosen Ubuntu as our distro. Why?

Well Ubuntu is the one, our saviour, our salvation……..

Ok coming back to the topic well Ubuntu is the most user friendly distro I have come across. Though Xubuntu is more user friendly due to its minimalistic nature it will take more of your precious time.

The Installation

All the buntu’s follow the simple 7-step installation procedure.

One you go through the steps you will find that there is really no need for this guide but I’ve run out of ideas for articles so I thought of doing this ;).

Re-buntu:-The reviewing distro

Finally a distro that beats ubuntu. Hold your breath and witness the miracle

So which one is it? This is a distro that’s been released along with ubuntu 5.10(no it’s not Kubuntu). Though many know about it is seldom used. Ok lets cut the suspense it’s Xubuntu-7.04. No don’t close the page read the review to find out why it really beats Ubuntu.

Why the hell did I even try out Xubuntu?

Well I needed to install it on a pretty old system(Pentium-3 700Mhz and 256Mb RAM. So what better than the good old XCFE desktop. While puppy(an 90mb distro using XCFE) misbehaved on this system, Xubuntu did not. It worked like a charm although with slow startup time but still very user friendly.

TechieMoe has put up an interesting article on his experience in getting Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon up and running on his MacBook Pro. Here’s what he writes:

Introduction:

Many times on LinuxForums I’ve come across folks who wanted to run Linux on an Apple computer. Most of the time the first question I ask of them is “If you have an Apple computer, why not just run OS X?” Until this past week, I could not have answered this question.

For several years I’ve run OS X on my Macbook Pro and been quite happy with it. The OS did what I wanted it to do and didn’t get in my way. I’ve been able to do work and play on it just fine. For those of you unaware, I write Java software for a living. I also sometimes coach a high school computer science competition. I spend a lot of time writing Java code and investigating new and exciting features in the language. One such feature is JavaDB. It’s completely new in Java 1.6, and can only be used with that version.

Every one is trying out linux, if you don’t want to be left out read on.

This topic covers what you need to know to shift to the boon called Linux.

Firstly why do you need Linux? Linux is for geeks and their geek factor right?

Well the answer is no. Linux is for those who need a peace of mind.

Let’s take an example here.

You come home tired after a long day’s work and all you want to do is sit in front of your computer and relax but as soon as you turn it on you get a message could not find system32 and windows wont start whatever you do.

So you call your system mechanic and he will comes the next day reinstalls windows an charges you a good 500 bucks. Now your system runs fine and also faster than before and all is well again right?

Again the answer is no.

Within a month or two you will experience the same or a new problem and again its 500 bucks gone.

Now you might ask if I mean to say that Linux is problem-free. I would say no to that. At present all Operating Systems do have their own problems but in the case of Linux it is lesser and you will find more stability and configurability. If this is not compelling enough then read on and I am sure you will reconsider.

StarryHope has a nice article on one of the most popular Linux distributions, Ubuntu. This article aims to find out just how popular Ubuntu really is, and although doesn’t follow any “scientific” methods, some of the tools used to find the popularity include DistroWatch.com – which is simply a ranking of the average number of hits per day that each distro’s page gets on the DistroWatch.com site Website popularity using netCraft Ratings Alexa Ratings  Blogging Trends using Technorati BlogPulse and of course using the 2 big daddies, Google Trends and Digg

Wine 0.9.48 was released today, with the following main changes: Still more fixes for regression test failures. Much more complete cryptnet implementation. WIDL is now able to generate the oleaut32 proxy code. Lots of bug fixes. Binary packages are in the process of being built and it may take a few days for them to appear, but the source is available now. You can find out more about this release in the announcement.

This is Linux Mint 3.1, codename Celena, based on Cassandra and compatible with Ubuntu Feisty and its repositories.

Celena is using Cassandra’s base (kernel 2.6.20-15, Gnome 2.18).

What’s new in Celena

While I was having a discussion on some of the popular Linux distribution on my favorite forum, CHIP TownSquare one of the members(thanks, Aditya :D) suggested me to try out DreamLinux. And I did that, downloaded DreamLinux 2.2 Multimedia GL edition. Since I was using my office PC, I couldn’t install this on the physical HD, had to make use of VMWare.

DreamLinux is a Brazilian distro, based on Morphix, and Debian. The Brazilian connection is evident from the Live CD screen: