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 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.

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 ?

I’ve owned a Sony Ericsson HBH-DS970 for nearly 2 years now{#aptureLink_GW9kUit5Kx}, and I use it pretty often with my previous phone ( the Sony Ericsson P1i{#aptureLink_Szc3RZREO3} ), and my current iPhone 3G. I also use it occasionally on my laptop. It has worked fine in Windows XP, Vista & Windows 7. Getting it to work with Linux, however has been an EPIC FAIL. The last time I tried it was probably a year ago, and I just gave up in frustration and continued to use my EP-630 as the earphone.

Been a while since I posted ;) For some strange reason, recently I got an urge to try out ArchLinux{#aptureLink_BWSwiwROlt}. After much deliberation finally decided to try out ArchLinux again, in VirtualBox{#aptureLink_YQu9cIpVYm}. My little install guide I compiled as I was reading through the Official ArchLinux Install Guide{#aptureLink_OrVThoOrTI} + Beginner’s Guide{#aptureLink_AMQvvRytbx}.

Please note: This is highly customized according to *my* requirements and nowhere as thorough /generalized as the official guides. Still, it might help you. Here we go –

I am probably writing this post too late. To many out there this could be an old news. But, since it was long since I wrote on Sathya Says, (been searching for something to write about) and also this post is worth featuring here, I decided to write this. ;)

Recent times has given birth to many ideas in beautifying one’s desktop. Windows+Linux and related people contribute much towards this. Like Stardock, for example, is a company that offers variety of products to customise your Windows desktop. WinCustomize.com is also another website worth mentioning.

While going through some of KDE settings I found this simple way to enable Anti Aliasing for Fonts (also known as ClearType in Windows). This will definitely make your fonts more pleasing to look at.

For this, just launch KDE settings – this is generally known as Configure Desktop in openSUSE or System Settings in Kubuntu.

Well recently I’d bought an external 750GB USB hard disk, as I was running out of space on my laptop. Now this drive requires an external power source, so I just cant lug it everywhere with my laptop in my room so I thought I’ll connect this to my other laptop, and share the drive (the other laptop is my office one, runs on Windows) and I could access this drive over WiFi. While accessing the drive contents via Dolphin was pretty easy thanks to the smb kparts (ie, to access just type smb:/// oh btw this works in Gnome 2.23 as well) trying to access the drive in Amarok via smb kparts would result in Amarok crashing. Hence I decided to mount it. I was sorta stuck, as I read the man pages for mount which mentioned smbfs is available but then mount kept throwing ‘unknown filesystem type smbfs”.

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!

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

LiveCDs are a great way to try out (new) Linux distros on your system.

Unfortunately CDs get scratched pretty easily, and can turn into a coaster pretty soon.

With prices of USB pen drives at rock bottom, they’re probably the best way to try out LiveCDs. Generally its not that easy to make a bootable LiveCD using USB pen/flash drives. If you’re a Fedora lover then here’s a very easy way to create a bootable USB pen drive.

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

Amarok is probably amongst the best audio player and jukebox software, bar none. This feature rich software is  also very flexible and extensible. By making use of third party scripts (and writing your own, if you know, say Python or Ruby) you can enrich your experience your Amarok experience. Here’s a list of some must have Amarok scripts

• weekalarm

weekalarm is one heck of a alarm script – you can set multiple alarms for the day, different times for different days, support for snooze and nap, make use of fading, and even use a separate playlist for your alarm tunes. Can’t imagine waking up without this one!

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?

In my previous post, I’d mentioned about Virtualization – what it is, how useful it is to test new softwares, distros etc. Now while working in your virtual machine, you’d obviously save some data – do some wordprocessing, or compatibility testing of your programs, just to name some, all this would mean that the data would be stored in the virtual machine.

Now you would like to have this data on your physical machine. Or alternatively you may want to transfer data from your physical machine to your VM. Of course, you could always go about using the concept of shared folders, but this would require installation of guest-additions. On a linux-based guest, this would require running scripts, and these scripts most likely require kernel-header or kernel source files. Going by my past experience, in most default installations, the header files would not be installed, or simply be missing in all of Live-CD based distributions, requiring downloading of the packages from the Internet. Is there a simpler way of going about this? Yes! Lets see how.

It’s the season of Linux distribution releases! Ubuntu was released about 3 weeks ago, and now it’s time for Fedora 9, aka “Sulphur”. So What’s new?

PackageKit

Much Like Ubuntu’s Add/Remove Programs, Fedora gets a similar one, known as “PacakgeKit”.PackageKit is a cross-distribution package management solution that has a complete yum backend. It has been designed to make installing and updating software on your computer easier, and aims to unify all the graphical package management tools used in different distributions.

GNOME Desktop 2.22 Release

As with Ubuntu 8.04, GNOME 2.22 will power Fedora 9. GNOME 2.22 features lots of new features and improvements, such as a new Nautilus that uses GVFS as its backend. GVFS makes it possible to fix shortcomings of Nautilus such as the inability to restore files from trash, pause and undo file operations, and will make it possible to escalate user privileges for certain operations using PolicyKit for authentication. It also brings a significant performance boost to many operations.

KDE Desktop 4.0.3

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.

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

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.

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:

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.

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.

Laptop Review:

As few might be knowing I’ve purchased a Dell Inspiron 1520. Here’s a short review on it.

Laptop Specifications:

• Processor: Intel Core2Duo T5250 @ 1.5 GHz, 2 MB L2 Cache
• Main memory: 2x1GB DDR2 667 MHz Dual Channel mode
• HDD: Fujitsu MHW2160BH 160GB SATA
• DVD-RW: TSSTcorp DVD+/-RW TS-L632H 8X
• Sound Card: Intel HDA ICH8(82801)
• Graphics Card: nvidia 8600m GT with 256MB RAM
• NIC: BroadCom BCM4401 100
• WiFi: Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG
• Bluetooth: BroadCom BCM2045
• System Chipset: Intel GM965
• Expansion & Misc ports: 4xUSB, 1xIEEE1394, 1xRJ-45, 1xRJ-11, 1xVGA Out, 2xExpressCard 54, 1xHeadphone out, 1xMicrophone In, 1xMedia Card reader(SD/MMC/MS Pro).

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:

I found this blog giving a step-by-step tutorial on how to get Direct 9.0c installed on your Linux box. Worthy of a look I say!

Excerpts:

About DirectX

Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with Direct, such as Direct3D, DirectDraw, DirectMusic, DirectPlay, DirectSound, and so forth. DirectX, then, was the generic term for all of these Direct-something APIs, and that term became the name of the collection. Over the intervening years, some of these APIs have been deprecated and replaced, so that this naming convention is no longer absolute. In fact, the X has caught on to the point that it has replaced Direct as the common part in the names of new DirectX technologies, including XAct, XInput, and so forth.

Windows vs Linux in a friendly fight to be choosen as the right OS for basic everyday use.

How we ranked

• Installation

Installation shouldnot be too messy and should be user friendly. A GUI is preffered and faster installation obviously scores well.Live Cd’s/DVD’s score plus points.

• Default Software

The operating system must come with a good suite of softwares to take care of all your needs.

• Stability

This is the place where the Operating System has to score. It is very important that it doesn’t spur problems routinely.

• Easy Availability and Installation of Softwares

Softwares for the Operating System should be easily available and easily installable.

• Light on System Resources

The Operating System Should not hog your system resources. By hogging you system resources you will get very little performance out of your system.

Introduction to the contenders

Hakan Bayindir at Phoronix writes about ATI’s new drivers, their performance(Non-performance, should I say ?).

It’s been nearly seven months since I wrote my first article about ATI drivers and how they literally crippled my computer and my daily life. Last month, ATI had finally released their latest drivers which contains the new OpenGL component and AIGLX support (AMD 8.42 Linux Display Driver). Was this release worth the amount of hype and did it solve everyone’s problems? For me, simply, no. After seven months of waiting, updating, and struggling, things are not good for me, in every possible feature of the ATI Linux driver I use.

ATI released six drivers since the first article I wrote at Phoronix and I have installed and used all of them. While some of the drivers showed some improvements over my problems, nothing has fully recovered. I am still having some problems, which can be grouped as follows:

· Hardware issues
· 2D acceleration & video playback issues
· 3D acceleration & AIGLX issues

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.

This excellent Linux installation guide was written by my friend, “The Trojan” initially on the CHIP forums. So all credits to him, for writing this excellent post(and note that I’ve taken his permission to reproduce it here).

I am writing this down considering the fact that most of the newbies who want to try out Linux or want to make a shift to it or want to use it along side with Windows are afraid of the installation and the “GEEK” status of the Linux OS. I will try to resolve the issues with both the mental fear of geek status of Linux and the small technical fear of a new operating system.

First with the mental fear as it is necessary that you are mentally ready to do something before actually trying it out! So, what is the reason people fear that Linux is tough to use. Well, Linux is not tough to use, its only that it is a bit more difficult to administer it when compared to Windows Operating systems. So first of all, before installing Linux, be ready that you will have to learn new things and some really interesting facts about the real potential of your hardware and its details will be shown to you. The rules of Linux are much different from that of Windows. But there is JUST NO NEED TO BE AFRAID OF LINUX. It will become easier as you keep on using it.

This is the first BETA release of Linux Mint 4.0, codename Daryna, based on Celena and compatible with Ubuntu Gutsy and its repositories.

Daryna is using Gutsy’s package base (kernel 2.6.22, Gnome 2.20, OpenOffice 2.3, Thunderbird 2.0…etc).