New to Linux

GPRS onLG GM200

2010-08-29T11:30:00.000-07:00

Additional commands

AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","TATA.DOCOMO.INTERNET"

AS PROVIDED BY CUSTOMER CARE.

Headbanging with the Samsung C5212

2010-02-15T11:08:00.000-08:00

The Wndos miracle lasted just a day. The next day the LCD terminated error returned with a vengeance.

So far, all attempts to get the phone working in linux have failed. The error has remained consistent.

pppd: LCP terminated by peer (PDP context activation failed, no network protocol running)

Using the same SIM in another phone - the Nokia 6230 - shows no errors.
Using a different SIM in the C5212 shows the same error.
Using the C5212 in Windows shows no errors.
Using GPRS to browse on the phone shows no errors, using both SIMs.

So far tried in Kppp, wvdial and pppd. All fail to connect, and the error has "LCP" in it.

As per suggestions on the web, I have tried the following :
commented out all lcp related lines in /etc/ppp/options file (the file did not have the lines in the first place)
used config files available online, with suitable modifications in the phone no., username and pwd fields.

GPRS miracle

2010-02-13T04:02:00.000-08:00

Bought the Samsung C5212 phone recently, and tried to get the PC connected using GPRS.

Since, unlike in Windows, the wvdial utility is omnipotent, I had a feeling that merely plugging the phone in would be adequate to get connected.

I was wrong.

The first attempt at using the same wvdial.conf file as the previous phone resulted in an error.

So I tried creating a separate config file with the

wvdialconf wvdial2.conf

command. Edited the resulting file to insert the proper number and ID etc using vi.

vi wvdial2.conf

and retried wvdial with the new config file

wvdial --config wvdial2.conf

This showed up a different error - Voice line Detected.

Googled for this error and nothing useful turned up.

Luckily the phone came with the windows application to get online. So, installed the app in a Windows box and tried connecting through it. The phone did get connected, but required some nudging. Strangely, the modem would not be activated unless the phone is disconnected - the application was verbose enough to mention this.

The app was not satisfactory, and given the situation was looking forward to selling off the one day old phone for a discount.

But, not before giving it one last try in linux.

Miracle, Miracle, Miracle.
The phone connected just fine. Using the wvdial2.conf file and the wvdial.conf file. No problems what so ever.

Was I shocked and awed!!!

So the phone stays.

I am not sure why the phone acted up the first time I tried connecting. But, I am hypothesising that the connection session in Windows sort of influenced the outcome the second time.

Ubuntu 9.10

2009-12-17T23:33:00.000-08:00

An article submitted to IT mag which was rejected...

Introduction
The release of Ubuntu 9.10 which coincided with the release of the latest Windows OS prompted comparisons between the two. With many sites even suggesting that those who are not satisfied with the MS product should give Canonical's a spin.
Frankly, this writer is not as thrilled about Ubuntu 9.10, even without having used Windows 7. So, strangely, an article titled "Tips and Tricks" for Ubuntu 9.10 also includes a suggestion to avoid the OS if possible!

Who is it for?
After trying out Ubuntu 9.10 this writer feels it necessary to discuss the target audience of the OS and this article.

If you are someone who has used earlier versions of Ubuntu upto 9.04 and is familiar with the OS, the latest version doesn't bring anything conspicuously new to the table, except some eye candy. For you, the OS and this article are avoidable. The extremely short release cycles ensures that minor releases are nothing but "service packs", and do not deserve the song and dance and alliterative codenames - in Ubuntu's case atleast - that usually accompany them. And, summing up the relevance of 9.10 going by online opinions, 9.10 is just a stepping stone to 10.04 which is expected to be a major release.

If you are someone who has extensively used Linux, but have not used any Ubuntu version seriously before, there is nothing in Ubuntu 9.10 that is compelling enough to make you hop from your existing distro. Most importantly, if you have found solace in KDE 3.5 and have grown familiar with most admin routines/commands, you will be tearing your hair out when dealing with the Gnome interface and the other new features in Ubuntu. For you, the OS is passable, and the article will shed light on the reasons for this suggestion.

If you are someone who has never tried out Linux at all, but have used some GUI based OS before, and are thinking of making Ubuntu your first step into this wonderful world, after being bombarded with the U marketese: be warned, Ubuntu is not the best distro for newcomers. More userfriendly distros like Opensuse and PCLinux do a better job of presenting the prowess of Linux in a seamless package. Yes, no other distro is as responsible as Ubuntu for popularising Linux and it is considered the hippest distro, but for a new comer Ubuntu 9.10 can be quite frustrating to the point of making the competition look better. This article should offer some comparisons with other distros to prove the point on userfriendliness to influence your choice of first Linux distro.

Probably anticipating this frustration, Canonical has included Wubi with the distro CD. Wubi offers a safer way to sample Ubuntu without the delays associated with a Live CD environment, but will work only in Windows. Which puts off Linux-only users!

If you have managed to slip through the above categories, Ubuntu 9.10 should be an ideal distro.

Where does the writer stand : After having tried out over a dozen distros, this writer settled on Opensuse 10.3 and has stuck to it even while sampling a few distros over the years. Being more comfortable with the GUI (rather than the Command line), the writer is representative of the bulk of the computer using population that shares a similar bias.

This writer would like to humbly submit the golden rule for people venturing into the Linux world for the first time, to make sense of the superabundance of Linux distros and avoid unwanted frustration of failed installations and internet scouring for fixes:
Do all the distro hopping till you find a perfect match (when all hardware works in perfect harmony), and then avoid all temptations to switch. Ofcourse, since all distros come in a live CD format, one can always succumb to the temptation without breaking one's vows.

New Features in Ubuntu 9.10

An exhaustive list is available on the ubuntu.com website, so we shall avoid duplicating it. Briefly, what would be relevant to lay users is summarised here.
Ubuntu 9.10 being woven around the latest Linux kernel version (2.6.31) supports the most hardware among the Ubuntus. So if you have a system that is loaded with the latest components, Ubuntu 9.10 offers the best chance of getting the most out of the system - right out of the box.

For those who spend time tweaking the appearance of the installation, 9.10 offers the latest Gnome Desktop Environment (2.28) which has a lot of visual appeal. Even on a system with 256 MB RAM, the visual effects were truely impressive without slowing down the OS collaterally.

Ubuntu uses the newest version of the GRUB boot manager. GRUB2 adds a lot of features, but for the lay users, it is nightmarish to configure in contrast to the earlier version. More on this later.

9.10 includes the new Empathy Instant Messaging client that includes support for most chat protocols, like Yahoo, Windows Live and Google.

Ubuntu introduces the online storage and syncing service called Ubuntu One. A free 2 GB account is available to all users, and data can be stored and synced across any PCs loaded with Ubuntu 9.10.

One has heard of the App store concept used in Apple products, which allows independent developers to create software and make it available for use/purchase to end users directly. Ubuntu incorporates the Ubuntu Software Center which offers similar function, but at present all apps available are free. This utility is not to be confused with Synaptic which is the default application manager, and also exists alongside.

Tips and Tricks

Setting boot options
If you are satisfied with the Live CD experience, and choose to install the OS to the disk along with any existing OS, you will feel miffed.
During installation, Ubuntu succeeds in annoying the user by displaying what is hallmark Windows behaviour - messing up the bootloader. The boot loader installation cannot be tweaked, so one cannot change the default boot option - which is Ubuntu. Dedicated tools to modify the boot menu are available in some distros like PCLinux and Opensuse, but in Ubuntu one needs to do the modification maually using the text editor and command line. Additionally, those who are familiar with editing the /boot/grub/menu.cfg file will be clueless here. The reason : Ubuntu uses GRUB2 which works differently and doesn't use a menu.lst file.

In Ubuntu to get the default OS entry right, you need to edit the /etc/default/grub file. This file is not quite helpful because it does not list the boot entries. So either recall the entries in the boot menu displayed when your booted, or open the /boot/grub/grub.cfg file to figure out the exact entries and their sequence. In the grub.cfg file, the "menu entry" prefix denotes the entries in the boot menu. The first entry is numbered 0, and the second 1 and so on.
Once the required default entry number is arrived at, this figure can be added to the line "GRUB_DEFAULT=1" replacing the 1. This line is in the /etc/default/grub file, NOT the grub.cfg file.

The default interval of 10 secs can be adjusted by tweaking the "GRUB_TIMEOUT=10" line, in the /etc/default/grub file.

Ofcourse, there is a possibility that the GRUB routine gets the boot parameters wrong. In the case of the writer's system already containing a PCLinux installation, GRUB did not properly detect the boot parameters leaving the PCLinux installation inaccessible. In such cases the menu can be modified by editing the /etc/grub.d/40_custom file to include the corrected menu entry. This is a bit advanced, but for minor editions, like in the writer's case, the relevant entries from the grub.cfg can be copied over to the 40_custom file and necessary changes made.

Once all modifications are completed, the command "grub-update" needs to be run to ensure that the changes are incorporated in the /boot/grub/grub.cfg file which is the basis of the boot menu.

What is the root password?
In the Linux world the root account is held in high esteem. In 9.10 the all powerful root account is practically insignificant - the first user becomes the defacto root. Unfortunately, if one doesn't know this fact, it can be quite frustrating trying to figure out what the default root password is (a online search reveals this is "rootmein"), since the installation routine doesn't seek one and trying the user password is the last thing on a Linux user's mind.
Also try logging in as root or su, and you won't get much far. The solution is to use the "sudo su" command to stay on with higher privileges for a longer period.

Getting the Resolution right
Getting the video right can be considered as a top most priority for a distro, and when two year old distros manage to get it right, one would expect the latest distros to atleast do as much, especially since the hardware is not cutting edge. But, Ubuntu 9.10 (or 9.04 for that matter), fails to detect the max resolution on two of the systems this writer tried installing the OS on. Now had this been PCLinux or Opensuse, the tools to modify the graphics properties would be available within the GUI, but this is Ubuntu. So one needs to be prepared for some command line action.
There are a few surprises in store here as well. For one, the familiar xorg.conf file is missing. So to create a xorg.conf file, one needs to run the "X -configure" command after logging in as superuser.
As in the writer's case, even this doesn't always work, in which case the best option is to download the relevant graphics drivers and follow the instructions.

Getting on the Cloud
Ubuntu One is the name of Ubuntu's cloud service. The Link to Ubuntu One is under the Appications, Internet Menu. A user needs to sign up for the service first, and on first launch a browser window takes you to the sign up page. Subsequently launching Ubuntu One link opens the preferences window, where one can set the behaviour of the service. An icon in the system tray will display the status of the Cloud and allow easy synchronisation. Unfortunately, despite 9.10 being the first Ubuntu to offer this feature, the synchronisation operation is not smooth and the reason for this is that the client software is incompatible with the server.

Nonetheless, one can add data in the form of files, contacts and notes to the Ubunto One account and these can be synchronised within applications like Nautilus, Tomboy and Evolution respectively on systems running the service.

Migrating settings from Other Installations
Theoretically, it involves merely copying the files from one installation site to the other. Ubuntu has incorportated a tool to do this during the installation, but in the three installations that this writer did, the tool failed to detect the Windows installation on the same disk, and in one case the PCLinux installation as well.
Even when the other OS is detected, the end result of the migration is not obvious. There doesn't seem to be any documents imported to the user's home folder, and neither are any settings changed in the Ubuntu environment as a result.

Wubi (Ubuntu Installer for Windows)
This is an interesting utility. Briefly, it allows one to install Ubuntu in any Windows partition. Wubi creates a folder in the Windows partition where all OS files are stored, and requires atleast 3 GB free space to start.

After providing a password, space and location to store the files at the start of the process, there is no user interaction required. So, potential minefields like creating partitions are avoided. Once launched, Wubi goes through the same motions as the normal installation process. On rebooting, post installation, the modified boot menu presents both OS options with the default option being the Windows installation. The Ubuntu installation performs quite smoothly with no apparent lag inspite of using a non native file system.
The application can be uninstalled like any Windows program and the disk space freed, but the boot menu is not restored (atleast in Windows XP). If no entry to the uninstall link figures in any menu, the uninstall file is present in the Ubuntu folder
Wubi is highly recommended for people using Windows and should be the only way to try Ubuntu to avoid most troubles of a normal installation. Sadly, Linux users are not similarly treated.

Automatic Mobile Broadband Configuration
One feature that thoroughly impressed this writer was the automatic configuration of the GPRS enabled mobile phone. Just plugging in the mobile presented a wizard, which already had the settings to access various GPRS service providers from India, like BSNL, Airtel, Idea etc. A few clicks and one was online. Impressive. In contrast with the earlier PPP or wvdial routine in older versions of Linux, and the Nokia PC Suite in Windows, 9.10 truely is in a different league.

Conclusion
9.10 is for the inveterate distro hopper who already has gotten into the Ubuntu groove. For Windows users, Wubi is the recommended route - probably the best way to sample a distro, something for the other distros to emulate. For the rest of us, 9.10 is worth a dekko to drool over the visual effects, and return to our more familiar distros.

rpm independence

2009-10-11T11:31:00.001-07:00

After some consideration, made a swtich from Opensuse 10.3 to PCLinuxOS 2009.1.

One of the many advantages PCL offered over OS was the ability to cache downloaded packages. In OS I needed the Smart package manager to do this.
But, I realised that having the rpms cached did not allow easy access in another PCL installation. Synaptic, the package manager in PCL integrates repository management and app management in a single interface, unlike OS. But, there are no settings to install rpms from a directory, all the sources have to be online. This is a major freedom limiter.

In any case, I found that this hinderance can be overcome with the rpm -i command. Thanks to rpm -i , I could install most of the apps I had downloaded in the previous installation. The ones that did not install were the ones that caught the dependency flu. In the GUI, the dependencies are automatically downloaded and installed, not with the rpm command (atleast the man page didn't suggest any setting for this).
One app that refused to install was vlc. Though there were other dependencies, which installed easily with rpm - i, the libv4l2 always held up the proceedings with a dependency error. I found that adding a "--nodeps" parameter would allow instation to proceed without dependency checking. And that is how I got vlc installed. So eventhough there seem to be some dependencies missing, the app works fine. I did observe the fact that these dependencies were not downloaded during the earlier installation, which was why they were not in the cache. So apparently synaptic too avoided a dependency check on this package.

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Ghost ( key ) busting with Linux

2009-09-29T08:05:00.001-07:00

Among laptops, it is common to come across the problem of stuck keys. Keys that continually send a signal even when they are not pressed, as a result of a short contact in the keyboard.

In most cases it is easy to find the offending key - just open a text editor and the output text will reveal the culprit with a long stream of repeated letters/numbers.
But, ghost keys are a bit difficult to identify - which is why they are so named. And these are usually the Function keys. The problem with having a stuck F2 is that it interrupts the booting process, unless another key is pressed after which things remain normal. Even normal working on the desktop is not effected in most cases, so you don't bother about it, untill you reboot the machine and have to nudge the system to continue from the interrupted state.

REcently I faced this problem, and the easiest solution to the issue was to use a live linux CD. Once the system starts to load itself into RAM, the log messages are displayed - this may not be the default behaviour in most cases, since a static loading page could be shown with a message to press any key to view messages, do so. The constant stream of output from the function key in the midst of log messages will give away the defective key. The output will be in a cryptic form and not "F4" or something similar, but comparing it with the output of all the Function keys will be adequate.

In the latest case, I had a tough time with the F10 key, with the only indication once the desktop was loaded was that the right click menu would disappear as soon as it appeared. With the live CD, I could find the output code and match it with F10. The F10 key was disabled permanently.

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Hibernate out of sight

2009-09-24T10:25:00.001-07:00

For so long I was unaware of the facility to hibernate. The speed with which a system can be brought up from the dead makes hibernating a really attractive option. But, I had assumed that Linux did not have this feature, and didn't bother with going online to search for options.

Today, which trying to find a way to check the laptop battery status when confronted with a low battery alert, I came across Kpowersave.
It is nowhere to be seen - not in the Desktop control panel or the Admin YAST panel. And probably, considering it as superfluous, probably I had disabled it's autoloading at boot time. Nonetheless, after going through all menus with a fine comb, I found it under System - Desktop Applet.

I sucessfully brought back the system from hibernate position, though I think the time it took was just as much as a normal startup. Kpowersafe also allow modifying the low battery handling process.

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BSD = BloodSheD

2009-09-24T10:16:00.001-07:00

Recently got an opportunity to try BSD (FreeBSD to be exact). Considering myself comfortable with Linux and all, I thought it would be a joyride.

Let's just say, BSD is Linux about a decade back. And as I have stated elsewhere, those who say that Linux is not ready for the big time, should spend time with BSD.

I am not sure about the origins of the disk partitioning scheme in BSD. Why make a simple task of partitioning, complicated by bringing in "Slices"? I would hope there is some performance advantage. There better be.

With a partitioner that does not do resizing, FreeBSD simply cuts off a vast proportion of people with little knowledge of manipulating partitions. Linux scores high here, since even novices can easily create blank space by squeezing existing partitions, and the tool is quite reliable as well.
Then there is the slicing operation which confused me a bit.

The whole OS installation is primitive, brought back memories of the CGA esqe Slackware installation routine. This was a bit more haphazard. There are three CDs (or a single DVD ) containing the packages, and the installation is not properly scheduled. So, try installing the KDE package, and the dependencies are sprawling over all three CDs requiring switching CDs furiously. It would seem more orderly to organise the packages sequentially on the CDs to reduce this switching.

Post installation, even if KDE is installed, you are dumped to a boot prompt. Unless you have already read about the editing the ttys file. In which case, the installer will launch a text editor to do the editing. I must stress here that this is the only area where BSD trumps Linux by a vast margin - the editor. vi is so annoyingly thick, that ee (the editor) seems like a genius. And ee is not there in my Opensuse 10.3. Sad indeeed.

Even after editing the ttys file, and getting into KDE, the lack of proper integration between the windows manager and the kernel leaves one returning to the command line for many tasks - some as routine as mounting a thumb drive (no automouting please, we are BSD). wvdial didn't work but pppd did, K3B would not recognise the PATA writer (requiring a lot of googling for an answer), wine installed and the only bright spot in the experiences, besides discovering ee, was I could install and run Opera 10 without hitch.

Eventhough I had downloaded the three isos over a GPRS connection (30 hours in all), I deleted them since I had no plans to return to BSD. The history is quite interesting - BSD v/s Linux, that is. It would not require great intelligence to see that the only thing that differentiates between BSD and Linux is the large band of contributors backing the latter. And the hand of fate, that took the form of a lawsuit to temporarily thwart BSD when Linus was seeking contributors for his pet project is for conspiracy theorists to ponder on.

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Mandriva 2009 Free - simply inane

2009-07-28T09:02:00.001-07:00

Mandrake/Mandriva was one of my favourite distros. The simplicity of it's installation and usage were a refreshing change from what other distros offered - waaay back.

I recently picked up Mandriva 2009 Free ( from zyxware.com ) to see if it could do the tango with the Canon printer.

What struck me, hard, like a slap, was the oversimplified installation procedure. NO PACKAGE SELECTION. Just a screen that shows three desktop screenshots of KDE, GNOME and another one. Once selected, the installation continues with no interaction.

Post installation, the flatfootedness of KDE4 dooms Mandriva. But not before I get to see a functional implementation of a proper desktop. The only KDE4 installation (including Opensuse 11.1) I tested so far that allows shortcuts to be created on the desktop. Ofcourse, there seems to be no intuitive way to recreate this "desktop space", once it is deleted.

Mandriva joined Slackware in oblivion soon after.

Mandriva 2009 Free is notable for one reason, it rightfully reflects the spotlight on to Opensuse. As a regular user of Opera 7.54 (under Wine) I see considerable similarities between the thoughfulness that went behind creating these excellent pieces of code. Yes, there are more popular choices, but with half a brain one can appreciate the profusion of practical, thoughful options offered by these two products that are glaringly absent in the others. Options are important, very important.

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Schizo Slackware

2009-07-28T08:43:00.001-07:00

I never could bring myself to try out Slackware so far, and I am not sure why.
Recently, I had the opportunity to try out Slackware 12. Well, actually had the DVD burnt at zyxware.com.

Slackware shows the classic schizoid behaviour - a split personality. The installation procedure brought back memories of days long gone by when I first ventured into Linux territory by trying out Red Hat (the free one, before it was FC). The absolute absence of any progress in this part of the Slackware experience was indeed a disappointment. What is Slackware trying to convey by not having a proper GUI driven installation procedure? The VGA screens and the absence of mouse control are pardonable, but the inability to create a Linux partition during the setup process is not. There are other similar areas where a user will need some familiarity with installation routines to successfully complete the installation. The app package selection is also quite difficult to use, even if it's uselessness is temporarily ignored.

Once a user bravely goes through the steps to get to the desktop, Slackware suddenly becomes an entirely different creature. The harsh taskmaster during the installation procedure, now becomes an overprotective mommy. So, there is no way a user can now access any real system admin tools - no "Control Panel" access. Sure one can change the way the dumb KDE4 behaves, but real access to underlying hardware is prevented.

Slackware was unceremoniously dumped soon after.

What Slackware DID show was the Opensuse remains one of the most well organised and planned distro in DVD. The Canon printer episode is just one major hinderace why I cannot use it.

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KDE4 : the impossibility of it's existence

2009-07-20T10:26:00.001-07:00

Most users of KDE4 would have found it to be irritatingly dumb.

A regular OS GUI user would appreciate the importance of the desktop. The benefit of a shortcut on the desktop can be realised only if a folder has to be opened to access a file in it. The sheer number of clicks that can be saved as a result of this shortcut leads to significant savings in time and resources. KDE4 completely makes it impossible to drop shortcuts on to the desktop, edit properties of existing desktop shortcuts and in anyway use the desktop productively. No useful menu pops up when right clicking on the desktop. The more one uses it, the more irritatingly dumb it seems. I tried KDE4 in Opensuse 11.1, and the default file manager is Dophin. Compared to Konqueror, this is a pretty obtuse application. Simple tasks like being able to set all folders to show ownership details of files is a mind boggling task which I haven't managed to complete. Then there is the issue of being able to manage the default view, it seems that Dolphin will by default only show folder contents as icons, not as detailed list. And there seems to be no way to modify this default behaviour, and manually setting the detailed list view in one folder isn't carried on to it's subfolder even.

How could something so obviously crippled be the outcome of a community? One of the core arguments in favour of the opensource movement is that problems in code are rectfied faster that in closed source apps, since there are many peers reviewing the app and the source. If Vista is a failure, it can be explained by the limited access the target market had to the beta version. But KDE4 cannot use this fig leaf.

One finds it hard to believe that the final product after so many peer reviews still managed to reduce the desktop to just a place holder for the wallpaper. It is just impossible that such a piece of code could see the light of the day. And yet, KDE4 is here, impossibe. Luckily, opensuse 11.1 thoughtfully bundled KDE 3.5 as well, which though also tweaked with, retained most of it's productivity features.

The loss of functionality is a big shame on the Linux community. It will have long term ramifications, since most new users will find KDE just too inefficient to bother with Linux. This is sad indeed.

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PCLinuxOS to the rescue

2009-07-20T09:55:00.001-07:00

Finally got the Canon 2900 printer working, without having to put up with the dumb GUI of KDE4. PCLinuxOS 2009 was the answer. The printer driver was installed as per manual - through command line with rpm command, and not the hardware tool in Control Center.

Used the live cd of PCQL for the job. It is sad indeed that PCQL doesn't come in a DVD format, which would have been so much more convenient. Now, every package needs to be downloaded.

PCQL hasn't changed much since the last time I used it. The Install to USB option, and the Remaster CD option were two things that stood out. Being able to save the present installation is a great idea.

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chowning out of trouble

2009-06-23T07:14:00.001-07:00

I have found that minor irritants that crop up in one user account are easily overcome by creating a second user account and moving all files.

This saved me the latest when for some reason all browsers would crash everytime I tried to save content or in anyway tried to access local files. Probably it had something to do with the interaction between wine and konqueror, since only Opera 7.54 and 9.6, which I was running under Wine seemed to have that problem. The problem cropped up recently, after flawless working for close to a year.

The quickest work around involved creating a new account, and copying all files from the older account to the new one - overwriting all existing files. This, ofcourse, was done under root login. The final act involved altering the ownership of all files from the old user to the new one. And chown is the command to do it

chown newuser /home/olduser -R

was all it took. Now under the new username the file error is not encountered.

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Free Fedora, Frustration & Fury.

2009-05-26T23:44:00.000-07:00

It had been a smooth ride for a long time with Opensuse 10.3. After experiencing the best that the linux community has to offer, I had become confident of finding my way around most day to day issues.

The issue with the Canon 2900 laserjet printer was the starting point for the search for a compatible distro. As a self created rule, this is the only reason to want to try another distro. It is important to not keep changing distros as soon as they are released since this fragments the user base. Also it is possible to incorporate newer kernels (which support newer hardware) without getting the newer distro entirely. This is something I haven't tried yet, though.

My search obviously took the familiar path - Opensuse 11.1. Unfortunately, like the 10.3 version, 11.1 too couldn't print a page, though no errors are reported during the installation or the printing. Just no page comes out!

The next step was Fedora 10. Thanks to the folks at zyxware.com, it is quite easy to get the full fledged DVD at one's doorstep for a nominal cost. In fact, I ordered the Fedora 10 DVD just to average out the shipping costs on shipping the Opensuse 11.1. DVD.

The Fedora experience is a nightmare. The frustrations that I faced as a newbie in the Linux world all came back to me, thanks to fedora. It could be because Opensuse is an excellent distro that Fedora looks uncouth, unpolished and unkempt in comparison. Everything about the distro, from the first page and menu to it's inability to get the resolution right fills one with fury.

Initially seeing the CGA menu I thought, well there is no need to invest resources to make the menu flashy, since it doesn't matter post installation. But, the resources were not invested elsewhere, probably because there were no resources to invest at all!
Part of the blame will need to be laid on the doorstep of KDE 4. An interface that is so retrograde functionally. But, Opensuse offers even KDE3 as an option, Fedora does not. I couldn't see an option to install Wine as well. Post installation, all attempts to get the screen resolution corrected was frustrated - there seems to be no xorg.conf file in /etc/X11 and running Xorg -configure also fails. And there seems to be no GUI way of getting X reconfigured, only the set resolutions are available as options. In contast the Opensuse 11.1 installation process, and installed environment seems heavenly.

Fedora was removed in a fraction of the time it took to install. It was too frustrating to deal with the mind numbing obtuseness that pervades the interface.

But, considering that people have reported success with getting the 2900 running under Fedora, it may be a bitterest pill I have to swallow.

As easy as GPRS

2009-05-26T09:32:00.001-07:00

I have experienced the pains of getting the Nokia 6230 to work as a GPRS modem under XP. And I was prepared for something worse in Linux, partially because there seems to be no readily available drivers to start with.
A lot of clicks with the Modem section in the Admin hardware control got nowhere. Trying the kppp utility also didn't result in anything workable.
Then a little google and I came to this site http://microdotsagamedev.wordpress.com/2007/12/11/usb-mobile-phone-modem-under-linux/ .

What is great about this site is that, unlike the many that are thrown up, the data is offered in the most briefest and clearest manner. The crux of the solution, as mentioned on the site, are these lines (most of which are cut and pasted) :

open /etc/wvdial.conf file as root (use Kate or anyother text editor).
delete everything from the file except the ‘Dialer Defaults’ heading (if there is none add one enclosed with ‘[' and ']‘) and add the following (Phone, Username and Password will be different depending on provider)
Modem = /dev/ttyACM0
Phone = *99#
Modem Type = USB Modem
Baud = 115200
Dial Attempts = 2
Username = vdata
Password = vdata

Save the file

Plug in your USB data cable ( Phone must be on… snigger :D )
* Exec the following at any point, root or not to establish an internet connection.
sudo wvdial

That's it.

It is hard to believe that all the gui fiddling was needed to effect this change, when it could have been done just this way!!!

Yahelite, yahoo

2009-05-23T09:53:00.000-07:00

There are chat clients for directly chatting over the main pm networks - yahoo, msn etc. But, I was in need for a client to chat over the public chat rooms offered by linux.
Previously I had used YAhelite and found it much better than the default, all frill yahoo client. Much like the google search page, yahelite was to spartan and functional. Remembering this, I was surprised to see that Yahelite also offered a linux client. This though was having issues right out of the box. The next solution was to get Yahelite for windows and rely on Wine. Here too, the yahelite site did mention the need to download additional files to be able to use text formatting for using under Linux. But, since all I needed was normal text, I just downloaded the main client. It works beautifully.
It was only after running the windows client that I discovered the issue with the linux one. The captcha image was not being displayed in the latter.

NEMESIS MET

2009-04-02T23:33:00.000-07:00

The ride had been smooth for a long time now.
But, with the Canon LBP 2900 Laser printer, I have hit a wall.

In their defence, Canon does offer a driver (2, infact, for the deb and rpm based distros), and an elaborate installation manual. One glaring omission in the manual is the absence of a troubleshooting section. Probably they are not believers of Murphy's law, or they did not bother.

The present installation being Opensuse 10.3, I first tried getting the printer to work in it. The detection and installation proceed without any errors, but the printer just wont print. It will even accept jobs, and the printer manager will show a processing status. Nothing else. I looked high and low for a solution. The few reported cases that I did come across, all ended without any success. Of particular interest is this interaction at linuxquestions.org Baig, eventually, did find success with Centos as reported at Unixmen. Unixmen was the other place where success was reported, but not as far as Opensuse was concerned.

Thinking Fedora will prove luckier, I tried a live Fedora 8 installation. Same fate.

Finally, after searching for the "dependencies" that unixmen had pointed out (at rpmfind), I found that only mandriva repository had those rpms. Opensuse and Fedora did not have the rpms even there. In anycase I doubt if the dependencies are really so. Because, with a Mandriva 2007 live CD, I can get the Printer to work. The only dependency that did cause a momentary hiccup was libstdc++.

It is a tough decision, whether to switch entirely to Mandriva or keep it as a "printing' installation and dual booting. IN the course of the installation, reinstallation, I have found the application management of Mandriva to be quite faster than Opensuse. Opensuse, I think, takes time reading through the entire repository list before loading the windows, whereas Mandriva doesn't. this saves atleast 20-30 seconds everytime. Besides double clicking on an rpm directly installs the package, without the kind of repository modification that is needed in OPensuse.

The jury is out.

Bypassing root password

2009-03-10T23:09:00.001-07:00

Found a tip at makeuseof.com that allows one to get inside an installation without knowing the root password. It did change my view of security in Linux. If the author is to be believed, by default a distro does not protect against this mischief, which is find unbelievable. Read the tip here http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-reset-any-linux-password/

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Konquering Konqueror

2009-03-10T23:06:00.001-07:00

After installing AVI Demux, I found that the default application handling order had been changed, so now all AVIs opened with AVI Demux and not VLC as previously. It was a minor bother that I overlooked for a long time, before I came across the Edit menu in Konqueror.
In this menu, under the Edit File type option it is possible to set the preferred file handling method. This can also be used to ensure that jpgs and pdfs are not opened within Konqueror, which I find annoying.

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Isomaster - a paradigm shift

2008-12-04T00:00:00.001-08:00

In the midst of gkrellm ( nonsensical name), and sysguard (misleading name), Isomaster is indeed a breath of fresh air. There need to be more developers thinking straight when it comes to naming their contribution.

It seems this is the only tool that allows editing ISO images, and it was an uphill task to get it. The first assumption, ofcourse, was that I could mount the iso as loop and edit it like any file system. But, the ISO 9660 file system is read only, and therefore the files need to be extracted, and a new ISO created. I was not sure whether doing this would retain the bootablility of the resulting ISO, hence I had to go looking for an ISO editor.

The need for the editor was felt because of the need to modify the OPensuse 10.3 DVD image to include some other rpms that are not available in it - isomaster is one.

The normal route to getting the ISOmaster was to include Packman repository in Yast and searching for ISOmaster. While ISOmaster did show up in the results, the rpm was missing from the repository, and so the installation by that route failed.

The next move was to go to the ISOmaster home page, and download the "One click installer" YUM file. This is a small file that when double clicked will launch YAST with the desired repository selected. This step, obviously, failed since the rpm was not in the repository. The other download option was the source code, and I was loathe to do the make, configure, link etc jig.

More googleing showed up the rpm proper at the Suse site. This was the easiest way to get application - download rpm, add path to YAST, and double click on rpm.

ISOMaster is spartan, but it get's the job done well.

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Hail Photorec, the genius

2008-11-30T19:15:00.001-08:00

One dangerous aspect of tabbed file exploring in konqueror is that the selected folder in the folder tree on the left pane, need not be the one whose contents are listed on the right. A slight oversight, and a ton of mp3s got deleted. Luckily I froze in horror when I realised the mishap and this greatly improved the prospects of getting the data back. I quickly unmounted all concerned partitions to prevent accidental data writes.

The background is important in this case, and it is briefly thus : hda with an ntfs partition and hdb with an ext2 partition were involved. Moving a folder from hdb to hda was interrupted due to lack of space in hda. After clearing additional space, the operation continued from that point onwards, after skipping one file. (This is a great feature missing in Windows, by the way.) Since the file was skipped, the folder structure in hdb was retained partially. Then intending to cleanup the partial folder structure in hdb, I deleted the folder in hda.

The first tool I looked up was testdisk. This great and versatile tool also has an option to recover files. In the ntfs partition, the option to recover files did not show up, so I assume testdisk can do its magic only in ext2 partitions. The partial directory structure left in the ext2 partition probably prevented the deleted files from being displayed, when I trained testdisk on that disk.

Next after googling a bit, I zeroed in on R-Studio. The demo version can scan for recoverable files in many file systems. Though, it is an exe and needs a proper Windows installation to work, since in my case under Wine or Crossover R-Studio had problems in detecting the partitons.

I had to revert to the windows installation which resided in the ntfs partition, and eventhough the page file was turned off, I was sure that Windows would muck up the scene. Running RStudio after installing it, I found, again, that the broken folder structure in ext2 probably acted as a screen, since after a 20 min scan I had no useful results. ( Now, it occurs to me that deleting the remnants of that folder would have helped). In the ntfs partition, I could get about 100 MB of mp3s, when the original folder had 2 GB. I was surprised by the result, since there was no writing operation that had occured in the preceding few minutes.

A little more googling, and Photorec popped up. This is a testdisk twin, since they are distributed bundled. As I already had testdisk installed, I could launch Photorec using that command. The interface and working resembles testdisk.

One feature of Photorec which I found quite useful was it's ability to scan selective areas of the disk, which significantly cut down the scan time. This seems a pretty obvious feature to include, but since I haven't seen it in any other recovery software, I was willing to call it an act of genius.

To elaborate the genius of Photorec, consider the normal "deleted file" situation: A large hard disk chock full of data, and some files get deleted to make room. The bulk of the situations would therefore involve small unallocated disk space where the deleted file exists, and large allocated disk space. Photorec explicitly asks which of these areas - allocated or unallocated - to scan.

The other intelligent trick up Photorec's sleeve, is the ability to fine tune the scan to search for files of a specific type. There are about 50 such file types that Photorec recognises, and can specifically scan for. Since I was only after MP3s I disabled all the rest, which could speed up scan times.

A combination of these two features ensured that in about one fifth the time it took with R-studio, I had results. How much? In all, bits and pieces included, the recovered content from the ntfs partition was close to 1.5 GB. Removing the chaff, I expect close to 1.2 GB of valid MP3s. The scan on the ext2 partition returned about 500 MB of mp3s, a few looked interesting. Does this say something about the suitability of ntfs for file recovery situations?

In the end, I am satisfied with what I have : Not a complete recovery, but substantially better than what I could have got with R-studio.

Ofcourse the file names were a mess, so now I need a media organiser than can batch rename MP3s based on their ID tags.

Photorec, like testdisk, is free.

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dd - deeeee deeeee

2008-11-30T03:22:00.006-08:00

I did manage to clone the hard disk using dd. But, it took considerably longer than Ghost.
Using watch, I could check the progress, and was alarmed to see that the transfer speed was 10 MBps. For a SATA2 to SATA2 disk transfer, this is an extremely low value.

A look around the net revealed that the "block" argument could speed things up. Not sure what the default bloxk size is, but read somewhere that setting it to 1 MB would result in quicker transfer. Need to check this out.

dd - the silent but strong type.

2008-11-26T06:53:00.019-08:00

In the years as an XP user, copying one disk to another, or making a mirror, involved using Norton Ghost. Since the version that I had was DOS based, I had to go through the bootable Win98 partition/floppy route to get the job done.

Today I faced a similar issue, and went hunting for the linux version of Ghost, and found the ridiculously simple dd command. After using it, I am reminded of the type of folks who are all business with hardly time to utter pleasantaries.

While dd can do much more, for the job at hand, all I needed to do was issue "dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/hda2" where hda1 was the source and hda2 the destination. To correctly figure out which is which, use the fdisk - l command to list all detected hard drives. This step is important, since it is easy to overwrite the wrong disk, since dd does not offer a prompt before going about it's business.

In my case, inspite of the fdisk command, I ended up deleting the Puppy installation in a flash drive that I had used to run the dd command to copy from one hard disk to another. It took me a couple of seconds to figure out the mistake, but it was too late. Now with the installation wiped out, I cannot use the flash drive at the next boot. The problem with that situation is that it has been close to 90 mins and dd has been working without any feedback, another quirkiness of dd.

The solution to this silence is to use another console to poke, literally, dd to offer information about what it has achieved. The Control - F1 (to F7) key combination can be used to launch a second console and from there issuing the command " $ watch -n X kill -USR1 PIDXX" where PIDXX needs to be replaced with the PID number of the dd process that can be found by issuing the "top" command. The "X" here is the time interval in seconds where the progress info is provided, which can be set according to user preference. And the kill -USR1 command is the actual poking that starts dd into giving the info.
A more detailed explanation is offered here :
http://linuxcommando.blogspot.com/2008/06/show-progress-during-dd-copy.html

Oh, in my case the power company had other plans, and an impromptu power loss brought the transfer process to a stop.

AVI Editor, at last.

2008-11-25T11:49:00.001-08:00

Besides games, the only reason I had to keep Windows in my system was the need to edit video files. The simplicity of virtual dub was too overwhelming. Especially when contrasted with the headaches that I had to go through to get AVI demux installed, by following the instructions on their website.

Now, finally, thanks to easgs at linuxquestions.org, I have taken out this nagging thorn in my side. It seems I had been looking at the wrong place all the time. I had been going out all over the Net searching for samples of successfully installed AVI demux, when the answer was all the while within the system. Hat's off to easgs for showing the path. Easgs, by the way, is the creator of a special package of all multimedia tools for Opensuse 11 details of which are available at linuxquestions.org. Such a package will save a user from the trouble I went through.

What is needed is the inclusion of the Packman and OSS repositories in YAST. Without the Packman repository, AVI demux did not show up in any of the searches in YAST (eventhough the OSS and Non OSS repositories were enabled), causing me to go outside looking for the package ( all the while thinking why it was not in the repositories, as a matter of fact). With Packman enabled, the job becomes a routine one, search for AVI Demux, select the relevant packages (including the GUI packages - GTK and QT) and let YAST do the download and install.

About 25 MB is downloaded, including about 11 MB of the core packages and about 8 MB of the GUI files ( I selected both QT and GTK though I think either would have sufficed). Post install, I have a new entry under Multimedia where AVI Demux resides. AVI Demux does live up to it's hyped image, as a versatile avi editing tool. I have merely, successfully, edited a few videos and there is a lot to explore. But, I am confident that I can, sadly, bid Virtualdub goodbye.

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Linux Musings

2008-10-22T20:12:00.001-07:00

Smoothly cruising with Linux for some time now, the data corruption notwithstanding, a few things to note :
1. When using larger screens, anything larger than 15", I find the KDE mouse pointer acceleration controller far superior than XP's, The ability to fine tune the acceleration values makes moving all over the screen quite easy, presently I have set it to 5 (threshold is always 1) on a 1280 X 1024 resolution screen. In XP a lot of lifting of the mouse is needed to get to the corners.

2. The last data corruption left me with a lot of files without proper names or extensions. In XP these show up as unidentified files, where as in Linux, even without the extensions, konqueror is able to identify the file types from the file headers. Impressive.

3. One area where XP scores is in the file transfer process. For some absurd reason, Linux creates empty folders in the target destination much before shifting the files within them. This can create a lot of problems if the transfer is interrupted for some reason, as the folders all exist at the destination giving the impression that the transfer has been completed. Then the user has to go to the target destination and check each folders properties to see if they are merely shells. I am sure there would be some script to automate this shell checking process.

4. Bulk renaming is a cinch in XP, strangely this is a novel concept in Linux. There is no way to convert all files with one extension into another. In XP something like ren *.jpg *.xyz works, but in Linux you need a script, like this one which I use to rename the youtube videos files from the browser's cache where it is stored without extension:
for file in *; do echo $file; new=$file.flv; echo $new; mv $file $new;
(the whole thing can be typed out at the prompt)

5. The difficulties faced in getting a video editor seem unsurmountable. Virtual dub and Wine do not tango. From the net, the many alternatives exist as source files requiring considerable patience in modifying them into usable form. Something I have been unable to accomplish so far. This is the only reason why I still need to have an XP installation.

6. Virtual box, the OS emulator fails to install properly, inspite installing from the DVD while installing the OS. No solution is forthcoming from the OPensuse forums in this regard, besides trying out the latest version.

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Multi page pdf printing

2008-10-03T22:56:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons I preferred to use Foxit pdf reader with wine was because the inbuilt pdf reader did not support printing multiple pages on a single A4 sheet. Ofcourse I could use the bloated Adobe reader which had a linux version as well, but since I already had wine for Opera 7.54, the 2 MB Foxit was much better. Unfortunately, in some cases Foxit would not run as expected,eventhough other windows apps did.
After looking around a bit, I think I may have found a universal setting that allows multiple page printing. It seems the print manager has the required settings. But, since the print manager is not launched automatically when the job is sent to the printer, and also since the job shows up only after it has been sent to the printer from the application, using the feature is a tricky affair, if it works at all - much like the rest of Linux!
The modus operandi : First launch the print manager, in Opensuse it is under the Utilities, Printing menu in the Start menu. Then send the file to print. This will cause the job to show up in the print manager.Here right click on the job and check its properties. In the properties window the number of pages per sheet can be set - 4 being the max.
While this feature exists, I have been unable to use it since the modified settings would not be accepted as the root username and password would be rejected. Probably some fine tuning is required.

Update : 24.11.08

A thorough ferretting through the Print options revealed that the print manager allows printing upto 4 pages per page. This option is available while printing any page. I had previously downloaded Adobe's bloated pdf reader to get this facility, since foxit in wine did not work and Kpdf did not have multiple page printing. This latest find is a significant help.

Do as I say, don't do as I Do.

2008-09-25T03:45:00.000-07:00

The Opensuse DVD seemed to have more relevant apps that I had initially observed. On closer inspection of the rpm folder I found the Smart App manager, the unrar application and the Opera browser.
All of the three were among the first apps that I downloaded after the installation. One point needs to be highlighted, these apps do not appear during the installation because the default selection filter is set as "Patterns". This need to be changed to "Package Groups" to reveal a better grouping of apps.

As I had myself mentioned a few posts back, one of the first steps should be to browse through the app list in the app manager, before commencing online downloads.

Opensuse 10.3 DVD

2008-09-20T22:17:00.000-07:00

The biggest fear when downloading the 4GB+ iso image was data corruption. But, thanks to the data verification built into the BT protocol, the repeated interruptions did not create problems. The installation was smooth. The biggest difference between the CD iso and the DVD iso was the inclusion of many server modules that I would not have needed anyway - so I am thinking this is a huge waste of time.
Further confirming this feeling was the wine installation which for some reason would not work properly. The package is there on the DVD, unlike FC8, but after installing the package, I am unable to launch the exe.. Since Opera and Proxomitron are central to my browsing experience, this is a major drawback.
Intersting is the fact that Realplayer 10 is included in the DVD. Thinking that atleast this package would come with the required codecs, like VLC media player (which is not included), I installed RP10 too. But it would not play AVI files, like the other onboard players like Kaffiene and 3 more media players. This makes Opensuse inclusion of RP 10 look inane.

I may fall back on the live CD of opensuse and install it to the hard disk from there, since past experience has shown that atleast in that case Wine was working properly.

Update:
It seems the installation type makes a difference to the final system health. Since Wine was not usable, I reinstalled the OS, this time adding Wine right at the installation phase. Now Wine is working fine.

FC 8

2008-09-16T02:53:00.000-07:00

Didn't have any other DVD, so decided to install FC8.
FC8 was irritating for the following reasons :
1. There is no control panel, just a System menu to manage the hardware. This is less userfriendly.
2. fdisk command does not exist.
3. I thought that the larger installation media would include many apps that I would otherwise have had to download, but Wine was missing - a glaring omission.
4. Only gnome and KDE as window managers, XFCE was a worthy inclusion.
5. No easy way to manage partitions. Unlike some other root level apps that can be launched from the menu by the user - and the root password subsequently provided, the disk management menu will not launch at all. Combined with the failure of fdisk, mounting partitions was an uphill task.
Another annoyance, no K3B.

Since I have been in Opensuse 10.3 for the longest time, I am currently downloading the DVD image of the same. Hopefully, it will come with Wine.

Games with ntfsresize

2008-09-10T06:34:00.000-07:00

Resizing with the GUI was a breeze, but for some reason I felt this overwhelming urge to try using the ntfsresize tool to do the same job.
Since Ntfsresize will not proceed with a "flagged" NTFS partition, I had to boot into XP to get the chkdsk /f routine done. Ntfsresize is a deep tool which can first estimate the amount of reducing that can be done, and then do it without really writing stuff to the disk, and then finally doing the whole hog.
ntfsresize -fi /dev/sda will give the reducable size of the partition.
ntfsresize /dev/sda -n -s XXXXM will do a dry run of the process of reducing the parition to XXXX MB
And without the -n option the actual process is launched.
The -n option is a good way to check if there would be any hiccups during the process.
The major issue with ntfsresize is that it does not actually make changes in the partition table as well. This means that while the partition would have effectively been reduced by transferring data existing at the end of the partition to other areas, and updating the MFT to reflect the changes in the addresses, the Parition table itself still shows the old size.
Therefore after the process is completed, ntfsresize suggests ways to modify the partition table to reflect the new size. These instructions are important, and it is best to write them down before proceeding. One critical area which could create problems is in the way fdisk displays partition sizes by default - as cylinders. ntfsresize explicity warns the user to change this behaviour of fdisk for a successfull completion of the resize. Fdisk needs to be set to display partition information in sectors.
Once this is done, the old partition can be deleted, and a new one created which starts at the same sector as the older parition. Ofcourse the final size has to be more than the figure used in the ntfsresize command.
The problem with fdisk is that it renames paritions without informing the user, and this causes a lot of heartache since the system is rendered non bootable if the partition names and positions are not in sync. To rectify the renaming, again fdisk needs to be resorted to, and since the system is not booting this means getting a live CD for this purpose.
The final word is that this is a rare instance where the GUI proves to be a better option than the command line.

NTFS issues

2008-08-25T23:54:00.001-07:00

For some reason I have been having repeated corruptions of NTFS partitions used under Linux. Unlike FAT32 partitions there is no fool proof way to check for NTFs volumes data corruption in Linux. ntfsresize which is the recommended tool itself requests the use of chkdsk under windows to rectify errors. This ofcourse requires a windows installation. Since the virtob virus still manages to infect files, I am loathe to return to XP.
The last straw was the corruption of the MFT tables, which could not be recitified by chkdsk and required testdisk. So I have formatted all NTFS partitions and converted them into FAT32 for lesser headaches.

More commands

2008-08-02T07:33:00.001-07:00

There seems to be no easy way to find the system's ip or to renew the ip address by using the GUI. Two commands to use :

dhclient -r : to renew ip address same as ipconfig /renew
ifconfig : displays net connection details.

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High resource Usage in Opensuse 10.3

2008-07-27T23:37:00.000-07:00

Probably the biggest complaint that remains is the high resource utilisation of Opensuse 10.3. I find that compared to Windows, Opensuse is quite a resource hog. KDE which I use could be the reason, and less intensive GUI's could reduce RAM usage at the cost of usability. In a system with 224 MB RAM, I find that just about 5 MB is left unused after a couple of browsers are loaded. And the constant hard disk access for the swapping takes its toll on the hard disk and power consumption. The solution may be to add more RAM.

Partition tools : (thinking) out of the box

2008-07-27T22:49:00.000-07:00

After a round of playing with partitions - both NTFS and EXT2 - I have come to the conclusion that as far as partition tools related to Windows OS is concerned, one needs to think "Linux" to get the best free choices.
The default disk manager does not do much in Windows, and unlike the more thoughtful Linux counterparts, does not allow the user a second chance before applying changes. So if you are confronted with a situation other than creating and deleting partitions, Linux offers a better choice of tools - full blown, GUI supported tools.
While one can use fdisk to delete and create partitions, the real ace is Gparted. This tool not only can create and delete partitions, it can also resize them - including Windows partitions. And making it truely accessibly is the fact that Puppylinux - a 80 MB Linux distro that is so accommodating and flexible to fit and boot from any medium - includes this great tool.

My problem involved a partition that was too small to fit a linux distro. Assuming that a 2 GB partition would be adequate for Opensuse 10.3, I installed the OS to that partition, after removing some unwanted apps before installation. But post installation, I was regularly reminded that I had less than 1% of the disk free. The only solution was to shorten the adjoining NTFS partition and claim more space. The inbuilt partition tool in Opensuse managed this quite admirably. I reduced the NTFS partition by 500 MB and created a new partition to mount /home/. The resizing of the NTFS paritition also sets a chkdsk operation on the next Windows boot. But this did not aleviate the problem of reduced space to install apps - most notably VLC since Opensuse is quite multimedia handicapped out of the box. The second idea was to fuse the newly created /home/ partition with the original partition containing the rest of the installation. To my surprise I found that the inbuilt partition tool in Opensuse did not do expansion -apparently resizing only meant reducing in Opensuse lingo.
My search for partition expansion tools took me to ntfsresize. This command line tool seemed capable of helping me but unlike most of Linux tools did not have a comprehensive documentation which make it unattractive. But ntfsresize is a capable tool that can check NTFS partitions for errors. Unlike fsck.ntfs that also exists, ntfsresize is a resizing tool that actually tests for volume consistency as a step to checking the amount of free space available on that drive (as a precursor to finding the smallest possible size it can be squeezed to). ntfsresize -fi /dev/sdx.
I recalled Puppylinux's partition tool and decided to test it's expansion skills since it was the fastest way I could boot into Linux, since I had already installed it on a USB Drive (by the way, after installing Puppy linux, the drive is rendered unsuable in Windows eventhough Puppy creates a 128 MB FAT partition on the drive. Windows asks whether the drive needs to be formatted when it is plugged in.
Gparted offers all the options to manipulate a parition - expand, reduce, delete, create etc. While it warns to backup the data before starting the partition manipulation, I overlooked it. The /home partition was deleted, the original 2 GB partition was then expanded to include the free space. It may have taken about 15 mins in all.

Getting the hang of it

2008-07-23T23:04:00.000-07:00

I believe the journey of a Windows user into the Linux world would be similar for everyone. In my case, after starting off two months back, today I find myself being able to do most of the stuff that I want to do as easily as I could in Windows. Most significantly, I do not feel too tied down by the shortcomings of the GUI and do not mind relying on the commands to overcome these.
Some of the commands that I think a Linux user will need on a daily basis :

df -h: shows disk usage.
ntfs-3g : it is only required if the user still has data in NTFS partitions. This is used to allow writing into such partitions. There is a GUI for this tool, but in my experience using the GUI can be a pain. The menu will not launch the tool, and using the GUI produces results that are not always predictable. The command line is easier and can be launched as and when required.
dir/ls : both list folder contents. But the results are different and some distros do not recognise the dir command. ls is better since it is able to properly name filenames with spaces in them (with a "\" inserted).
[tab]: this is a sanity tool. When confronted with filenames like "filename.xxx-xx.xx.xx", a press of this button will autocomplete the filename freeing the user the headache of typing out the long list of numbers. Just using file[tab] is enough (unless similar named files also exist).
less : strangely named command that restricts the screen output to one page length. Especially useful when dealing with ls/dir output in a command prompt not launched from within KDE.

Opensuse revisited

2008-07-20T00:03:00.000-07:00

One major reason I ventured into Puppy linux territory was because I wanted to install Linux on a partition that was about 1.5 GB. Since I could not recall seeing any major distro offering a program selection menu in the live CD prior to install, I was lost for a means to reduce the installation size to fit into that partition. Hence a small distro like Puppy was turned to.

A chance discovery in the course of reinstalling Opensuse 10.3 was that there was an option to choose packages - though this was NOT a live CD. Ofcourse, I faced the issue of reinstalling Opensuse because the PC Linux installation would not allow applications to be uninstalled (RPM database not accessible error) and Kopete also crashed. So, Opensuse 10.3 again proved a better choice.

NOP 4 aka the leaner Puppy

2008-06-28T03:06:00.001-07:00

Puppy at 80 MB is lean enough. But the flab in the form of Abiword and Seamonkey can be a deal breaker especially since the usual repository route to adding apps is not an attractive option.
NOP is a puppy derivative, called Puplet, that does away with these two apps, brings in Opera and also changes the default file manager. With the original file manager I had a tough time figuring out a way to save files on the Desktop since there was no folder with that name. A visit to the puppy forum revealed that the file manager stored the Desktop contents a bit differently and the entries in some XML file needed to be modified. Thunar which is the file manager in NOP, since it uses a different Windows Manager as well, was already familiar since Belenix sported it.
Overall NOP is more appealing than Puppy. It retains all the good points of Puppy - the hardware configuration and extremely helpful tips are still there - and add a few thoughful touches of its own.

I think I'll have NOP for a long time to come. Especially since it can be run off the thumb drive, making it more convenient and faster than the live CD route. I still have to figure out how to load Openoffice onto it, and that would probably be the last touch needed to finish this excellent distro. The ability to "remaster" the installation is also a god send, since a backup on the CD can be retained.
There is a lot that Puppy can teach the other distros.

Bootable USB, finally

2008-06-26T05:44:00.000-07:00

With the thumb drive rendered undetected after the last attempt using Kubuntu, I had to perform a low level format using the tool from hddguru.com. Since the tool is only for Windows, and I could not run it successfully in Wine, I had to go back to a system running XP to do the honours. Post low level format, as promised by HDDguru, the drive was back in action.

Since DSL was out of the race, I focussed on pendrivelinux itself, next. This was a 450 MB download, and no torrents were active at the time. I tried downloading it from the site, but got less than satisfactory download speeds. So rather than wait for the file to download I looked around for other options.

Puppylinux was the other distro that was hailed for its size - 90 MB and it also seemed to have a dedicated tool for installing to the USB drive. Downloaded and wrote a Live CD and booted into it.

Puppy inspite its size is a giant killer. A trendsetter of sorts, Puppy actually has meaningful user menu options that guide even the novice user through many esoteric steps through the booting process. It allows the user to select the graphics options, even offering a backup plan in case X failed. I was quite impressed with the userfriendliness of the distro. Unlike many other more popular distros I tested, Puppy was successful in loading the GUI in the native resolution.
It is more visually appealing than DSL, and has the SeaMonkey application suite compared to DSL's konqueror.
As promised ther was a tool to install to the Flash drive. Here too there are descriptive messages that hand hold the user through the entire process making it difficult to get something wrong. The first attempt failed, and on the second attempt I chose a different option suggested by Puppy. This time I was able to get a working bootable flash drive. The difference in the approaches was that in the first method the entire flash drive was formatted in ext2 and used, whereas in the second option the drive is divided into two partitions with one of them being a FAT16 file type for increased compatibility with Motherboard bioses.

Puppy was quite capable and I was taken aback by the extreme ease with which it installed my printer - while with opensuse I had to download the drivers. The wizard was HTML driven and hence devoid of the usual gloss, but it gets the job done quite well.

The drawbacks of Puppy which franky are heartbreaking were the absence of any really extensive repository. Or it could also be that I was unable to use it properly. The list of applications available are quite limited, and I could not find Openoffice in it. While there are links to the larger repositories, for some reason I am unable to search for an application name, and only those apps that are already available in the distro are displayed. Further fiddling is required.

Side Effects of Linux tools

2008-06-23T04:00:00.003-07:00

This behaviour of Linux tools reminds me of Allopathic drugs (in contrast to other medical systems - Ayurvedic, Homeo etc). Allopathic drugs are all about balancing the benefits with the deleterious side effects that invariably occur due to the use.
The Linux tool in question is NTFS-3G. I had to use it to be able to access some NTFS drives. NTFS-3G makes entries in the Fstab, so any drive that is plugged in is recognised as NTFS drives and the OS tries to load it according to those parameters set by the tool.
In my case since the external drive was sda1 and sda2, while plugging in any other flash drive causes sda1 to be mounted as an NTFS drive causing errors. The solution was to delete the NTFS-3G created entries in the fstab and replugging the thumb drive.
I wonder if NTFS-3G can be set not to modify the fstab.

Bootable USB distro disastro

2008-06-23T04:00:00.002-07:00

The quest for a distro that could be booted off the USB flash drive took a turn for the worse.
While the first attempt failed, trying to get Knoppix to boot off the drive, the second attempt with DSL was successful. Partly because there was a specific tool to accomplish this task, and all I had to do was watch the process after launching it.
After booting with the flash drive I concluded that the GUI was too basic for my taste, and revisited pendrivelinux.com for more options.
Kubuntu was the next item on the list. This too I did as told, and here is where things went awry. After configuring the drive, on reboot, the system would not proceed beyond the POST beep. I would get the beep, then the system would crash. The only way to get the system to proceed after the post beep was to remove the thumb drive.
I tried checking whether the contents of the drive were lost, but no the partitions were there as was the data. I tried deleting the partition, but that too did not improve the situation.
I am guessing that the Flash drive's boot sector has been damaged, but even in that case how could it crash the system - even without being able to access the BIOS to check if altering any settings would help.
Fiddling some more with hope.

Opensuse Automount Option

2008-06-23T04:00:00.001-07:00

The inability to unmount a partition in Opensuse was begining to nag. On the search for a way to create a bootable Flash drive installation, I came across the procedure to do so.
The drives can be unmounted through a circuitous way which requires launching the file manager, and accessing the System tab in the left most column. There all the partitions that have been mounted are displayed. Access the Properties of the relevant partition and the option to unmount is displayed there. Here one can also manage the auto mounting behaviour of Opensuse.

By the way, the initial attempt at creating a bootable flash drive failed with Knoppix 5, and instructions from pendrivelinux.com. I recall Damn Small Linux had an explicit option to install to USB, and I am hopeful that will do the trick.

NTFS-3G

2008-06-23T04:00:00.000-07:00

This is the module/app that is needed to enable accessing NTFS partitions.
In Opensuse while I could read these partitions, even the root account was not permitted to write into the partition. That was when I went hunting for ntfs related apps in the app manager.
To my surprise I found that ntfs-3g was already installed, though I have no recollection of installing it. So, probably, it is preinstalled in Opensuse. The other crucial piece of the ntfs family was the ntfs-config package which was the gui to control ntfs-3g's behaviour. Without it, I am sure ntfs-3g could be manipulated from the command line.
With ntfs-config installed, it is much easier to set options about the ntfs partitions in the system, and control which of them have R/W access to it.
In the first instance, ntfs-config would present an error that the ntfs partition was busy and so the modifications could not be made. Since mine was an external drive, plugging the drive into the USB slot would invariably mount the partitions. This was an issue that I found irritating, since there was no way to unmount the partition.
In my case, the partition was loaded under /media/New Volume which could be accessed from the file manager. With the partition editor, I could not unmount the parition, something that I frequently did in PCLinux. So under the command prompt, I tried running the umount /media/New Volume command, and got an error that "media/New"was not found. Apparently the space in the loaded name was the issue, which is quite strange. Looking at the partition tool found that "New Volume" was shown as "New\40%Volume", but replacing this in the umount command also did not work.

With ntfs-config (run this command) I could set the mount location manually quite easily. The mount option had to be "forced" since otherwise it would give an error.

The nag that remains is that I need to do this everytime the system is booted and also everytime the drive is plugged it. For some reason, Opensuse reverts to the older "New Volume" nomenclature eventhough the fstab entries are modified, and this time I get a permission denied message which prevented even viewing the contents.

Open Sesame Opensuse 11

2008-06-23T01:35:00.000-07:00

One important point that lead me to abandon PC Linux was the fact that eventhough it was based on Mandriva, it did not use the same repositories. This is a major peeve for me since having different repositories and package nomenclature causes fragmentation of the linux family. Since Mandriva is more entrenched than PCLinux, and the latter owes its genesis to the former, the least that PCLinux could have done was to retain package compatibility. An analogy that springs to mind is Mint Linux and Ubuntu. While Mint is based on Ubuntu, it also retains package compatibility so any app downloaded for Ubuntu can also be used for Mint. By sharing the repositories and package standard, Mint is freed from the need to convert packages and also maintain repositories. These are major resource hoggers, especially if you are a small team (as is in the case with most distros). By splitting the Mandriva family, PCLinux has created another area that would consume resources which could have been used to better the core product.

Got the OPensuse 11 live CD with KDE4. And it works as the previous edition (10.3), which was quite good itself. The KDE4 does add a lot of additional GUI features, most of which I do not like, but one significant area of improvement is the ability to use the Realtek gigabit LAN chip onboard the motherboard. This, I assume, is because the Linux Kernel is newer and has the drivers bundled. The lan chip proved to be too slippery for all the older distros - except Belenix based on Opensolaris.

There are no conspicuous changes that immediately catch the eye. Most menu options remain the same. The Widget placeholder (on the top right corner of the screen) is new, but I do not find any need for it. The Dolphin File manager is new. As is the plugged media indicator in the system tray.

Best of PCLinux

2008-06-22T07:56:00.000-07:00

After spending considerable time with PCLinux, I have decided to replace it. Two biggest drawbacks of PCLinuxOS : ever crashing synaptic (the application manager), and inability to detect external USB drive.
Both were becoming issues that I could not ignore anymore. The external USB drive had no problems with Opensuse or Windows.

PCLinux still rates as the most user friendly distro. Some features that are worth mentioning :
1. The Partition tool : unlike the one seen in Opensuse, this tool offers greater control over the mounting and unmounting process; is much more informative with regard to the relative location of each partition. This is a tool that deserves to be standardised across as distros.

2. The Application Manager : unlike Opensuse, where the repositories need to be configured discretely, Synaptic offers a single interface where one can configure repositories as well as install/uninstall apps. It is also much easier to modify the behaviour of the manager to retain downloaded rpms for later use. This is another tool that deserves to be standardised across all distros.

3. The hardware GUI features are also quite good, but here Opensuse is an equal. Hardware GUI refers to the presence of GUI tools to manipulate hardware aspects like Graphics card monitor, network card etc.

PCLinux 2008 is already available, though I have not tested it yet. So far in the latest crop of distros I have sampled Kubuntu 8.04 and Fedora 9 and both fall significantly short in user friendliness, when compared to Opensuse 11, which is what I intend to use as the default. Opensuse 10.3 which I have begun using increasingly is more stable in the app. management field, and for the time being that is more important that the other advantages that PC Linux offers.

The SMART way to manage apps

2008-06-07T01:18:00.000-07:00

The default Opensuse 10.3 app manager, not sure what it is named - YAST2?, is great at installing and uninstalling apps. But, recyclability is completely ignored. Downloaded rpms are deleted once the installation is complete. And as I found at linuxquestions.org, thanks to google01103, there seems to be no way to modify this behaviour. What this incident also showed me was that basic tools of Linux also are modified across distros, since the help entries quoted by google01103 did not exist on my PC, and neither did the command switches for the rpm command. Very strange.

Google01103 also mentioned an alternative app manager (I was ignorant about the ability to use different app managers in one distro), SMART. SMART is a package that can be installed from YAST2. Since I was not keen on using SMART from the command line, I also selected SMART-GUI package for installation. About 10 MB was downloaded and installed, including dependencies, and after that I could use SMART. To launch it, the command "SMART --GUI" , or the SMART entry under the Configuration menu can be used (though for some reason this stops with a "-gui command not found" error).

As the SMART manual at labix.org mentioned, the default rpm deleting behaviour can be modified with a "smart config --set remove-packages=false" command. To test this I installed a media player PIA. And as promised, the downloaded rpms were located at /var/lib/smart/packages (unfortunately, PIA itself did not make an appearance in any menu, but running the pam command gave the usage options). Interface wise SMART is leaner than YAST2, there seems to be no way to control repositories, so I assume the YAST interface is to be used to modify sources. The first step would be to refresh the cache since otherwise the app list in the repositories are not reflected, and searches end without result.

One lesson which I learnt, was the relevance of the point I made some posts back, that one of the first steps that an user to do after installing a distro is wade through the app list in the distro and try to install all relevant packages before starting out. This saves a lot of time and effort (and bandwidth) later.

Package recyclability is important to avoid redundant downloading of packages to install the same app in different PCs with the same distro. It would seem quite a significant oversight on Opensuse's part. I think, PClinux has such a facility (or was it Mandriva?).

Foxit

2008-06-05T23:20:00.000-07:00

An excellent PDF viewer, albeit only for Windows. One reason to have Foxit is because the internal PDF viewer in KDE cannot handle multiple page printouts - printing more than one page of the document on a single A4 sheet.
Foxit on Wine is the solution.
The hiccup is when trying to use Foxit as the default PDF viewer. It gives an error stating the command line usage options.

Update : 27.6.08
For some reason some documents are not printed correctly in Foxit - the text appears either inverted or as bars. Serendipitous discovery : KPDF the inbuilt PDF viewer DOES handle multipage printouts. Requires eagle eye to get to the option.

Reading RARs

2008-06-04T03:51:00.000-07:00

By default RAR format archives cannot be handled by any distro. In Opnesuse, when trying to open with Ark, the message received was that "rar was not found in the path". The solution was to install the unrar package with the application manager. With this installed, I could open RAR archives.

Trusty Testdisk

2008-06-02T22:33:00.000-07:00

I have had the honour of using testdisk many times in Windows. An excellent tool to restore partition tables and deal with other issues that can occur in the critical sections of a partition, Testdisk is god-incarnate.

I found out that it can also play saviour in Linux, thanks to its multiplatform nature.

The XP installation, previously mentioned, being on the C: drive could be easily included in the grub menu by adding "chainloader +1" and "makeactive" terms, to the grub menu. but since C: drive being the only primary partition on the drive, I wanted to shift XP to another partition. Post installation, I was confronted with a "disk error" message.

Reverting back to the grub menu (since the reinstallation again wiped grub) I loaded PCLinux, and did an fsck on the drive. fsck indicated that the partition table differed from its backup and offered to restore the backup. After permitting this, I reran fsck, and was dismayed to find that the restoring had not succeeded. This is when I remembered test disk.

Since PCLinux had consistently failed to install any new program through the application manager (always ending with an "cannot access rpm database" error), I loaded OPensuse to try to install Testdisk. First I downloaded the RPM (http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download) and double clicked on it. The application manager flashed briefly and then nothing. Then I tried using the application manager to include testdisk from the repositories. On doing a search I discovered that testdisk was already installed.

How can one be sure that an application is installed, if it does not make an appearance in any menu? Run the command from the console. I did this and was presented with the familiar testdisk textbased interface. A little browsing was needed to get to the required menu, on running the tool to check the parition, it reported that the original and backup differed. Then I restored the backup, and reran the tool to confirm. This time the backup was successfully restore.

On a reboot and reentering the grub menu, I was able to boot into the fresh XP installation.

Regrowing Grub

2008-05-31T23:58:00.000-07:00

The scanning need being important I had to revert to XP. Post install, ofcourse, the grub menu was replaced by XP's boot menu.
The first procedure that I tried was to use a live CD to try to recreate the lost Grub. I recalled seeing such an option in one of the distros. Probably Sabayon. Since FC8 and Kubuntu 8.04 were the only ones that I had at that moment, and neither had the required boot option, I searched online for a solution.
One solution was to use the grub-install command in the Linux rescue mode. This mode is available in most live distro's, though it was absent in Kubuntu. Usually adding "linux-rescue" to the boot option is also adequate, but Kubuntu did not allow changing boot options either. The webpages providing the solution mentioned that the rescue mode would mount the linux partition under mnt/sysimage, and from there the grub-install command from the boot/grub/directory could be accessed. Unfortunately, the FC8 rescue attempt failed with the error that the installation could not be mounted. Without that the grub-install command would not work since the paths were not accessible. So running the command gave a /boot/ path not found error.

More hunting revealed an alternative way. This involved using the setup command after running grub. This too required a Live distro and the rescue mode. At the command prompt, run the grub command, and you get the grub prompt.
There run "find /boot/grub/stage1", to find the path to the directory. This will return the partitions containing the said folder. This would be in the format (hd0,1).
With this info run the root command to locate the menu files. "root (hd0,1)"
The run the setup command to reinstall grub. The format is "setup (hd0)".

After a reboot, I found that grub was installed, but I did not see the menu, just the grub prompt. So I looked around a bit in the grub help, and found the configfile option. Then at the grub prompt, I entered configfile /boot/grub/menu.lst" and voila the menu appeared. After loading the GUI ( I was on PCLinux) I redid the grub installation from the control panel. Now all installations are back to normal, including the new XP.

Scanning snafu

2008-05-27T22:55:00.001-07:00

Canon is adamant with regard to releasing Linux drivers. With a Canoscan 3000ex scanner, I am left in the lurch since there are no drivers for it. During my online searches, I came across a forum where someone suggested that using the HP laserjet driver seems to work. While that suggestion seemed to work for one of the readers, the lack of information on how he managed to use the "printer" to scan left this an unsolved riddle. So far I have been unable to use the scanner, even with the HP driver installed.

Shame on Canon. And more appalling is that it is not a small company short on resources to create linux drivers.

Instant Messaging on Linux

2008-05-26T05:53:00.000-07:00

One important area where Linux is significantly handicapped is this. A decent IM client which allows voice, text, video streams is missing.
Shame on yahoo and ICQ (MSN can be forgiven for overlooking Linux, and google only has text which can be accessed just as well with the web browser).
Kopete the IM client in KDE seems to be the best option. It supports multiprotocol IM, with yahoo, msn, ICQ and a few other protocols being supported. The support though is rudimentary with many features of the native clients missing (as is also the case with Windows multiprotocol clients like Trillian).
The question that needs to be asked is what prevents major IM services like yahoo and icq from offering a full blown linux client. After all they make money by displaying ads and the more the clients used the greater their earning potential.

FC 9 - A Step Back

2008-05-18T11:22:00.000-07:00

FC9 which was released probably a week back would be expected to have support for the latest harware. But, for some reason, the X server could not handle the Geforce 7025 onboard graphics. This was seen in almost every other distro I tried so far as well, which leads me to conclude that FC9 is not a step ahead.
On the other system with the ATI Radeon 200 onboard graphics, no distro had faced a problem, but FC9 did. Though X loaded this time, the taskbar did not, so I was unable to launch any programs or check the menu options. Since the live distro had these issues, installing it to the hard disk is not planned.

Time Travel with Linux

2008-05-01T01:31:00.000-07:00

There used to be a time when computer users needed to be qualified to use it. Most older computers were operated by technicians who had the required knowledge to program instructions that had to be sent to the computer.
Thanks to Linux you get a chance to experience the old days. Linux offers a comfy experience to a narrow band of users - those whose PCs are using chipsets that have their drivers included in Linux, and who's computing needs are satisfied by the included applications. Though the band is narrow, it includes a lot of people. Stray a bit from the narrow band, and you are in a different era where to survive you need programming skills and a lot of patience to use the hardware optimally. Delinquents, in the Linux world, include those on systems with chipsets not supported by Linux, and those who are using customised software or games meant only for other OS.

The Rationale of Linux.

2008-04-29T04:37:00.001-07:00

After my amateurish attempts at trying to get a "enjoyable" Linux installation working, I have begun to question the reasons for trying to do so.
As a single PC owner, it makes little sense to try to tackle the issue of shoe horning Linux with the hardware. The problems with driver installation, and Wine installation (for gaming, since games are an important use any PC will be put to) are simply too challenging for most people. The plethora of live distros seem to be a solution, since a user has the option to go about trying out different live distros to see if the drivers are all proper and the Wine installation is error free. But even then the downloaded content remains incompatible amongst distros so a lot of downloading is needed. For those not on a broadband connection, this eclecticism is not an option. In my case, PCLinux offered the best compatibility with hardware, and also the right amount of "administrative freedom", but I have not been able to install a single application without the application manager crashing with a "rpm database not available" error. In those distros where I could get Wine installed, the GUIs to most of the routine tasks were missing.
The cheapest Windows option that can address these issues will cost me about Rs. 4000 (Windows XP Home OEM). The added benefit of doing Windows is also that any custom hardware can also be used without much heartache, like plugging in a webcam.

But, seen from the perspective of a person who is incharge of many systems that are to be used in an official (aka no fun during working hours) environment, Linux is a god send. Here, since the driver issues need to be addressed, it helps if all the systems are homogeneous. Testing out a few live distros hopefully will offer the most compatible option, and that just needs to be replicated on all systems. The cost saving is substantial, since at Rs. 4000 per PC, in a place that has 10 PCs, the cost savings just multiply. The added benefit is the inablitity to load up the PC with irrelevant programs. Since it is common to find many office PCs loaded with games and other software which can bog down the system, Linux's inability to handle such programs is a boon. Manhours spent in unproductive entertainment via games are reduced, which is also a saving in disguise.

Transmission

2008-04-27T04:54:00.000-07:00

FC8 opened the Transmission gates for me. Transmission is an extremely lightweight torrent client that is quite deep. Compared to the overhead of Azureus and the clunkiness of Ktorrent, Transmission is a featherweight torrent handler. It has most of the required options available with a host of statistics on display. Very intuitive to use as well.

After yuck, Transmission is a face saver for FC. I dare say some of the torrents that seem to get stuck in Azureus found a fresh lease of life in T. Though this could be all the positive energy talking.

Update:
Tansmission has a nasty habit of amnesia. On restarting the app, it forgets the download locations of the torrents not saved to the default download location. This is rather strange.

Application Management in FC8 - yuck

2008-04-27T04:27:00.000-07:00

They say that application management in FC is handled by yum - type it in the console to launch the routine.
But, I launched it the GUI way. For newbies, the routine is a bit puzzling. Handling a simple uninstallation routine for example cannot go on without having net access. Only after a net access is not found is the option to select repositories offered.

Since I was looking for Wine, and this package was not offered even in the DVD (which is a shame) I had enabled the two online repositories already selected - fedora and fedora updates. The routine started accessing the online repositories, which I presumed was for getting the program lists. But half an hour of "retrieving software information" and over 150 MB of downloaded content later, the program was still downloading stuff. I lost my patience and killed the application.
Ofcourse I could not launch it again since a message that some other routine is already accessing it came up preventing it use.
A restart later, I launched the app. Again without a net connection I was able to get to the repository list. Here I disabled all options, including the installation media. Now I could get the application list that I was familiar with after seeing it in other distros. Then I enabled just one online repository. This time the downloading was brief, and a few MBs and seconds later, I could search for the Wine package. Unlike a few other application managers I have met, this one does not mention download sizes at all. There is no way one can find size information of existing programs, so how much space will be freed on uninstalling it also cannot be found.

I managed to install wine, which proceeded, thankfully, uneventfully.

Update :
The experience with yuck repeated itself, so I am sure that it is not a one off incident. On installing FC8 on a second PC, and running the application manager, here too the initial attempt seems to take too long "retreiving/reading application list". On cancelling the attempt, and restarting it, things were much faster. Wine installed well here too.

SIOCSIFFLAGS

2008-04-27T02:31:00.000-07:00

Ofcourse it is not supposed to make sense, if it did it would not be a linux distro that we would be dealing with! If you can accomodate Dolphin, synaptic, atun then why not SIOCSIFFLAGS.

It is an error, that crops up when trying to boot FC8 on the Geforce 7025 motherboard. And since it is immediately preceeded by "eth0" I can safely conclude that it is the Realtek Gigabit LAN that is causing it. Unlike the other distros that managed to boot up well enough, FC8 stumbled even there.

The reason I returned to FC8 was because I got the DVD, without having to download it. Since Wine is a must have, and PC linux is having problems with it, I was hoping that FC8 with its popularity would offer fewer challenges. Things are not looking sunny after this.

The solution could lie in disabling the ETH interface from being started at boot time. To prevent this changes needed to be made in the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifgcfg-eth0 file.

Compiling the Kernel

2008-04-27T01:58:00.000-07:00

It is one of the rites of passage. I have no clue why I bothered, but it was something that I wanted to do. Theoretically, having a custom compiled kernel ensures maximal compatibility with the hardware, this step is also necessitated if any new hardware is being used whose drivers are not supported innately by the kernel.
So I downloaded the latest kernel from the kernel.org site. First I ended with a 9 MB bz2 compressed file, and I was taken aback by the size. I was expecting a larger file to be the center of a revolutionary movement. After getting the instruction on compiling the kernel from different sources I got down to doing it.
Before compiling, one needs the tools which are mostly not available in the Live CD distro in most cases. The tools needed are gcc and make. For some reason, probably during my earlier attempt to get the driver for the Realtek Gigabit LAn, I already had the files installed, which was revealed by looking at the application management window.
The first command to put in is make menuconfig. This is supposed to offer the user a list of parameters that can be altered before the compiling can begin. In my case this returned an error that the directions were missing. Further looking around revealed the presence of two types of souce files, the entire source and the patch source. A patch source merely contains the differences between the two kernels and hence is of a smaller size. The actual latest kernel weighed in at over 50 MB.
With the package extracted, on running the make menuconfig command the expected menu popped up. In it there were many options that could be enabled or disabled. Since I was using AMD Athlon and nVidia chipset, I disabled all entries that related to Intel CPUs and other chipset manufacturers. I played around with other options as well - irrelevant stuff like bluetooth and wireless support was also disabled.
The next step involved using the make modules command. And as I feared here I was presented with an error, which I did not bother investigating.

Clobbering Kubuntu

2008-04-27T01:39:00.000-07:00

For some unknown reason I am unable to visit any blogspot.com address since a few days. Only today did I remember that I could post through blogger.com without having to visit blogspot.com.

In the meantime I downloaded Kubuntu 8.04 with the KDE4 windows manager. Besides a large dose of visual candy, Kubuntu remains incorrigible.
There still is no way to access any graphical interface to install-uninstall programs, change the desktop resolution, mount-unmount partitions selectively. I wonder what is the reasoning behind this continued aloofness.

KDE4 looks quite pleasing in the all black mode, and rounded edges. The problem is that on a 256 MB machine this is not a practical option. While using the Live CD, the slick GUI consumed so much resources that all the swapping that was necessitated as a result left the user waiting for things to happen. I wish every distro also offered the equivalent of the simple tool in Windows, where a single setting to set the installation for Performance would impact all GUI aspects.

While not adding anything to improve a user's experience, Kubuntu did change the startmenu. This addition is similar to the Opensuse 10.3 start menu with the menus opening up in the same menu. I found this feature user hostile then too. This ofcourse could be changed in OPensuse, and hopefully Kubuntu allows it too. I did not see a Firefox icon, with Konqueror being the sole browser. The File manager, Dolphin which I liked a lot in Kubuntu 7.04 is still here. The all important button that I missed was "Open as root". It is probably hidden elsewhere.

I did not spend as much time as I would have liked to. The sluggishness was getting on my nerves.

Eventhough it was the latest distro, hopefully having the latest kernel and all, it did not get the graphics settings right, and I was left with a 800X 600 desktop on the geforce 7025 motherboard. This was disappointing, indeed.

In conclusion, a CD has been wasted. This experience has prompted me to get a CD RW. I will not be installing it on a hard disk.

Who touched my fstab?

2008-04-21T01:38:00.000-07:00

Confirming the whimsical nature of Linux, today morning I was unable to boot the system. Since it is not possible to scroll back through the error messages, I had to reboot a few times and use the scroll lock button to figure out what the problem was.
Apparently, the entry for / in fstab was missing! Without the root partition I was getting a long list of permission denied errors.
Thinking this may because of some data corruption, since it is difficult to imagine a particular line missing from a file overnight, I tried booting into the Opensuse installation that was also on the same drive. In Opensuse I got a "su" error, meaning that I was unable to login as root and use any of the tools limited to su, like fsck or accessing the disk partitioner to figure out how the partitions were labelled. As already mentioned in one of my posts, hda and sda are used depending on the distro used. Opensuse used sda while PC linux used hda to refer to the master primary hard disk. With OPensuse also acting dilinquent, I relied on a live cd to boot up.

I first did a fsck on the partition, and it did find some errors. Thinking this would solve the problem, I rebooted after the check. But the same errors were showing up. I also observed that even though the root partition was missing, the other partitions were being checked and tagged as clean.
Another live CD boot, and I investigated the fstab file in the relevant partition, and shockingly the entries for the root and swap partitions were missing. I am not sure how this happened. The last time I edited the fstab was probably two days back when I had mounted a few partitions and allowed the fstab to be updated. During that process, the root parition was not selected, since it was already mounted and did not need a mount point. Same with the case with the swap partition. I doubt if this could have overwritten the root and swap partition information in the fstab.

This remains a mystery. But, it confirms the claim that Linux is endowed with human qualities like eccentricity and impulsiveness.

PC Linux Migration problems

2008-04-19T04:44:00.000-07:00

The shift from the Geforce 6100 motherboard to the Geforce 7025 motherboard had been hard on FC and PC linux. The other distros atleast managed to bring up the console. In PC Linux's case the failure was especially hard hitting since I had been using it regularly.
The problem was that the system would crash soon after the the boot option was selected. Using the safe boot mode and frame buffer mode did not improve matters. My belief that Linux manages hardware changes much better than Windows was belied after that experience. But what made matters even more annoying was that even the Live CD would not proceed too far. Stopping with an unprecedented "Unable to Mount Live CD" error. Considering that the same Live CD worked fine on the other motherboard, and that other Live Cds worked fine on this motherboard on the same DVD drive, the CD-motherboard interaction was suspect.
A google brought up the explanation and the solution. Apparently, PC Linux has problems in dealing with SATA drives and adding "linux all-generic-ide" to the existing boot parameters solves the problem. Eventhough the DVD drive and Hard disk that I was using were NOT SATA, I edited the boot menu and voila the earlier problems vanished.

X still had issues with the 7025 onboard graphics. For this I used the Xorg -configure command, which promptly left the system unresponsive. I tried editing the original xorg.conf file and reduced the colour depth, but that did not help. Since the driver and monitor were accurately identified, there was nothing else to edit. Then I loaded the live Cd and went through the contents of it's xorg.conf file, since the live Cd managed to load X with diminished resolution. On browsing the contents of the file, I found that the device was not identified as nvidia, rather as vesa. I simple copied this section from the live xorg file and pasted it on the original xorg file. The next reboot brought up the GUI.

I could change the resolution to the max of the monitor from within the OS. Since the nv drivers were not being used, there was a reduction in the visual aspects of the GUI, most notably the lack of Anti alaising which ensures smoother fonts and curves. But, that is a small price.

I had hoped that the change of luck would carry on to the Realtek driver as well, but this was not to be.

Update:

Well, well, well.
I have had a change of heart with regard to the apathy of component manufacturers towards linux. The Realtek LAn driver ordeal fresh in mind, I braced my self for another session of make, make install etc to get the display drivers for the geforce 7025. Without the correct drivers the fonts were all pricky and scrolling was a slideshow.
A google search revealed the presence of a nvidia self extracting, self installing package (http://www.nvidia.in/object/linux_display_amd64_100.14.11_in.html). I'll repeat the nature of the package, because it is probably a first in Linux - SELF EXTRACTING, SELF INSTALLING. The package with a .run extension weighed in at 15 MB. To run it the sh command is all that is needed.

Post download, I tried the sh command, but since I was using X, I was asked to run the package after exiting X. After exiting X, and logging in as root, I ran the command. The experience was too good to be true, except it was. The files were extracted and promptly the installation began. Somewhere midway during the installation, the routine came up with an error that a compatible precompiled kernel module was not found (probably referring to the PC Linux kernel which may not have been on the top of the developer's mind). IT offered an option to download the same from the Net which I permitted. A few seconds later, it returned with empty hands. Now get this : after the message that no compatible modules were found, it says "NO PROBLEM I SHALL CREATE ONE!!!!!!!!!!!". And so it proceeds to compile and create a kernel module. Then it tells me that the Xorg libraries were not found, and its paths are being guessed, and if the guesses were inaccurate another utility needs to be downloaded to rectify it. With that message, it goes ahead and tells me that the installation is complete.
startX and lo and behold.

The nvidia experience is not just an eye opener, it is a techtonic shift, it is a vision of paradise from the midst of pain and suffering, it is beyond words.

I shall not waste any more words riling Realtek and their asinine handling of drivers. In their support, though, compared to the might of Nvidia, they are paupers and probably incapable of allocating adequate funds to match the sheer elegance of nVidia's driver routine.

Driver Driven

2008-04-18T22:22:00.000-07:00

Finding the solution to the Realtek driver issue became important, because I also discovered that the USB ports were not functional, which could also be related to the absence of proper drivers.

Googling for Realtek 8169 directly, I discovered that there were many who had faced the same problem - of the system inaccurately installing the wrong driver. The chipset was the 8168, but Linux used the 8169 driver automatically. Besides the readme instructions, I found anothe set of steps here http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?p=3029998#post3029998. Following these also proved futile.

While in Opensuse, I managed to successfully complete the steps, in Mandriva 2008 I was stopped midway with a "invalid module format" error on using the insmod command.

Temporarily, I have given up the pursuit, and have resigned to opt the easier way out, that of using the discrete lan card. The USB will also have to wait.

What makes this entire ordeal unacceptable is that Belenix, an Opensolaris distro, seems to have no problems in this front (but it fails in other aspects). The reason : this issue is based right in the core, the Linux Kernel itself.

Make a tar#$%* Part 2

2008-04-18T03:52:00.000-07:00

Installing drivers being central to the whole Linux experience, I took another jab at trying to figure out what the reams of text blurted out by the "make clean modules" command meant.

The first search on google revealed that to utilise make, one needs the kernel source code. To check if the kernel source is installed use the "rpm -q kernel-sources" command. I bet this can also be used for any application. The source was not included in the Opensuse installation I was on, and probably is not available in any live CD, for a reason that I found soon after.

I tried using the application manager to check for the availability of the source. Shock : the source is about 250 MB!

By the way, drivers are usually created specifically for each kernel version, and though the driver source size is comparatively insignificant (a few KBs), the command to find the kernel version is "uname -a". The application manager listed the source for the correct version. This need not always be the case, as I found out during my google forays.

250 MB is a strong motivation to look for other possibilities, but finding none, I prepared to download the source.A pleasant surprise awaited me, when I discovered that the actual download size was less than 50 MB. The 250 MB referred to the decompressed size, probably.

Post download and auto configuration, I reran the make clean modules command. This went past smoothly. The next command make install also did not throw up any problems. The depmod -a
and insmod ./src/r8168.ko commands also did not have any hiccups.

The readme file also provided some diagnostic commands to check if the driver had been installed, and these seemed to indicate that it was indeed the case.

I tried using the GUI to see if any changes had happened. Indeed the driver had changed from 8169 to 8168 which is the correct number of the chip.

But since the proof of the pudding is in the eating, I tried accessing the Net. Alas, this was not possible. Before going through all this, even with the automatically installed 8169 driver I was facing the same problem. A restart also did not help. So the attempt on the whole was not a success.

The sole consolation I could extract was that I had experienced my first compile and install session, and except for the initial hiccups, it went smoothly.

Now while the information to install a driver is readily available, how to accomplish uninstallation is not.

Linux losing cool

2008-04-17T00:42:00.000-07:00

A recurring "feature" of Linux is the unpredictability associated with it. Every reboot presents a new, usually unwelcome, challenge. Presently I am unable to launch any KDE application because I get an error that the DCOP could not be contacted. This system worked fine till yesterday, today DCOP is AWOL. Without DCOP I cannot launch any KDE window - no menus, no file manager. The solution is a reboot. But, I am not sure doing so will not bring up another problem.

While many lacunae in every distro can be attributed to the improper selection of preinstalled packages, the kind of problems like DCOP is more intrinsic. Expecting a user to spend a large part of the working hours trying to get the system workable is wishful thinking.

Make a tar @#$*

2008-04-16T07:40:00.000-07:00

Installing Drivers can be a major headache for newbies and GUI enthusiasts. In my case, since the achilles heel of most distros seemed to be improper drivers for the LAN card, I headed to the Realtek site. The drivers were there, but in the most unfreindly format - source code.
Source code needs to be compiled before it can be installed. And while this ensure maximum compatibility with the hardware, it also means relying on the console throughout the process.

I tried this in Mandriva and Opensuse, and in both cases stumbled in the second step of the installation process mentioned in the readme file that accompanies the driver.

The tar command can be used to open th gz/bz2 compressed packages. Or it is just much easier to use the usual GUI option to extract the archive. The result is the same.
After extraction, the source needs to be compiled, and the steps to do this is present in the readme that is available after extracting the archive.
"make clean modules" is the first command to be used, according to the readme. This promptly returns an error - make command not found. The make command will be available after installing the make package. So I loaded the application manager and did that. With make available, I reentered the command. This time the error related to the absence of a gcc file. Another visit to the application manager and the gcc packages was installed. Retrying the command not produces numerous errors, all relating to missing files.
gcc is just one of the many C language package available. There are other options titled gcc 3, gcc 4 etc which refer to the version of the package. With no advice on which version was needed, I did not venture to install any further package.

The solution or rather shunt, involved using a discrete lan card with a chip whose driver was already in the distro. So I extracted the Lan card from an older system, and was quickly online.

I needs to be mentioned that none of the distros indicate that lack of driver is the problem. All of them, during the configuration stage continue as normal, but accessing the net is impossible. Opensuse during the installation also identifies correctly the chip - realtek pcie gigabit - but still when trying to go online I get "no connection" errors. This is strange.
While an older LAN card solved the net access problem the fact that Realtek did not offer a precompiled or binary version of the driver is worth considering. This is undoubtedly one of the negative effects of the multiple distros, offering a single source file beats having to offer over a dozen binary versions since each distro has projected its own package manager. This approach is suicidal, for the Linux movemen, of course.

Probably the motherboard manufacturer has the relevant drivers on the site, which is where I should have gone first.

Disk Drake

2008-04-16T00:56:00.000-07:00

There is only one partition tool that combines versatility with ease of use - Diskdrake, the partition tool seen in PC Linux. It can handle the most partition types, it allows the user to control the fstab entries, it allows easy mounting/unmounting of paritions. The only area where it lacks is that it doesn't make the distinction between primary and logiical drives.
Qtparted and Gparted which are the other partition tools seen more commonly in Linux distros pale in comparison. Unfortunately, these are the tools one is more likely to comeacross. While Gparted is comparatively better, it allows mounting and distinguished between logical and primary, it can only handle few partition types. Qtparted which is at the bottom of the pile also has the nasty habit of renumbering partitions, which can render an installation unbootable unless the boot menu is edited. Avoidable.

Self Saboteur, Belenix

2008-04-16T00:24:00.000-07:00

The art of shooting oneself in the temple is something that Belenix teaches the world. It is simply unimaginable how a distro creator can be so oblivious of the lack of the essentials.
There are many obstacles that need to be overcome before someone keen to install Belenix can begin that actual process of the installation. Persistence and Determination, the two friends that one will need to taste success in life are critical for success with Belenix.
1. Belenix does not make it clear that it is possible to install the live CD onto the hard disk.A user has to go online to discover "hdinstaller".
2. Belenix does not offer a disk partition tool that can create a partition of a format which is needed for the installation! This is so stupid that it needs to be repeated, emphatically. BELENIX DOES NOT OFFER A DISK PARTITION TOOL THAT CAN CREATE A PARTITION OF A FORMAT WHICH IS NEEDED FOR THE INSTALLATION. The Gnome partition tool which is bundled with the distro cannot handle Solaris or Solaris2 types.
3. Ofcourse, hdinstaller does have a command line disk partitioner - fdisk. But using it would be similar to doing a rope walk, blindfolded. It will not allow a user to create a partition based on the size of the partition. A user is expected to figure out the percentage of the disk space to be allocated instead, or alternatively, the cylinder numbers are to be provided. A persistent user will go to those lengths to see Belenix installed, only to be rebuffed by a terse "the partition space is inadequate" message by hdinstaller.Can't it be considered idiotic to give that message after all the changes have been committed? What prevents Belenix from telling the user to create a 5GB partition before hauling him over the coals? Users without that much free space on the disk can avoid all the hassles. Ofcourse, the fact that a primary partition only will do is also not mentioned upfront.

4. If the user has gotten so far, and created a 5 GB Solaris2 partition, another obstacle comes in the way of a message "The window is too small for the application. Resize screen and restart application". Also hdinstaller only offers a Hobson's choice, no going back, its either quit or OK all the way.

In their defence, it can be said that a user takes on the hdinstaller challenge voluntarily, since Belenix only promised to be a live distro of Opensolaris. And if the user wanted Opensolaris, that is a different story (hopefully not as nightmarish).

I am writing this as Belenix is being installed in the background.

Update:
The Cup of Woes overfloweth

The ludicrousness of Belenix scales newer heights, post installation. It doesn't even manage to get the GRUB installation right. It seems it is using some ancient notation, and while the boot path is shown as "/platform/multiple kernel/unix"; the error message states that "Opensolaris no longer uses Multiboot option". But, this comes up later.
The default options do not work, the first error referred to an incorrect path. On viewing the boot line options, I find that the hard disk is numbered hd1. Modifying this to hd0 causes the booting to stop with the previous "Multiboot" problem. So I remove the multi word, and the boot process manages to creek to the next error - "kernel needs to be loaded before the modules".

Since this would require checking the path to the kernel, I had no option to use a live CD to boot. Using Belenix live CD itself failed, crashing midway - I am guessing this has something to do with the hard disk installation. It is not the first time though where I have observed that the fate of the Live CD is influenced by the state of a hard disk installation. I had to resort to Knoppix to boot. Navigating to the partition, I found that the boot path was incorrect, the unix image was in the boot/platform/... directory. So I tried editing the menu.lst file from within Knoppix, but this was not permitted, even when using the root account.

Returning back to the hard disk boot, I tried editing the menu to accomodate for the boot option, this time the error was that "absolute path" was needed. So I preceeded the kernel path with the hard disk notation hda0. Finally, the boot progressed past the earlier errors and came to a halt with a "Stack error".

Well the solution it would seem is a reinstall. But, since the Belenix live CD will not boot with the hard disk installation, all hopes of a repair reinstall faded away. I used the Knoppix CD to delete the partition, and was able to reboot with the Belenix live CD and type this.

I am disappointed, mildly put.

Since this whole exercise was necessitated since all the rest of the distros did not have the relevant drivers for the Realtek Gigabit LAn, I downloaded the relevant drivers from the Realtek site. Imagine my surpise when I tried to extract the .tz and .bz2 archives. The XFCE windows manager does not pack in a archive tool! Not that it would have helped much, since I did not have a Cd burner as well, and plugging in the flash drive received a cold shoulder. Funny thing is when logged into the KDE interface, one of the entries under the Utilities menu is Xarchiver, this is in addition to KDE's Ark tool.

New Motherboard Problems

2008-04-15T07:00:00.000-07:00

The new motherboard has managed to evade all attempts to successfully install a completely working copy of Linux. Some distros like PC Linux and FC 8 could not even mount the live CD. PCLinux stopped with an explicit message that the Live CD could not be mounted. FC8 gave a different error that seemed to point that it did not take the onboard IDE controller as a friend. Some ATA... error.
Other distros that I tried - Mandriva, Centos, Sabayon, Opensuse - all failed to tackle the net connection. The onboard Realtek gigabit network card proved too much. But, in all other aspects they were successful.

Salvation came in the name of Belenix. The only hiccup was in the X configuration, since this took time and a lot of trial and error and restarts. What aggravated the situation was that I could not login from the console to try editing the conf file manually. The username password combination remained elusive - root, user, password etc were tried out.

Eventually the combination that worked involves using the Vesa drive and not the Nvidia driver, and reducing the colour depth to 16 bit. The network problem was addressed beautifully, and here I am typing this. The resolution remains at 800 x 600, for which the only solution is a manual edit of the xorg.conf file since Belenix does not offer the proper graphical tools to tweak X.

The default combo is user and belenix.

Segmentation Fault

2008-04-13T23:36:00.001-07:00

This means that either the RAM or the program code is corrupt. If the RAM is to blame, a restart fixes this, but it can reappear. If it is the code then a pattern can be deciphered, helping pin point the program to blame.

A series of unfortunate events

2008-04-12T08:06:00.000-07:00

The seeds were sown yesterday when the system would not power off after a shutdown command. The system remained unresponsive after displaying the "sending term signal". After waiting for the usual time, I did a manual shutdown with the restart and power down buttons.

Today morning the series began. The system would not boot to the desktop but stopped with a series of permission denied messages. The use of the "Scroll Lock" button, something that I had never felt the use for for over a decade, allowed me to make out the messages as they quickly scrolled. A few files were identified.

Thinking this could be a result of the improper shutdown, I concluded running the fsck command on that partition would help. Since the system even couldn't boot to the command prompt, running it from the same system was not possible. Ofcourse, at the point I noted that an explicit boot option to boot to the console was missing.

Booting with the PCLinux live CD, I ran the fsck command. Way too many inodes were found out of order. After the sweep, I tried booting from the hard disk. No luck.

Had this been Windows, the next logical step would be a repair install. This is the first area where I felt Linux is a major let down. For one it makes life difficult by having too frequent disk errors (this could also be because one of my RAM modules is not error free, though this fact does not seem to affect normal working). Secondly, a repair reinstall is not available in most distros. I have seen this in, probably, just Sabayon- though even there it is accompanied by a message that it takes a lot of time but works.

PCLinux does not offer a repair option, so thinking a reinstall on the partition without formatting would work just as well, I proceeded with the install. At the partition selection step, I selected the older partition as "/" mount point but disabled the format option. Imagine my shock when the next step still gave a warning that all content on the drive will be erased! I quickly backed out. Then I copied all files under the home folder from the older partition to a safer place and returned to the reinstall step. During the backing up process I made a useful discovery, that the downloaded packages of Synaptic are stored under /var/. I had searched for *wine*.*. To return, the format option was disabled, yet the warning came on, but it did not format the drive! The installation proceeded and after the boot loader was installed, I shutdown the system.

The corrupt RAM was weighing on my mind, and I blamed it for the Azureus phenomenon ( Azureus would complete download of a torrent, check it, find peices missing, download these peices, recheck again, still peices would be missing, and the cycle continued a few more times, before the check was satisfactorily completed. Many times the extra MBs downloaded would be just a small fraction of the total file size, but occassionally, somewhere like 50-75 MB would be downloaded after the entire file had been completed. The corrupt RAM could be causing the hash failures, I conjectured.). The solution would be to add the drive to another system where the RAM was error free. Since the earlier experience of Linux taking hardware changes in it's stride, I was confident that there would be no hiccups. Linux surprised again.

But, I was so convinced that it was a lingering problem with the previous corrupt installation that I did not immediately switch to the older configuration. On the new system, I discovered that not only would not the freshly reinstalled system not work, nor would any Live CD as well. Belenix, PCLinux, Freespire, all failed to properly boot, crashing before the desktop showed up. Kubuntu managed to deliver the desktop, though. Another fsck followed. Eventually, better sense prevailed and I restored the older association, and the reinstallation booted normally. In hindsight, it seems that the reason none of the live CDs booted properly could have been because the motherboard, being quite recent - based on the geforce 7050 onboard graphics chipset - the proper drivers may be missing. A VI of one of the non GUI loaded installations xorg.conf file showed that the contents under the device section were correct - nvidia.

After the reinstallation experience, I discovered that the network would not work in the reinstalled system. All attempts to reconfigure, delete and create a network connection failed, leaving me with no net access. To make things worse, Synaptic too began playing truant. I had hoped that the reinstallation would've made some changes so that this time Wine installation would proceed more smoothly. Dashed. Synaptic would show up on the taskbar and then close. So the Wine experiment could not be done.
Since I had backed up all files, I copied them back into the earlier locations. I had recreated the same user and root accounts with no password in both during the reinstallation. Azureus would not load, till I deleted the older .azureus folder under the account's home folder.

Overall this took almost the entire working day. And at the end of it I was still without a net connection. Which leads me to the point where a complete reinstall is needed.

The experience has been informative. I found out where the synaptic download folder is. I disovered that there are limits to which Linux can accomodate new hardware, which brings be to the need to learn how to install drivers during installation. I revisited Kubuntu, and reexperienced the marvel that is Dolphin - the file manager, also found that it is the one distro which mentioned Wine in the most logical way - as an option in the Control panel offering to run Windows applications (Wine is NOT preinstalled though). I recollected that Opensuse is not a Live CD.

Apt-get

2008-04-10T00:53:00.000-07:00

Apt-get is Synaptic without the GUI.
If Synaptic begins to act funny, you can rely on apt-get to get the job done. In my case I had to use apt-get because synaptic would not launch. I can see the busy icon, and then nothing appears. Luckily, apt-get is a bit more logically deviced unlike many other commands in Linux.

I was completely flattered by the concise and well laid out command options. Usually typing in a command will output it's help file by default. In the few commands I have had the misfortune of having to use, this runs in to many pages. Not apt-get. The screenshot below shows the beauty of apt-get.

Since I had been trying out installing and uninstalling Wine till it somehow got motivated to sync properly so that I could use it, I was interested in removing the Wine package.
Entering apt-get got the options. Seeing that "remove" is the required option to uninstall a package, I simple entered apt-get remove wine. A few seconds of analysis later, apt-get prompted for confirmation and after the affirmative response, proceeded to remove Wine.

What striked me was the speed of processing. In synaptic invariably, even if no new packages are to be installed, it would spend a few seconds "downloading packages" then it would proceed to remove the selected packages. And usually this step if followed by a reloading of the package list which takes a few seconds more seconds. apt-get does away with both the preceeding and succeding steps and sticks to the brasstacks. It probably takes half the time as a result.
The drawback is that unlike Synaptic which automatically tracks down dependent packages and lists them too, apt-get did not do so. So a re read of the help document revealed that another parameter needed to be given for removing dependencies as well.
The correct command to remove dependencies as well was "apt-get remove wine -D".

It would be hard to understand apt-get at work without having an opportunity to see Syanptic first. The visual feedback of the package listing, the dependency calculating etc makes Synaptic many times better. But, for those seeking a quick end to a application management problem, and know exactly the package to be done away with will find apt-get more useful. It also helps when Synaptic is too gloomy to come out to play.

Since the problem I was facing was that Wine would cause X to restart without warning, which was why I was uninstalling and reinstalling the Wine package, after the latest restart, I logged into the user account, almost absent mindedly. And to my surprise Synaptic works find in that account, not Wine though.

Checking Windows partitions

2008-04-09T08:32:00.000-07:00

fsck works for Linux partitions. Try running it on a FAT partition and you get a fsck.vfat not found error. A google search revealed that the tool may have been renamed to dosfsck in some distros. Well in PC Linux atleast this is true.
To avoid having to run the dosfsck command separately, a "symbolic link" can be created linking fsck.vfat to dosfsck by running this command : ln -s /sbin/dosfsck /sbin/fsck.vfat

Snapping Synaptic

2008-04-09T03:25:00.000-07:00

Repeated attempts to uninstall unwanted applications by using Synaptic end with the error - rpm databse not found. Unlike most Windows applications with an "uninstall" or "unwise" program that can be run to uninstall applications, I am not able to find a similar executable for programs installed in the Linux system. Programs mostly end up under the /usr/bin folder.

In general, application misfires are not a rare event in Linux. It is expected that every boot brings something new to the equation. It is not surprising to have a system that worked fine during the last session to exhibit inexplicable anomalies at the next boot. Most of these anomalies disappear on a restart, though.
I would like to believe that these problems arise out of the absence of tight integration between different components that constitute a disto. It is rare for all applications in a distro to have the same creator. Since all distros are a bundle of different apps, it is expected that the interfacing between all these apps across different environments would not have passed rigorous quality tests.

Fixing X

2008-04-08T04:49:00.000-07:00

Shifted the hard disk from the system with the Via chipset motherboard to another system having the nvidia chipset (Geforce 6100 onboard graphics). As previously experienced in PC Linux, the new hardware was properly detected and relevant drivers loaded. All hardware except the graphics. So I was left with the command prompt. The shortest way to getting back the GUI involves reediting the device details in the xorg.conf file. To get these details XFdrake needs to be run. Running XFdrake will show the name of the driver being used. Note down this name, and replace the existing one in xorg.conf. Then do a startx at the command prompt and you are all set. This works only in those distros with XFdrake. Xorg -configure is another command which can also be used, but in my case this left the system unresponsive requiring a restart and the associated fsck due to the improper shutdown.

Stepwise :
1. run XFdrake.
2. Identify driver name usually in quotes
3. Run vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf
4. Dig down to the devices paragraph, where among other things, the driver is mentioned. This is usuall "nv" or "Savage4" etc.
5. Replace existing value with the one displayed by XFdrake.
6. Save :w and quit :q! vi
7. run startx.

While in PC Linux I had to do this, Mandriva even managed to reconfigure X all by itself. All I had to do was twiddle my thumbs.

Installing DirectX in Wine

2008-04-07T04:04:00.000-07:00

A google search threw up this page :
http://wine-review.blogspot.com/2008/03/directx-90c-march-2008-redistributable.html

An older version relating to the installation of DX 9c is here :
http://wine-review.blogspot.com/2007/11/directx-90c-on-linux-with-wine.html

I tried the latter, and installation was glitchfree. I could run DXdiag and the direct draw tests were a bit sluggish, which could be attributed to the 256 MB shared RAM and the onboard S3 graphics. But, probably, the hardware would not have posed a problem had the tests been done in Windows. Since the emulation process takes CPU power, some headroom is needed to match the speed.

The dll files mentioned can be downloaded from here : http://www.dll-files.com/

Testing with real games will require a beefier system.

Mandriva driving mad

2008-04-07T01:02:00.000-07:00

It doesn't allow you to login as root. It doesn't offer an option to browse through the drive as super user. So how can one access files under the root partition or in those drives mounted by the root?
Doing an su in the command prompt does not reflect in the file manager.

Update:
A quick query at Linuxquestions and I have a solution thanks to a guru. The solution:
Create a link on the desktop to the Konqueror application, which is the default file manager. The Konqueror executable is in the /usr/bin directory. Only the working folder needs to be filled in the properties. Then under the Advanced options enable "Run as another user" and enter the root username. The next time any locked file needs to be accessed, launch the file manager with this link, and insert the password and voila.
In the same link properties mentioned above, under the command box entering "kdesu konqueror" will also suffice.

The moot point is : if it is so easy to offer a superuser file manager, why not incorporate it in the distro in the first place?

Update 2
A follow up post at linuxquestions offered a more user friendly option. INstall openasroot-kmenu. This will give the Open as Root option that makes using PC Linux so much easier. Since this application is in the Application manager's package list, this is another reason follow the earlier tip to look through the application list as a first step to working with a distro. If the program doesn't turn up in the first search,, this is because the relevant repository is not enabled. Enable the Contrib repository and retry. In Opensuse, this is a 19 KB package, and installed without problems.

Serendipity

2008-04-06T03:23:00.000-07:00

After trying out many distros, I had come to like PCLinux. It had most of what I wanted in a OS without being tied down by paranoid security protocols. The inability to get Wine installed was a major blow. Since installation had failed on one system, and on the other system the installation proceeded in the same lines, I had given up hope of being able to live with just one distro, needing a second distro like Mandriva for the wine utility and the ability to run windows games.
But, a reinstallation of Wine seems to work, even though I do still get a lot of errors. Since I had enabled saving the packages locally, for the reinstallation there was no more downloading. The application manager went through the motions of the installation, and abruptly stopped with errors. BUT, fortunately, the Wine name made an appearance in the programs menu, AND more importantly, launching it worked without glitch.
I still have been unable to replicate the reinstallation success on the other system. No matter how many times I tried to remove and reinstall Wine, it always crashed on launch. Online, there are no sources of information to shed light on this situation.
The conclusion I have arrived at is that a lot of serendipity is associated with program installation, especially when dealing with new program installation. I am of the view that the Wine installation would not have been a problem, had the installation DVD of PCLinux been used, since in that case the packages would have been installed along with the OS. There are obvious advantages of using a CD, since one would rarely need most of the apps on the DVD. So if both are as easily available, the latter is a wiser choice.

To enjoy a distro

2008-04-05T02:44:00.000-07:00

The first step to enjoy a distro is to look at the list of applications available in the application manager. After having gone through the list myself, I have found many applications that need to be removed and added to make the installation run more effectively.
Ofcourse, making changes to the list and having them applied successfully are two entirely different issues. Nonetheless, browsing through the list, an updated list that contains all the packages available in the different repositories especially, should be one of the first things to do before settling down with the distro.

(updated 6.4.08) A side effect of this exercise is that the cryptic nomenclature of applications becomes less annoying. GKrellm makes sense.

Wine in OPensuse

2008-04-04T08:56:00.000-07:00

After having tried installing Wine in PClinux (failure), and Mandriva 2008 (success), I tried doing the same in Opensuse.
Of the three, the installation was the briefest in Opensuse. Just over 8 MB was downloaded. Post download, the entire integration took less than 5 mins. BUT, Wine was no where to be seen. It did not mark its presence on the desktop or the menu. To find out where the program files had ended up, I had to relaunch the application management routine. There the path /usr/bin/wine was revealed. I double clicked on a shell script, winecfg.sh. It ran successfully, so the installation was not botched up. But since there seems to be no easy way to run a windows application (right clicking on an exe did not produce the Run in Wine option), it is hard not to consider this a failure.

The work around is to use the Open with option while right clicking on the exe file. Then browse to /usr/bin/wine and select the "always use this application " option. The next time an exe is clicked, Wine will do the necessary.

Distro choice

2008-04-04T04:59:00.000-07:00

Here I have listed a few criteria that need to be considered before selecting a distro. Probably I shall create a chart to compare the distros across these features.

1. Ease of switch as Root. PCLinux offers a context menu option that reads "Edit as Root", in Mandriva 08, I can't login as root from the normal login screen, there is not Root terminal, there is no root mode file manager, and the context menu seen in PCL is missing.
2. Password lengths
3. Mounting/Accessing other partitions graphically.
4. Command line editors - nano beats vi
5. Openoffice
6. Wine
7. Repository management - adding and removing offline or online repos.
8. Acess to control panels
9. Autologin any user.
10.

X Factor

2008-04-04T04:43:00.000-07:00

Linux owes its popularity to X. You cannot spell Linux without X. The masses that adopted Linux did so because X offered the freedom to bypass the complexities of the command line.
It would logically follow that X IS Linux, without X, Linux is just Unix.
My experience with X and how it is treated by different distros seem to indicate that the importance of X is underestimated by many distros. In this particular case it is Sabayon.
Migrating a hard disk with PC Linux installed from a geforce onboard graphics motherboard to a savage graphics onboard motherboard was quite simple. X had problems, but XFDrake worked which showed that the drivers are all there, since the test with the new settings was a success. Ultimately, I just copied the relevant portions from the live CD's xorg.conf file to that of the installation. And it worked smoothly.
Sabayon makes life difficult. For one there is no XFdrake. Searching online I found about the Xorg -configure command, but this stops with an error. Finally, copying the relevant parts from one Linux distro to the Sabayon one also failed with an error that xinetd has errors.
I have said this before as well, but the message is too important to ignore. There needs to be some standardisation among distros with regard to critical OS functions. Display is one of them. My experience with many distro leads me to believe that it is more appropriate to consider each of them as a distict OS rather than the same OS in different flavours. If this reality were digested, the distro navigation becomes easier. Linux needs to be pushed to the background, and each distro needs to be accepted as a distinct OS, like Windows, MAC etc.

Sabayon vi sabotage

2008-04-04T01:57:00.000-07:00

While I have stated, repeatedly, that vi offers the only hope when the dark ages of the command prompt are confronted, Sabayon proved me wrong.
The heartless Sabayon takes away even the little ray of hope that vi is. So if dumped at the command prompt, when using Sabayon, you need "nano". I chanced upon nano accidentally, I tried out pico, vim, emac, emacs and was considering the arrogance of Sabayon in their inability to add even a basic editor.
nano happenned by fluke, being from the same naming retarted family as pico. But, the naming irrelevance aside, it offers greater ease of use than vi, much greater. For one there is a list of commands that can be used, which is a god send. The rest is easy. I need to check if nano is available in other distros as well.

Another instance of Sabayon playing truant is the absence of the XFdrake command. I recall that I had used this command to gain some hope when I was dumped at the console after a system switch. In Sabayon this command does not exist

GRUB errors, contd

2008-04-04T00:48:00.000-07:00

The problems in resizing with Qtparted began showing up in different ways. This time I end up with just a grub command prompt. No more Error 18 message.
In the mean time I tried a few modifications to the jinxed OpenSuse installation. I used the sabayon live Cd to re-resize the NTFS partition, then I reduced the size of the extended partition which was covering the rest of the drive to make space for another primary drive to hold the swap and boot ext2 partitions. Here too the Sabayon installation proceeded smoothly, but after a reboot I do not get any errors, just the Grub command prompt.

I tried using the drive on another system. This time I got the boot menu, which surprised me a lot. I was just begining to think that the previous mobo was to blame and not GRUB or Linux, when the booting process stopped with an error that the root drive was not valid. The boot progress could be seen from the display, and one word seemed interesting - mtab. Rhymes with fstab. A google search showed that mtab is automatically created and hence editing it is not worthwhile. Editing fstab seemed like the logical next step.

Opening up fstab, I was introduced to yet another system of naming drives. This one goes one step beyond the one seen so far in making life for the ordinary user difficult. While the naming scheme involving sdx or hdx which could label a disk based on its location in the channel was idiotic, this one was downright incomprehensible. When a partition on the drive is labelled "/dev/disk/by-uuid/f7a69855-d98a-448b-9347-0688aa548dc3" it is impossible to tell which partition is being referred to. Atleast "hda5" made some sense.
Seems distros like Opensuse and Sabayon revel in aggravating a user, since I have seen a similar notation in OPensuse menu as well. I wonder if UUID is the same for a hard disk irrespective of the motherboard it is plugged into, or is it a random figure.
The fstab entry is reflected in the menu.lst file in GRUB as well. In Sabayon's Boot folder, I discovered another thing - that menu.lst is a short cut to grub.conf file. Is this only in Sabayon's case?

Replacing the UUID gibberish with the more sensible hdax notation seemed to improve matters, a lot. With the modified menu.lst, Sabayon booted right into the command prompt. As previously experienced, the shift in systems only caused a hiccup in X. fstab still contains the UUID notation, but it didn't cause a problem during boot.

Proxomitron

2008-04-03T01:13:00.000-07:00

With Wine installed, I could use many of the best apps that were out of bounds because an equivalent was not available in Linux.
Proxomitron was one of them. While Privoxy is rated highly among ad blocking proxy servers for Linux, it does not offer the ease of use and configuration that Proxomitron does.
All that was needed to run Proxomitron, was to right click on the executable and use the Run with Wine option. Since it did not have an installation routine, I had apprehensions on how it would run under Wine. But, they were unfounded.

Why I whine vi

2008-04-03T00:39:00.000-07:00

Mastering Vi, the very irritating text editor which is the only hope to edit a file when the system does not boot and drops you in a maintenance console, is the only way to avoid taking the circuitous route of loading a live Cd to edit the same file in GUI mode.
The frequency with which you will get dumped in the maintenance console increases exponentially depending on the number of entries in the fstab file. You will need vi in those cases to delete all but those lines relating to the boot partition and the swap partition.
A google search revealed the most elusive commands in vi - :w and :q, to save and quit respectively. During my fiddling with vi I had figured out how to insert and delete content but the saving and exiting were hard to pin. The ":" was the eel in this case.
There is a lot of history behind Vi, but the controls are unforgivably irritating. I am not sure if this is the only text editor to be used in maintenance mode. Even if it isn't, isn't it time someone made it less stressful.

GRUB limitations

2008-04-03T00:25:00.000-07:00

I am not sure if this is a shortcoming of just the boot loader or something more intrinsic to linux.
The partition nomenclature used in Linux has a serious limitation when it comes to migrating hard disks. A hard disk is named differently based on the channel which it is connected to. To elucidate : a hard disk connection to the primary IDe channel, as master is hda. Strangely, if the same hard disk is made slave (even if there is no master in the same channel), it gets labelled hdb. Similarly, there is a sdx series to denote SATA drives, though I am sure I have come across this naming even when PATA drives are used.
This is not just a source of confusion, it also makes migrating hard disks difficult. A drive that is hdc in one system, has to be installed as master in the secondary IDE channel of another system if it has to be booted. Since the GRUB menu entries use hda, hdb etc notation the menu entries are rendered unbootable if the drive is loaded on some other channel.

In comparison, Windows uses a more user friendly nomneclature. Atleast a bootable hard disk will work in any system irrespective of its channel status.

QtParted skills

2008-04-02T23:22:00.000-07:00

Qtparted, the partition tool that comes with Knoppix had rubbed me the wrong way previously, by renaming the partitions and thus causing the system to become unbootable.
I had another opportunity to use Qtparted. This time I wanted to resize an NTFS partition to make way for a Linux distro. Before using Qtparted, I had defragmented the partition in XP. (which brings me to the question does Linux have such a tool?)
Then I booted with Knoppix, opened Qtparted, set a new size for the partition, and applied the changes. It must have taken less that 5 minutes for the job to complete. I was taken aback by the speed with which the partition had been resized, that I was quite sure that the data had been erased. But, that was not the case, I could see the files in the resized partition, as well as boot into the XP installation which that partition contained. The 1 hour defrag process in XP may have some say in Qtparted's quick response. Interestingly, it was an NTFS partition, a file system which cannot be written to in Linux (in my knowledge).

So, far so good.
But then the Linux installation started acting up, or rather the GRUB in it did. While the Opensuse installation went smoothly, after restart, GRUB would stop with an Error 18, before offering the boot menu. Thinking the Grub menu would need some tweaking, I tried booting with Knoppix. This time Knoppix did not boot, but stopped midway with some hard disk or partition error. Then I tried using the FC 8 live CD, and the Gparted partition tool in it showed that the resizing operation had left a 5 MB space free between the partitions. Could this be the cause of the error? I checked Grub's the menu.lst entries and found them to be valid. So probabably Qrparted's crude resizing had something to do with it.
The 5 MB space was the result of the unused space on the cylinder. Usually, when partitions are created, the sizes are rounded off to include the entire cylinder. So it is quite common to find paritions that are a few MBs off from the user's desired size. In QTparted, the partitioning does not do so, leaving the rest of the cylinder free. Since a new partition will start with a new cylinder, the free space remains free.
A Google search revealed that the Error 18 is a result of improper disk geometry reported by the BIOS to the OS. So the partition table was incorrectly written thanks to Qtparted. Some other sites also report that an EXT3 partition could also be to blame, since I had used EXT3 for the partition this needs to be checked.
The Qtparted problems also prevented rewriting the bootloader, which I tried to do with the Sabayon Live Cd. SAbayon offers installation option including a full install or upgrade or bootloader installation. Doing the latter produced another error. So I tried creating a new partition by deleting the earlier one, but this too ended in some hard disk error. After the aborted bootloader modification with Sabayon, Knoppix booted without problems. When I tried to use Qtparted to undo the damage, it would not cooperate. The options to delete or resize the partitions were greyed out. Even when the partitions were not mounted.

Update :
Plugging the hard disk onto another system seemed to solve the Error 18 problem, and the boot menu and all installations in it worked fine. This was strange. Then it struck me that the BIOS settings could be the cause for the change in behaviour. So I reinstalled the hard disk in the original system and changed the BIOS parameters for that hard disk to Auto, from the previous Manual (which can shave a few seconds off the booting time). Voila, the error 18 vanished.

Wine and Opera

2008-04-02T02:12:00.000-07:00

Opera 7.54 is my default browser. While all Opera browsers are the best of the lot, 7.54 has a special trick up its sleeve - the ability to reduce the tab size to a few pixels wide. This feature is absent in all later Opera versions, besides all other browsers.
Installing Wine allowed Opera 7.54 to be run, since this version is not available on Linux. Wine unfortunately makes it difficult to change the default font, resulting in unpleasantness as seen in the screenshot below.

The only way to overcome this is to either install a Windows theme - not just any theme, but a theme that also includes a font file (ttf), or install a font. Installing a theme is easier, since Wine offers an interface to do so. Notably, while many site offer themes, not all of them contain a font, so a lot of trial and error can be expected. Installing a font is more direct, yet Wine does not allow any interface to do so. The easiest way out is to copy font files from the Linux installation's fonts folder to the Wine installation's font folder. Since Linux also contains ttf files, there is little incompatibility encountered. The Linux fonts are stored in the /usr/share/fonts/TTF/ folder, and the Wine fonts are in /home//.wine/drive_c/windows/fonts. .wine is a hidden folder.
The much better results are next

Mandrake 2008

2008-04-02T00:16:00.000-07:00

The shift to a new system gave me an opportunity to retry the failed Mandrake 2008 installation. This time the graphics drivers were cooperative.
Man 8 offers almost similar features as PC Linux, probably the latter is based on the former. The one sore point was that Man 8 insisted on a 6 letter password for the root, and would not allow the root to login from the GUI. Besides this, it is PC Linux in a different colour scheme.
One experiment that I wanted to tryout on the Man 8 installation was installing Wine. Since the installation on PC Linux had failed, I was hoping that Man's popularity would make a difference. It did.
The application management routine in Man 08 is quite good, allowing easy adding and removing repositories offline and online. Since Wine did not show up in the initial search, I added an online repository, and proceeded to install Wine.
After the first download and installation, about 50 MB was downloaded, the menu entries of Wine made their appearance, but launching it did not result in anything. On revisiting the applications selected for installation, I found that lib wine package, which were the libraries on which the Wine executable depended upon, were not installed. Though I do recall that on selecting Wine a few dependent packages tagged along, probably this particular one was not one of them. So the second time, I selected the lib package and a few other apps were tagged on as a result, and then proceeded to download and install these as well. In all the total download size came to about 90 MB, compared to the 300 MB which I had to download while installing wine in PCL.
Post installation, since the glibc package had been updated, a restart was needed. After restart, Wine was running as expected. After installation, a new context menu entry makes an appearance everytime an exe file is selected - Run with Wine. Selecting this will launch Wine, and in it the particular application, without any further action from the user. The screenshot is of Irfanview running in a Wine window.

More dirt on Sabayon

2008-03-31T20:42:00.000-07:00

Sabayon does not offer the linux control panel that PC Linux does, even for the root user. This makes it difficult to do things like create a new network connection.
I did not see a volume control in the system tray. So I had to add an applet to the task bar to do this. This applet is probably the most compact master volume control I have come across. It squeezes into the taskbar and offers bars that can be used to control levels of many audio sources - master, wav, mic etc - the options usually seen only by launching the mixer in most distros and Windows as well.
Another useful applet seen here is the Media player control that can also be squeezed into the panel. This applet can work with more than one media player, and since only Amarok seems to be available in most distros I was surprised to see the many media player names in the list. There is minimal configuration needed, besides indicating the media player.

Application management is tricky in Sabayon. The most obvious option a user will select is the "Applications installed by Klik" in the main menu. The assumption being that this would launch something similar to the add-remove programs applet in Windows. Since the menus are well stocked with icons, some users will feel the need to uninstall a few unwanted apps before adding some. The above mentioned link, tries to go online without warning. BAD. After coming to the end of this route, a user will spend a long time launching almost every link in every menu before coming across something even remotely close to an add remove applet. And after coming across this link, the stupidity of it all is brought home, since the link is also available on the desktop! Portato. As good a descriptive name one will find in Linux. But wait, Sabayon offers a hint about the name in the status bar - "Portato - Portage GUI". Helpful. The name is just a taste of things to come. Once launched, though the somewhat familiar application list is displayed, the controls are all cryptic. There is no option to find the repository being used, no way to change or update repository list. A few buttons are available titled Emerge, Unmerge, Update World and Remove. There is no easy way to identify which apps are already installed, a user has to hunt them out. Once an installed app is found, selecting it will show details about it. There are a few more options here - Installed, Masked,(Testing), Revert, Ebuild, Remerge. While Installed is easy to understand, the rest are not. Those who like like puzzles will feel at home, trying to figure out what the options mean. The bottom line - Portage is insanely complicated. Avoid.
It is hard to understand why Sabayon would take the pains to create a distro that has more apps that the norm, and yet make it difficult for users to use them.

Migration to New system

2008-03-31T04:35:00.001-07:00

Shifting the hard disk to a new system caused problems in XP with Windows warning you that data would get corrupted etc. So I was expecting similar problems in Linux.
But, a shift from the nvidia chipset motherboad to a Via chipset motherboard, which besides their differing chips also had different onboard graphics went ahead smoothly.
Ofcourse, X had problems, but it booted right up to offer the command prompt. There I did the startx routine which I had picked up from some earlier encounter with Linux. And somewhere in the output I latched upon the /etc/X11/xorg.conf name. I opened the file with the vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf command. Vi as I have already mentioned is too intelligible to be used without blowing one's fuse. No toolbars, no menus, no help, only headaches. But, in the file, I noticed the values that needed modification, and also picked up the name XFDrake.
Running XFdrake in the command prompt brought what appeared to be a tool to configure X. Navigating this tool is tricky, till I figured out that the Up and Down keys were for moving around the menu options, and the left and Right keys were to perform actions. Soon I had set the correct Savage driver (for the onboard Savage 4 graphics), which was automatically detected by the tool, tested the driver and all seemed OK. Exiting the tool and redoing a startx produced the same result as before. Evidently, Xfdrake does not modify the conf file. Rather that endure the insanity of vi, I went down the live CD route.
Booted with PC Linux live CD. Since during the boot, the live Cd will also create a conf file for X, I thought it would be more easier that I envisaged. Logged in as root, the partitions were thankfully mounted, went to the relevant partition, copied the relevant portions of the live CD created xorg.conf file onto the target file on the partition. Rebooted, and voila.

Wine Worry

2008-03-31T00:33:00.000-07:00

Wine, the Windows Emulator which allows some windows applications to be run in Linux is not prebundled with PC Linux. I do recall seeing it bundled with some other distro, probably Freespire.
Since I had mastered the art of extracting gz packages and creating a shortcut to the shell script and running a program, I thought getting Wine would be similarly easy.
Alas. For one, there are no readily executable gz packages. Two, the available binaries are for distros not including PCLinux.
The alternative was to fiddle with the application management routine in PC Linux - Synaptic.
I have had troubles in dealing with repositories in some distros, but PC Linux makes this considerably easier. New repositories - online or offline - can be easily added with a few clicks. By far the easiest repository management I have experienced so far.
Getting Wine started off on the wrong foot. The default list of applications did not have the Wine package, as I had come to expect after seeing the app managers of some other distros which list many applications. PCLinux does not have a package list preloaded so, obviously, the search ended empty. Other distros have a package list loaded, so the app manager contains other apps besides the ones installed.
I went searching for repositories in synaptic, and enabled one of the online ones. Then the list needs to be reloaded. A few MBs are downloaded, and then the list gets loaded. Now Wine made an appearance.
Selecting Wine for installation, automatically indicated the dependent packages that need to be updated or installed fresh. While most of the applications on the dependent list were small or seemed important, one name stood out - Adobe Acrobat Reader. I am not sure how Wine is related to Abobe. Seems like some conspiracy to allow Adobe to gain a backdoor entry into a Linux distro. Disabling Adobe from the list of apps to be downloaded, automatically removes Wine as well. Irritating.
Synaptic indicates the download size before starting off. While the Wine package itself is under 15 MB, the total download size comes to 300 MB with about 300 packages needing updating or installing. Adobe is the largest package downloaded at 50 MB. After the long download, the process grinded to a halt with an "cannot access rpm database error".

A few anxious searches revealed that this is usually caused by some other process locking the database, and this should be rectified by restarting the system. To restart the system I had to close the Synaptic window, which gave a warning that doing so would undo all the work. Luckily, I had set Synaptic to save the downloaded files locally, and so redoing the Wine installation would require no further downloads, or so I comforted myself.
After a restart, I relaunched Synaptic, redid the steps, and the installation proceeded smoothly - all without going online.
There are no diagnostic messages to indicate the installation results. But, Wine makes an appearance in the More Applications Menu. Adobe is conspicuously absent. Someone needs to relook at the insidious way Adobe downloads itself and yet doesn't make an appearance.
For all the troubles, on launching Wine, X restarts.

FC Revisited

2008-03-28T00:10:00.000-07:00

I had the opportunity to revisit FC (not sure which version - 6 probably, there seems to be no easy way to find out - like a right click on My Computer in Windows) after spending a long time on PC Linux.
Some of the most glaring deficiencies in comparison were :
1. The Gnome interface with the two taskbar layout.
1. Absolute lack of partition tools even for the root user. I did not find a tool to check the partitions, I did not find a way to access the other partitions on the drive, they were not automounted as an alternative. The Gparted and qtparted commands were not identified as well.
2. The terminal would be expected to be easy to access. But, it does not exist in the system menu or the system tools menu, as would be expected. A look at all menus revealed it under the Accessories menu.
3. The mouse acceleration applet is better in KDE since it allows digital control rather than the anologous slide bar in Gnome.
4. Openoffice was missing.
5. Media playing support is rudimentary. As is popular in Linux, the naming is designed to make forgetting easy . Kaboodle would seem to be the mp3 player of choice, but it cannot handle playlist files like m3u. Double click an m3u file and another forgetful application Noatun is launched. In both cases I missed an equaliser. I am not sure if there was a video player at all.
It is irritating to figure out what an application does without a proper name. The only way one can conclude the use of an app is to look at its position in the menu. This logic makes it impossible to coax users to try out apps classified under Accessories. Naming is lazy and immature.

Overall, what this has shown is that reputation is NOT indicative of intelligence, at least with regard to distro creation.

Amarok

2008-03-27T01:56:00.000-07:00

It's a media player. It is not light weight, intuitive, and userfriendly.
The biggest gripe is playlist management. There seems to be no direct way to open a playlist, modify it and save it again without browsing to the location of the original playlist.
It also cannot commence playing from where the previous session stopped.

Clipboard Management

2008-03-27T01:34:00.000-07:00

Opera, the browser, has a nifty feature - Paste and Go, that makes it possible to paste a URL in the address bar and press "enter" in a single step.
I have noticed that this feature does not work in Linux. Why? Because, selecting a text also loads it in the clipboard, superceding the earlier content, without a copy command. For example, if the address bar has an URL - abc.com, and you copy another URL xyz.com and proceed to do a Paste and Go after selecting abc.com (to overwrite it in the Paste Operation), the URL that will show up is abc.com. This situation will not arise if a blank address bar is chosen for the test. Which leads me to conclude that the Select operation is enough to flood the clipboard. The same phenomenon was observed in another application as well, though I do not recall which one.
Strangely, a paste will bring back the superceded clipboard contents - which means that the Paste and Go and Paste URLs are different. And in our example, the Paste operation will bring back xyz.com.

Any theories?

Gkrellm

2008-03-27T01:13:00.000-07:00

It would be hard to describe the visual image that is conjured up when an unpronounceable name like GKrellm is mentioned. Is it a bird, is it an aeroplane,....

I do not know the mnemonics, but this is the name of a system resource monitoring applet that is hidden in PC Linux - System - Monitoring menu. With such a name, you wouldn't launch it without being prepared for a system wide automated destruction.

I had talked about the System Guard charts which were quite informative and configurable. GKrellm offers something that System Guard does not - space conservation. Anyone who has had the good fortune of learning about and using Netmeter (in Windows) will understand the role a space saving design plays in the overall application usability. System Guard is rich in the number of sensors it can track, but if you are going to keep the window open all the time, it has to be of such a size that it does not obstruct the other windows. Since my main aim was to check if the 2MBps broadband link was being fully utilised, I needed to keep the monitoring window on top always, and still continue to work on other windows.

GKRellm fills this void. Once launched it appears as a vertical banner that has different windows tracking the RAM and CPU and other usual parameters. What raises the bar is the configurability. The size of the window can be modified, as can the number of sensors, the charts the lengths of time being tracked etc are all configurable. This strongly reminded me of Netmeter's awesome skills. It still is way sub par though, but for all practical purposese it is satisfactory.

The screenshot is of a highly modified GKrellm window tracking the eth0 interface placed on top of an Opera window.

What's in a name

2008-03-27T01:04:00.000-07:00

In Windows, plain talk makes life easier for users.
Q1: Where are the programs installed?
A1 : In the Program Files folder

Q2: Where are the Operating system Files?
A2: In the Windows folder.

Q3 : How can you monitor the system resources?
A3 : Task manager.

It would seem the most obvious thing to expect and recall.

But, look at the same scenario in Linux.
A1: /usr/ folder. ("come again?")

A2 : I really don't know.

A3 : system guard.

Why would a folder containing the program files be called /usr/? Probably there is a lot of history behind this naming, but is it difficult to start afresh and have a folder/application nomenclature that makes it easier to find stuff in the hard disk? Intuitive seems too ungeeky for Linux heads.

Sabayon

2008-03-27T00:39:00.000-07:00

After having gone through the installation of many distros, Sabayon had little new to offer. The Kubuntu installation is what comes to mind first. Except for the blood red theme, everything else is the same. The Live CD loaded without glitch.
While installing on the hard disk, Sabayon has a few issues. For one, it will tell you that a 5.8 GB partition is inadequate. 5.8GB is a significant size, so the warning seems a bit audacious. Probably, it is the same warning that is used in the DVD version of Sabayon where it holds true. Nonetheless, the installation proceeded smoothly, with enough space left in the 5 GB partition I had chosen.
Post installation, the blood red theme is too eye catching to replace. "Where art meets inspiration" and a three digit/toe footprint are the motifs of Sabayon.
It lacks the ease of mounting hard disks that PC Linux has. In PC Linux, the partition tool also allows mounting with the ease of a few clicks. In Sabayon, the need to access the terminal to do the same thing is a put off. Ofcourse, one could say that it is easier to just edit the fstab file, but this has a major drawback. Which is that any problems in the partitions mentioned in fstab will cause the system to not boot even if the boot partition is "clean". This situation has to be avoided at all costs.
Sabayon also lacks Openoffice. I think this was also seen in the Fedora distro, and some others. Why would Openoffice be overlooked is beyond me.
Sabayon also insists on 6 letter passwords, for the root as well as the user accounts. BAD. Sabayon also puts up a second taskbar on the top. This is a recurring design theme in many distros, and I think this makes it evident that Linux is meant for large screens. On the most widepsread 15" screen a second taskbar is a waste of space.
The menus are fuller than that seen PC Linux and Opensuse, but not as much as seen in Knoppix.
The mouse cursor is a bit too bloated to my taste, but there are no choices.

Sabayon stands apart for the colour theme. The novelty will wear off soon.

Ktorrent Second Thoughts

2008-03-15T02:16:00.000-07:00

After using Ktorrent over a period of time, I have made the following observations.

1. Though there seems to be no way that a user can preferentailly download the starting bits of a file, Ktorrent does it automatically.
2.There is not way to specify individual torrent speeds.
3.Keeps crashing or shutting down for no apparent reason. Stopping a torrent is all that is needed to cause this.
4. Unlike utorrent, partially downloaded pieces cannot be completed. Torrents can be stopped or started only.
5. There seems to be no way to prioritise torrents. Though I am not sure if doing so actually matters, even in other torrent clients.

System Guard for all Monitoring needs

2008-03-14T23:57:00.000-07:00

The Windows 98 system monitor was light years ahead of the task manager of the subsequent Windows editions. The System monitor allowed differet sensors to be selected and included which made it an ideal tool to keep an eye on the system's status.

I am pleased to say that the System Guard applet in PC Linux is a similarly gifted tool. While I was initially put off by the fact that the only sensors available by default are the CPU and RAM readings, a closer look revealed that other sensors could be added, and there were more customisation options.

The fastest way to access system guard is to add it as an applet to the taskbar. This will create a small indicator which only shows CPU and RAM readings, but a couple of clicks is all that is needed to launch the actual application. System guard can also be acessed from the System - Monitoring - KSysGuard menu.

Here the right sidebar shows the list of all available sensors. The existing sensors can be removed with a right click to make space for a new sensor. If needed a new Worksheet containing more sensors can be added. The number of sensors and their layout can also be modified. Other customisation options include colour, grid, scale settings etc. Since I was seeking a tool to track the network usage, the result of my work is displayed below. The biggest drawback is that the taskbar icons cannot be modified to reflect the sensors being tacketed. They can only show the CPU and RAM status, and importantly, as happened in my case, removing the graphics from the taskbar is a permanent step. Once deleted they cannot be replaced or recovered. This also makes it difficult to access the system guard from the task bar. So it is best to leave atleast one graph running in the taskbar icon.