Art of Tech

Being a Fedora Package Maintainer

2011-12-19T21:43:00.001+05:30

Source : http://www.thegeekstuff.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/rpm-package-management-300x257.png

Recently I was sponsored by Peter Robinson [1] to become a package maintainer for Fedora. The first I packaged were sugar [2] activities. So far I've packaged,

sugar-ruler - a simple collection of measurement tools
sugar-portfolio - a simple tool for generating slide shows from starred Journal entries

Packages I co-maintain;

sugar-abacus - a simple abacus activity for sugar
sugar-jukebox - media player activity for sugar
sugar-labyrinth - a light weight mind-mapping activity
sugar-typing-turtle - a multilingual animated touch typing trainer
sugar-visualmatch - a visual matching game

A list of packages I own and co-maintain [3].

There are couple of review request filed at the moment;

sugar-fractionbounce [4]
sugar-pukllanapac [5]
sugar-bounce [6]
sugar-flip [7]

[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Pbrobinson

[2] http://www.sugarlabs.org

[3] https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/users/packages/callkalpa?acls=owner&acls=approveacls&acls=commit&acls=watchcommits&acls=watchbugzilla

[4] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=749812

[5] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=741494

[6] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=739263

[7] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=768700

Hanthana Linux 15 released !

2011-12-14T23:39:00.001+05:30

Hanthana Linux [1] project released Hanthana Linux 15 which is the 5th consecutive release of the project. Hanthana Linux 15 ships with Gnome 3 and many more features.

Read more about Hanthana Linux 15 release from here [2].

[1] - www.hanthana.org
[2] - http://blog.hanthana.org/2011/12/10/hanthana-linux-15-released/

Features that impress me on F16 + GNOME 3.2

2011-11-04T01:50:00.000+05:30

It's just 5 more days to go for Fedora 16 release which is named "VERNE". Features of F16 states that it will ship with GNOME 3.2. And Release Notes of GNOME 3.2 lists pretty good features that I longed for so long.

When I go through "What's New for Users" on GNOME, it seems that the developers are more concentrated on making the user easier to interact with his/her online data. In other words making the user interact with his/her online data in a more convenient way.

There are couple of new features that I longed for,

"Notifications in the lower-right corner now include a counter. This makes it easier to see how many emails are waiting for you without having to open your email program, or to determine how many messages you have missed in a particular chat."

I really love the chat notification system implemented with GNOME 3 but if we didn't see the notification it disappears after few seconds where it is gone for ever. We have to point the bottom of the screen, click on individual chat and see it there are any new messages which is tedious specially when there are few chats going on. Now it seems better, where I only have to point to the bottom of the screen and it will show me how many new messages are there. I wish that the notification (at least the new number of chat messages) are displayed in the top most bar where it is visible all the time. Moving on, here is the next feature I like the most,

Online Accounts - "Documents, contacts, calendars — They can be stored locally on the computer, but storing this type of information online is becoming increasingly popular. In GNOME 3.2, Online Accounts provides one place to manage these online sources. These online accounts are automatically used by Documents, Contacts, Empathy, Evolution as well as the calendar drop-down."

When somebody ask me "are you free on next Monday (let's say)", I really wished I could click on the drop down calendar on my desktop and look for for the schedule for the day. For the time being, I have to fire up google calendar or gmail and see. Now it's going to be possible, one step less, life a lot more easier.
Apart from that I'll be able to go through my online docs locally the same way I do with my local documents. Hopefully I'll be able to modify them locally and they will be reflected online. Sort of synchronization.

There are some more pretty cool features lined up with GNOME 3.2. It's just 5 more days hopefully and after that I hope to do a fresh install. F16 with GNOME 3.2 and other features like introduction of GRUB 2 will mark a more user friendly and stable release.

There's a lot more to explore. Waiting to see how it goes...

t2u

2010-12-03T00:40:00.001+05:30

It was day before yesterday (01) this idea hit my mind. The basic I wanted to do was to code something. Develop an app, a small one but I wandered with no proper idea. I had two things in mind. One to develop a facebook app and the other a twitter app. Ok so what should the app be about? How it should serve the user? I didn't know. All I wanted to do was to code. That's how it has always worked for me specially when it comes to 1's and 0's stuff. And most of the time it left me with satisfaction and I hope that it will be the case this time also.

Back to the topic. So I wanted to anchor at one side either fb or twitter. I checked my gtalk contact list and found my friend Hiranya online. "Hey I really need to code, this is kinda urgent and do you have any idea on what O should code?" that's all I asked him and surprisingly he replied "ok go and develop a twitter client for mobile". So that just set the anchor. Thanks to Hiranya.

Next I composed a mail, look in the gtalk and fb contact lists for known tweeps who tweet from mobile and send them. Well, I'm not imitating Linus Torvalds :-) So following goes my mail,

Guys & gal,

I'm about to develop (or trying to let's say :-) ) a new twitter
client for mobile. So I want to know your ideas on how it should be.
How it should differ from the existing ones. So please let me know
your valuable comments.

Note: Perhaps this idea will limit only to this mail :-) I try my best
to proceed.

Thanks

I got a bunch of good ideas some I've no idea at all on how to implement them right now. We'll see. So special thanks goes to them. I googled on how to develop a twitter app and got a basic idea. Since this is for mobile I though to use J2ME. Most importantly this is going to be open source :-)

I needed a name for the project. The first came to mind was "twit2u". ok I used it for the project name in Netbeans. Today I googled for "twit2u" and found a twitter account with the very same name. So I changed it to "t2u" and here is the sourceforge project https://sourceforge.net/projects/t2u/ So far I've committed some code there already. The approach is to develop a basic client with basic functionality like tweet, timeline, retweet, dm etc. Then go for the more specific feature requests.

So basically that's it for now. Expect more news on the project in future.

Accepted

2010-10-24T23:22:00.001+05:30

"Accepted", this was the most sought after word for the 24 hours ended at 5:30AM today (24th October 2010). I'm pretty sure that people in the computer laboratories of Department of Electrical Engineering, Department of Computer Science and Faculty of Information Technology of University of Moratuwa and thousands around the globe eagerly looked for this word, "Accepted".

IEEEXtreme 4.0 which is a global programming competition organized by IEEE was held for 24 hours starting from 00:00:00 UTC, 23rd October 2010, it's 5:30AM on 23rd on local time. People can compete in groups not exceeding 3 members a group. They post some questions, real world ones and we have to code to get the answer and submit online.So if the answer is correct, the web interface of the competition software displays the magic word "Accepted", else it display a general error message like "runtime error" upon which yeah with some effort we have to modify the code and resubmit until "Accepted". Then based on some criteria like time took to submit the answer from the time the question released (not quite sure though), they rank us. This is basically the procedure of the competition.

This was my first experience at IEEEXtreme and it was yeah simply magnificent. The group consisted of Pulasthi Mahavithana, Andun Sameera and myself. I'm from the Department of Electrical Engineering and the other two from the Department of Computer Science. Apart from our team there were 36 teams from University of Moratuwa competing for Xtreme 4.0 which is about 3 times greater than the number for Xtreme 3.0 in which one of the teams from the University of Moratuwa became the first in the globe. And at the end of the 24 hours we were ranked 162 among the 970 teams participated from all over the world. yep HAPPY :-)

There were 16 questions which they released with a 6 hours interval, 4 questions each time. Out of the 16 our team managed to submit 9 with that magic word "Accepted". Why I named it the magic word was that as soon as the team members saw it, next was a burst of happiness, +1 status of confidence, a relaxed mentality although limited until we read the next question. There were two questions that we almost finished but not "Accepted" and we couldn't figure out where or what the error was. That's the nature. The submission has to be a complete, partials are not "Accepted". After all it is a COMPETITION. We successfully submitted answers for 7 questions in the first 12 hours and in the final 12 hours we could only submit 2 with "Accepted".

It was a great experience and we hope to do better next time.Special thanks should go to the IEEE Student Branch of University of Moratuwa for organizing such an event, conducting practice sessions in prior, supplying us with food and all that and being with us and encouraging us.

I hope that I'll be able to add more "Accepted" to the next year's blog post :-)

NOTE : While writing the last line I though to count the number of "Accepted"s (not including this one) in the post. Surprise, it summed to 9, exactly the number we submitted successfully. Random, nothing serious. Just thought to state it.

Matrix and SFD

2010-09-18T09:47:00.001+05:30

SOURCE : http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/screenshots/glmatrix.jpg

It was three or four years back when I first saw this MAGIC at an event organized to celebrate Software Freedom Day at Olcut College, Galle. This MAGIC was to put the glmatrix screensaver as the background of gnome desktop. It was Anuradha Rathnaweera on stage demonstrating the power of linux. I was in the audience still schooling at that time. Science then I want to give it a try, I tried several times and failed.

Last night, a few hours before the SFD 2010 (in local time) I thought to give it a try. With little browsing I was able to do that MAGIC. Here is how to do it,

1) Install xscreensaver
In Fedora
yum install xscreensaver
In Ubuntu
apt-get install xscreensaver

2) Disable show desktop in nautilus
gconftool-2 --set --type b /app/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop false

3) Put glmatrix as background in gnome desktop

/usr/libexec/xscreensaver/glmatrix -root

(the path to glmatrix may depend on the distro, above works fine for Fedora 13)

Enjoy !

Empathy log

2010-08-06T23:14:00.001+05:30

source: http://home-gym-fitness-equipment.co.uk/files/log-book.jpg

This is the second lucky month that the Empathy icon lies on the top gnome-panel of my desktop. Well it is... let's say ok when compared with Pidgin. I love see Empathy developers add the buddy pounce function too. It was after the fresh F13 installation that I tried to give Empathy a try. It was pre-packaged with the the system (formerly it was Pidgin) and most importantly Open Source is all about Choice.

Empathy, as Pidgin does keeps a log of all the conversations we had via Empathy. Yeah, this can be deactivated also. The chat files of Empathy resides in ~/.local/share/Empathy/logs and I found them to be a little messy. They include all the technical data and other stuff and it makes us hard to find the messages. So I though to get it to a more human friendly and readable format and wrote the following python code. This for me works fine, and if there are any bugs, suggestions to improve, please leave a comment.

#!/usr/bin/python2.6
#
# W.H. Kalpa Pathum <callkalpa@gmail.com>
# 6th August, 2010
#
#    empathy_log.py
# This script formats a empathy log file in a more human readable way
# usage : empathy_log <empathy log file>
#

import re
import sys

msg_d = ''

def print_output(message_data):
    global msg_d
    
    # print the conversation date
    if msg_d != message_data[0]:
        msg_d = message_data[0]
        print 'Conversation with', message_data[2], 'on', msg_d

    print '('+ message_data[1]+ ')',  message_data[2], ':',  message_data[3]

def main(filename):
    f = open(filename, 'r')
    # read line by line and extract message details
    lines = f.readlines()

    for line in lines[3:-1]: # except first three lines and last line
        match = re.findall('^<message time=\'(\d+)T([\d:]+)\' [\w\W]+ name=\'([\w\W]+)\' token=[\w\W]+>([\w\W]+)<', line)
        if match:

            for item in match:
                # format msg_d
                d=item[0][:4] + '-' + item[0][4:6] + '-' + item[0][6:]
           
                message_data = [d, item[1], item[2], item[3]]
                print_output(message_data)
       
        # if the pattern is not found, print the modified line
        else:
            print re.sub('<[/message][\w\W]*>', '', line),

    f.close()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main(sys.argv[1])

DOWNLOAD

Dropbox usage made easy in nautilus

2010-06-01T21:32:00.005+05:30

It has been a couple of weeks that I started using Dropbox to get my files synced, to backup actually. The Dropbox client for Fedora works well but still allows only to have a single directory (Dropbox directory) and whatever files or directories you put to the Dropbox directory will get synced.

Say you want to sync a text document that your are working on and the file resides in the Desktop (and Desktop is not your Dropbox directory). So basically what you can do is to move the file to your Dropbox directory and edit it from there. But in Fedora (or any other GNU/Linux distribution), you can have a symbolic link to the file and move the link to the Dropbox directory. In this case your file resides where it want to be (Desktop) and whatever changes you do will get synced due to the symbolic link.

Even this I found difficult when there are so many files to deal with. So I thought to write a nautilus script. Following is the code I wrote,

#!/bin/sh
#
# W.H. Kalpa Pathum <callkalpa@gmail.com>
# 1st June, 2010
#

# Dropbox directory
DROPBOX_DIR="$HOME/Dropbox/"

# creates a temporary file
file_list=$(mktemp)

# writes the URIs of the selected file to the temp file
echo $NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_SELECTED_URIS | sed 's/ \//\n/g' > $file_list

# iterete through the file list
for file in $(cat $file_list)
  do
    # extract the last filed from the URI, that is the file name
    filename="$(echo $file | awk -F'/' '{print $NF}' | sed 's/%20/ /g')"
   
    # creates the symbolic link
    ln -s "$(pwd)/$filename" "$DROPBOX_DIR$filename"
   
    # sets the emblem
    gvfs-set-attribute -t stringv "$filename" metadata::emblems default
    done

exit 0

To use this script,

download the file from the link below
open the file in a text editor like gedit
replace $HOME/Dropbox/ with the path to your Dropbox directory
copy the file to ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/
give the file the execute permissions

cd ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts

chmod +x <your file name>

Now you are ready to use this script. In nautilus select the file(s) that you want to sync with Dropbox, right click and select the script from the Scripts sub menu (the script name will be the one that you saved the file with).

Once the symbolic link is created, a new emblem (a green coloured tick) will be added to the file just to notify that the symbolic link is created. But to see this emblem you need to refresh nautilus manually which I couldn't find a way to do it from the script.

So enjoy and make your life easier from this script and please comment any bugs or ideas.

Download the script

OpenOffice.org Translation Marathon 2010 April

2010-04-12T01:23:00.001+05:30

An event, a marathon is scheduled to be held for 27 hours starting on 27th April 2010 at 9pm. The event will bbe held online and the objective is to translate OpenOffice.org help files into Sinhala. We have almost finished translating the user interface of OO.org.

So this is an open invitation for you all. If you love OO.org, willing to contirbute and meet all the pre-requisites, this opportunity is for you. Spend few hours and be proud for years.

Pre-requisites

Sinhala unicode installed Linux/Windows system (how to install)
Ability to type Sinhala in Sinhala unicode (no need to be fluent, all that is needed is the ability)

How to contribute

Subscribe to openoffice-lk mailing list
Drop a mail with the subject "Translation Marathon 2010 April", say that your willing to contribute.

What you have got to do at the event

Type simple Sinhala terms for the English terms provided.
You should only use Sinhala unicode.

You are not alone

There will be a lot for sure.
You can ask others for unknown terms.
You can get to know each other.
You will have fun.

As this event is going to be held you 27 hours you can contribute at any time for any long. We hope to get a considerable percentage of the OO.org Help files translated to Sinhala in this event.

Make use of this significant opportunity you have, contribute to the community project, spend few hours at the event and be your self proud for the life time.

Touchpad in GDM

2010-03-22T22:26:00.001+05:30

GDM is for GNOME Display Manager, the graphical login program in GNOME. I recently (though it's been a couple of years I started using GNOME. Well I actually started using a touch pad recently :-) ) found that mouse tap is not working there. Called google and the was able to solve the prob. Here's what should be done.

Copy the file /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/20thirdparty/10-synaptics.fdi to /etc/hal/fdi/policy/

Open the file and you will find something like

Just below that add the following line

<merge key="input.x11_options.TapButton1" type="string">1</merge>

Save the file.

Now you need to restart hal. You can simply reboot the machine or

Mouse tap should work now.

Airtel GPRS with E-tel P7 in Fedora 11

2009-11-03T02:36:00.006+05:30

Here's how I configured an E-tel P7 phone in Fedora 11 to connect to the internet via GPRS. I was successful with a Sony Ericsson W200i. All I have to do was to create a new mobile broadband connection. But when P7 was connected it was detected as a modem but I couldn't connect to the internet. So I tried with wvdial.

STEP 1:

First check whether wvdial is installed
$whereis wvdial

If it returns something like
wvdial: /usr/bin/wvdial /usr/share/man/man1/wvdial.1.gz

then you have wvdial installed. If not install wvdial
$yum install wvdial (need to be super user)

STEP 2:

Configure wvdial
$wvdialconf

After the configuration /etc/wvdial.conf will be created. Then open this file a text editor and replace the whole text with

[Dialer Defaults]
Init1 = AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","airtellive","",0,0
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Stupid Mode = yes
Modem Type = USB Modem
Baud = 460800
New PPPD = yes
Modem = /dev/ttyACM0
ISDN = 0
Phone = *99#
Password = a
Username = a

[Modem0]
Init3 = ATM0
SetVolume = 0
Modem = /dev/ttyACM0
Dial Command = ATDT
Baud = 460800
FlowControl = NOFLOW
Init1 = ATZ

Try replacing the text in Init 1 as follows for the following service providers

Dialog Postpaid: AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","www.dialogsl.com",,0,0
Dialog Prepaid: AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","ppinternet",,0,0
Mobitel: AT+ CGDCONT=1,”IP”,”mobitel3g”

STEP 3:

Open /etc/resolve.conf from a text editor and append the following line

nameserver 4.2.2.2

STEP 4:

As super user issue
$wvdial

Your done !

Fireup firefox and start surfing, don't forget to clear the tick on "work offline" in ff ;-)

STEP 5:

yeah termination. Press Ctrl+c in the terminal where you issued wvdial

Sources:
http://www.brantel.lk/
http://tuxomaniac.wordpress.com/2007/12/20/airtel-gprs-on-linux-with-nokia-phone/

Acer Aspire 4736z with Fedora 11

2009-09-25T22:33:00.012+05:30

This all about my experience with Acer Aspire 4736z notebook with Fedora 11. F11 installation went smoothly and after the installation many worked well, except the following issues.

Touchpad tap

Touchpad tap don't work by default. The solution is simple. Just go to System -> Preferences -> Mouse, click on touchpad tab and tick Enable mouse clicks with touchpad

Ethernet port

Install Atheros ethernet drivers and it will work.

Headphone jack

The problem is that even when the headphone is connected, sound comes from the notebook speaker instead of from the headphone. The solution is here. And in my case adding options snd-hda-intel model=auto to /etc/modprobe.conf did the trick. If /etc/modprobe.conf does not exist just create a file /etc and save it as modprobe.conf.

Multimedia shortcut keys with Amarok

I use Amarok as my media player and the media shortcut keys don't work with Amarok. There's a Amarok script which solves the problem. Just download it from here and follow the instructions there.

I hope that this will help you and you are welcome to add more tweeks if there are any.

purple-microblog to Gwitter

2009-05-29T07:18:00.003+05:30

Earlier I used purple-microblog, a pugin for pidgin as a twitter client for my desktop. But pidgin had some issues with SCIM so sometimes I couldn't use my native language. Despite that issue, purple-microblog is a cool plugin for pidgin. So I searched for some other twitter clients.

Founds some for linux. Among twitux, mitter were good. But gwibber was the best. GTwitter as most say the best had some issues. Gwibber supports some other protocols also. Only used a day. So far so good :-)

Twitter, Facebook and Pidgin

2009-04-16T19:27:00.004+05:30

Pidgin is one of the most popular IM client in linux as well as in windows. It supports multi protocols and have a lot of plugins.

purple-microblog is a plugin for pidgin which enables you to update your twitter status, display others' status, display replies etc.

For Fedora install purple-microblog as follows
yum install purple-microblog

After installing don't forget to enable Twitgin plugin in pidgin. Go to Tools --> Plugins and enable Twitgin plugin.

Now comes Facebook. In my Facebook account I have installed twitter application which enables you to view twitter updates and update Facebook status as you update twitter.

Just another method to make things easier :-) .

Watch videos in linux terminal

2009-04-12T16:39:00.004+05:30

Ever thought of watching a video in linux terminal ? Give it a try.

mplayer -vo caca <video file>

To have a black and white output

mplayer -vo aa <video file>

Enjoy.........

Online Java Compiler

2009-03-26T11:28:00.003+05:30

http://www.innovation.ch/java/java_compile.html

This is an online java compiler. All you have to do is just upload the java source files and set compiler parameters as you wish, select the JDK version and press "compile". If there are no compilations errors the next page will provide you with a link to download the compiled java (*.class) files.

CDPATH

2009-03-12T08:41:00.007+05:30

CDPATH is an environmental variable in linux which specifies the additional base for cd command. Suppose you frequently cd from /etc, in terminal issue export CDPATH=/etc. Now if you issue cd mail from any location, you will be in /etc/mail (unless there's no such directory named "mail" in your current location.)

To set several bases issue export CDPATH=.:[base 1]:[base 2] etc.

To make this bases permanent add export CDPATH=.:[base 1]:[base 2] to your ~/.bash_profile

Wine matures.....

2009-02-05T20:14:00.002+05:30

I wanted to edit some files in Excel today. As I run Fedora 10 in my PC it was a problem. So I tried wine which allows Windows programmes to run in Linux. I installed MS Office 2003 with wine. No problem at all. Then I tried running MS Excel with wine. WOW. It worked. I did my editings.

As time pass by wine matures....... isn't it ?

BlockSite

2009-01-20T07:20:00.002+05:30

BlockSite is an add-on for firefox. It blocks web sites of your choice. You can maintain a list of websites that you wish to block and this nice add-on will not only block them but also disable any hyperlinks to them.

Find out more information and get the add-on from here

Convert

2009-01-17T10:08:00.002+05:30

Convert is a tool for linux to convert between image formats, resize, flip and do many more with images.

I wanted to reduce the resolution of 160 image files (*.jpg) and add copyright lable. To do one by one is a time consuming and boring task. So I google a bit and found this nice tool which was installed with Fedora 10 by default. So no additional software installations and work done.

Here is the script I wrote to get the work done.


#! /bin/sh

DIR=~/123

for n in $(ls $DIR)
{
convert $DIR/$n -resample 28.25 -gravity SouthEast -fill white -draw 'text 10,10 "COPYRIGHT TEXT"' $DIR/$n
echo $n
}

exit 0

I copied all the images to "123" directory in my home directory. "-resample" is for the resolution and the rest for the copyright lable.

It took only about three minutes to get the work done (The original size of the images were 372MB which reduced to 75MB after reducing the resolution). Image how much time it will take if I used an image editing software like GIMP or photoshop.

Here is the link if you want to find out more,
http://www.imagemagick.org/www/convert.html

Shifted to Fedora from Ubuntu

2008-12-21T17:07:00.001+05:30

I used the Fedora DVD for the installation. When booted my mouse pointer was not displayed. I thought that it will be ok after the installation and I continued. So the whole installation process with the keyboard ;-)

I came to the point in which to select partitions. I saw that the "Manual" option is selected and I entered. Then a message box asked whether I want to format the disk. I pressed "Back" (as I remember) and a progress bar appeared saying "Formatting". I let the format and after quit the installation and re-boot the computer. Surprise, I could not load my Ubuntu system. Then I used a live CD and found that the partition in which Ubuntu was installed is blank. Oops what to do ?

NOTE : This is not because of any fault of Fedora or Ubuntu. This is due to a human error, liveware error. Yes you are correct, its my error :-(

I tested several data recovery softwares and recovered with PhoRec. Although said "recovery", I ended with a mess. The files are there but their file names have changed and the directory structure was not there. I couldn't analyze them deeply yet.

Then installed Fedora and came out with two problems.
1) ZXDSL 852 modem which I used to connect to the internet was not working under Fedora
2) The mouse pointer problem was still there

Then brought a router and connected to internet, installed necessary codecs etc.

The mouse problem was solved with the help of this.

All are OK. Now in Fedora. But the whole process was not easy as said. Specially the recovery and all that.

The first linux distro I used was RedHat. It was when I was at the age of 14. Actually I could understand nothing. No MP3s, no internet connection (at that time) so bored. Then Ubuntu, started from 5.04. Used upto until 8.10. To be honest Ubuntu is a great distro. If Ubuntu was so hard to use and learn I would have still be in Windows. So thanks Ubuntu. Its that so special about Ubuntu. I still recommand Ubuntu for a new comer for the linux world from Windows. So why have I shifted to Fedora. Simple reason, there's a lot to learn :-)

Fedora DVD includes almost all the software I needed besided the codecs and some minorities.

So thanks to all who helped me in this whole process.

Hope more posts about Fedora.........

Budget SMS from Dialog

2008-11-23T10:06:00.001+05:30

Dialog GSM offers its latest service,Budget SMS, to both post paid and pre paid customers. With this service you will be able to send D2D SMS for 50 cents (+ applicable taxes). All you have to do is type "10" before the receiver's mobile number (Ex: 10077*******). However the number of characters allowed are only 100. The rest will be used to add a sponser's advertisement. Further it supports only normal text messages while each customer can send only 10 Budget SMS per day.

gSMS

2008-11-01T23:03:00.003+05:30

gSMS is a plugin for Pidgin, the multi protocol IM client. It sends you SMSs containing the names of users who IM you while you were away. It sends SMSs via Google calendarservice and thus require a google account.

Here is the link to download the file and read how to install
View

ScribeFire

2008-10-11T22:02:00.002+05:30

ScribeFire is a add-on to firefox. It lets you write blog posts without login to the particular blog. This makes things easier. It works well with wordpress and I came across some trouble in blogger. When post to blogger it is saved as a draft and not published. May be something wrong with the settings in my blog. Anyway this is a nice add-on.

Grab it from here

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1730

FOSS event @ Galle

2008-09-25T18:10:00.001+05:30

On 20th September there was a FOSS event at Olcutt College, Galle. The event was organized for the Software Freedom Day 2008.

Some members of LKLUG (Lanka Linux User Group) including Anuradha, Danishka, Suchetha, Chamith were also present. A large audience of students and teachers from schools were there.

Mr. Bandula, the organizer and a teacher of Sri Sumangalodaya College, Kalahe commenced the event. Anuradha talked about what is FOSS and how it benefits us. Suchetha, about the opportunities in FOSS field. Chamith illustrated various FOSS applications which can replace proprietary softwares even in Windows. Danishka made the audience aware about sinhala unicode, firefox and sinhala translation process and its current progress.

Rev. Meththavihari also joined the event after the lunch break. Next item was a demonstration of a installation of Ubuntu Hardy. Though it took some time in the case of saving Windows (it was a dual boot) there was a lot to learn. During the installation Suchetha kept the event alive with his magnificent way of presenting. Finally experienced some interesting scripts by Anuradha followed by a Q & A session.

So the event was a success. I thank all members of LKLUG and the organizers of the event to let us have this experience and hope that there will be more in future.........