Techzone

Damm these Windows Promotions

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 9 Mar 2010 08:12:00 +0530

Windows 7 promotions are the order of the day. Specially bad ones are the upgrade from Vista and thats making my life difficult.

A brief history, I have just convinced my wife to replace Windows Vista with Linux Mint on her Vaio. She is ok with it but has a few problems with hibernation and using her iPod Touch. Now she was upset with Vista as resource hog, so Mint was a breath of fresh air and easily accepted. However, from nowhere someone gave her a promotion code to buy Windows 7 upgrade and she did.

As windows 7 was bought without my knowlwdge, I have told her that I cannot offer tech support with it. Lets see how she does it on her own.
I'll post all my observations after 1 week of her trying and getting mad ;)

From Mandriva to Mint

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 07:02:00 +0530

I have liked Mandriva since Mandrake Linux 9.1. Its been an amazing distribution ever since. Pure visual delight and ease of use. I like KDE for the look and feel, GNOME is mostly a no no for me. Mandriva being a KDE centric distro fits the bill perfectly. Mandriva is the default king of our two year old Family Desktop. We all loved the latest version and despite KDE being a little buggy, find it convenient to use.
I gave this info to emphasize that it was not easy for me to think about moving from Mandriva to any other distro, specially a GNOME centric Mint. Here goes the story :

My wife's vaio completed 1 year and ran out of official warranty. Hence she allowed me to dual boot it with Mandriva and Vista. She was already comfortable with Mandriva, so it was supposed to be a smooth move. The problem started right after the first install.

The boot was fast but DKE would come up with plenty fo Akonadi errors. We tried searching for solution, but nothing on net/forums. As this was not causing any usage error so this was low priority.
Keyboard would hang. Yeah, while working all of a sudden keyboard would stop responding. We had to kill X-Server and restart for keyboard to be functional again. This was a big issue and evry frustrating.
The webcam worked with r5u870 drivers, but the inbuilt mic would not agree to work. Now I am using Linux since 5 years and am fairly conversant with Mandriva. Still I could not make it work.
Hibernation sucks. This is the first time I tried Mandriva on Laptop and I must say hibernation is great even in Vista. When I simply close the lid, the system does not go into hybernation. Though this was resolved quickly with some tips from Ubuntu forums, but it should work by default. More troubling is that comming up from hybernation is nto guranteed. Yuck !!! Strange but true. Many times even after clicking hibernate ( and not merely closing lid) the system would not resume. I would see some activity in battery and hard disk lights and some flicker on screen, but thats all. Even command line would not come up. CTRL+ ALT+ BKSP also does not work. My wife was so used to of closing the lid in Vista that she said its better to use Vista itself.
Plasma would crash and cause the X-Server to restart. Now I have seen plasma crashes in Desktop, but restarting X-Server means loosing all the unsaved work. This was unacceptable.

I wanted to stick to Linux, but Mandriva was causing lots of issues. We started looking for more options. My first choice was Arch Linux, which I use on my main desktop, however, my wife wanted something easy to administer with all GUI controls. We went to distrowathc and started looking at distributions as per Page hit ranks. She kind of liked Ubuntu looks, but was floored by Mint screenshots. She said this amazing and she would be happy to use it. Actually despite being a GNOME Desktop Mint 8 looks evry good. Also, due to known Plasma crashes, we were ok to try GNOME.

Now Mint is a pure delight once it boots, the LIVE CD takes a huge time to boot. The looks were as impressive as in the screenshots and operation evry smooth. The webcam mic worked in the LVIE CD itself and even after 24 hours of use there was no crash/ hang. Satisfied with LIVE D test, we went ahead with the install. Here are my thoughts :

All regular hardware works out of box. Things like Wireless, Bluetooth and USB Scanner/Printer require no config at all. Webcam worked fine with r5u870 drivers and Mic was functional with little tweaking.
Despite being GNOME, it looks and feels like KDE and hardly any difference while working.
Huge list of applications in repos, though I would use only a couple which are readily availble in alomst all distros. Package management is a breeze through Synaptic.
Skype download page has a version for Ubuntu and it works perfectly with Mint.
All media formats work out of Box. Youtube, flash, mp3 you name it and it works in Mint.
System config is centralized. Now this is one of the best feature in Mandriva, I was relieved to finid similar one in Mint. Though I must say Mandriav is much more exhaustive and refined.
Hibernation works with little tweaking, though I must say VISTA still outclasses it by leaps and bounds.
Stablity. No crashes even in LIVE CD mode. Installed version looks more promissing.
Speed. I can bet tha Mandriva is anyday faster. Right from bootup to application open time, Mandriva is much faster. However, Mint is not very slow as compared. Though I can feel the slowness, it is not a Black Mark. I will not use this on my main system, which is accustomed to speeds offered by Arch Linux.
Look and Feel. The more you say the less it is. In its default form it just impressed us too much. Compiz bring more eye candy. The transparent Titlebar, translucent windows when dragging, the inactive windows all make you feel wow. I think the implementation is as good as Win 7.

Conclusion :

Mint is not just one of the best looking distribution I have come across, its also one of the most easier to use. 90% of things work out of box and for the remaining there is Mint and Ubuntu Forums ;). Its an eye candy, which is eaqually easy to administer and at the same time very stable. Long time KDE users like me would be at ease with Mint's GNOME implementation.

Its a distribution which I can easily give to my Windows friends to try and be assured that they will atleast use it often as a LIVE CD if not install it on hard disk. The menu and options are evry intutive to a Windows Guy and would make the transition easy. The GUI is as good looking as Win 7 and would appeal to all.

Unfortunately, this is not a perfect world. Even Mint has some issues. If the devs can improve the speed and make hibernation less painfull, Mint has all the possibilities to become the default option for Home users.

The future of package manager.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 15:14:00 +0530

I truly believe that dpkg ( Debian/Ubuntu) and rpm ( Red Hat/OpenSUSE/PCLinuxOS) are all dated package managers which have not evolved enough with time. Not to undermine any of the two -- they have been performing well since ages and have given us some excellent distributions.
However, like everything, technology also ages; enters the newer breed like emerge(gentoo/Sabayon), pacman (Arch/Frugalware), PBI(PC-BSD) and conary(Foresight/r-path).

Unfortunately Gentoo development team has gone crazy and are busy in doing everything but development. Check out a small review of the other three by lazytechguy.

Of the three mentioned Conary seems to be the most technically advanced. I came across an interview with the developer of Foresight Linux and was impressed by the description of Conary by the dev. Check out some of the fine points.

Foresight Linux seems to have an interesting release cycle, can you explain it in-depth?
- Our package manager, Conary, follows many of the principles found in version control systems. Not only does it maintain the source of our packages in the same place as the binaries created, but there are branches. So we have development, QA, and release branches. We are able to do our development on the development branch, without affecting our users. We then promote packages to our QA branch, and test them as a group. The entire operating system is defined in a group, and the packages are built together for optimal compatibility. We test the group of packages together, as a whole, when the QA cycle is complete the entire group is promoted to the release label for user consumption.
NOTE: Foresight is the first distribution to make a release immediately after a GNOME release.
When did you come to realize that Foresight Linux was needed?
- Well mostly frustration with existing distros. At the time I was working for a large enterprise where we managed a very large scale linux infrastructure. We struggled with maintenance and deployment issues, as well as the “we have to customize red hat mentality”. I always hated rpm spec files, and hated that our environment was never easily reproducable. Using Conary, I was able to very quickly build a distro that was made up of what I defined as of proper desktop OS using the latest GNOME.
NOTE: Foresight follows a rolling release so we need not wait for 6 months to get a new package as in Ubuntu or one year in case of Red Hat
How does Conary differ to other popular package management systems (such as dkpg, Portage, and Yum) and why is it a better method of doing things?
- Whew… where to start Conary does so much more than legacy packaging systems such as apt(dpkg) and yum(rpm). Conary melds version control concepts into package management. Not only on the build/packaging side of things, but even for system maintenance. Conary stores sources with the binaries, in the same package, supports branching, merging, etc. On the flip side of that, Conary does some other very nice things. For example, every operation is a transaction. So you can actually rollback your last update or even all the way back to when the system was installed. And, these rollbacks contain local changes that get merged. Also being transactional, Conary breaks updates into smaller “jobs”. These jobs are dep complete, so if at anytime an update fails Conary will rollback to the previous job leaving your system dep complete and fully functional. Conary also breaks packages down into manageable components, :runtime, :lib, :devel, :devellib, :doc, etc. So unlike other packaging systems, where you might have 2 packages, firefox and firefox-devel, Conary would have one package with the devel headers split into firefox:devel. This is a great thing, you no longer end up installing -devel packages from random repos in your sources.list just because it looks like a newer version. The devel headers are just part of the same package, you just don’t have to have them installed. These components combined with rich dependancy information really shines.
NOTE: This means that even if we subscribe to dev repository we will be shielded from a development version of an application.

All the above statements( except for my comments in form of NOTE) are copied verbatim from fscking.com.
Enjoy the full article there.

ATI/NVIDIA Driver install in PCLInuxOS 2008

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 10:20:00 +0530

PCLinuxOS 2008 Minime is a boon for so-called advanced users, who like to keep their system free of flab.
It comes with a minimal set of applications and an amazing artwork.
This ultra small release also comes with a few good utilities including an easy setup for ATI/NVIDIA drivers.
Check out the images below and see for yourself how easy is it to install NVIDIA driver.

The Utilities Folder

The Video Installation Tool

Click the NVIDIA Tab

Click the "Install Driver" Button

NVIDIA Driver installation in Progress

At the End, the installer gives an option to restart X Server ( I missed taking a screenshot of that), and on X restart, the correct NVIDIA drivers are installed and used. I think PCLinuxOS 2008 has made ATI/NVIDIA drivers install very easy, however it is still not as easy as the Restricted Drivers Manager of Ubuntu, which not only correctly auto-detects the driver for the card but also gives a pop-up to install it, making the user aware that there is a better driver for his hardware.
Nevertheless, this is a very good attempt by PCLOS devs.

Blogged with Flock

How to install KDE 4.0 in OpenSUSE 10.3 - 1-Click install

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 13:37:00 +0530

I saw this excellent tutorial on ubuntu-tutorials about steps to install KDE4.0 in ubuntu. Its easy, actually fairly easy.
However, it involves use of command line, vim and warns to remove any previous installation of KDE 4.0.
Basically the steps are

Remove any previous KDe 4.0 install
sudo aptitude remove kdelibs5 kde4base-data kde4libs-data
edit the /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list
and append this line
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-members-kde4/ubuntu gutsy main
Finally install the KDE 4.0 packages by these two commands
sudo aptitude update sudo aptitude install kde4-core

so a total of 3 steps involving command line.
Hey why am I mentioning command line this often ? This is Linux and command line is an integral part of it, specially for installing packages ;right ?
Well !! its partially right, true that command line is integral to Linux, however, for trivial tasks like installing KDE 4.0 its not required, provided the distribution you choose is OpenSUSE 10.3.

Lets check the OpenSUSE KDE4 webpage for the steps required to install KDE 4.0.
Bingo !! OpenSUSE guys have integrated KDE4 install with their famed 1-Click install service and now KDE4 could be installed just by clicking this single icon .

Just a minute, what about any previous installation of KDE 4.0. Intrestingly, you are lucky if you already have a KDE4 version installed, as all you need to do is open YAST GUI and update all pacakges. All the KDE4 packages will be updated to the latest version.
OpenSUSE has truly eliminated command line from KDE4 install and I love mouse clicks.

KDE4 System Settings

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 14:01:00 +0530

In KDE4 they have changed the KControlCenter and named it System Settings.
I found it to be easy to navigate and very intuitive. Lets start the visual review.
The start page looks very similar to KControl of KDE3.

Lets start with Look and Feel section.

Appearance :: Configure Theme, Colors, Style
Desktop: Configure Cool desktop Effects and Screen Saver
Notification : System Notifications and Bell
Splash Screen
Window Behavior : Titlebar Actions, Windows Actions, Focus, Moving Actions etc.

Second Section is the personal Settings

About Me. Configure user details
Accessibility. Improve accessibility for differently abled people
Default Application
Regional and Language Settings

Going over to Network and Connectivity Section

Network Settings: Set Connection preferences, proxy etc.
Setting for Samba Client (Not Server) Windows Share

KDE4 System Setting also provide some Computer Administration settings

Date & Time
Display Settings
Font Installer
Joystick configuration
Keyboard & Mouse Settings
Sound Settings

These are normal settings. The Settings manager considers some more settings are part of Advanced Settings

File Associations
Input Actions
KDE Resources
KDE Wallet
Service Manager
Session Manager
Solid Configuration

and
Samba Configuration. I do not have Samba installed so got this message

All in all, I can say that KDE4 System Settings provide and exhaustive interface for almost full system settings.
I liked the new and crisp interface, please do share with me how you liked this screenshot tour.

KDE 4.0 Final packages released.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 11:31:00 +0530

I have installed KDE 4 on OpenSUSE 10.3, you may read the detail in my previous Article. Today morning, I fired up YAST and found that there was an update available. The KDE4 packages now have version 4.0.X instead of the previous 3.97.X. If its available in YAST that means that KDE team has released the KDE 4.0 final source and OpenSUSE team is quick enough to package them.

I found the package kdebase4 having a version number 4.0-1.3 against the previous 3.97.2-4.5. Same goes for most of KDE 4 packages.
Now I am here in India and its already January 11, 2008, however, in NewYork it will still take more than 4 hours before the clock ticks 0:00.
A strange thing I noticed is that the following KDE PIM packages are marked to be deleted. ::

libkdepim4
libakonadi1
kdepim4
kdepim4-wizards
kde4-korn
kde4-korganizer
kde4-knotes
kde4-knode
kde4-kmail
kde4-kaddressbook
kde4-kakregator and
akonadi.

At the same time "oxygen icon theme scalable" package was marked to be installed.
Looks like the KDE4 PIM is still not stable so KDE devs have removed them from the official release.
I had to come to office so could not install and check the packages, surely this will be the first thing to do when I get back home.

Disable Touchpad while writing

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 10:37:00 +0530

I code a lot and also write some blogs, during writing sometimes my thumb or palm touches the touchpad and results in mouse pointer moving to another window or at a different place within the same window. While coding in "vi" editor in konsole, sometimes I have even accidentally closed the konsole terminal resulting in me loosing all the unsaved work.

Now I do not want to permanently disable the touchpad of my Laptop, but was looking to find a solution where I can disable and enable it at will. I found a great article on gentoo wiki where they use ksynaptics or gsynaptics to accomplish this.
I followed their manual config and found it to be much simpler and easier than the GUI versions.

Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Add the Option "SHMConfig" "on" to the Section "InputDevice" where the driver is "synaptics".
The entry would now read something like ::
Section "InputDevice" Driver "synaptics" Identifier "TouchPad" Option "SendCoreEvents" Option "Device" "/dev/input/mouse0" Option "Protocol" "event" Option "SHMConfig" "on" Option "Emulate3Buttons" "on" EndSection
Thats it !! Config has been done. Now we just need to make use of the syndaemon utility to disable touchpad while typing.
If I want to disable touchpad for 1 second after the last keystroke then I would type
$syndaemon -i 1.0 -t -d
If we see the man page of syndaemon, then we can see that "-i" governs that seconds to wait after the last key press before enabling the touchpad; "-d" makes syndaemon start as a daemon, we can close the terminal and still syndaemon will run; "-t" indicates to only diable tapping ( the accidental touch) and not mouse movements.

Job accomplished.

Installing Banshee - Gnome Music player

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 21:12:00 +0530

Banshee is a music management and playback application for GNOME. Over the course of the year a variety of high quality, highly polished, and all around “swell” Mono GNOME Desktop applications have been popping up. As with many of these apps, Banshee has a beautiful user interface and is well architected.

It features

Import Music
Organize Music
Play & Share
Rip CDs
Sync with IPod and most popular Music devices
Play Last.fm playlists
Play podcasts

The latest version ( 0.13.2) got released on January 8, 2008 and I was pleased to see the packages in Arch Linux. A simple pacman -S banshee revealed the fo;;owing packages will be installed.

 pacman -S banshee
resolving dependencies... done.
looking for inter-conflicts... done.

Targets: libgdiplus-1.2.6-1  mono-1.2.6-1  gtk-sharp-2-2.10.2-1  
         libgnomecups-0.2.2-4  libgnomeprint-2.18.2-1  
         libgnomeprintui-2.18.1-1  gtkhtml-3.16.2-1  gnome-sharp-2.16.0-2  
         sqlite3-3.5.4-1  gstreamer0.10-faac-0.10.5-1  
         gstreamer0.10-faad-0.10.5-1  pmount-0.9.13-4  sg3_utils-1.25-1  
         libipoddevice-0.5.3-1  ipod-sharp-0.6.3-1  libnjb-2.2.5-3  
         njb-sharp-0.3.0-1  banshee-0.13.1-2

Interesting to note is that banshee comes default with ipod-sharp, the C# library for syncing with IPod. However, Banshee does not currently support IPod Touch or the IPhone. Also the latest version of Banshee supports PodSleuth, which replaces libipoddevices. However, Arch linux still does not have packages for PodSleuth and still use libipoddevices, I am sure this will soon change.

Banshee requires HAL and Dbus to be started before starting banshee.
I have just installed it and started using it for playing music from my hard disk.
Will try bnashee soon to sync my IPod Video.

Well if doing pacman -S banshee is difficult for some people, then they can install latest banshee with a click of mouse on OpenSUSE 10.3.
Aaron Bockover, the developer of banshee, got a comment saying that

dude a release blog without a 1-click link is like coffee without caffeine
So Aaron has promptly released the 1-Click install package for OpenSUSE 10.3.
Just click the following icon and let YAST do the work for you.

KD 4.0 Desktop blossoms

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 9 Jan 2008 22:39:00 +0530

I have installed KDE 4.0 RC on OpenSUSE 10.3. I was just checking the installed version and found that we have an updated version (3.97.2-4.4) of kdebase4 and almost all kde4 packages in YAST. A simple YAST update took me to a much better looking KDE desktop.
The new KDE 3.97 is beautiful, more stable and a little slow.

Now I have a NVIDIA 6200 with propriety drivers and Compiz Fusion works very well with KDE3. KDE4 comes with its own desktop effects. Though as of now I am not able to use them, but will soon find a way. For the time being I am loving my current desktop.

KDE4 now comes with a few desktop wallpapers, I really liked the KDE4 black wallpaper.
Next was the time to configure some plasmoids

KDE4 took up all the desktop icons from my KDE3 desktop and displays them as plasmoids. Hence, I had plasmoids for Firefox, SUSE Help, etc..
I added the plasmoid to display KDE news. It acts as a news ticker and clicking any news opens it up in konqueror. The plasmoid configuration option allows to add more feeds apart from KDE news.
Also in my must have list is the "New Device Notification" plasmoid. I have a TSONIC MP3 player, when plug it into the USB port, I get an intimation in "New Device Notification" plasmoid. Clicking it opens the TSONIC device in Dolphin.

Here is my beautiful desktop screenshot.

The desktop is lean, elegant and well organized. The inclusion of plasmoids make it compatible to VISTA ( Lets accept it that MS definitely knows how to offer a very good looking and usable desktop). Unlike the traditional means of adding desktop widgets, plasmoids are easy to add and very functional. All in all I would say that KDE 4.0 is turning out to the the dream desktop I could imagine.

Konqueror in KDE 4.0 RC2

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 8 Jan 2008 08:04:00 +0530

Konqueror has the distinction of being the default file manager as well as the default web browser of KDE 3.xx. It supports basic file management on local UNIX filesystems, from simple cut/copy and paste operations to advanced remote and local network file browsing. It has support for KIO slaves and has the KParts object through which it can embed components like media player, KWord etc. As a web browser it is HTML 4.01 compliant, supporting Java applets, JavaScript, CSS 1, CSS 2.1, as well as Netscape plugins (for example, Flash or RealVideo plugins).
Konqueror is a also universal viewing application, capable of embedding read-only viewing components in itself to view documents without ever launching another application.

Its like the center of my KDE desktop, hence when KDE devs decided to limit Konqueror as a web browser and introduce Dolphin as the default KDE file manager, I was disappointed. KDE devs, however, had their own reasons and say that what often happens in Konqueror when you are browsing the internet is that Konqueror still wants to behave as a file manager and not a web browser. This split behavior is easily noticed through elements such as toolbar buttons. For example: the "Up" arrow is still available on the toolbar even when browsing Google Maps, but it is totally irrelevant in this context; another is having a web bookmarks toolbar visible while sorting icons in your /home folder.

Here is my take on the new konqueror.
The default interface still remains very similar to the earlier one, it still acts as a file manager ( and I still like it over Dolphin)

I, however, faced a little problem while accessing "Storage Media" and got the error that Protocol not supported: Media

I found a similar issue with Dolphin, luckily the Konqueror of KDE 3 works and I was able to view my DVD contents. I will limit myself to using Konqueror as a web browser and will cover it differences with Dolphin when I review Dolphin.

Konqueror now supports OT4 based WebKit, a modified version of KHTML used by Apple in Safari web browser. It renders a variety of pages very nicely.

The rendering is as neat as we would expect it in Firefox or IE. Konqueror, by default, does not allow any cookies and asks user permission. While this acts as a good security measure, this can easily disturb a novice user. I believe some cookies should be allowed.
I found Konqueror too much integrated with Konsole, it has a option to start Konsole (Tools -> Open Terminal) and another option to start Konsole embedded in Konqueror (Window -> Show Terminal Emulator). If we use Konqueror as a file manager, then Konsole integration makes perfect sense, but purely as a web browser, I really fail to understand the importance of integrating Konsole within Konqueror, but KDE devs must have their own reasons.

Another interesting feature is integration of download manager KGet. Now this was possible even in KDE 3.x konqueror, but with KDE 4.0 an icon for KGet comes floating to the desktop and we can simply drag and drop links from konqueror to KGet. Not only is this handy, it also looks cool!!. Talking about cool feature, we have different split views in Konqueror (Window -> Split View (left/right and Top/Bottom) ).
Check it out.

I really found the split views usable. Foe instance if I want to compare the Page Hit Ranks, in Distrowatch, of PCLinuxOS and OpenSUSE for different Time frames, I can simply open two views ( Left/Right) and compare all distributions. We can also open different websites in different views. Like I have opened Distrowatch in two of the views and Linux Today in the third.

The KDE 3.X Konqueror had and option to configure the plugins in "Configure Konqueror". With this option I could easily specify the mozilla plugins I want Konqueror to use, notably java and flash plugins. In Settings of KDE 4.0 Konqueror, I did not find an option to specify plugins, also I does not take the Firefox plugins by default, hence I do not have flash integrated into KDE 4.0 konqueror and cannot watch youtube videos.
This is expected as KDE 4.0 is still not stable, but I wish that on 11th when the devs make the stable version public, they enable flash in Konqueror.
Finally, I found Konqueror 4.0 to be faster than Konqueror 3.x and it appears that Konqueror 4.0 renders better. This might be a case on my OpenSUSE desktop, btu as OpenSUSE is one of the first distribution to release packages and LiveCD for KDE 4.0, I believe that OpenSUSE does not do much modifications.

The next gen of SMS

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 2 Jan 2008 18:34:00 +0530

Airtel and Affle have launched SMS2.0 - the world's first upgrade to
SMS. Airtel is the first in India to offer this service to its 55
million customers. SMS2.0 enables an interactive and non-intrusive platform on the
mobile phone that allows Airtel users to discover content services
along with enhanced messaging features.
With Affle being the inventor of this
technology, Airtel claims to be the first in the country to offer this
innovative service to its 55 million-odd customers.

While riding on the popularity of the
familiar SMS application, SMS2.0 is unique in that it converges
messaging, content, and contextual advertising into one seamless
application that resides as the default SMS application on the
customer's mobile handset.

SMS2.0 also serves free content to users, contextual to their areas
of interest. The content is served in the form of teasers on the
Message Compose/Read window and a Full Screen that appears along with
the Message Sent/Sending Window.
SMS2.0's message personalization options
include additional features like composing and sending messages with a
variety of text, background colors, and emoticons.

The content experience is driven around leveraging SMS, and
delivering user-relevant content such as news, jokes, movie updates,
Cricket, Astrology, etc -- all seamlessly integrated into the messaging
experience.

Available as a 'free upgrade' to the regular SMS application,
Airtel subscribers can download SMS2.0 by sending "SMS2" to 543210.
There are no charges for downloading the new application or for
subsequent content delivery on this platform.

Anuj Kumar, Executive Director (South Asia) Affle, says, "India is a
very exciting mobile market and in Airtel we have found a great partner
to take our services to users. We are confident that SMS2.0 would
redefine the messaging experience for a large set of users and become
their entry window to the world of Mobile Internet. We have already
seen a very positive response from users, for the value features and
the rich non-intrusive content, and expect to grow it substantially
during this launch. We are very confident that given Airtel's
significant marketing efforts, this service would soon be accessible to
a huge mass of users."

Ubuntu for Dell 6200 Laptop

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 2 Jan 2008 08:35:00 +0530

Canonical ships the (K)Ubuntu CDs and I received mine as a New year gift. I was really excited and decided to try it immediately.
My wife has a Dell 6200 Laptop and I tested the LiveCD on it.
I popped in the Live CD and it booted into a nice looking desktop. Ubuntu gave me a warning about the Laptop battery,
.
I checked it and was amazed. It read "Your battery has very low capacity (5%), which means that it may be old or broken. Since last month my wife is complaining about the battery problem, the battery lasts only 15 minutes. Since this problem started after the flight from Delhi, which had a bumpy Landing, I think the battery might be broken.
Its amazing that the user friendly "Windows XP" could not issue such a warning, neither did PCLOS. Kubuntu or OpenSUSE, however, Ubuntu was prompt to report it.
I hope this feature of Ubuntu will help my wife in making up her mind to use Ubuntu instead of Windows XP.

NOTE:: The KDE cousin of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, also failed to report this problem.

Failed Attempt with Mepis

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 10:33:00 +0530

Simply Mepis 7.0 got released on December 23rd. The release announcement proclaims it to be a holiday present and surely it looks like one.
A quick look at the packages reveal a detailed list containing 2.6.22.14 kernel, Xorg 7.1.0, KDE 3.5.8, OpenOffice 2.3.0, Firefox
2.0.0.11, Thunderbird 2.0.0.6, Digikam 0.9.2, Sun Java 6.00, Amarok
1.4.7, mplayer 1.0.rc1, fuse driver 2.7.0, ntfs-3g 1.710, madwifi-ng
Atheros driver 0.9.3.2, wpa-supplicant 0.6.0, ALSA sound drivers
1.0.15, libglib2.0 2.14.0, libgtk2.0 2.10.13, and QT 4.3.1-1.

Some of the additional packages in the MEPIS 7.0 pool include:
acroread 7.0.9-0, icaclient 10.6-1, evolution 2.10.3, NVIDIA driver
100.14.19-1, NVIDIA legacy drivers 1.0.9639 and 1.0.7185, AMD fglrx
driver 8.43.2-1, libgnome2 2.18.0, compiz 0.6.3, and compiz-fusion
0.6.0.

After reading all this I got excited and decided to try it myself. Little did I knew that it will be a disaster. It was easy to download and burn the iso. Problem started immediately after that. The boot screen has many thoughtful options like

Default Boot
Run CD with r/w more
Boot with 60 Hz ( for digital Monitor)
Boot with 75 Hz
Boot with Vesa drivers
Failsafe, and
Memtest

I tried the default Boot but got some problem with my monitor VSYNC/HSYNC and got a black screen. Then I tried all the remaining ones and every time the HSYNC was not proper and I was never able to get a GUI. Whenever KDM tries to start, it would result in a Monitor HSYNC out of range error. I have NVIDIA 6200 256MB card, which no distribution supports out of box, however, in (K)Ubuntu the vesa options worked perfectly. Looks like Mepis shifting from Ubuntu was not welcomed by my desktop.
Interesting thing is that on the command line I can see Mepis complaining about not finding 915 chipset and saying that the current chipset is "wrong". Comeon is this Mepis release only for 915 chipset.

Anyhow this was not a big deal, I added HSYNC=30-60 in the kernel boot line and booted with VESA drivers. I was greeted with a good looking KDM login menu.

The KDM gives an option to login as either demo or root. Mepis does not believe in tell the passwords of the users, though the passwords are an easy guess. The password for user demo is "demo" and user root is "root"
I logged in as root.
The default wallpaper of root user has a warning icon to indicate that the user is root and can perhaps cause damage to the system.

I wanted to install Nvidia drivers so that I can evaluate Mepis with all the cool effects. Opening Synaptic resulted in a pop up errot.

I thought that maybe I should refresh the Synaptic repositories and get fresh package lists. However, this resulted in further errors.
and .

You can see that my network was properly configured and this was simply an error with Mepis repos.

The last thing I tried was to install Mepis on my hard disk. Check out the cool looking installer.

The Mepis installer resembled the Windows installer a lot but was easy to navigate. Sadly, whenever I tried to install, the installer froozed the entire system and I could never get Mepis installed on my system. Maybe this error is because I do not have intel 915 chipset.

My wife has a Dell 6200 Laptop which has intel chipset. I decided to try Mepis on that and Met with even more errors. The Live CD would not reach KDM no matter what boot options I choose. It gave some error about hard disk spinning too fast ???

In a nutshell my experience is like

Problem while booting
Had to guess user password
Synaptic not working
Hard drive installer not working
System hangs while running.
Would not boot on Dell 6200 Laptop.

This is end of Mepis trial for me. Maybe I'll try another of their release if it gets good reviews from users.

NOTE:: Thanks to The Coding studio for a few screenshots.

Ubuntu Community Page on iPhone

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 09:37:00 +0530

Ubuntu has perhaps the strongest community and the community is its greatest strength. The community members go out of their way and try to make things simpler for other users. Check out this webpage regarding using iPhone/iPod Touch with Ubuntu.
I specially liked the small directions which makes life simpler like, Auto mounting tips and integration with Amarok.

Waiting for iPhone to become legally available in India so that I can also use the "Most hyped gadget of 2007".

KDE 4.0 install on OpenSUSE

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 08:11:00 +0530

I have previously installed KDE 4.0 RC2 on Kubuntu. It involved adding deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-members-kde4/ubuntu gutsy main to your /etc/apt/sources.list and then installing a few KDE4 based packages. To be true, I was not able to do that using Adept, the Kubuntu package manager. I had to go to command line and then the install went fine.
OpenSUSE, however, changes the entire perspective of installing applications. Their revolutionary 1-Click install performs the job very well here too. All we need to do is to goto KDE4 page on OpenSUSE website and click this button . There are a few alternative install too; like the basic install and the KDE4 build dependency for developers who want to install KDE4 from source.
After clicking the KDE4 Desktop install button, YAST2 takes care of the install and does its job very well. Please check out the screenshots from the install.

KDE4 Page
Welcome screen with the option to choose Advanced features.
Repository chooser.
Aditional Package chooser.
Final Install .
Lastly the default KDE4 desktop and its beautiful.

Check out the plasmoids. I really love them. My next article is going to be on Pasmoids.

As compared to Kubuntu, the install is a breeze and very easy. I love mouse clicks.
I hope you enjoyed the article as much as I had enjoyed installing KDE4. Watch out for more articles on KDE 4 on OpenSUSE.

Merry Christmas From Google

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 13:51:00 +0530

Google has linked up Reader with Google Talk (also known as chat in Gmail) to make your shared items visible to your friends from Google Talk. Once you've logged into Reader and been notified of the change, these friends will be able to see your shared items in the Reader left-hand navigation area under "Friends' shared items". We've provided an option to clear your shared items in case you don't want your friends to see what you've shared in the past. We've also added a Settings page so you can choose which friends you see and invite friends who aren't yet sharing to try it out.

"We're really excited about adding friends, but want to make clear that this is a work in progress. We know you might not see every feature you want just yet, so we hope you will play with it and send us your feedback. For now, this is available only in English on www.google.com/reader."

Readers, however, did not find it exciting or amusing.
Some of the replies at Google Groups thread indicate this.

Don't you think there might be a method of being selective with what

you share that might be slightly more fine grained than, you know,

deleting our shared items en masse? This is the worst "feature" you

have ever introduced.
This is BY FAR the worst feature ever added by google.
I think the basic mistake here, as Modulo has noted, is that the

people on my contact list are not necessarily my "friends". I have

business contacts, school contacts, family contacts, etc., and not

only do I not really have any interest in seeing all of their feed

information, I don't want them seeing mine either. This is a major

privacy problem.
I don't need Gmail to become a social networking tool. If I wanted

that, I'd sign up for Facebook, Orkut, or whatever. I want it to do e-

mail, feeds, docs, etc., and I want it to *respect my privacy*. :P
Using my Gmail contacts as a friends list is a dangerous thing.
How do I turn this off? Do I need to unsubscribe from all my feeds?

I do *NOT* want colleagues seeing my personal feeds. Unless I'm

misunderstanding something here, I have to stop using Google Reader.
This "feature" sucks big-time. How do I turn it off?
This is a terrible idea, and a violation of privacy, and it

contradicts your own documentation
I want this turned off and like, now.
'm going to stop using Google Reader

if they don't fix this SOON.

The thread is full of complaints like these. Not sure if Google will look into this soon, but ifthey delay, many people will either delete all their "shared" data or switch to Hotmail or yahoomail. I am planning to revive my Hotmail account.

Holiday gift for OpenSUSE entusiasts

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 10:16:00 +0530

I just love OpenSUSE, I think it is one of the best distributions for a Linux user ( Novice or expert).
For people like me an ideal holiday gift would be an OpenSUSE branded T-Shirt or a bag so that I can flaunt my association with the Green Linux Distro.
The OpenSUSE Shop, presents an excellent place to get all OpenSUSE stuff.
Check otu some of cool T-Shirts and Mugs.

I specially liked their offering for babies -- teach them open source from toddler age.

Happy holiday shopping.

Reveal Firefox Passwords

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 10:04:00 +0530

I was browsing the Firefox settings for optimizing performance and came across the "Security tab in Firefox Preferences". I was amazed to see a button called Show_Passwords.

.
I decided to probe further and clicked on it, viola it showed the list of websites with my user name on it. What more it even had a button which said "Show Passwords".

Clicking on it brought a dialog box which confirmed if I really wanted my passwords to be displayed.

Clicking yes revealed all my usernames along with respective passwords.

Now this can be handy for a home computer where if I forget my password, I can easily get it back. At the same time this poses a huge risk in Office environment, where many a times we go to get a steaming cup of coffee without locking our desktop. I know leaving the desktop unlocked is a foolish thing to do, but its a fact that many a times we do forget. In those circumstances, a colleague might easily get our personal passwords. Imagine someone getting your mail password, without your knowledge and silently read through your mails/chats.

Having discovered this, I immediately looked for similar "feature" in Konqueror- I found none. I know of a few hacks in Windows which help reveal the IE stored passwords, but the password-self-revealing feature of Firefox takes the cake when it comes to security loophole.

Advanced Web Statistics -- Distrowatch

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 18:49:00 +0530

For the month of December 2007, the web statistics of Distrowatch show an interesting pattern.
This stats shows the number of hits made to Distrowatch from many Operating systems and different Linux Distributions.

As usual the highest number of users have accessed Distrowatch from Windows XP ( 43.74 %).
The second position goes to Ubuntu (11.47 %).
Here we see that the best amongst Linux distributions still lags too much behind Windows XP.

Windows Vista is comfortably placed at third position with 6.94 % hits. Mac OSX scores a respectable 2.8%, considering that not many Mac enthusiasts look outside of Apple. The BSDs combined form a mere 0.3%.

Among the Linux distributions Ubuntu tops with no other distribution in near sight.
Debian (3.80%), OpenSUSE (2.27%), PCLinuxOS (2.03) and Linux Mint (1.89%) follow Ubuntu to form the Top five Linux Distributions. Its amazing that the KDE cousin of Ubuntu (Kubuntu) scores a poor 0.09%.
Decent numbers posted by PCLOS and Mint justify their page hit rankings. Surely these easy to use distros are going to be a huge hit in near future.

Sharp Fonts on Linux

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 14:07:00 +0530

Linux today has very good looking fonts, however, some of the people who migrated from Windows still feel the lack of Windows Type fonts.

Luckily we have two very good options

Install the core fonts. Usually most current distributions contain a package to install the core fonts through the package named msttcorefonts.
Use Sharp Fonts.

Now which one to install is just a matter of personal taste.

Okular. The universal document viewer. KDE 4.0 series

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 12:03:00 +0530

With KDE 4.0 release in sight, I plan to test some of the prominent features of KDE 4.0 and explore their functionalities.
I am starting off with Okular - The universal Document Reader.

With KDE 4, we will get Okular, the one stop shop for all our Documents.
Okular supports the following document types:

PDF
Postscript
DjVu
CHM
tiff
images
dvi
xps
ooo
FictionBook
ComicBook
Plucker.

Okular began as a replacement of KPDF and was part of Google Summer of code, the project description is at KDE Developer's Corner. It is such a hugely successful project that it will form part of kdegraphics module and will replace the following KDE 3.x applications

KDVI
KFax
KGhostview and
KPDF

Watch out for more KDE 4.0 applications on this blog.

Few Okular Screenshots ( Taken from Official Okular web site):

Installing Skype 2 Beta on Kubuntu

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 13:41:00 +0530

Skype seems to be following a tradition. They had first introduced Video chat with 2.0 Beta version for Windows. They followed the same version pattern and introduced Video chat in Linux with version 2.0 Beta for Linux, though this happen a long two years after the windows release.
Whatever said, Skype 2.0 Beta has fulfilled a huge gap in the Linux world. With internet speeds reaching 100 Mbps and more, video chat is soon becoming very common and skype is the most dominant player.
Skype has provided installable packages for most of the prominent distributions on their Linux beta download page.
I had opened the site in Konqueror and choose Ubuntu FeistyFawn, I was expecting that Adept Package installer ( or a variant ) would open up and offer to install, however, Konqueror gave me merely the option to download.

I knew that things cannot be this dumb, so I fired up Firefox ( NOTE:: Firefox is not part of standard Kubuntu install and has to be installed separately).
Firefox appeared a little more intelligent and offered to open the deb file with debian-view

The download was easy, but after the download I did not see any installer being fired. The download simply ended. I knew that the downloaded file will be in /tmp and there it was.
I opened the /tmp directory in Konqueror and clicked on the deb, Luckily this time gdebi fired and gave me the option to install.
I thought that all's done, how wrong I was. The gdebi installer gave an error that another installer ( adept, apt-get etc..) was running. I killed the adept-updater icon I had in the Kicker tray, still the problem remained. Then I fired Adept Manager, which also gave me the same error but also gave me an option to release the lock. I selected to release the lock and Adept Manager crashed. Wow!!
I again Fired Adept Manager and this time it came up without any error, I presumed that the lock is removed and closed it. Again clicked on the downloaded Skype 2.0 deb package to bring up gdebi. This time there was no lock problem and the installer went ahead fine and I became happy( I know I can just delete the lock file, but wanted to do it through proper channel, without any command line tweak).
My happiness was short lived as gdebi was unable to install due to missing dependency of libc6. My only option was to fire up Adept Manager and install libc6, OOPS!! libc6 is already installed only an upgrade was required.

On my third attempt with gdebi installer, I was finally able to install Skype 2.0
What a relief !!.
As expected Skype 2.0 video is all that I expected and I was able to do a video chat with my friend instantly.

Regarding my experience, all I can say is that in Ubuntu has one of the best package management whereas its KDE cousin Kubuntu presented an extremely frustrating experience. Not sure if Canonical does it deliberately, but in no way is the quality of Kubuntu same as that of Ubuntu

PCLinuxOS vs Ubuntu -- the Battle Continues

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 09:59:00 +0530

There is little doubt that Ubuntu is the most popular desktop Linux distribution. However, lately people have started noticing PCLinuxOS. Did I say noticing, actually it is much more than that. Since a long time PCLOS is at the top of Distrowatch Page hit rankings, PCLOS is featured in LXF magazine in an *8 page article*, the number of derivatives ( called remasters) of PCLOS is growing.

Its rather funny that once Ubuntu was considered just a derivative of the mighty Debian, now Ubuntu has hogged all the limelight and left Debian far behind in terms of popularity. Debian is considered one of the most stable Linux distribution and most suitable for Servers. However, Hardware vendors ( Like Dell) are considering offering Ubuntu preinstalled even as a server; I am not aware of any vendor selling Debian pre-installed.
Debian acted as base for many newbie friendly distributions like Mepis, Linspire, Knoppix etc.
Now Ubuntu is acting as a base for many other including Mint, Freespire, gOS etc. Here a point to note is that all the Debian derivatives, except for Mepis, are not in news too often; whereas the Ubuntu derivatives like gOS and Mint are on almost every Linux site.

With PCLinuxOS, it seems history is repeating itself.
PCLOS is a Mandriva derivative, well !!! that was long time back. Now PCLOS is poised to take Mandriva head on in terms of popularity.
Mandriva which was considered the easiest distribution for a newbie has lost its status to the newer ones like Ubuntu and now PCLinuxOS.
People have started using PCLOS as base distribution instead of Mandriva, though the numbers are limited.

Looks like PCLOS is going on the same path as Ubuntu. However, PCLOS is still very distant and has a long journey to cover before it reaches anywhere near Ubuntu, with respect to popularity and support from hardware vendors.
For a normal home user its a matter of choice, if he likes debain based -- Ubuntu/Ubuntu derivatives is the way to go. If the user is OK with an rpm based distribution then PCLOS acts as a serious contender.

Finally, a distribution is also judged by the distributions it is compared with. Nowadays we see many comparisons of PCLOS with Ubuntu.
Check out two interesting ones Here and Here. These are enough evidence that the Ubuntu community is taking notice of growing popularity of PCLOS and even reacting to it.

PCLinuxOS all over Linux Format

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 11:24:00 +0530

The latest issues of Linux Format ( UK's best selling Linux Magazine) went on sale on 13th December 2007.
LXF have put a lot of emphasis on PCLinuxOS. The article about PCLOS is titled "Why PCLOS is so great". They have proclaimed it to be the

"Next Gen distro for 2008"
Fast
Reliable
Easy
Powerful
GoodLooking and lastly
Ubuntu Alternative.

Check out the cover page to find PCLOS overshadowing everything else.

From their web site

Features

PCLinuxOS - With a new update
just around the corner, we look at this remarkable distro, finding out
why many beginners and experts alike find it to be the perfect antidote
to their lust for Linux. (Graham Morrison)

LXF has an eight page article on PCLOS, readers claim this to be the biggest ever for any distro.
Apparently reporters from LXF had asked a few questions from Tex a month ago
You may want to read the discussion about this article on PCLinuxOS forums.

PCLOS is already at the top in Distrowatch, now with the good publicity from LXF it will reach more home users.