My tryst with Linux

Run Latest Ubuntu from USB stick.

2011-10-21T12:07:00.000+05:30

My favorite Linux Distribution Ubuntu Linux has come long way in last 7 years. Today I decided to download the latest version 11.10 and try it on USB stick since I am not yet prepared to upgrade the LTS version 10.04. Downloading and making a USB stick has become so simple. Here is how to do it:

Go to download page.
Select Download options:
Ubuntu 11.10 Latest Version
32 or 64 bit
Click on Start Download
After download check the iso with following command:
sha256sum ubuntu-11.10-dektop-i386.iso
sha256sums are available in this file

Following procedures assumes that you are running Windows
Go to pendrivelinux.com
Download Universal USB installer
Insert USB stick
Click on Universal USB installer exe file
Accept TOS
Select Ubuntu 11.10
Click on Browse button and select ubuntu-11.10-dektop-i386.iso
Select the drive for USB stick and check to format if necessary.
Select persistent file size
Click on Create

The installation process is going to take time. Relax.

After installation reboot with USB stick (I hope you know how to boot your machine with USB) and you get the new Ubuntu on your screen.

I did all the above steps and here is the screenshot:

I could also setup network connection using Bluetooth through my Samsung Galaxy 5 using the GUI.

I love new Ubuntu 11.10 but I need to learn using Unity Desktop which I am going to finish today.

Importing ICICI Bank and other Banks account file in GnuCash

2011-09-04T15:28:00.000+05:30

I wrote in the previous post that I would write about how to import Indian Banks Transaction files in GnuCash accounting software.

ICICI Bank offers download of Bank Transactions file in MS Money Format (.qif) and GnuCash accepts importing this file format but when you try to import it may fail and if it succeeds the import wizard will ask many questions. Open Office has a macro CALC2QIF which imports .qif file. When you import the file you will see that the Category column has entries like TCI, TBI, TIP etc and while GnuCash can import the transactions into the Bank Account it does not understand where to post the corresponding debit/credit entry into the other account. Let us consider one example.

Suppose you have received payment from your Customer there are two entries to be made. One in the Bank Account and the other in Accounts Receivable but the file downloaded from ICICI Bank shows TBI on the Category. You need to change TBI to Accounts Receivables. Similarly you should write the names of other accounts like Cash etc in the Category column. If you can't decide the account name you can write Imbalance against such entries in the Category and GnuCash will show them as imbalance till you change them.

After you change the entries in Category column you should select the cells and click on Save to QIF, clear the default fields and select them again in the order they are displaced i.e. Date, Amount, Check Number, Payee, Memo, Category and Sub-Category, select the destination for QIF output file and click on Convert.

Now you can import this file easily in GnuCash.

Using GnuCash for maintaining books of accounts of small business in India

2011-08-15T16:51:00.003+05:30

For the last two months I was working on suitability of GnuCash for maintaining books of accounts of small businesses of India. When you start GnuCash for the first it offers to setup the accounts. In Business Accounts Category it creates most accounts necessary for a Business excluding Fixed Assets. You can also select the Fixed Assets category which creates three accounts House, Other Asset and Vehicle. You can delete the accounts (e.g. House) you don't need for your Business later on. After you select the accounts the next screen offers to change the name of accounts. This is necessary because the default names are suitable for a Business in USA e.g. there is an account called "Federal" under Taxes which you can change to "Income Tax" and there is an account called "Checking Account" which you can change to "Current Account" and so on. You should also have the amounts of Opening Balances ready with you for Fixed and Current assets while setting up.

After setting up the accounts with Opening Balances you can delete the accounts (especially there are too many Expenses accounts) not relevant for your Business and also add the accounts which you need but not present (e.g. you can create Computer, Office Furniture etc under Fixed Assets.

I found a site explaining the setup nicely and there is no need to write the details here.There are more details on this page.

The next step is to import the Data from Bank Accounts. Some Banks (e.g. ICICI Bank) offer to download the statement in MS Money Format (.qif) which can be imported directly into GnuCash. I am going to write another post for importing the data from Bank Statements. If you do this correctly all Bank transactions get posted in double entry system in Books of Accounts and saves lot of time.

How to get new Indian Rupee Symbol ₹ on Keyboard shortcut on Debian or Ubuntu?

2011-08-12T06:53:00.000+05:30

The new Indian Rupee Symbol ₹ exists for more than one year now. There are various posts on the Internet describing how to type it. The symbol has been included in UTF-8 as U+20B9. Most fonts now support this character therefore you don't need to install any special font for typing it.

You already know how to type $ sign (by pressing shift +4). There is a new Keyboard Layout "India English with Rupee Sign" in new xkb-data file but the stable Linux Distributions have not updated their files.

If you want to get this Keyboard Layout on Debian or Ubuntu download the latest xkb-data file. It is available on Debian Sid as xkb-data (2.1-2) You can download and install it on Debian or Ubuntu.

After installation you need to select the Keyboad Layout "India English with Rupee Sign". Now you can type ₹ by using Right Alt +4 key combination.

Using Thunderbird to down load mail using POP3 server and importing address book from Evolution

2011-07-18T12:16:00.003+05:30

I have been facing some issues using Evolution mail client and decided to switch to Thunderbird. When I opened the program for the first time it asked the email ID and password and communicated with server and configured IMAP server automatically. When I tried to change to POP3 server there was no option anywhere in the settings.

After Googling a bit I found couple of solutions. The one I used is as follows:

I deleted the account setup initially and asked Thunderbird to setup the account once again. While it was communicating with the server I interrupted the process and it offered me to edit the setup with a drop down for the server type. I selected POP and could setup POP3 server.

I faced another problem importing the Address Book. Evolution saves the Address Book only in VCard format and Thunderbird does not import from this format. I used this on-line utility to convert VCard (.vcf) into LDIF (.ldif) format and imported the converted LDIF file.

Deleting sms messages on Android Phone

2011-04-18T13:48:00.000+05:30

I am getting sms messages daily from 2 numbers. Android phone was forming a thread of all the sms messages. In default Android messaging system it was not possible to delete one or some of the messages in a thread and if I wanted to delete the complete thread was getting deleted including the newest messages.

I searched on Market with "sms" and got number of applications. I downloaded HandsentSMS. Now with this application I can select Batch mode and then select the messages I want to delete and delete them

Moving/Copying Virtual hard disk for Virtualbox

2011-04-10T14:54:00.000+05:30

As described on this post I installed Windows XP on Virtualbox on Ubuntu 10.04. For creating virtual hard drive I used the default settings of Virtualbox which created it in hidden .virtualbox/harddisks folder on home.

Since I did not think about running Windows inside Ubuntu the /home was not very large. After a few months Ubuntu started complaining about low disk space and when I examined it the largest space was occupied by the virtual hard drive.

I copied the Windows.vdi file on another partition and tried to attach it but Virtualbox complained of same uuid already registered and refused to attach the copy.

Then I opened the terminal and typed following command after changing directory to that partition.
VBoxManage internalcommands sethduuid Windows.vdi

The uuid was changed and I could attach and use the copy of .vdi file.

After testing that everything was fine I deleted the original .vdi file.

Now I have enough space on home and Windows XP running in Virtualbox as before.

Tethering Samsung Galaxy 5 on Ubuntu 10.04

2011-01-26T13:42:00.000+05:30

I have been using Samsung Galaxy 5 to surf the net on the Laptop through USB and Bluetooth using its modem. But the speed which I was getting on Mobile could not be obtained on the Laptop.

Then I discovered EasyTether application on Android Market and installed the EasyTether Lite (Free). I could get better speed on the Laptop.

EasyTether Lite does not support https protocol and I could not login to gmail, facebook etc. Today I bought the License paying $9.99 and now it is supporting https also.

Enjoying Samsung Galaxy 5 Mobile Android (Linux) phone.

2010-12-02T20:06:00.001+05:30

Being a passionate Linux user I was curious about Linux Mobile smart phones. Recently I purchased Samsung Galaxy 5 mobile phone which has Android 2.1 which is Linux based operating system developed by Google. It is a 3G phone with GPS and internet connectivity through Wi-Fi and Mobile Network and synchronization with Google Applications. I can download and install Android software. Yesterday I installed Skype and Facebook.

I have enabled GPS in it and the visitors of this blog can track my presence in the power station where I work or my home at Jharsuguda in real time through the Google Latitude gadget on right side bar.

As I was connecting my Nokia phone through USB or Bluetooth to my Laptop for browsing the net I can use this Samsung phone as well through USB or Bluetooth.

Using Micromax BSNL 3G Modem on Ubuntu.

2010-09-26T14:23:00.002+05:30

While doing my new job at Jharsuguda I am also introducing people to Ubuntu Linux and many people are using it booting from USB stick. BSNL provides Micromax USB modem for net connection and I had specific request from one person yesterday to help him set it up on Ubuntu. I brought his modem home and tested it as following.

While googling for this modem I discovered that usb_modeswitch was necessary to detect it as modem instead of mass storage device. I downloaded the latest version of usb-modeswitch and usb-modeswitch-data from Debian repositories. Then I proceeded as follows:

When I plugged in the Modem it got mounted as a CD. I got its vendor and product ID (thro lsusb) and unmounted it:

$ lsusb
Bus 002 Device 004: ID 1c9e:f000
$ eject /dev/sr1

I found the configuration file for ID 1c9e:f000 in /etc/usb_modeswitch.d/
Since I did not want the configuration on my machine I simply used it:
$ sudo usb_modeswitch -c /etc/usb_modeswitch.d/1c9e:f000

The modeswitch reported success I got the new ID for the device:
$ lsusb
Bus 002 Device 005: ID 1c9e:9605

I inserted the driver thro:
sudo modprobe usbserial vendor=0x1c9e product=0x9605

and the Network Manager detected it as BSNL Mobile Broadband device using the same set up which I use for the Mobile.

There is a wonderful script Sakis 3G for doing all this automatically.

Using Nokia Mobile GPRS net connection via Bluetooth.

2010-09-20T19:54:00.000+05:30

Since I have come to Jharsuguda I am using Nokia Mobile GPRS through USB connection to my Laptop to access internet. Although, it is painfully slow but it works. When the Mobile is connected through USB cable to the Laptop it gets detected as new Mobile Broadband device and after choosing BSNL East (my service provider) it works after putting correct access point (APN). The APN was gprseast.cellone.in which has been changed to bsnlnet recently.

The problem with USB connection was very short cable provided by Nokia. Moreover, I had to sit in the balcony of my flat to get constant signal strength.

Today I decided it to use Bluetooth. I switched on Bluetooth and it got detected and I could browse the files on the Mobile and transfer files from/to the Laptop. It was also detected by the Network Manager but not connecting to internet.

After googling for the solution I discovered that I need to write the following in

/etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf

rfcomm0 {
        bind yes;
        device mac-address;
        channel 1;
        comment "Bluetooth PPP Connection";
}

The mac-address of the phone and channel could be found by following command:

$ sdptool search DUN

For connecting I had to use the following command:

$ sudo rfcomm connect 0

Then I could use the connection which was set-up via USB but without USB cable (through Bluetooth).

Now the mobile is kept in the balcony and I am sitting in the bedroom posting this.

Restore panels in Ubuntu.

2010-09-13T15:37:00.000+05:30

In Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx the shutdown applet was found missing once. After restart it reappeared. Today I found the Network Manager applet in top right corner. Although this may be happening due to some bug I found the following way to restore the panels. Open a terminal or if the top panel is missing and you can't click on Applications/Accessories/Terminal press Alt+F2 and type 'gnome-terminal' (without quotes) in run box and type the following commands:

$ gconftool --recursive-unset /apps/panel
$ rm -rf .gconf/apps/panel
$ pkill gnome-panel

That's it. Your panels would be restored with default settings.

Using Ubuntu and Windows simultaneously.

2010-07-30T16:54:00.000+05:30

Since Ubuntu is my favorite operating system I installed it on my office Laptop initially in dual boot with Windows. I can do most of my office work like emails (in Evolution), creating and reading the documents (in Open Office) on Ubuntu. But we have many drawings in dwg and dwf formats and although, I could install dwg viewer on Ubuntu I could not find satisfactory solution for viewing dwf format. In addition Bank of Baroda Net Banking transactions require Internet Explorer and Microsoft Virtual Machine. I was using Windows for this purpose.

After briefly trying Wine I decided to install Virtual Box on Ubuntu and installed Windows in Virtual Box. I added dwg and dwf viewers in the Windows installation.

Now I can simultaneously use Ubuntu and Windows. See the Ubuntu and Windows running in two workplaces below:

USB support and access to folders on Windows running in Virtualbox.

2010-07-10T21:25:00.000+05:30

After joining at Jharsuguda I need to view Autocad files and although, I can view dwg files on Ubuntu I could not find any viewer for dwf files. I was using Windows to view the files.

I was also using Internet Explorer along with Microsoft VM for Net Banking of Bank of Baroda.

Meanwhile various viruses were spreading due to transfer of files through pendrives and one virus corrupted Microsoft VM and I could not use Net Banking.

I was having Ubuntu in dual boot with Windows. I decided to install Windows as Guest OS in Virtualbox on Ubuntu to provide virus free environment to BOB Net Banking. I have posted about this in previous post.

Then I installed dwg and dwf viewers on Windows running on Virtualbox and this required USB support and access to folders on the hard disk.

Providing USB support was simple on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx. I had to add the user to the group vboxusers. Further I could delete the viruses by initially mounting the pendrive on Ubuntu. Then I could mount the pendrive on Windows by clicking on Devices/USB_Devices.

For accessing folders on hard disk I had to install Guest additions on Virtualbox. Then I clicked on Devices/Shared_Folders to add the folders.

Finally, I could access the folders through My_Network_Places.

BarodaConnect BOB Net Banking on Ubuntu Linux.

2010-07-08T21:06:00.001+05:30

Bank of Baroda Net Banking requires Internet Explorer and Microsoft VM for initial change of password and entering Transaction password. If you use Firefox on Windows or Linux it gives an error "[21996] Javascript disabled in browser" after you enter the transaction password.

In order to use BarodaConnect I installed Virtualbox on Ubuntu. Then I installed Windows XP in Virtualbox. Opening BarodaConnect on Internet Explorer I clicked on Java Settings Link and downloaded the Zip file which had Microsoft VM.

After installing Microsoft VM I restarted Windows and did the required browser settings.

Finally I could use BarodaConnect on Internet Explorer running in Virtual Box on Ubuntu.

Step by step instructions for Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx:
Install virtualbox-ose through Synaptic or apt-get

If you need usb support in guest os download proprietary Virtualbox from this link and install through gdebi.

Start Virtualbox through Applications/System_tools.

Create a new Virtual Machine for Windows.

Insert Windows CD and install it on Virtual Machine.

Start Internet Explorer and go to BarodaConnect.

Click on Login link for Net Banking.

Since Java VM or Microsoft VM is not yet installed you will get the link to download java_settings on login page.

Click on the link and download java.settings in zip file.

Unzip and click on msjavx86 exe file to install Microsoft VM.

Set up Internet Explorer as follows:
Click on Tools/Internet_Options
Click on Security Tab
Select Internet
Click on Custom_Level
Scroll down to Microsoft_VM/Java_Permissions
Select Custom
Click on Java_Custom_Settings
Click on Edit_Permissions Tab
Select Enable every where
Click on Ok.

Select Restricted Sites and repeat all above steps.
Finally click on Apply button.

You can now access BarodaConnect and carry out transactions.

Reading Phonebook of Nokia 5130c-2 on Ubuntu.

2010-03-25T15:12:00.000+05:30

In order to read the phonebook of my Nokia 5130-c-2 on Ubuntu I installed gnokii (available in Universe repository).

Then I searched on Google and found the following configuration file which I saved as .gnokiirc on home directory.

[global]
port = /dev/ttyACM0
model = 6510
initlength = default
connection = dku2libusb
use_locking = yes
serial_baudrate = 19200
smsc_timeout = 10
[xgnokii]
allow_breakage = 0
[gnokiid]
bindir = /usr/sbin/
[connect_script]
TELEPHONE = 08093098045
[disconnect_script]
[logging]
debug = off
rlpdebug = off
xdebug = off

Then I tried Xgnokii but it was not working as normal user
. Then I tried with sudo and it gave this error:

Couldn't open PHONET device: Device or resource busy

After searching on Google I removed cdc_phonet kernel module:

sudo rmmod cdc_phonet

Now I am using the following command and can access phonebook, send sms and initiate call from Ubuntu laptop:

sudo xgnokii

Checking built-in Webcam on HP Notebook

2010-02-25T16:41:00.000+05:30

I got HP ProBook 4410s from my new office and running Ubuntu 9.04 Live CD on it. To test whether the built-in webcam was working I opened a Terminal and typed:
gstreamer-properties

A GUI window with title 'Multimedia System Selector' opened in front of me. I clicked on video tab and clicked on Test under Default Input.

The webcam indicator showed light and I could see my image in front of me. I could take a screenshot of the image.

Using Tata Docomo Nokia Mobile to surf on Ubuntu Laptop.

2010-02-19T20:40:00.000+05:30

Many readers of this blog are not aware that I am a Power Plant Professional. I joined at 4x600 Thermal Power Station at Jharsuguda in Orissa on 18th Jan and could not get net access except for a few minutes every day through Reliance Data Card in the new office.

Then I got Tata Docomo post paid connection on Nokia 5302c which is web enabled phone. Initially I used Opera browser on the mobile connecting through GPRS. Today I connected the Mobile through USB port to Ubuntu Laptop. The Mobile asked what to use the USB connection for and I selected PC Suite. Ubuntu opened the Network setup wizard automatically and I selected Tata Indicom (Plug2surf) and Ubuntu configured it for me. After connecting the Mobile asked me to subscribe to Data Packets. In the Mobile I selected Connectivity and set up the access point as tata.docomo.internet in Packet Data.

I could connect to internet through the Mobile and posting this through the connection.

Update on March 1, 2010
GPRS charges on post paid Mobile on Tata Docomo were very high (1p/KB). Today I received an SMS from Tata Docomo Customer Care that I could activate a day pass for Rs 5/10 MB for the day. I activated it and using it now.

PCLinux OS on Intel 82845 chipset

2009-12-23T19:54:00.000+05:30

PCLinux OS is a very user friendly Linux Distribution which I have not tried since long. I am bored with Ubuntu Karmic and most mainstream distributions since the desktop I am using at present has Intel 82845 chipset which has problems with all these distributions because the problem lies with the latest intel driver. When I looked at PCLinux OS it has X.Org X Server 1.4.0.90 built in 2007 and I thought it should work on this machine.

I decided to have a look at their LXDE Live CD and downloaded the iso. I mounted the iso and copied vmlinuz and initrd.gz in pclos folder on the root of sda4 partition (mounted at /media/disk) and livecd.sqfs at root of sda4:
mkdir /tmp/pclos
sudo mkdir /media/pclos
sudo mount pclinuxos-lxde-2009.4.iso -o loop /tmp/pclos
sudo cp /tmp/pclos/isolinux/vmlinuz /media/pclos
sudo cp /tmp/pclos/isolinux/initrd.gz /media/pclos
sudo co /tmp/pclos/livecd.sqfs /media/

Then I wrote the following lines in/etc/grub.d/40_custom:

menuentry "PCLinux OS" {
set root=(hd0,4)
linux /pclos/vmlinuz livecd=livecd root=/dev/rd/3 vga=788 keyb=us splash=silent fstab=rw,auto changes_dev=/dev/hda4
initrd /pclos/initrd.gz
}

and updated grub:
sudo update-grub

If you are having Legacy grub you have to write following lines in /boot/grub/menu.lst:

Title PCLinux OS
root (hd0,4)
kernel /pclos/vmlinuz livecd=livecd root=/dev/rd/3 vga=788 keyb=us splash=silent fstab=rw,auto changes_dev=/dev/hda4
initrd /pclos/initrd.gz

After reboot I could choose "PCLinux OS" on grub menu and get the Login screen. I logged in as guest and I could see the LXDE Desktop but could not do much before it froze. Then I added vesa at the end of linux boot line in grub and I could use the Live CD.

I went to PCLinuxOS Forum and searched for 82845 and read a couple of posts and got a solution in this post. PCLinux OS loads intel driver which does not work for 82845 chipset, however, it also has the old i810 driver which works.

I clicked on Configure your computer icon in the Application Launch Bar entered the root password (root), clicked on Hardware/Set_up_the_graphical_server/Graphic_card_selection (Intel 810 and later) and changed it to Intel 810, accepted the changes and clicked on Ok to logout. Unfortunately, I got blank screen on logout.

On next attempt I booted without vesa driver and followed the above procedure once again. This time I could get Login screen on logout and after re-login the driver was changed to i810.

If you intend to install PCLnuxOS the blank screen on logout should not matter since the change of driver is already saved by the system.

I can say that PCLnux OS 2009 works for Intel 82845 chipset with i810 driver.

Update:
I have added changes_dev=/dev/hda4 to boot options to have persistent Live system. Now when I change the driver to i810 the new configuration is saved for reboot. The default web browser is Midori. I have installed Firefox 3.5.6 using Synaptic package manager and it is available on reboot.

If you are looking for how to use Ubuntu Karmic on Intel 82845 chipset read this post.

Sidux with XFCE.

2009-12-15T15:21:00.000+05:30

I had tried KDE version of Sidux earlier in May 09 and wrote about it in this post. I decided to try XFCE version this time and downloaded the latest iso. As before I wanted to boot from iso without burning a CD. Now I have grub2, therefore, I opened /etc/grub.d/40_custom to edit and wrote the following lines in it:

menuentry "sidux 32bit from ISO" {

set root=(hd0,4)

linux /sidux/vmlinuz boot=fll quiet vga=791 fromiso=/sidux/sidux.iso persist tz=Asia/Calcutta

initrd /sidux/initrd.img

}

First I copied the iso to 'sidux' directory at the root of sda4 partition (mounted at /media/disk)

sudo cp sidux-2009-03-momos-xfce-i386-200911110039.iso /media/disk/sidux/sidux.iso

Then I mounted the downloaded iso and copied vmlinuz and initrd.img to 'sidux' directory at the root of sda4 partition (mounted at /media/disk):

mkdir /tmp/sidux

sudo mount sidux-2009-03-momos-xfce-i386-200911110039.iso -o loop /tmp/sidux

cd /tmp/sidux/boot

sudo cp vmlinuz* /media/disk/sidux/vmlinuz

sudo cp initrd.img* /media/disk/sidux/initrd.img

Then I updated grub to get the sidux entry in grub menu:

sudo update-grub

Then I restarted and selected 'sidux 32bit from ISO' entry in Grub menu and I could boot into the XFCE Desktop on latest Sidux.

There was a freeze after some time because of the bug in Xorg for Intel 80845 chip-set.
I had faced same problem on Ubuntu Karmic on this chip-set and forced Xorg to use vesa driver by writing xorg.conf. I copied the file to /fll/cow/etc/X11 on sda4:

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier    "Configured Monitor"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier    "Default Screen"
    Monitor        "Configured Monitor"
    Device        "Configured Video Device"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier    "Configured Video Device"
    Driver        "vesa"
EndSection

Google Chrome Browser for Linux

2009-12-09T18:01:00.000+05:30

Some Linux users were already running Google Chrome Browser from dev channel. Now Google has announced immediate availability of Google Chrome Browser for Linux. You can download it from here. You can download themes and extensions. See my screenshot. I have installed Similar Pages, Feedly, Aviary screenshot utility, Gmail checker and Xmarks extensions and you can see their icons on right side.

Update on Dec 12
When Google announced Chrome Beta it was version 4.0.249.30 and unstable version was also same, however, the development continues and if you upgrade unstable today it is at version 4.0.266.0. If you installed unstable before beta was announced the version changes if you upgrade, however, those who installed beta the version remains at 4.0.249.30, therefore, if you want to stick to beta remove unstable and install beta or don't upgrade unstable and let it stay at version 4.0.249.30.
Update on Dec 17
Today Chrome Beta also got updated to version 4.0.249.40.

Using Google Chromium OS on Desktop.

2009-12-07T17:04:00.000+05:30

After Google announced the availability of source of Chromium OS VMWare and USB images appeared on internet. I downloaded USB image but it exceeded the 2 GB size of my pendrive. Then a smaller USB image (less than 1 GB) was made by a developer and I downloaded it today from this site. I extracted the image and copied it to the pendrive through:
sudo dd if=ChromeOS-Cherry.img of=/dev/sdb bs=4M

I could boot from USB to the login screen but it froze after login then I realized that I was using a desktop which has Intel 82845G chipset. Then I modified xorg.conf on the USB stick to use vesa driver.

I could then get to the Chrome browser. I could browse but noticed following two problems:

I was already logged in to my Google account but could not use the Blogger even after I logged out of gmail and tried to login to Blogger. The Blogger complains about cookie functionality.
When I type I have to wait a few seconds before the text appears on the browser.

Note: On next boot I was already logged into Blogger. You can ignore point 1.

Xmarks on Google Chrome Browser.

2009-12-03T18:36:00.000+05:30

I have been running Google Chrome Browser (unstable) on Ubuntu Linux. Today I discovered that I can run Xmarks for Chrome Alpha, version 0.5.11 on it. I clicked on the download link of Xmarks through Chrome Browser and it installed as an extension.

You need to have an Xmarks account to access the download link and the Google Chrome Browser should be from Development Channel.

Xmarks is working perfectly on Google Chrome from dev channel.

How to change default Operating System on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

2009-11-11T21:04:00.000+05:30

Some people use Ubuntu in dual boot with Windows and they prefer to make Windows as default Operating System. Prior to Ubuntu 9.10 this was achieved by changing the default line in /boot/grub/menu.lst file.

Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala has Grub2 which does not have menu.lst file. The configuration file is /boot/grub/grub.cfg which is not supposed to be edited even by root. The primary configuration file for changing menu display settings is /etc/default/grub. The procedure to change the default OS is as follows:

Count the line number in the Grub menu taking first line as 0.
$ gksudo gedit /etc/default/grub

Change 0 in this line to the desired number:
GRUB_DEFAULT=0

Save and close the file

$ sudo update-grub

After running update-grub the default will change in grub.cfg

Running Ubuntu Karmic on Intel 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset

2009-11-03T08:07:00.000+05:30

My daughter's Desktop which I use while at Bhubaneswar has this chipset:

$ lspci -nn | grep VGA
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated Graphics Device [8086:2562] (rev 03)

I have installed Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala on this machine and it is having random freezes. I have submitted a bug report but I don't think the bug is going to be resolved very soon. There is another bug resembling mine (my bug may be a duplicate) which has been submitted upstream on freedesktop.org but I don't think that it may be resolved soon.

I decided to change to vesa driver but there was no xorg.conf. I used the following xorg.conf:

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Configured Monitor"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
Monitor "Configured Monitor"
Device "Configured Video Device"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Driver "vesa"
EndSection

There is no freeze using vesa driver.

Update on Jan 1 2010
There is some activity on the bug report. The commit in the Kernel responsible for this bug has been identified and informed upstream. Meanwhile I have found that if I use IceWM instead of gnome there is no freeze with intel driver. If you are comfortable with IceWM you can also use it.

How to boot Ubuntu from Desktop iso.

2009-10-29T12:22:00.000+05:30

I have been trying various Linux distributions by copying the contents of Live CD ISO to a spare partition, editing menu.lst file of Grub for suitable entries and booting the operating system. This method saves a CD.

Grub2 is the default boot-loader on Ubuntu 9.10 Karnic for previous distributions you have to install it.

To install Grub2:
$ sudo apt-get install grub-pc
This will install Grub2 but does not replace Grub Legacy and puts an entry in /boot/grub/menu.lst to Chainload and try it. After you find that it is working you need to replace Grub Legacy by Grub2:
$ sudo upgrade-from-grub-legacy

I installed Grub2 recently and discovered that it can directly boot from ISO. I had Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop CD ISO to try. Instead of copying the contents of the ISO I copied the ISO in my-ISO folder on one partition (sda4). Then added following entry in the file /etc/grub.d/40_custom
menuentry "Karmic Live CD (sda4)" {
loopback loop (hd0,4)/my-ISO/ubuntu-9.10-desktop-i386.iso
linux (loop)/casper/vmlinuz boot=casper iso-scan/filename=/my-ISO/ubuntu-9.10-desktop-i386.iso
initrd (loop)/casper/initrd.lz
}

Then I updated Grub2:
$ sudo update-grub

The update copied the above menu entry from /etc/grub.d/40_custom to /boot/grub/grub.cfg (Please note that you are not supposed to edit grub.cfg directly).

On reboot I selected the new menu entry "Karmic Live CD (sda4)" and could boot from the ISO.

Please note that on Grub2 sda4 is represented by (hd0,4) and not (hd0,3) like in Grub Legacy.

How to make manual entry in Grub2 on Ubuntu.

2009-10-27T12:15:00.000+05:30

I installed Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala RC today on one partition using Desktop CD. This version of Ubuntu has Grub2 which is under development. The Grub did not detect Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope and I could not boot into it till I studied the problem and resolved it.

As suggested on Ubuntu Wiki I tried the following workaround:

$ sudo apt-get install --reinstall libdebian-installer4
$ sudo os-prober
$ sudo update-grub

The above commands detected the Jaunty installation and updated /boot/grub/grub.cfg file (equivalent of /boot/grub/menu.lst file) but put wrote wrong partition #.

After reading Grub2 documentation on Ubuntu Wiki I made following manual entry in the file /etc/grub.d/40_custom

menuentry "Ubuntu 9.04" {
set root=(hd0,8)
linux /vmlinuz-2.6.28-16-generic root=UUID=5fdb796b-96c0-49f1-80ec-9455e337625c ro xforcevesa quiet splash
initrd /initrd.img-2.6.28-16-generic
}

The partition numbering system has changed on Grub2 and (hd0,8) now means sda8 partition. After writing the above file I had to run:
$ sudo update-grub

to add the entry in grub.cfg file.

How to create Google Chrome theme with your picture.

2009-10-18T13:15:00.000+05:30

Since the day I installed Mariah Carry theme on Google Chrome I wanted to create one with my picture. This did not work immediately since the Linux version of Chrome browser could not pack the theme into .crx file. The new version 4.0.222.5 does.

Here is the screenshot of my theme:

This is how I created it:
Create a folder MyTheme and another folder Image inside it. Copy the following text on editor and save it as manifest.json in MyTheme folder.

{
   "name": "name_of_theme",
   "theme": {
   "colors": {
   "bookmark_text": [ 255, 255, 255 ],
   "frame": [ 255, 255, 255 ],
   "ntp_background": [ 45, 42, 41 ],
   "ntp_header": [ 0, 0, 0, 1 ],
   "ntp_link": [ 255, 255, 255 ],
   "ntp_section": [ 68, 68, 68, 0.3 ],
   "ntp_section_link": [ 255, 255, 255 ],
   "ntp_section_text": [ 255, 255, 255 ],
   "ntp_text": [ 255, 255, 255 ],
   "tab_background_text": [ 0, 0, 0 ],
   "tab_text": [ 255, 255, 255 ],
   "toolbar": [ 0, 0, 0 ]
   },
   "images": {
   "theme_frame": "Image/theme_frame.png",
   "theme_ntp_attribution": "Image/theme_ntp_attribution.png",
   "theme_ntp_background": "Image/theme_ntp_background.png",
   "theme_tab_background": "Image/theme_tab_background.png",
   "theme_toolbar": "Image/theme_toolbar.png"
   },
   "properties": {
   "ntp_background_alignment": "bottom",
   "ntp_background_repeat": "no-repeat",
   "ntp_logo_alternate": 1
   },
   "tints": {
   "buttons": [ 1, 1, 1 ]
   }
   },
   "version": "3"
}

Replace "name_of_theme" with the name you want to give to the theme.

Now you require following images in the Image folder:

theme_frame.png

theme_ntp_attribution.png

theme_ntp_background.png (Put your photograph as this image)

theme_tab_background.png

theme_toolbar.png

You can download the images from this page.

Next step is to pack the theme. Type the following in the address bar of the chrome browser:
chrome://extensions/
Click on Pack_extension under Tools.
Click on Browse for Extension_root_directory
Chose MyTheme Folder
Click on Ok.
This will create two files MyTheme.crx and MyTheme.pem.

Now you have to open the .crx file using Chrome browser. You can do this by typing the following in the address bar:
file:///path_to_MyTheme.crx

Save the file and the theme is installed.

Google Chrome Browser on Ubuntu with nice themes.

2009-10-06T18:54:00.000+05:30

As per Google the Chrome Browser for Linux is under development. For Ubuntu user it is a fairly developed Browser with Flash working and even themes could be installed from Google Chrome Themes Gallery. Look at the Mariah Carry Theme on my Browser running on Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope:

I have installed Daily Build of Chromium Browser available on following PPA:
http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu
the GPG key can be added from the following command:
sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 4E5E17B5

For some people what I have installed from PPA is Chromium and not Google Chrome, although, both are same browser. If you want to install with the name Chrome here is the link to Chrome .deb package.

Tux Paint Open Source Drawing Software for Children.

2009-09-22T12:16:00.000+05:30

I installed Tux Paint on Ubuntu for my grand daughter but while teaching her how to use it I have fallen in love with it since I can't paint. It has an option called Stamps which can be used to insert images on the canvas like the following images of the Sun, Seagull and 3 types of houses on the following painting:

Talking about my lousy painting I painted this one using GIMP.

Install new Opera 10 on Ubuntu

2009-09-03T09:16:00.000+05:30

Opera 10 was released on 1st September and I tried to upgrade since the Opera deb repository was already available on my software sources file. Then I noticed that I had not added the Opera GPG Key. I added the key:

$ wget -O - http://deb.opera.com/archive.key | sudo apt-key add -

and I could upgrade to the new version.

If you don't have Opera repository in software sources add it:

deb http://deb.opera.com/opera/ stable non-free

I have installed on Ubuntu Jaunty but the repo should work on any version of Ubuntu.

Personally I am dissatisfied with Opera since it does not render Devanagari fonts properly e.g. see how it renders this word स्पष्ट The correct rendering is

How to talk using Pidgin 2.6.1 on Ubuntu Jaunty.

2009-08-22T10:40:00.000+05:30

Pidgin 2.6.0 was released on Aug 19 2009 and brought good news to Linux users that it comes with Voice and Video support.

This is how I installed on Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope.

Removed existing Pidgin:

sudo aptitude purge pidgin pidgin-data libpurple0 libpurple-bin

Add the following repositories to Software sources:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/pidgin-developers/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/pidgin-developers/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

Add signing keys:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys A1F196A8

Update and install:

sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install pidgin

For audio/video calls:

Double click the buddy and
Click on Conversation/Media in the new window.

If the buddy does not have audio/video facility the options will be greyed out.

Google Applications for small business owners.

2009-07-31T14:19:00.000+05:30

My son-in-law launched a company this month and was looking for low cost email, Document Sharing and website solution and I discovered standard edition of Google Applications which is giving more than he asked for and only at the cost of a domain registration.

I became a Web Administrator for him and it was very easy setting up gmail for his domain after registering the domain with one of Google's partner GoDaddy.com. For setting MX records I had only to enter the Customer # and password on this page and gmail at his domain started working after setting up the users.

He had made a Powerpoint presentation introducing his company and wanted it on Google Sites. I could have put it straightaway on Google Docs but it had special fonts. I opened it in Open Office after copying the fonts from his Windows machine to ~/.fonts folder on my Ubuntu box. The fonts rendered correctly but formatting on some slides was lost. After correcting the errors I saved it as Open Office Presentation on my box. I still could not upload it to Google Docs since it does not have those fonts.

Initially, I exported the presentation as Flash (.swf) in Open Office, uploaded it to Google Sites and embeded it in AnyFlash Gadget and it worked on Flash Player version 9 and older but not on version 10.

Afterwards, I exported it to HTML Document (OpenOffice.org Impress). Then I created a new presentation on Google Docs and inserted the images (created by HTML Document) on the slides and published the presentation to the web.

I could insert the published presentation on Google Sites.

This was a great 3 days experience and now I can provide services on Google Solutions Marketplace, another feather in my cap.

Printing Mailing Labels using gLabels

2009-07-23T10:09:00.000+05:30

When there are weddings you need to send large number of invitations. You need to build postal address database and then print mailing labels. I had prepared address database for my daughter's marriage in 2001 but lost the file due to loss of hard disk on my old desktop from which data could not be recovered.

Another marriage is planned in Nov 2009 and since advance period of rail reservations is 3 months formal letters of invitations are required to be sent by first week of Aug 09.

This time I have prepared the Database in Spreadsheet on Google Docs so that it does not get lost. I have shared the document with others so that addresses could be fed into it quickly.

I bought Mailing Labels from a Stationery shop and the page format is 210x306 mm which looks non-standard. The product is from Oddy and perhaps obsolete (meant for Dot-matrix Printers).

I tried to create the Labels in Open Office but it has selection for Brand of paper and Oddy was missing from the list and no Brand was close enough.

Then I searched for "Printing Labels on Ubuntu" and discovered gLabels and installed it.

gLabel also had many templates but I decided to create one for Oddy for the paper size I had. There is a Template Designer accessible through File Menu. I selected custom size of paper and entered the measured dimensions. Then I entered the dimensions of the Label, no of Labels on the paper (16), horizontal and vertical pitch etc. carefully and saved the template but it was not satisfactory. Then I opened the XML file of the template from ~/.glabels as text file and edited and saved it.

gLabel does not accept spreadsheet data, therefore, I saved it in CSV format and used it through "Merge Properties". For entering text on the label, I created the text objects and inserted the merge fields into them.

I could print the Mailing Labels perfectly on the non-standard stationery. Before printing I went into the printer set up and selected Custom paper size.

Opera Unite provides webserver, chat room, file sharing right from your PC.

2009-06-17T18:24:00.000+05:30

Opera Unite was launched on 16th June 09 and I decided to give it a try on first day. When I clicked on the download link on Opera Unite page it was nothing but version 10.00 Beta of Opera browser. I downloaded the .deb package and installed on Ubuntu Jaunty Jaackalope.

When I opened the browser there was Unite icon on side panel. I could use myopera userid and password to setup the system on my PC. Immediately I could start the chatroom on my PC and send the link to my friends and chat with them.

I had developed some content regarding my experience on steam Turbines using Tiddlywiki in 2007. I could immediately setup website on my PC using that content.

For sharing photos and files I don't need to upload them anywhere. My friends could download directly from my PC.

All these things have become so easy for common user.

Uzbl the new usable browser on Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope

2009-06-03T21:28:00.000+05:30

Uzbl is a new Webkit based browser with minimal graphical interphase. For opening a URL you have to type 'o URL' and it opens. See the screenshot below:

For adding a bookmark you have to type 'B'. For loading a bookmark you have to type 'u' and for loading a URL from history you have to type 'U'.

Actually o, B, u, U etc are keybindings defined in the config file and B, u and U also call the required scripts.

Tabbed browsing is not available but you can open any number of windows for different URLs.

This browser is being developed on Archlinux and easily installable from AUR. The bookmarks and history use the utility dmenu which has been patched for displaying the URLs vertically and available as dmenu-vertical in AUR.

After installation you can start the browser with 'uzbl' command but you get a blank browser window which does nothing since there is no default configuration. You need to create 'uzbl' folder in ~/.config and copy the following two files in it:

cp /usr/share/uzbl/examples/configs/sampleconfig ~/.config/uzbl/config
cp /usr/share/uzbl/examples/configs/cookies ~/.config/uzbl/

For bookmarks you need to create 'uzbl' folder in ~/.local/share and copy the file:

cp /usr/share/uzbl/examples/data/bookmarks ~/.local/share/uzbl/

and create an empty session file:

cd ~/.local/share/uzbl
touch session

You can also create a launcher uzbl.desktop:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Uzbl
GenericName=uzbl
Exec=/usr/bin/uzbl %u
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Application;Network;
Icon=applications-internet

All the above settings are required even on Archlinux on which it is being developed since the developer is trying to just give a browser with all other things managed from scripts outside the browser, although, thy are giving 'example scripts' and the settings given above configure these example scripts to work in conjunction with the browser.

Now let us come to installation of uzbl on Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope.

For installing the recent version of Webkit Library add the following sources to /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/webkit-team/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/webkit-team/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main

to import keys

sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 0x991e6cf92d9a3c5b

and to install

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install git git-core libwebkit-dev

to compile and install uzbl

git clone git://github.com/Dieterbe/uzbl.git
cd uzbl
make
sudo make install

After installation on Ubuntu you need to create uzbl directory in ~/.config and ~/.local/share and copy/create the files as stated above.

In addition, Ubuntu does not have $XDG_DATA_HOME set to ~/.local/share by default and dmenu-vertical is not available in Debian/Ubuntu repositories. These things are required by the example scripts.

There are various ways to set the environment variable $XDG_DATA_HOME but I simply decided to put the following line in the load_url_from_bookmarks and insert_bookmark scripts for the time being.

XDG_DATA_HOME=~/.local/share

I have downloaded dmenu-4.0 sources from:

wget http://code.suckless.org/dl/tools/dmenu-4.0.tar.gz

and the required patch from:

wget http://evaryont.me/dmenu-vertical-history.patch

and compiled dmenu-vertical:

tar -xvzf dmenu-4.0.tar.gz
cd dmenu-4.0
patch -p1 < ~/path-to/dmenu-vertical-history.patch
make
sudo checkinstall

I used checkinstall to make .deb package of dmenu-vetical.

VOIP to Gtalk, YM, MSN using Gizmo.

2009-06-01T21:57:00.000+05:30

I have setup Gizmo on Ubuntu and called couple of friends (Windows users) on their Gtalk and Yahoo Messenger and had voice chat today and surprised them.

Gizmo has not updated its Linux version since Nov 2007 and there is lot of criticism by Linux users on its forum. I had to use OSS to make the audio work.

Once setup and audio checked through free sip call to Echo Test I could easily import the Gtalk and YM buddies and could have text chat with online buddies but voice chat did not work. This was happening because they were setup as user_id@xmpp.chat.gizmoproject.com (Gtalk) user_id@yahoo.chat.gizmoproject.com

Then I added one contact as user_id@gmail.com and called him and had successful voice chat.

Booting sidux from iso with persistent

2009-05-29T17:13:00.000+05:30

I wanted to try sidux since long time. I downloaded the KDE lite version and searched on Google for 'sidux boot from iso' and got the page Booting with "fromiso" of sidux manual.

I created sidux folder at the root of an ext3 partition and copied the iso, vmlinuz and initd.img as per instructions and created following entry in /boot/grub/menu.lst

title sidux 32bit from ISO
kernel (hd0,X)/sidux/vmlinuz boot=fll quiet vga=791 fromiso=/sidux/sidux.iso persist
initrd (hd0,X)/sidux/initrd.img

After booting into sidux KDE 3.5.10 desktop I configured static IP through Ceni. Then I added noxorgconf and nonetwork boot parameters so that sidux does not create xorg.conf and reconfigures the network on reboot.

Since I don't like browsing with Konqueror I installed Iceweasel.

After reboot I found my static IP configuration intact and Iceweasel available.

The persist boot parameter creates folder fll at the root of same partition and uses the remaining space on the partition.

Installation of Archlinux from archiso-live-2009-05-24.iso

2009-05-27T19:25:00.000+05:30

I had earlier installed Archlinux after downloading Core installer and following Beginners Guide on ArchWiki.

After reading about Archlinux Live CD archiso-live developed by godane on latest issue of Distrowatch Weekly I decided to give it a try and also use the installer.

I was very much impressed with the Live CD with Xfce as default and choice of LXDE, e17, gnome, openbox-session, Fluxbox by pressing F1 key at Slim Login Manager. The normal user login is arch/arch and root login is root/ArchLinux

The choice of applications is also good:
Blender, Comix, GIMP, GPICViewer, Rawstudio, mtPaint in Graphics category
Arista, Asunder, Audacious, Audacity, Avidemux, Elisa, Hydrogen, VLC in Multimedia category
Abiword, Gnumeric, HomeBank in Office category.

I decided to give the installer a try. Initially, the installer produced some errors after partitioning stage while copying files. I googled for the errors and decided to logout and login as root.

The installer worked this time and copied all the files successfully and failed at Bootloader stage (which I did not want to use anyway).

I found the installation in order except /etc/fstab (which was meant for Live CD) and some tweaks needed in /etc/rc.conf file DAEMONS line. I used the Beginners Guide to build /etc/fstab and also corrected the DAEMONS line.

I made an entry in present /boot/grub/menu.lst as suggested in Beginners Guide and I could boot into the installed Archlinux.

I found that the installer did not delete the Live CD user "arch", therefore, I logged in as arch password arch and everything is working fine.

I updated the system through pacman and found upgrades to clamav, docbook, pidgin, xchm and openvpn which I applied.

Ulx 9.04 Ubuntu based LXDE Live CD with all applications.

2009-05-13T18:14:00.000+05:30

Today I am putting new iso of Ulx 9.04 on Linuxtracker.org which has Ubuntu 9.04 minus Gnome (replaced by LXDE), gnome-panel (replaced by lxpanel), Nautilus (replaced by PCManFM), gnome-terminal (replaced by LXTermina), gedit (replaced by Leafpad) but all other applications on LXDE Desktop. I have removed things which refer to Ubuntu like usplash (replaced by LXDE splashy), Ubuntu Docs, Ubuntu themes and wallpapers, Ubufox etc, GDM Ubuntu Themes. COMPIZ is also removed (replaced by Openbox).

It has gnome-games, Brasero, Movie Player (xine based), Rhythmbox, Pulse-audio, F-spot, GIMP, GPICViewer, XSane, Network Manager, Add/Remove, Computer Janitor, Language Support, Network Tools, Synaptic, System Monitor, Update Manager, Ekiga, Evolution, Firefox, Pidgin, Transmission, Open Office (minus Dictionery, language support). In short everything Ubuntu 9.04 has.

Some people may say it is as heavy as Ubuntu itself, may be. I have not tried to make it lighter by removing applications but I am sure the distrolet is lighter than Xubuntu.

In addition, I have written a small utility "mykeyboard" which helps in adding a Keyboard Layout to the default US Layout and added fbxkb to toggle.

Please download from torrent, seed it for some time, try it and post your comments here.

Ulx -- Ubuntu 9.04 distrolet with LXDE.

2009-05-03T17:54:00.001+05:30

Today I made Ubuntu 9.04 LXDE Live CD and uploaded the iso on LinuxTracker. This is an experimental effort to get user feedback. At present it has Firefox 3.0.10 OpenOffice 3.0.1 gnome-games Leafpad only.

I am going to add multimedia applications and upload another iso image shortly.

Users are requested to write their feedback about Ulx 9.04 under comments on this blog post.

xserver crash on restart taught me optimised use of memory.

2009-04-12T17:25:00.000+05:30

I have a machine which originally arrived with 128 MB RAM and Linux Distributions with 2.4 series kernels (Mandrakelinux 9.1) worked well with this memory. Even Ubuntu 5.04 with 2.6 series kernel worked vey well.

Subsequently I added 256 MB RAM to the machine making it 384 MB to use Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake properly.

I soon learnt to use lightweight Window Managers to have good speed with later versions of Ubuntu and also tried Debian and Arch Linux to further optimise thye memory usage.

The video setting in the BIOS was on "Auto" and 72 MB RAM was getting allocated towards the video leaving 312 MB for the OS.

Although Ubuntu says that its Live CD works with 256 MB RAM it is very slow and even 312 MB is less for effective use.

Recently I downloaded Ubuntu 9.04 Beta Live CD and in order to use it effectively changed the video setting in the BIOS to minimum (8 MB). The memory available for the Live CD was 360 MB (instead of 312 MB) and it worked very well.

Subsequently I forgot to restore the BIOS setting and continued using Linuxes installed on the hard disk (Ubuntu Hardy, Archlinux and antiX). They were working very well till I decided to change the Window Manager on Ubuntu Hardy and logged out of GDM to change session. To my surprise, the xserver crashed. I checked restart of xserver on Archlinux and antiX and it crashed on those distributions as well.

I googled for "xserver crash on restart" and read many bug reports and tried some remedies. Ultimetly I discovered the BIOS video setting and changed it to "Auto" once again.

Then I remembered that I had tested "logout" on Ubuntu 9.04 Beta Live CD and xserver did not crash.

I changed the BIOS video seiing to 16 MB and found that Archlinux (with xserver 1.5) did not crash on restart but Ubuntu Hardy Heron (which has xserver 1.4) required 32 MB setting in the BIOS.

Today I upgraded to xserver 1.6.0 on Archlinux and it is not crashing on restart with minimum (8 MB) video setting in the BIOS (like Ubuntu 9.04 Beta). With this setting the available memory for the OS has jumped from 312 MB to 367 MB.

Debian Live LXDE persistent mode

2009-03-22T21:13:00.000+05:30

I was very happy that Debian Lenny had Live LXDE Desktop CD. I had tried it briefly earlier. Today I decided to use the persistent mode i.e. changes saved in live-rw file and used on reboot.

As always I copied the contents of Debian Live LXDE iso to a 1 GB partition and edited /boot/grub/menu.lst to make following entries:

title Debian Live LXDE
root (hd0,7)
kernel /live/vmlinuz1 boot=live union=aufs ip=frommedia swapon timezone=Asia/Kolkata persistent noprompt
initrd /live/initrd1.img

Explanation of boot parameters:
boot=live union=aufs This is copied from live.cfg file in isolinux directory
ip=frommedia This tells the system to read configuration from /etc/network/interfaces saved from earlier boots.
persistent This tells the system to look for live-rw home-rw partitions or files on the hard disk
noprompt This tells the system not to wait for removing Live CD on shutdown/restart

For persistent media I created live-rw on one partition (mounted at /media/disk) as follows:

$ dd if=/dev/null of=live-rw bs=512M seek=1
$ /sbin/mkfs.ext2 -F live-rw
$ sudo mv live-rw /media/disk

Just to check that persistent includes the installed .debs I installed ttf-indic-fonts:

$ sudo apt-get install ttf-devanagari-fonts

and the fonts are available on reboot.

All my personal settings are available, although, I did not create separate home-rw because live-rw includes changes to /home/user

Couple of steps on Zenwalk 6.0

2009-03-11T16:16:00.000+05:30

Finally I have made Zenwalk 6.0 usable to my liking.

Setting static IP through Ethernet
Remove Wicd from Startup services:

Start Control_Panel (zenpanel}
Click on Startup_Services
Uncheck Wicd
Click OK.
Click on Session_and_Startup in XFCE Settings Manager.
Click on Application_Autostart
Uncheck on Wicd.
Close

Reboot.

Set up through netconfig (Just enter the required information):

$ su
Password:
# netconfig

Restart network (if you know how) or reboot.

Gmail Display problem
This is how Slackware site looked on Iceweasel on Zenwalk 6.0.

Similar problem was happening in Gmail. After reading on Zenwalk Forum I added the following lines in Device section of xorg.conf and it worked.

Option "AccelMethod" "XAA"
Option "XaaNoOffscreenPixmaps" "on"

Zenwalk 6.0

2009-03-10T09:14:00.000+05:30

I decided to try the new Zenwalk 6.0. As usual I copied the contents of the iso to a partition and found nice article on Zenwalk Wiki. Accordingly I edited the existing /boot/grub/menu.lst:

title Zenwalk 6.0 install
root (hd0,X)
kernel /kernels/ata/bzImage
initrd /isolinux/initrd.img

As per instructions I selected "Exit setup" and got root shell where I mounted the extracted iso:

cd /
mkdir zeniso
mount /dev/sda(X+1) /zeniso
setup

and started the installation. When it asked for source selection I selected "Install from a pre-mounted directory" and when asked for the directory where the installation files are:

/zeniso

and continued the install. I did not install the bootloader and edited the /boot/grub/menu.lst once again to make an entry for Zenwalk:

title Zenwalk 6.0 (on /dev/hda6)
root (hd0,5)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28.7 root=/dev/sda6 ro
initrd /boot/initrd.splash

Next step was to connect to internet on newly installed Zenwalk 6.0 but I had to struggle because Wicd 1.5.9 does not detect the wired ethernet connections properly. I had to setup as follows:

$ su
Password:
# ifconfig eth0 down
# ifconfig eth1 192.168.1.3 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
# route add default gw 192.168.1.1
# exit

I am yet to find out a way to save the above configuration.

After choosing the timezone the clock did not indicate my time. I discovered that Zenwalk was assuming that the hardware clock was set to localtime (which is actually UTC). After struggling a little I found the file /etc/hardwareclock and changed the word 'localtime' to 'UTC' and it worked.

I also installed ttf-indic fonts and flash-plugin using Netpkg.

Zenwalk 6.0 has XFCE 4.6 which I had briefly used on Arch Linux the day it was released and now trying it on Zenwalk.

I am going to love antiX

2009-02-17T20:01:00.000+05:30

I tested two Live CDs today. The first one was Debian LXDE Live downloaded from cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/release/current-live/i386/iso-cd/ It booted into nice LXDE Desktop with GIMP and OO apart from usual LXDE software. But there was no Network Manager and since my present router is not connected to NIC I had to manually configure the USB router by editing /etc/network/interfaces and /etc/resolv.conf But it is a good Live CD for machines having as low as 64 MB RAM. The Live CD does not have an installer and you can only have frugal type of install on hard disk.

The next Live CD was antiX-M8 'Intifada!' with IceWM as default Window Manager but believe me no distribution has such lovely IceWM fully configured:

I had Debian Lenny installed on one partition since Sep 08 which was not updated and the updates were huge. I decided to replace Debian Lenny with antiX since it is based on Debian Lenny with 2.6.27 Kernel.

Flash MPEG everything just works out of the box.

I am going to love antiX.

Enjoying the latest software on Arch Linux

2009-02-11T14:35:00.001+05:30

I had installed Arch Linux on one of the partition in Sep 2008 but did not use it much since I was forced to use vesa driver because ati driver had a bug and it did not work on secondary monitor. Although Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron had the same bug I could update the driver through Debian Sid in June 2008 after the bug was removed.

Arch Linux is a rolling distribution and latest packages are periodically transferred from testing to main repositories and you need to just upgrade the packages through pacman.

Xorg 7.4 was moved to extra repository on 30th Nov 2008 and I was eager to use it to test the driver. I upgraded Xorg and on reboot found that although the ati driver worked for the secondary monitor the touchpad did not work. After exploring I found that this version of Xorg had input hotplugging enabled by defaut. After reading on this page I added the following packages:
xf86-input-evdev xf86-input-vmmouse xf86-input-synaptics

and it worked.

Then I did the system wide upgrade and now I have:
Linux Kernel 2.6.28
Xorg 7.4 (xserver 1.5.3) working without xorg.conf
Gnome 2.24
Open Office 3.0.1
GIMP 2.6.4
All latest packages on LXDE

Upgrading to Open Office 3.0 on Ubuntu

2009-02-09T18:01:00.000+05:30

Open Office 3.0 has been released but it is not available on Ubuntu 8.04 or 8.10. Fortunately it is available on Launchpad repository. Add the following repository to your software sources:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/openoffice-pkgs/ppa/ubuntu hardy main

Replace hardy with intrepid if you are running Ubuntu 8.10.

Get the PGP Key from the following URL:
http://keyserver.ubuntu.com:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x60D11217247D1CFF

Save the PGP Key to a text file and add it through Authentication tab and click Import Key File… on Software sources.

If you already have Open Office 2.4 you can do:
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade

otherwise you can install the entire office suite through:
$ sudo apt-get install openoffice.org

Making custom Ubuntu Live CD using Remastersys

2009-02-08T06:33:00.000+05:30

I use LXDE desktop on Ubuntu and wanted to make a Live CD from the hard disk installation. It was so easy using Remastersys.

I added Remastersys repositories to the sources:
deb http://www.remastersys.klikit-linux.com/repository remastersys/

Then installed Remastersys:
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install remastersys

There was a menu entry "Remastersys backup" which I clicked, selected "Dist" and clicked on ok.

After some time "customdist.iso" was created in /home/remastersys/remastersys

I burned the iso to a CD and it works.

My custom distribution is Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron on LXDE with all updates, gnome-games, Brasero, Mplayer, GPIC Viewer, xpdf, Synaptic, Firefox 3.0.5 (with Adobe Flash Player), Pidgin, Transmission, OpenOffice.org 3.0.1, PCManFM, Leafpad, Xarchiver. The size of the iso is 686.5 MB

My review of KDE 4.2

2009-02-02T15:25:00.000+05:30

I am not a fan of KDE or Gnome since both have become too heavy for the kind of machines I use but I try when something new comes up. I had tried KDE 4.0 last year and wrote about the Desktop Widgets.

Since KDE 4.2 is having many new features i decided to install it. I have Ubuntu 8.04 on this machine but KDE 4.2 is not available for this version. I decided to install Kubuntu 8.10 for a change. After installation I applied all the updates. Then added the following repository:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-experimental/ubuntu intrepid main

and the package signing key through the command:
gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 493B3065 && gpg --export -a 493B3065 | sudo apt-key add -

Then updated through Adept Updater tool in the system tray.

After reboot it was KDE 4.2.

Some people don't like the application launcher of KDE 4 for them the old launcher has been added as a widget called traditional menu based launcher. There are many widgets and I have added Analog clock, CPU Temperature, weather, Twitter and Calculator and you can see them on the screenshot below:

In addition the KDE Window Manager has Desktop effects like COMPIZ and you can see the cube below:

My review of KNOPPIX 6.0

2009-01-30T16:09:00.000+05:30

I am long time user of various Linux distributions and also love Live CD distributions. I had never tried KNOPPIX before. I downloaded KNOPPIX 6.0 yesterday and burnt a CD. I never burn a CD to try new distributions but I had to for KNOPPIX (that story for some other day).

KNOPPIX 6.0 comes with LXDE (which I love) as default but it also uses COMPIZ as default (this I did not know till the desktop appeared).

My review: I have fallen in love with default COMPIZ settings on KNOPPIX 6.0. See the screen shots below:

Cube with glxgears rotating inside

and this is what happens when you close an application;

Live CD has following applications:
GnomeMplayer with multimedia codecs (I tried wma and mp3)
GIMP ImageViewer xpdf
CCSM LXRandR
gconf-editor NM_Applet(0.70) PCManFM Synaptic Wavelan Xsceernsaver
elinks Icedove Iceweasel Pidgin Java6_Web_start
Open_Office_3.0.1
Leafpad LXTerminal Orca File_search_utility XArchiver

on LXDE/COMPIZ
with Linux 2.6.28 and Xorg 7.3 (xserver 1.4.2)

Putting small Linux Distros on one CD.

2009-01-26T13:01:00.000+05:30

Every Linux lover often carries many linux distributions each on one CD or DVD. In addition you need some utilities like Super Grub disk etc. There is a cool script through which you can combine small distributions The latest version can be used to combine:
-customized-
Debian Live binary.iso
-compilation-
Ultimate Boot CD ubcd.iso
-very small-
DSL dsl.iso
Puppy puppy.iso
Feather feather.iso
SliTaz slitaz.iso
-rather small-
Slax slax.iso
Slax modules *.lzm
DeLi Linux deli.iso
TinyMe timyme.iso
anitX antix.iso
Wolvix wolvix.iso
-partitoning and specialized-
RIPLinuX riplinux.iso
SystemRescueCd sysrcd.iso
Trinity Rescue Kit trk.iso
Parted Magic pmagic.iso
GParted Live gparted.iso (can't be on same CD as Debian Live)
Offline NT Password & Registry Editor ntpasswd.iso
EASEUS Disk Copy diskcopy.iso
Clonezilla clonezilla.iso
PING ping.iso
-installers-
NetbootCD netbootcd.iso
Ubuntu (hardy or intrepid) mini.iso ubuntu-mini.iso
Debian (etch, lenny or sid) mini.iso debian-mini.iso
Fedora 9 netinst fedora-boot.iso
openSUSE NET iso opensuse.iso
Mandriva boot.iso mandriva-boot.iso
Arch Linux FTP or CORE arch.iso
FreeDOS base or full CD fdbasecd.iso/fdfullcd.iso
-utilities-
Any floppy disk image *.img or *.imz (could be Super Grub Disk, MS-DOS, etc.)
Any floppy disk image games/*.img or games/*.imz (for bootable DOS disk images with games, like this one)
GRUB4DOS grub.exe grub.exe
DBAN iso image dban.iso
Balder (FreeDOS) automatic
Memtest86+ automatic

The site is at Tuxfamily.

TinyCoreLinux

2008-12-19T12:20:00.000+05:30

TinyCoreLinux the wonderful 10 MB Linux Distribution on which you can add applications and run.

You can see icons of aterm, panel, applications_browser, emelfm, Leafpad, Firefox and GIMP on Wbar.

I have downloaded the wallpaper and added Tinycore logo using GIMP.

Here is the wallpaper image without Wbar for you.

and here is the original image:

Rediscovering SLAX .

2008-12-08T15:42:00.000+05:30

I had checked SLAX in Feb 2008. Today I decided to download version 6.0.7 and try it. As before I mounted the iso and copied it to a spare partition and edited grub to add the following entry:
title SLAX 6.0.7
root (hd0,X)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/ram ramdisk_size=6666 rw changes=/dev/hdd(X+1) autoexec=xconf;telinit~4
initrd /boot/initrd.gz
boot

As before I opened KDE Control Center, clicked on Regional and accessibilty, Keyboard Layouts and removed all Keyboards except US English and added India. I also added ttf-indic fonts.through System Administration, Font Installer.

Then I searched for Firefox 3 Slax module and downloaded it with following dependencies:
SQlite 3.6.6.2
libgconf2-4
libgnomevfs2.0
liborbit2
Gecko-Seamonkey-Proof-Of-Concept 1.0.0

As before I copied the modules to /mnt/hddX/slax/modules and activated them through System/Slax Module manager.

Tiny Core Linux -- New arrival on small Linux Distributions.

2008-12-06T10:02:00.000+05:30

As per the Welcome page on Tiny Core Linux:

Tiny Core Linux is a very small (10 MB) minimal Linux Desktop. It is based on Linux 2.6 kernel, Busybox, Tiny X, Fltk, and Jwm. The core runs entirely in ram and boots very quickly.

It is not a complete desktop nor is all hardware completely supported. It represents only the core needed to boot into a very minimal X desktop typically with wired internet access.

The user has complete control over which applications and/or additional hardware to have supported, be it for a desktop, a nettop, an appliance, or server, selectable from our online repository.

I came to know about it on Ubuntuforums and downloaded it immediately. Generally I don't burn a CD for trying Linux distributions but mount the iso on a directory on /tmp and copy the contents to a spare partition. This time I did not copy even to the spare partition since it is 10 MB only and copied it to /tinycore on Ubuntu. I added following entry to /boot/grub/menu.lst:

title Tinycore

root (hd0,X)

kernel /tinycore/boot/bzImage

initrd /tinycore/boot/tinycore.gz

It booted within seconds to JWM Desktop using Xvesa. Since my BIOS is quirky the desktop was showing funny colours on Xvesa with 1024x768 resolution. I changed the resolution in .xsession file to 640x480x16 and the colours were normal.

Since the resolution was not acceptable I installed Xorg but it failed with fatal xserver errors. I posted on TinyCoreLinuxForums and got prompt replies. There is a bug in xserver 1.5.1 for intel driver and I had to manually add the modules agpgart, intel-agp and drm before startx command. I was also advised to add the modules to /opt/bootlocal.sh so that they are loaded before start of X server.

I installed Opera and posting this from Opera running on TinyCoreLinux, Xorg 7.4.

Kazehakase 0.5.4.2 on Ubuntu Hardy Heron

2008-12-02T12:52:00.000+05:30

Kazehakase version 0.5.2 is available on Ubuntu Hardy Heron which has bugs. When you click on preferences it crashes with segmentation fault. I decided to install the version 0.5.4.2 available in Debian Lenny and downloaded the .deb and tried to install. The package complained for following dependencies to be installed:
libgcrypt11
libgnutls26
libxcbrender-util0

I downloaded .deb packages for the above libraries from Debian Lenny and installed and could install kazehakase .deb package.

Kazehakase is much lighter than Firefox and has all the features.

Ubuntu Hardy Heron Cube.

2008-11-29T16:06:00.000+05:30

This machine specs:
description: Desktop Computer
product: EXPO-LD
vendor: HCL Infosystems Limited
version: 1.XX
description: CPU
product: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.66GHz
-memory
description: System Memory
size: 256MiB
display UNCLAIMED
description: VGA compatible controller
product: 82915G/GV/910GL Integrated Graphics Controller
vendor: Intel Corporation

Trying Fedora 10 Live CD.

2008-11-27T22:29:00.000+05:30

Today, I have downloaded Fedora-10-i686-Live.iso and burned a CD. sha1sum was ok. CD integrity was ok. CD was working well on Laptop.

On Desktop it was not going beyond liveuser login screen and I think that the system was failing to detect the hardware.

I posted on Fedora Forum then searched bugzilla and found bug for the intel chipset of the desktop.

Meanwhile my forum post was replied and I was advised to boot in run level 3 and copy the following xorg.conf:

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "single head configuration"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "kbd"
Option "XkbModel" "pc105+inet"
Option "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "vesa"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Videocard0"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
EndSubSection
EndSection

After copying the above file I could boot with startx command into gnome.

Updating the distribution which is not running.

2008-11-26T07:48:00.000+05:30

Many people like me have more than one Linux distributions on different hard disk partitions but only their current favourite is in use. How to update the other distribution which is not in use?

I am using Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex and would like to update/upgrade Arch Linux which is on the other partition. I am double clicking the partition and it gets mounted at /media/disk then I am using the following commands in the terminal:

$ sudo chroot /media/disk
bash: /dev/null: Permission denied
# pacman -Syu

I just ignore the error message and type the pacman -Syu command.

Arch Linux gets updated and upgraded without running it.

ZTE MG880 CDMA USB Modem on Puppy Linux

2008-11-18T11:16:00.000+05:30

Reliance India provides ZTE MG880 CDMA USB Modem and one friend of my son-in-law arrived yesterday with a Laptop on which Windows partition was reformatted recently and he had no driver CD for the Modem. In addition sound was not working on the Windows desktop.

I popped in Puppy Linux 4.0 CD into his Laptop and showed him how to mount his Windows NTFS partitions and started playing one MP3 file from D:/ drive. Then I opened one .doc file into Abiword. He was very much impressed. Then he gave me the USB modem and asked me how to connect.

Puppy Linux could detect the modem but could not load the module. I googled and found the solution which was working on Ubuntu.

# modprobe usbserial vendor=0x19d2 product=0xfffd

and to use the following /etc/wvdial.conf file:

[Dialer zte]
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Modem Type = Analog Modem
Phone = #777
Username = 93XXXXXXXX
Password = 93XXXXXXXX
ISDN = 0
SetVolume = 0
FlowControl = Hardware (CRTSCTS)
Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0
Dial Command = ATDT
Baud = 460800
Stupid Mode = 1

The above configuration did not work on Puppy. Then I found that Puppy was linking the modem to /dev/USB/ttyUSB0, accordingly, I changed the Modem= line to:
Modem=/dev/USB/ttyUSB0

After changing the line I got following error:

PPP daemon dies (exit code =2).

On checking /var/log/messages following errors were found:

(none) daemon.err pppd[6304]: Can't open options file /etc/ppp/peers/wvdial: No such file or directory
(none) daemon.err pppd[6317]: Can't open options file /etc/ppp/peers/wvdial: No such file or directory
(none) daemon.err pppd[6352]: Can't open options file /etc/ppp/peers/wvdial: No such file or directory

I copied the file /etc/ppp/wvdial into /etc/ppp/peers directory and finally, I could connect to internet.

He wished that there was Skype on Puppy. I got the link for .pet for Skype on Puppy Linux Forums and installed.

I think I have added one user in the Puppy Linux community.

Standalone Compiz Fusion on March Linux.

2008-11-16T13:41:00.000+05:30

As written on this post I had installed March Linux 2.0 on hard drive. I added Standalone Compiz Fusion to the installation

and discovered that like other Window Managers Compiz Fusion could be installed without any particular desktop environment.

PCManFM is already there to provide the wallpaper and File Manager. There are two LXPanels like Gnome on March Linux 2.0. What else you need?

March Linux 2.0 installation on hard drive.

2008-11-13T12:16:00.000+05:30

March Linux 2.0 is based on Arch Linux with openbox, pcmanfm, lxpanel, lxappearance etc. The developer has built a Live CD using Linux Live scripts and SLAX kernel. Beta1 iso of the Live CD is available here for testing.

I tried the Live CD and liked it. Although, installation is not possible directly from Live CD, the developer started writing a procedure on its wiki.

I tried to install but it failed at Kernel installation stage at Step 6. The developer advised to use this procedure on ArchWiki. I had to create /proc /sys /dev directories before starting the ArchWiki procedure, which was required only for kernel installation. All the packages were already available on the hard disc through Step 4 (Unsquashing modules) of March Linux wiki page.

Grub could not be installed properly but I could boot the system after adding following lines to existing /boot/grub/menu.lst

title Marchlinux (on /dev/sda3)
root (hd0,2)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz26 root=/dev/sda3 ro
initrd /boot/kernel26.img

title Marchlinux (on /dev/sda3) fallback
root (hd0,2)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz26 root=/dev/sda3 ro
initrd /boot/kernel26-fallback.img

Before booting I created /etc/fstab and configured /etc/rc.conf file.

I could run the installed system on the hard drive. I created a user before starting X.

Since it is based on Arch Linux I could upgrade to the latest packages on Arch through pacman. There was an error during upgrade and I had to remove a symlink /usr/lib/klibc/include/asm

I am very happy to use this variant of Arch.

Restore Grub

2008-11-11T12:20:00.000+05:30

I am using Linux for more than 4 years but never used Grub command line to restore grub. I have used Puppy Linux Live CD GUI to restore Grub. Today I decided to use Grub command line.

$ sudo grub
[ Minimal BASH-like line editing is supported. For
the first word, TAB lists possible command
completions. Anywhere else TAB lists the possible
completions of a device/filename. ]

grub> find /boot/grub/stage1
(hd0,2)
(hd0,5)

grub>
root (hd0,5)

grub> setup (hd0)
Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exists... yes
Checking if "/boot/grub/stage2" exists... yes
Checking if "/boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5" exists... yes
Running "embed /boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5 (hd0)"... 16 sectors are embedded.
succeeded
Running "install /boot/grub/stage1 (hd0) (hd0)1+16 p (hd0,5)/boot/grub/stage2
/boot/grub/menu.lst"... succeeded
Done.

grub> quit
$

There is Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex installed on (hd0,5) and I installed OzOS (Ubuntu variant using E17 Desktop) on (hd0,2) which overwrote the MBR. Now I want to format (hd0,2) but if I do it without setting up the Grub's MBR pointing to (hd0,5) my system would become un-bootable.

By the command root (hd0,5) I have told Grub to use the menu.lst of (hd0,5) while setting up.

Simple, isn't it, only three commands:

grub> find /boot/grub/stage1
grub> root (hd0,X)
grub> setup (hd0)

Now suppose I want to boot OzOS installed on (hd0,2) I can edit menu.lst on (hd0,5) and make an entry to boot it but I decided to use some other way which is not commonly used to boot Linux.

$ sudo grub
grub> root (hd0,2)
grub> setup (hd0,2)
Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exists... yes
Checking if "/boot/grub/stage2" exists... yes
Checking if "/boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5" exists... yes
Running "embed /boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5 (hd0,2)"... failed (this is not fatal)
Running "embed /boot/grub/e2fs_stage1_5 (hd0,2)"... failed (this is not fatal)
Running "install /boot/grub/stage1 (hd0,5) /boot/grub/stage2 p /boot/grub/menu
.lst "... succeeded
Done.

grub> chainloader +1
grub> boot

I have setup grub of (hd0,2) on the partition itself instead of MBR and edited menu.lst as follows:

title OzOS
root (hd0,2)
chainloader +1

When I select OzOS on grub installed on MBR it "chainloads" the bootloader installed on (hd0,2) which opens another boot menu (listing menu.lst of hda3).

Wireless Networking using Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG, Netgear WG111v3 802.11g Adapter [realtek RTL8187B]

2008-11-04T10:50:00.000+05:30

As written in this post I had set up Wireless network at my daughter's home. We had a guest who wanted to use the router to check his mail. I went into the router configuration, disabled MAC Filter temporarily so that he could connect and I could get the MAC address of his Laptop in the router. I added the MAC address to the filter and enabled it again.

Later on I requested him to give his Laptop to me for a few minutes.I inserted Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex Live CD in the machine and started Live session. I wanted to set up the wireless access through the Network Manager. The network card was Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG which was detected and configured as wlan0, but the Network was not available. I followed the following procedure to make it work:
Right click on Network Manager Icon
Click on Edit Connections
Click on Wireless Tab
Click on Add button
Enter SSID: Default
Put checkmark on System settings
Click on OK.

The Network Manager will say:
Connection Established

The guest was also carrying an old Laptop and Netgear WG111v3 802.11g Adapter [realtek RTL8187B] (USB). I decided to check it on the Desktop which had wired network. The adoptor was also detected and set up as wlan0 upon insertion in the USB slot. I had to apply the same procedure to make it work.

This was my first experience of setting up wireless on Ubuntu.

Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex experience.

2008-10-29T08:13:00.000+05:30

I am at Bhubaneswar and using my daughter's old desktop. This can be called old because it arrived with 128 MB RAM and another 512 MB was added 3 years ego on my advice. This desktop is not used by my daughter but my granddaughter who will be 3 years old next month. I have installed Ubuntu in dual boot with XP on it starting with version 5.04. In fact two partitions are dedicated to Ubuntu on this machine.

It already had Ubuntu Hardy Heron and Dapper Drake. I decided to remove Dapper and install Intrepid Ibex and downloaded RC because I may be leaving this place after Diwali.

Generally I don't burn any CD for installing Ubuntu (or any other distribution unless essential). I copied the Live CD to a spare partition and edited grub to boot.

Normal Live session produced blank screen. I added "xforcevesa" to the kernel line in grub and could boot into Live session and tried to install.

Ubiquity failed to detect the hard disk partitions which I promptly reported on Ubuntuforums. Then I found a new option "Create a USB startup disk" in System/Administration. I used it and it copied the Live CD to the USB stick.

After setting BIOS to boot from "USB-HDD" I could boot into another Live session after selecting "Safe Graphics Mode" on boot menu. Ubiquity failed to detect the hard disk once again. Meanwhile, there was a reply to my post on Ubuntuforums that in case I was booting from hard disk partition, it gets mounted at /cdrom and hard disk partitions (of that disk) are not detected by Ubiquity..

Since I had not deleted Live CD from the hard disk partition, it was getting mounted at /cdrom although, I was booting from USB stick (Funny Linux). I reformatted the partition and rebooted and this time Ubiquity detected all hard disk partitions.

I installed Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex replacing Dapper Drake.

But I was not happy with vesa driver. I replaced it with intel in xorg.conf. I could get up to GDM login screen and system hangs with blank screen. I had to do hard reset.
I booted into the Hardy Desktop and looked at /var/log/Xorg.0.log (of Intrepid) and found many lines with this error at the tail:
[mi] EQ overflowing. The server is probably stuck in an infinite loop.

I added openbox and found that I could login to openbox session with intel driver without any problem and concluded that I should disable visual effects on Gnome. I posted once again on Ubuntuforums and was advised to remove compiz and compiz-core.

I went into single user mode and removed compiz and compiz-core which removed many other packages related to compiz.

Now I could boot into Gnome with intel driver.

NB: While using vesa driver I did update and upgrade before removing compiz. It can be concluded that compiz is not working on intel driver as on updates till now.

Setting up Home Network on SIEMENS SL2_141 Wireless Router.

2008-10-18T22:12:00.000+05:30

Today I have set up Home Network consisting of two Laptops and one Desktop on SIEMENS SL2_141 Wireless Router at my daughter's residence in Bhubaneswar.

The Router arrived with default settings in Bridge Mode. In Bridge Mode ISP userid and password is supposed to be given from the computer, therefore, only one machine could be connected to internet. I tested the internet connection through one Laptop and then used it to configure the router to alter the WAN settings from Bridge Mode to PPPoE. After changing the mode and rebooting the router it logged into ISP account and surfing could be done from the two Laptops and the Desktop connected through NIC to the router.

The next step was to prevent the neighbor from surfing the net on his Laptop using our router. The router was showing the MAC addresses of the two connected Laptops. I entered the MAC numbers in the MAC Filter and enabled the filter allowing access only to these machines.

I also changed the Admin password of the router, otherwise, a smart neighbor could easily disable the Mac filter of the router and surf from his Laptop.

I feel I have secured the Home network.

Listening to musicindiaonline streams on Linux

2008-09-28T08:55:00.000+05:30

Musicindiaonline is a nice site having music collection in most Indian Languages. The site requires you to have Real Player installed but the problem does not end there. The browser you are using should have the necessary plugins to run embeded Real Player. Most people use Firefox on Linux, therefore, I will take the example of Firefox to proceed futher.

So you have installed Real Player if not go to Real.com/linux and download the latest real Player 11 binary. You can install in /opt directory (which is default) or in your /home directory.

After installation see whether plugins are installed in Firefox by typing about:plugins in the address bar. Look for the plugin listed as:

Helix DNA Plugin: RealPlayer G2 Plug-In Compatible

File name: nphelix.so

If you don't find it you need to copy the following files from /opt/real/RealPlayer/mozilla directory to /mozilla/plugins directory:
nphelix.so nphelix.xpt

In default Firefox installation this directory is /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins. If you are runnimg Iceweasel on Debian it is /usr/lib/iceweasel/plugins

After copying the files check once again by typing about:plugins in the address bar.

If you have totem installed you need to remove the following totem plugin files which may conflict with running Real Player on this site:
libtotem-complex-plugin.so libtotem-complex-plugin.xpt libtotem-gmp-plugin.so libtotem-gmp-plugin.xpt

Now go to Musicindiaonline and play your favorite song.

Some songs use the dnet codec which is not present in Real Player 11 due to licensing restrictions. You can search for follwing files on Google:
ddnt.so.6.0 dnet.so.6.0

Copy these files in /opt/real/RealPlayer/codecs and create the following symlink:
ln -s dnet.so.6.0 dnet.so

Enjoy.

Archlinux has least memory usage compared to Debian and Ubuntu.

2008-09-22T18:06:00.000+05:30

I install any Linux distribution after copying the contents of ISO to a spare partition on the hard disc. For Archlinux I found this page. As suggested I downloaded FTP USB variant of the ISO from this page. I copied the contents of the ISO as suggested using dd command. The document suggest to chain load the installation boot menu. It did not work for me, therefore, I made following entries in /boot/grub/menu.lst to boot the installer.

title ArchLinux Installation System
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz26 lang=en locale=en_US.UTF-8 ramdisk_size=75%
initrd /boot/archlive.img

I use the USB port of my router but the installer, although, detecting it as eth1 did not work, therefore, I connected it through NIC. The installer downloaded and installed the base system. The Grub of Archlinux does not detect other operating systems on the hard disc, therefore, I did not install it to MBR.

After rebooting I made necessary entry for new Archlinux installation in existing Grub

title Arch Linux
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/72e737f9-5faf-4103-bfe2-84f9a01c4dab ro
initrd /boot/kernel26.img

and rebooted again into Archlinux base install.

On the other PC I had opened the very elborate Beginners Guide on Archwiki. I followed it step by step to install xorg and LXDE desktop environment.

The screen of my Laptop is broken and I use it as desktop through external monitor. The ati driver of Xorg 7.3 has a bug and as expected I got blank monitor on startx command.

In order to generate xorg.conf for xvesa I used the following method:

# pacman -S hwd
# hwd -u
# hwd -x

The last command generated xorg.conf files for vesa and ati driver. I copied the vesa file to /etc/X11/xorg.conf and could boot into LXDE desktop.

I find the LXDE desktop on Archlinux having less memory usage compared to Ubuntu Cli and Debian Cli.
On LXDE+LXTerminal (Debian uses 104 against 67 by Arch)

$ free -m
  Total used free shared buffer cache
Mem:  312 67 244 0 5 32
-/+buffers/cache  29 282

My tryst with computers.

2008-09-01T09:10:00.000+05:30

Some people from my ET batch were taken to manage IT in BHEL Hardwar in 1974, therefore, as such "Computers" had already arrived when I began my career.

I have seen those stupid cards on which Data was being punched and fed into mainframes but was not personally involved.

During 1983 to 87 I was responsible for accepting the 200 MW Steam Turbines of NTPC and was getting fed up with manual calculations with Calculators and learned to write small programs in BASIC. I asked my brother-in-law to bring a calculator from USA which had P1, P2 etc programmable keys in BASIC worth $80 (I think $ may be around Rs 30). I had put even Steam Table Formulations in those keys apart from mass flow calculations.

IBM PC arrived in USA in Aug 1981 and also in India soon thereafter but I could use only in late eighties since I was transferred to NTPC project in 1987. I have used 386 and 486 in DOS for dbase and lotus. I use to get data on floppies from Mainframe in print file format and had developed program to extract it into dbase.

Windows arrived in 1990 but I could use it only in 1996 when I came to Delhi. I made a complete Tender Proposal in Excel linking many sheets and even files wuth macros. Soon I became an expert to remove viruses from Word and Excel files.

I bought my home desktop in 1997 with genuine Windows 98 and was using Star Office and free software only.

I bought personal Laptop in 2004 which came with Mandrakellinux 9.0 CDs and my tryst with linux began.

How to post your top 10 used terminal commands.

2008-08-31T16:45:00.000+05:30

You need to use terminal on Linux often. Recently one Ubuntuforum member posted this code to know the top 10 terminal command used by you.

history | sed -e 's/  / /g' | cut -d " " -f3 | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail | sort -nr

You can copy the code and paste in the terminal and know the results.

Yamaha opl3sa2 sound card configuration through alsaconf on Debian Lenny.

2008-08-20T11:20:00.000+05:30

I have mentioned about my old desktop Intel Pentium 200 Mhz MMX 32 MB RAM many times on this blog. This PC has a legacy ISA sound card Yamaha opl3sa2. Puppy Linux has the utility alsaconf which detects and configures this card correctly. I have 256 MB swap partition and Puppy Linux uses it, therefore, it is possible to take out the Puppy Linux CD and play an audio CD.

I have recently installed Debian Lenny on this desktop and wanted to configure the sound card. I installed alsa-utils package which contains alsaconf. Following are the steps:
$ su
Enter root password
# apt-get install alsa-utils

After installations I got alsaconf in Debian menu. I clicked on it and had to enter the root password once again.

The first screen read:
No supported PnP or PCI card found. Would you like to probe legacy ISA cards/chips
yes

Next screen:
Probing legacy ISA cards might make your system unstable. Are you sure to proceed.
yes

Next screen:
Probing legacy ISA cards. Please select the drivers to probe.
[*] opl3sa2 Yamaha OPL3SA2+

I deselected other drivers.

Next screen:
Shall I try all possible DMA and IRQ combinations? With this option, some unconventional configurations might be found, but it will take much longer time.
yes

Next screen:
Configuring opl3sa2. Do you want to modify /etc/modprobe.conf
yes

Next screen:
OK. Sound driver configured. ALSA mixer used to raise volume. You can change the volume later.
ok

Next screen:
The mixer is set up now for playing. Shall I try to play sound sample now?
yes

After sound card configuration I downloaded the command line CD player cdcd (it was dcd on earlier versions of Debian).

# apt-get install cdcd

Now I am happily playing an audio CD and surfing through Kazehakase (or elinks) on Debian Lenny IceWM desktop on 32 MB RAM.

How to password protect a file on Linux?

2008-08-17T12:15:00.000+05:30

This question is being asked by many Linux users on various forums. Today I searched on Google and found this solution on Linuxforums.org.

You can password protect a zip file. Proceed as follows:

Create a directory for this experiment, and name it test.
Copy a few files and paste them into this directory so it isn't empty.
Now open a terminal and enter:
$ zip -e -r test test
Enter password:
Verify password:
Delete the directory test.

Now you have a file test.zip which is password protected.

zip with -e option encrypts the contents of the zip archive using a password. This encrypts with standard pkzip encryption which is considered weak.

However, the job of protecting the file is done, because even the root user needs the password or should be a hacker to decrypt.

Debian Lenny rocks on 32 MB RAM.

2008-07-29T08:56:00.000+05:30

Recently I downloaded the 150 MB netinst CD image of Debian Lenny Beta2 from this page.

Initially I installed it on my COMPAQ Presario 2500 series Laptop. After installing the base system I added xorg, IceWM and slim since I wanted very lightweight system. I found really a very light Debian.

Inspired by the lightness I decided to try it on my old desktop Pentium MMX 200 Mhz 32 MB RAM.

The installer went into Low Memory mode and loaded minimum installer components and asked to add additional components I wanted. I did not add anything. This resulted into failure of Network Card Detection. I bypassed the Network Configuration. The installer contacts NTP server after Network configuration. When it could not contact NTP server it simply asked whether hardware clock was set to UTC or not and proceeded to install the base system. The installer automatically selected the 486 Kernel image. At select and install software stage (after Base Install) I unchecked every thing and the base installation was finished.

After booting I configured the network by editing /etc/network/interfaces file and started the network. I updated and upgraded the system through apt-get (including Kernel 2.6.24 to 2.6.25) and could reboot into the new Kernel.

I added xorg and icewm and edited xorg.conf to configure the serial mouse, added Modeline, PreferredMode in Monitor Section, Default depth, depth and Mode to use in screen section. I made .xnitrc to boot into IceWM and used startx to get into IceWM.

The result on IceWM:
$ free -m
Total used free
Mem: 28 26 2
-/+ buffers/cache11 17
Swap 243 1 243

$ ps aux | wc -l
31

I have reduced the tty terminal processes by commenting getty lines in /etc/inittab file.

I added Kazehakase web browser. It gives performance similar to Firefox 1.5 on old DSL.

How to install LXDEbuntu.

2008-07-09T18:26:00.000+05:30

I had installed lxde on Ubuntu Hardy command line earlier but certain things did not work like mounting of partitions, icons on application launcher.

Today I discovered another way of installing lxde on minimum Ubuntu and it is full proof and it works.

1. Install complete Ubuntu Hardy Heron.
2. Add lxde and login to it.
3. Remove Gnome completely through the following command:

$ sudo apt-get remove alacarte bluez-gnome brltty brltty-x11 bug-buddy capplets-data cdrdao cli-common compiz compiz-core compiz-fusion-plugins-extra compiz-fusion-plugins-main compiz-gnome compiz-plugins compizconfig-backend-gconf contact-lookup-applet dcraw deskbar-applet diveintopython ekiga eog espeak evince evolution evolution-common evolution-data-server evolution-data-server-common evolution-exchange evolution-plugins evolution-webcal example-content f-spot fast-user-switch-applet firefox-3.0-gnome-support firefox-gnome-support gconf-editor gedit gedit-common gimp-gnomevfs gimp-python gnome-about gnome-applets gnome-applets-data gnome-control-center gnome-desktop-data gnome-doc-utils gnome-media gnome-menus gnome-netstatus-applet gnome-nettool gnome-panel gnome-panel-data gnome-pilot gnome-pilot-conduits gnome-session gnome-settings-daemon gnome-spell gnome-terminal gnome-terminal-data gnome-themes gnome-user-guide gnome-utils gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-plugins-base-apps gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio gstreamer0.10-tools gtkhtml3.14 gvfs gvfs-backends gvfs-fuse hwtest hwtest-gtk launchpad-integration libalut0 libao2 libarchive1 libart2.0-cil libcdio-cdda0 libcdio-paranoia0 libcompizconfig0 libcurl3 libdecoration0 libdeskbar-tracker libdirectfb-1.0-0 libedata-book1.2-2 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserverui1.2-8 libeel2-2 libeel2-data libegroupwise1.2-13 libexchange-storage1.2-3 libexempi3 libflickrnet2.1.5-cil libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-google1.2-1 libgdata1.2-1 libglade2.0-cil libglew1.5 libglib2.0-cil libgmime-2.0-2 libgmime2.2-cil libgnome-pilot2 libgnome-vfs2.0-cil libgnome-window-settings1 libgnome2.0-cil libgnomevfs2-bin libgnomevfs2-extra libgpgme11 libgpod-common libgpod3 libgtk2.0-cil libgtkhtml3.14-19 libgtkhtml3.16-cil libgtksourceview2.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-common libgvfscommon0 libgweather-common libgweather1 libicu38 liblpint-bonobo0 libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo1.0-cil libmono-corlib1.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil libmono-data-tds1.0-cil libmono-data-tds2.0-cil libmono-security1.0-cil libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip0.84-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil libmono-sqlite2.0-cil libmono-system-data1.0-cil libmono-system-data2.0-cil libmono-system-web1.0-cil libmono-system-web2.0-cil libmono-system1.0-cil libmono-system2.0-cil libmono0 libmono1.0-cil libmono2.0-cil libmtp7 libmusicbrainz4c2a libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libneon27 libopal-2.2 libopenal0a libopenobex1 libpam-gnome-keyring libpisock9 libpisync1 libpt-1.10.10 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l2 libpth20 libpulsecore5 librarian0 libsamplerate0 libsdl1.2debian libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsgutils1 libsmbclient libsoup2.4-1 libsqlite0 libtracker-gtk0 libvorbisfile3 libwpg-0.1-1 libwps-0.1-1 libx11-xcb1 libxml2-utils mesa-utils metacity mono-common mono-gac mono-jit mono-runtime mousetweaks nautilus nautilus-cd-burner nautilus-data nautilus-sendto nautilus-share o3read obex-data-server openoffice.org-base-core openoffice.org-calc openoffice.org-common openoffice.org-core openoffice.org-draw openoffice.org-gnome openoffice.org-gtk openoffice.org-impress openoffice.org-style-human openoffice.org-writer pkg-config pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat pulseaudio-module-gconf pulseaudio-module-hal pulseaudio-module-x11 python-gmenu python-gtksourceview2 python-uno rdesktop rhythmbox rss-glx scim-bridge-agent scim-bridge-client-gtk seahorse sound-juicer sqlite sqlite3 ssh-askpass-gnome tangerine-icon-theme tomboy totem-mozilla tracker tracker-search-tool tsclient ttf-opensymbol ubuntu-desktop ubuntu-docs ubuntu-sounds usplash-theme-ubuntu vino whois xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xsane xsane-common xsltproc xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support yelp

This command has been copied from psychocats.net.

My struggle with Ubuntu Hardy Heron.

2008-07-03T15:01:00.000+05:30

Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron arrived with Xorg 7.3 which brought many bugs. Prior to the launch of Hardy I had a glimpse of the troubles ahead when I tried PUD Linux LXDE version which was based on Hardy beta. Actually the problem was not with Hardy but with my Laptop whose display is broken and I use it as a Desktop along with external monitor.

When I tried PUD Linux the external monitor worked till GDM was started, then it became blank. I shifted to console by pressing Ctrl alt F2 and opened xorg.conf file and found the file was as good as not being there. It had no configurations. This was due to the new concept of auto-magic in Xorg 7.3. This concept had arrived in Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon in which if you delete xorg.conf you could still boot into the desktop. But in Gutsy you could rebuild the file through dpkg-reconfigure command. In Hardy dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg did not work. I tried to copy the xorg.conf from Gutsy but it did not work.

When Ubuntu Hardy Heron arrived I studied the changes in xorg.conf and wrote the file using vesa driver and after one or two changes it worked and I could get the desktop using vesa driver.

The video card in my Laptop is ATI Radeon IGP 340M and the driver used in Xorg 7.3 had a bug which was reported at bugs.freedesktop.org on 25th April 08.

The bug was resolved in June 08 and within a week the .deb file of updated ati driver appeared on Debian Sid (Unstable) repositories. I downloaded the .deb and its dependencies and installed on Ubuntu Hardy Heron and it works.

Now I could switch off the broken display of the Laptop through the command:

xrandr --output LVDS --off

Rediscovering Puppy Linux.

2008-07-01T15:12:00.000+05:30

I have always admired Puppy Linux for its hardware detection, speed etc. The main reason for not using it regularly was my love for Hindi and Marathi sites which required perfect rendering of Indic fonts. Firefox 2.0 and earlier versions required Firefox build with pango which was not available for Puppy Linux. Firefox has recently launched version 3.0 which provides out of the box support for Indic script (no special build is required now). I decided to give another try to Puppy Linux.

I downloaded Puppy 4.0 iso and mounted it on /tmp/puppy by following command:
sudo mount puppy-4.00-k2.6.21.7-seamonkey.iso -o loop /tmp/puppy

and copied the following files to a spare partition in /puppy400 folder:
sudo cp vmlinuz initrd.gz pup_400.sfs zdrv_400.sfs /media/hda8/puppy400

then I added following lines to /boot/grub/menu.lst
title Puppy Linux 4.00 frugal
rootnoverify (hd0,7)
kernel /puppy400/vmlinuz pmedia=idehd psubdir=puppy400
initrd /puppy400/initrd.gz

and I could boot into frugal install of Puppy Linux on my machine. The first step in Puppy Linux is to configure the internet connection by clicking on the "connect" icon on the desktop. Configuring eth0 is very easy.

Next step was to add Indic fonts. I downloaded the fonts from Indlinux site, created .fonts folder in /root and copied the fonts folder "Open Type" in it.

Then I searched on Puppy Linux Forum for Firefox 3.0 and found following .pet packages:
firefoxfix-1.0.0.pet
firefox-3.0.pet

firefoxfix-1.0.0.pet is required to resolve the dependencies for Firefox 3.0.

My next project was to add Hindi Keyboard and the Desktop applet to toggle between English and Hindi Keyboard. Hindi keyboard could be added by clicking on Menu/Setup/Mouse/Keyboard_wizard/Advanced_Xorg_keyboard_configuration/Layouts/ and selection "in India".

Adding fbxkb applet was a little difficult because I had to compile it from source. For compiling on Puppy Linux you need to download devx_400.sfs and copy it to / of the partition.

Then I downloaded fbxkb-0.4.tgz source package, extracted it, entered the directory and issued ./configure and make commands. (Note versions 0.5 and 0.6 of fbxkb do not work on Puppy Linux).

In Puppy Linux you give the following command instead of "make install"
new2dir make install

By the above command Puppy Linux makes separate directory for the package. You convert the directory into .pet package by following command:
dir2pet fbxkb-0.4-i486

and I got the .pet file:
fbxkb-0.4-i486.pet

fbxkb does not come with Indian Flag. I added it to /usr/share/fbxkb/images/

After giving fbxkb command I got the US Flag icon on the panel and clicking on it changed to Indian Flag (Hindi Keyboard).

SliTaz -- 25 MB Live Distro.

2008-06-22T16:41:00.000+05:30

I decided to try SliTaz the 25 MB Live Linux wonder. The beauty of SliTaz is in its rootfs.gz file which is compressed using LZMA compression. As per the Documentation the file can be extracted using lzma and cpio with following command:
# lzma d rootfs.gz -so | cpio -id

I mounted the iso and tried the above command in Ubuntu Hardy. Although, lzma and cpio are installed, it did not work. I decided to boot into SliTaz Live environment. I mounted the iso and copied the contents to a spare partition. Following grub line was available in /boot/grub/example-menu.lst file:

title SliTaz GNU/Linux
kernel /boot/bzImage root=/dev/null vga=771
initrd /boot/rootfs.gz

I added root (hd0,X) line and could but in Live Slitaz.Using the above command (# lzma d rootfs.gz -so | cpio -id) I could extract the rootfs.gz file. I copied contents to the root of the partition and changed the gub entry to:

title SliTaz GNU/Linux 1.0
root(hd0,X)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24.2-slitaz root=/dev/hdaX+1 vga=normal

This became Hard Disc install of SliTaz.

I find SliTaz very fast for web browsing.

Slim Ubuntu Desktops.

2008-06-08T18:50:00.000+05:30

I am Ubuntu user since version 5.04 and it use to run on Gnome Desktop on 128 MB RAM comfortably. When Dapper Drake arrived I could install it but I had to add RAM to use it. I added 256 MB. Then the Laptop Display was broken and I converted the Laptop into Desktop by connecting an external monitor. This reduced available RAM to 312 MB.

I installed Gutsy and could use enhanced Desktop effects but it was very slow. I added KDE 4 also just to see what is coming but it was slow. For daily tasks I added Fluxbox. Then I saw LXDE thread and added LXDE. Since then I was using LXDE and liked it very much.

For Hardy Heron I decided to do Cli install and add Window Managers one by one. Initially I added openbox and fbpanel. Then I tried to install lxde meta package but it failed to install due to unmet dependencies. I checked the dependencies and could not find 3 packages in Ubuntu repositories. I downloaded these packages from Debian and installed through dpkg. Finally I could install LXDE Desktop.

Initially, I did not install any Login Manager and was using startx command after console login.

Today I discovered slim login manager and installed it. On Login Screen I could select the session by pressing F1 key. The first option was XFCE which I had not installed. After pressing F1 again the second option was openbox and I could login to openbox. Third option was IceWM, so I installed IceWM and could login to IceWM session.

I searched for "slim" files and got /etc/slim.conf file. In the section "Available sessions" I changed "xfce4-session" to "lxsession" which also became the default session.

Now I could login to LXDE Desktop. Then I thought that I should add all light weight WMs to the sessions and downloaded Fluxbox and JWM and replaced "wmaker" and "blackbox" with "jwm" and "fluxbox".

I really like these "Slim Ubuntu Desktops" and slim login manager.
LXDE
openbox
IceWM
Fluxbox
JWM

Rediscovering Mandriva with 2008 edition.

2008-05-24T17:37:00.000+05:30

I began my tryst with linux by installing Mandrake Linux 9.1 on my then brand new Laptop in Sep 2004. In July 2005 I shifted to Ubuntu 5.04. Since then I have been an Ubuntu lover.

My love for Ubuntu is slowly fading with the RAM requirement going up with new versions. When I saw Mandriva 2008 DVD with Linux for you magazine I decided to give it a try.

I don't have DVD drive in the laptop, even the CD drive does not work. I install new versions of Ubuntu directly from iso. I have spare 1 GB partition to copy the contents of the iso. I converted Mandriva DVD into iso on another machine and copied it to my Laptop by connecting the two machines. I had to increase the spare partition to 4.5 GB since DVD is much bigger then a CD.

After reading the README and install.txt files I discovered that I had to go to this page to get the lines to write in menu.lst file of Grub boot loader. After entering the partition # on which i had copied the contents of the DVD I got the following lines:

title Mandrake Install
root (hd0,3)
kernel /i586/isolinux/alt0/vmlinuz ramdisk_size=128000 root=/dev/ram3 acpi=ht vga=788 automatic=method:disk,partition=hda4,directory=/i586
initrd /i586/isolinux/alt0/all.rdz

I copied the above lines at the end of /boot/grub/menu.lst file. On reboot I scrolled at the end of Grub menu and clicked on the line "Mandrake Install". The installation began.

Since I did not want KDE or Gnome I looked at other option which was Icewm. I decided to see what happens if I don't select any desktop environment. I was surprised to find that even then X window system was being installed. The installation was smooth. The Grub boot loader detected Ubuntu 7.10 and 8.04 installations on the machine correctly.

After reboot I logged in the command line and entered startx command. The X window system started and I got into Window Maker. There was no panel but I got a Menu on right click. In the Menu there was an optopn to start IceWM session. I selected it and I got the bottom panel and blue Mandriva wallpaper. I checked the memory usage by clicking on xterm and got the following:

$ free -m
total used free
Mem 312 91 221
buffers/cache 35 277

This means Mandriva 2008 with IceWM is suitable for 128 MB machine and the memory required is less then what I got on Ubuntu Cli and LXDE desktop.

Just out of curiosity, I installed XFCE and created .xinitrc file with following lines to boot into it on startx command:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

exec startxfce4

I got following figures on XFCE:

$ free -m
total used free
Mem 312 136 176
buffers/cache 58 253

I think XFCE may also work on 128 MB RAM but IceWM is preferable to have more memory for the applications to run.

Usability of Ubuntu on 128 MB RAM PC.

2008-05-19T17:57:00.000+05:30

Earlier I have posted about LXDE the new light weight Desktop Environment on this blog.

I decided to install it on Ubuntu command line system to really see how light. After installing Ubuntu Cli through Hardy Heron alternate CD and adding xorg xterm and testing the X window system working properly I added the repositories as per the previous post and tried to install lxde.

Initially lxde failed to install due to unmet dependencies. I discovered that required dependencies were not available in Hardy repositories. I downloaded the following packages from Debian and installed them through dpkg:

libnetpbm10_10.0-11.1+etch1_i386.deb
netpbm_10.0-11.1+etch1_i386.deb
xscreensaver_5.04-2_i386.deb

Finally I could install lxde.

There is a big difference in memory usage compared to LXDE on full Ubuntu install and login through GDM.

Memory usage full Ubuntu install & login through GDM:
Total used free
Mem: 312 255 56
buffers/cache 74 237

Memory usage Ubuntu Cli and using startx:
Total used free
Mem: 312 166 146
buffers/cache 44 268

Note: Memory figures are on the desktop with xterm only running.

I recommend it to all Ubuntu LXDE users.

Using Damn Small Linux on Pentium 200 MHZ 32 MB RAM

2008-05-13T13:36:00.000+05:30

My 4 years old Laptop was getting heated up and ACPI was shutting it down at 72 degC. I have given it to my friend for opening and cleaning. Now I am forced to use the old Desktop bought in 1998. The specifications are Pentium I MMX 200 MHZ 32 MB RAM. I am using Damn Small Linux from live CD and Firefox Browser. I have to wait after clicking on Firefox icon, then I have to wait for loading of the web page. Once loaded, I can work quickly, like I am typing this on blogger.com at normal speed.

I have Broadband connection but web page loads slowly because of memory limitation on this PC. I am trying to enjoy the slowness, particularly, the gmail and other Google Applications which have become necessary part of my online life.

I am Linux Geek.

2008-05-10T10:46:00.000+05:30

After using Linux for 4 years, I think that I am a Linux Geek.

Proof: After struggling with Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron, I concluded that I can report a Bug in Xorg 7.3 and submitted it on freedesktop.org.

Original Specifications of my Laptop:
HP COMPAQ Presario 2500 series Laptop, Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 2.80GHz, CDRom, 30 GB HDD, 128 MB RAM, Mandrake Linux 9.1 Tailor made CDs with multimedia codecs and Linuxant internal free modem driver (14.4 Kbps), Radeon IGP 330M/340M/350M video card, Ethernet Card.

Bought in July 2004. Original Mandrake Linux 9.1 worked very well. Then I started using Ubuntu 5.04.

Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake could be installed but was slow, therefore, I added 256 MB RAM to make it 384 MB total. With this RAM it is just suitable for today's Ubuntu. I have started using LXDE to make it faster.

Hardware Changes and Laptop turned into Desktop:
Original HDD replaced by 40 GB HDD, CDRom does not work, LCD screen is broken. I have hooked up external COMPAQ V45 monitor and using it as a Desktop.

Since CDRom does not function I install from ISO.

Difficulty in installing Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron
I have installed from alternate ISO but the new Xorg 7.3 fails to show anything on the external monitor. I can see GDM login screen through broken patches on LCD screen, blindly enter my userid and password, hear the Gnome welcome music and get satisfaction that Hardy is installed.

I can see the console by pressing Ctrl Alt F1, login and try xrandr but could not make X work.

I went to Bugzilla and found a Bug in Xorg for my video card. I have also submitted a bug report.

Till the bug gets resolved using Ubuntu 7.10 with LXDE.

LXDE 0.3 - Lightweight and Fast Desktop Environment on Ubuntu.

2008-04-14T20:04:00.000+05:30

Today I read about LXDE 0.3 - Lightweight and Fast Desktop Environment on Ubuntuforums and decided to install it on Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon.

I added the repository to Ubuntu sources list:
deb http://people.linux.org.tw/~pcman/ubuntu ./

then installed with apt-get
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install lxde

apt-get automatically installed all dependencies including openbox and PCMAN File Manager.

After the installation, I could login to LXDE by choosing it from gdm.

It is beautiful DE with all Menu built automatically. See the sreenshot below:

Ubuntu KDE4 Desktop Widgets

2008-03-20T14:53:00.000+05:30

I installed KDE4 Desktop on Ubuntu 7.10 as follows:
Added the repository:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-members-kde4/ubuntu gutsy main

updated:
sudo apt-get update

installed:
sudo apt-get install kde4-core

Then I checked the available widgets in add widget dialog. There are very few.

I searched on Google "Get more widgets KDE4" and found this site.

Installed the following package:
sudo apt-get install extragear-plasma

Now see my KDE4 desktop with some of the widgets running:

There is comic strip widget at the top.
Below that there are two more:
Picture frame on left in which sideshow is running and
Dictionary.

File transfer between two machines running Ubuntu and using ssh.

2008-03-14T12:25:00.000+05:30

I had successfully transferred a file from Windows machine to the one running Ubuntu through Samba but had no experience of a transfer between two Ubuntu machines.

I have an old desktop with 32 MB RAM on which Win98, Ubuntu server and Puppy Linux are installed. The CD drive on this machine still works. There is no USB port on this machine.

I have 3 years old Laptop on which the CD drive is not working and I don't intend to replace it.

Yesterday I was required to use some folders and files from a CD and decided to make an iso of the entire CD on the old desktop and transfer it to the Laptop by connecting the two machines.

For transferring the file I decided to use SSH, therefore I downloaded openssh-server on the desktop and installed it.

I made the iso using the dd command:
dd if=/dev/cdrom of=file.iso

I opened a Terminal on the Laptop and logged into the desktop through the command:
ssh desktopuser@ip_of_desktop

After confirming blah blah about RSA key etc I was asked the password and the terminal user changed as the desktopuser@desktop_host_name

I tried to transfer the file through scp command
scp file.iso laptopuser@ip_of_laptop:/home/laptopuser/

But found that the port 22 on the Laptop was closed.

I used the following command to see what was listening on the Laptop ports:
netstat -an | grep "LISTEN "

Although I was logged in from the Laptop to the Desktop no daemon was listening on port 22. I also changed the ssh client to openssh-client on the Laptop but could not make it listen on port 22.

I searched on Google but could not find any satisfactory solution.

Finally I decided to install openssh-server on the Laptop as well.

With openssh-server running on both the machine I could transfer the file that too after the server on the Laptop asked the password of the laptopuser.

Slax is very fast.

2008-02-29T19:12:00.000+05:30

I love Puppy Linux because of its speed but Slax is equally fast and it has KDE desktop.

Today I downloaded the latest updated version Slax 6.0.1 which has fixed many bugs in Slax 6.0 which was launched on 13th Feb 2008.

I keep a spare 1 GB partition on my hard disc where I copy the iso and modify /boot/grub/menu.lst file to boot directly from the iso without burning CD.

First I create a "install_cd" directory in /tmp and mount the iso on it by the following commands:

mkdir /tmp/install_cd
mount slax-6.0.1.iso -o loop /tmp/install_cd

Then I copy the contents of the iso on /media/hda8 (hda8 is 1 GB partition formatted in ext3) by following command:

cp -r /tmp/install_cd/* /media/hda8

Then I edit /boot/grub/menu.lst to add the following line:

title Slax 6.0.7
root (hd0,7)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/ram ramdisk_size=6666 rw changes=/dev/hdd8
initrd /boot/initrd.gz

"changes=/dev/hda8" is the cheatcode for saving configurations since Slax is a Live CD distribution which is loaded into RAM.

After rebooting I could run Slax.

After setting up the Network connection (Slax sets up automatically if it is dhcp but mine is static ip) I went to Slax site and downloaded Firefox module from this page.

After downloading I copied the module to /mnt/hda8/slax/modules so that it is available permanently.

Then I activated the module through Slax Module Manager. It is really very neat.

I have also changed time zone removed many keyboard layouts which are not required added Hindi (IN) Keyboard and installed additional fonts through KDE Control Centre.

It is an excellent distribution and very fast since it runs from RAM.

Installing Ubuntu 7.10 on 128 MB RAM PC from Desktop CD

2008-01-02T20:29:00.000+05:30

Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon Desktop (Live) CD does not run on 128 MB RAM machine but it has a boot option "only-ubiquity" for installation on Low RAM machines. I decided to install Ubuntu on 128 MB RAM desktop PC using this option.

Booting Ubuntu Live CD on low RAM machine also requires SWAP partition, therefore, I booted with Puppy Linux Live CD and created 512 MB Linux SWAP partition using Gparted. (The same could be done with Gparted Live CD or any other Linux Live CD which can boot on 128 MB RAM and has Gparted).

Then I inserted Ubuntu 7.10 Live CD and pressed "Esc" key to get the "boot:" prompt. I used the following command:

boot: live only-ubiquity

After waiting for a few minutes the first screen of Ubiquity installer was in front of me on default Ubuntu background. I did the selections on each step and chose the "Manual" partitioning method. I selected the / partition and proceeded to install.

Ubiquity took 3 hours but I could successfully install Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon on the machine.

Kamalakar

First impression of Fluxbuntu 7.10.

2007-11-27T17:29:00.000+05:30

After waiting for one month (since RC release) I downloaded RC iso of Fluxbuntu 7.10 Gutsy. As expected the CD was not booting from the cdrom drive (there is a bug). I copied the iso on a spare partition and used the method to install from iso given here

I added Firefox but it was not added to Menu even after "sudo update-menus", howver, I could put Fireox icon on the Desktop linking it to the application.

My first observation is "it is not very lighweight" distribution. In fact it is heavier than running Fluxbox on Ubuntu Dapper. Perhaps that is the reason why it is not reaching the "Final" release stage.

kagashe

Getting Enlightened on Linux

2007-11-17T18:44:00.000+05:30

Apart from Blogger, Gmail, iGoogle I use almost every Google Application like Google Documents, Google Maps, Google Calender etc., therefore, I was thrilled to see the above Desktop image of gOS.
I downloaded the iso, burnt CD and tried it Live and was very much impressed with newE17 Enlightenment Desktop and installed it to Hard Disc. Immediately after installation, I wanted to replace the Facebook icon with Orkut and Meebo icon with Gaim (or now called PIDGIN) but I was afraid that the attempt may mess up something.

I remembered that I had tried to fiddle with E16 version of this Desktop on Dapper Drake and did not like it. I removed E16 and tried to add gOS desktop to Ubuntu Dapper from gOS repositories but it refused to install due to broken dependencies because the package was meant for Ubuntu Gutsy which I have not installed. After searching a little more, I found the repositories containing E17 Desktop for Ubuntu Dapper.
I installed the Desktop and started to configure. I found some new terms like shelf, pager, ibar and ibox. Then I remembered the recent article posted on Linux.com in which the author has mentioned these terms and what they do. I could configure the Desktop within a few minutes using GUI tools and the screenshot is below:

The wallpaper was available in the system somewhere and I changed the default wallpaper. Look at the boxes at the bottom. The whole rectangular shape is called "shelf" which can be put on any side of the Desktop (aligned Left, Right or Center). The first yellow icon (after the cock's image) is the Start button. The 4 boxes next to it are the 4 Desktops (or workspaces) available in Ubuntu The space containing them is called "pager". The next box called "ibar" contains the icons of Firefox, Abiword, Evolution, GAIM, Gnumeric Spreadsheet have been inserted by me, then there are 2 applets (Temperature and Clock), the next box called ibox contains running minimized applications (Freecell, Rhythmbox, Home Folder, Terminal).

I am very happy to see that I can customize the Desktop on E17 with GUI tools provided and any user can do it and get enlightened.

I forgot to add you can have one shelf in each corner and fully customize it like on the green gOS desktop there is another shelf on right (middle aligned) with Network and Clock applet.

I could add the orkut icon to the ibar after setting it to open my orkut account and I am adding the sreenshot below. The orkut icon is next to gmail icon.

Running Linux on Pentium MMX 200 MHz, 32 MB RAM

2007-07-17T12:38:00.000+05:30

Hi,

I have an old desktop with Pentium MMX 200 MHz 32 MB RAM. It has Windows 98 since it was bought. Ubuntu is my favorite distribution so I installed it first in dual boot with JWM window manager. Here is my post describing Ubuntu installation on this machine.

Later on I tried Damn Small Linux and did a frugal install. I added Opera from mydsl and found that it was faster compared to Opera on Ubuntu with JWM.

Then I fiddled with the sound card and found that it was Yamaha OPL3-SAx. I searched on many Linux forums including Ubuntuforums and learnt that I required alsaconf to configure it. I remembered that Puppy Linux Live CD had this utility.

I inserted Puppy Live CD and could configure the sound card without inputting any DMA or IRQ numbers by using alsaconf. I could test the sound through alsaconf at the end of the configuration.

Then I decided to play an audio CD and discovered that I could remove Puppy Live CD (although I had only 32 MB RAM) and insert and play the audio CD in the same drive. Amazing!

I also configured my network connection and saved all configurations on the hard disc at the end of the session.

Now whenever I insert Puppy Live CD the saved sound card and network configurations work. There is no need to do hard disc install.

I am looking for suitable Opera version for Puppy like I have in mydsl.

How to write to Windows NTFS partition from Ubuntu Feisty.

2007-07-03T15:45:00.000+05:30

After you install Ubuntu in dual boot with windows it is necessary to have Read/Write access to your old files on NTFS partition. When you install Feisty, it mounts your NTFS partitions Read only. Here is how to get write access to the partition.

Click on Applications/Add-remove.
Type NTFS in the search box and select all available applications in show box.

You will find NTFS Configuration Tool, select it to install and click apply.

After the utility is installed click on Applications/System Tools/NTFS Configuration Tool.
Check the required boxes and click ok.

kagashe

Installing Ubuntu Feisty using Windows Bootloader

2007-06-19T16:19:00.000+05:30

Hi,

One of my friend wanted to install Ubuntu Feisty on his office desktop without installing Grub on MBR and instead use Windows Bootloader to boot into Windows or Ubuntu. I checked on Illustrated Dual Boot Site and decided to use Wingrub to accomplish this.

I edited the BIOS settings to make first boot device as "floppy".

I used alternate install CD to install Ubuntu and when the installation asked "Install the GRUB boot loader to the master boot record?" I selected "No". On next screen I typed "(fd0)" and inserted a floppy to install Grub on floppy.

On rebooting I could boot into Ubuntu since the floppy was inside the drive. The installation was perfect. I commented the "savedefault" line in /boot/grub/menu.lst as suggested on Wingrub page.

Then I removed the floppy and rebooted into Windows and followed the instructions on Wingrub page which I am reproducing below:
To relax the security attributes for the boot.ini file:
1) Click Start
2) Click Run
3) Type CMD in the run box
Open: CMD
4) Click the 'OK' button

Type cd \ (to go to root directory)
Type attrib -s -h -r boot.ini (so that you can see boot.ini file which is hidden)
Open the file boot.ini file and add the following line:
C:\GRLDR="Start Grub" (This will add "Start Grub" line to Windows Bootloader.

Then I downloaded WINGRB0206.EXE from sourceforge

I double-clicked on the installer's icon and received a window titled 'WinGrub 0.02 Build 6 Setup: Installation Options'.

The options are, 'Type of install:' ('Full', 'Normal', 'Minimum', or 'Custom').
I left the spinbox set to 'Full' for mine.

Right under that spinbox are: 'WinGrub GUI', 'Stage Files', Create shortcut', and Create Desktop Icon'.
The first three checkboxes were already checked, and I also added a tick mark to the fourth checkbox, to have the installer create a desktop icon for me.
I guess that makes it a 'custom' install. The spinbox resets to 'custom'. Okay.
Next>

The next Window is to tell me where WinGrub wants to be installed, or allow me to browse for an alternative location if the default location isn't suitable for me. I just clicked 'Install'.
Install

As quick as a flash, a new Windows appeared and a blue progress bar zipped across it, a new icon appeared on my desktop, and WinGrub was installed.

That was simple wasn't it? :)

Now I see a nice new icon has been added to my Desktop.

Now I double-click the WinGrub icon on my Desktop, and a Window titled 'Base Setup' opens.

The 'Base Setup' Window has a field with a big empty space in the middle titled 'Choose Drive'.

In my computer there is one line in the top of that space. It says, 'C-Free:7300M, Total: 13548M'
I selected that line with my mouse.
I imagine in some computers there might be a list of partitions you could install WinGrub in, but I only have one.
I clicked 'Ok'.

The next Windows opens, it's called 'WinGrub -C:\Grub\
The big square in this one is titled 'General Options'.
I clicked the 'Profiles' spinbox and down came a list of options, 'sample', 'default', 'netboot', and 'dskboot'.
I selected the last one, 'dskboot'.

Below the 'General Options' rectangle in the same Window there is a box called 'Menu table', in which the lower left field has just changed to show some terms I'm familiar with.

I clicked on the top line, '', and this caused some output to appear in the right-hand side fields.
The top field, called 'title', now has 'load /boot/grub/menu.lst' printed in it.
Right under that in the next field, I see' find --set-root /boot/grub/menu.lst
configfile /boot/grub/menu.lst

Finally, back up in the upper rectangle, just to the right of the 'Profiles' spinbox, which is set to 'dskboot', there's a 'save' button. It doesn't have 'save' written on it anywhere, but I can tell what it's for by the icon. I clicked that.

In the 'Base Setup' window again I clicked 'tools'-->'install Grub',
and in the 'Install Grub' Window I saw system drive 'C' was pre-selected.
I clicked on the radio button for BOOT.INI
and hit the 'Install' button at the bottom middle of that window.

Then, I closed the WinGrub Setup and rebooted my computer.

Windows Bootloader provided the following options:
Please select the operating system to start:

Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
Start Grub

When I clicked on "Start Grub" I could boot into Ubuntu.

Now suppose my friend wants to remove Ubuntu from the machine he could simply remove the "Start Grub" option from boot.ini file after deleting the Linux partitions.

kagashe

Downloading Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty on Windows XP using BitTorrent

2007-04-21T10:43:00.000+05:30

Hi,

It is long long time since I posted on this blog because I was not having regular access to Internet. I reached my daughter's home and she has a desktop with 24 hours cable internet connection. Although it has Xubuntu 6.06 in dual boot with Windows XP the Linux is not in use due to 128MB not being sufficient for adequate speed on Xubuntu. Moreover, the desktop is used by all family members so the default OS is Windows XP.

Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty was released on April 19th 2007 and I wanted to download it ASAP. I decided to have the experience of downloading through BitTorrent. There are many sites offering Bittorrent clients for Windows. I decided to download the original Bittorrent client. In order to use Bittorent you need the link to the torrent file of the iso which is a small file (27 K).

I had to modify the Windows XP firewall settings for the Network Connection to allow access to port nos 6881 to 6889 for which instructions were available on this site.

I entered the URL of the torrent file in BitTorrent by clicking on Add button. I was asked where to save the downloaded ISO on the hard disc and the download began. Since it was day 1 there were more people asking for the file than those sharing theirs (called seeds). My max download speed was limited by the ISP (could reach 12 KB/s only). In spite of such low download speed the PC was uploading at 3 KB/s and surfing was not possible. After trying for a few hours I decided to pause the download for one or two days. On April 20th I found that 98% machines were seed and it was possible to download and also surf on the desktop. It took more than a day to download the ISO.

kagashe

Sound problems in Ubuntu 5.10

2006-05-01T15:16:00.000+05:30

Recently I installed Skype and my tryst with "sound recording" in Ubuntu Breezy began. I searched on Ubuntu forum and did the following settings as suggested on one of the posts:

System>Preferences>Sound
Uncheck Enable Sound Server Startup
System>Preferences>Multimedia System Selector
Set Default Sink to OSS Open Sound System
Set Default Source to OSS Open Sound System

I could not record sound from the external microphone.

I read number of posts in many threads with no result.

Then I went to Skype Forum and serched for "Ubuntu" and found an excellent advice:

For testing your audio-setup, I suggest you to use
aplay -D default test.wav
arecord -D default testrec.wav

"aplay" and "arecord" are ALSA command line utilities. The first command did not play anything since there was no "test.wav" file.

But I could record from the microphone after using "arecord" command. Then I played the recording:

aplay -D default testrec.wav

Then I found that I could also record from the "Sound Recorder" of Gnome.

After fiddling with some other "Sound and Video" programs I found that I could not record the sound once again. I restarted the PC and could record once again.

I found one excellent post Unofficial Skype + Linux Sound FAQ on Skype Forum.

Hope it helps some people.

Resizing NTFS partition on Windows XP

2006-01-04T11:07:00.000+05:30

Hi,

When I installed Ubuntu in dual boot with Windows XP on my daughter's desktop I could resize the partitions since it had FAT32 partitions.

Recently I installed Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy on another desktop which had 80 GB SATA hard drive. The administrative tools in Windows XP did not allow me to resize the NTFS partition (c:/ drive size 45 GB). But I was sure that Ubuntu installation CD could do this.

So I put the install CD and booted (after changing boot options in BIOS). At manual partitioning stage I resized the partition to 20 GB. Just as a curiosity I aborted rest of the installation process and rebooted in Windows XP.

I was able to see the unused space but there were 3 primary partitions (all NTFS) so I could not create the fourth one. I copied the contents of drive D: temporarily on C: and deleted the partition (drive d:). Then I created three extended partitions in FAT32. (Windows XP allows no of extended partitions). I named one partition as D: and copied the data back from C:

I had created another 2 FAT32 partitions one of 9 GB (for linux /) and another of 600 MB (for SWAP).

I rebooted putting Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy install CD and installed the operating system using the two FAT32 partitions (changing them to Linux partitions).

The GRUB boot menu boots in Ubuntu if you don't select Windows XP. I modified the menu.lst file in /boot/grub and brought Windows XP on top of the list since the user wanted the machine to boot in Windows by default.

I am now more confident of installing Ubuntu Linux in dual boot with Windows XP on an existing system.

kagashe

Upgrading Ubuntu to the new release.

2005-11-27T19:39:00.000+05:30

Hi,

I received free CDs of Ubuntu Breezy Badger 5.10 recently. So I wanted to upgrade from Ubuntu Hoary Hedgehog 5.04 to the new version. After reading many posts on Ubuntuforums I decided not to do an "upgrade" but go for a new install of Breezy.

When you do a fresh install you need to reformat the partition. So how about your /home folder (containing personal files)? It is best to have /home on separate partition. If you don't have it create it, mount it and copy the required files or everything on /home.

Since I started my Linux journey with Mandriva my /home already existed on separate partition (Mandriva does it by default). When I installed Ubuntu 5.04 I used it during the installation.

I put the install CD and installed Breezy on the partition which had Hoary. I created the same userid (which I had on Hoary) and I could login to Breezy without any problem.

But I realised very soon that there was some mistake. After posting on Ubuntuforums and reading a couple of posts I found the problem. My /home contained the config files (in hidden folders/files) from Hoary and Breezy was trying to use them.

I did a fresh install after deleting most of the hidden folders/files. Before deleting .mozilla I saved my bookmarks. I did not delete .evolution (mail client) and .gaim (Instant Messenger) which were suppossed to work (and they did).

That is how I upgraded my Ubuntu Linux to the new version.

kagashe

Build your own Linux distribution from Scratch.

2005-09-28T17:59:00.000+05:30

Hi,

Linux From Scratch (LFS) is a project that provides you with step-by-step instructions for building your own custom Linux system, entirely from source code.
Why would I want an LFS system?
LFS teaches me how a Linux system works internally
Building LFS produces a very compact Linux system
LFS is extremely flexible
LFS offers me added security

Today I have finished the installation of LFS on one of the partitions on my PC. But it is only the base linux system. Now I have to start the installation of Beyond Linux from Scratch (BLFS) which will install KDE, Gnome, XFCE desktop (whiever I chose), Firefox browser etc. so that I can use my personally built Linux system and enjoy.

LFS is compiled and installed by following the instructions in the LFS book which one can read online or download The current stable version is 6.1 which is based on Kernel 2.6.11.12.

One can install the system just by following the book. I faced two minor problems one in the begining and other in the middle of the process. The first problem was resolved on LinuxQuestions.org-LFS Forum. You can read my post here. The second problem was resolved by me and I am going to write about both the problems here.

The LFS book says that the host system must be running at least a 2.6.2 kernel compiled with GCC-3.0 or higher. It does not say what software, utilies should be available on the host. When you start building the first package Binutils it says that the installation depends upon 15 packages. This does not mean that these 15 packages are required on the host system. So which ones are required? Without bothering about this I started compiling the Binutils package and got stuck up. I posted on LinuxQuestions.org and got an answer that on Ubuntu 5.04 I require GCC (which I had), Bison and Flex.

LFS is built on a separate partition. During about half way (or may be 30%) you mount the Virtual Kernel File System on this partition and enter into the LFS through what is known as "Chroot environment". At this stage you are isolated from the host system (within the Bash shell) and you build the basic LFS system. This takes 2 days or more and you may have to shutdown the machine. The book says that if for any reason you stop working on the LFS system and start again later, it is important to check that these file systems are mounted again before entering the chroot environment. This is OK. But not only this, you have to mount tmpfs over /dev and create the necessary devices in /dev after entering Chroot.

But I should appreciate the LFS book. It is very thorough and one can actually build his/her own Linux system from the book.

kagashe

XFCE the fast Desktop on Linux.

2005-09-17T07:47:00.000+05:30

Hi,

The popular desktops KDE and Gnome available on Linux are slow to load on any Linux distribution. I have only 128 Mb RAM, therefore, I decided to switch to XFCE desktop. After login the XFCE desktop loads within 10 seconds. The applications also load faster.

I use more than one keyboard layout. I could add the keyboard layout switcher to the panel but found only the default keyboard layout, although, I had alreadt added another keyboard layout while working in Gnome. After searching I found the answer on XFCE Wiki under Tips, Tricks and Howtos.

There are so many plugins on Xfce Goodies
I added laptop battery monitor and weather update to my desktop.

Xfce is really a light feature rich desktop.

kagashe

How to build your own Linux Distribution

2005-09-03T17:30:00.000+05:30

Hi,

On Distrowatch.com there are 342 active distributions and another 121 are on waiting list. I thought why not have your own Linux distribution. So today I googled the title of this post and to my surprise I got an excellent page for guidance here. Finally I reached a site called Linux from Scratch (LFS). I started reading and found that it was not meant not only for developers but also an average user. I have decided to devote some time every day and try building my own Linux distribution.

kagashe

Five reasons NOT to use Linux.

2005-09-01T15:14:00.000+05:30

Hi,

Read the article here:
http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS8124627492.html

After reading you will find why a Linux fan like me is posting the link to the article.

Here, we go again: why Linux is better:
http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS3304110264.html

Now in case you decide to try Linux. Let me tell you which distribution to start with and why by quoting from an article about Linspire:

"One of the main differences between Linspire and other Linux distros (Mandriva, Ubuntu, MEPIS, etc.) is that Linspire does include a lot of legal and paid-for 3rd-party licenses for things like mp3, Java, Flash, Quick Time, Windows Media, Bitstream fonts, Real media, music, etc., and this is all pre-loaded, tested and ready to use. Take all that away and you don't have Linspire, you have something more like other Linux distros."

Actually Linspire is so much like Windows that it was called "Lindows" but it changed to Linspire after agreement with Microsoft (That is another story).

Download version of Linspire costs $49.95 but you can get a free coupon here and use it upto September 6th, 2005:
http://info.linspire.com/freespire/index.html

I am using Ubuntu myself but I am recommending Linspire due to the above reasons in the "quote". It is possible to use the software inside the "quote" and many others in Ubuntu as well but it is not included on the official Ubuntu CD and one has to look for the information on Ubuntuforums to get the additional software most of which is available on another "unofficial" CD (free download). Ubuntu offcourse is free and will remain free for ever.

In case you decide to stick with Windows please apply all the patches and don't use Internet Explorer in which many holes are getting discovered. Here is the latest one:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1854038,00.asp

Good Luck.

kagashe