Pavi's world

Gnome 3 Rocks !

2011-12-18T00:48:00.000-08:00

Comparing to the criticism KDE4 has I think gnome3 has learned from KDE mistakes and is a better release :)

I might be partial in my opinion looking out for weirder interfaces and not sticking to the default start menu , my computer interface which has been in our world since windows 95 . I loved Unity as soon it was released in Netbook remix version of ubuntu . But ubuntu kind of screwed it up when they made it the default release and not thinking about the desktop form factor running unity as default . People are bound to hate it and hence linuxmint 12 seems to be the alternative to those gnome 2 fans as it came with Gnome3 /Gnome3+2 / Gnome2 port(MATE) .

Was everything stable ?

In my case this was the second time I tried installing gnome3 and succeeded this time . The first time I made a mess with Apt pinning on LMDE for which the instructions I followed were supposed to be for Debian testing .

The next I installed LMDE and partially moved it to Debian testing . Now I needed some upgrade and yeah the whole machine went into a broken state with still mint components and debian testing components . I went into a newer kernel which was not booting up . Realised after some upgrades that newer kernel( 3.x) is the only one which decently boots up the Gnome 3 .

A post in debian mailing lis t confirms the fact that LMDE is not "fully" compatible as mint people say so . Anyways I don't even know what my distribution was hence I tried aptitude safe-upgrade and finally a dist-upgrade which fixed everything :)

And yeah I am presented with the beautiful Gnome 3 desktop . Its smooth , though I had issues with my nvidia card which I suspect is still not being fully used thanks to the noveau drivers .

MInidebconf pune Day 1

2011-08-21T01:39:00.000-07:00

It all started with a very irritating journey and a long wait at pune bus stop in the morning . Nopes things didn't at all get worse :D . We couldn't read the no on the buses cause we never learned hindi no's when we were children. actually atleast me couldn't even read telugu no's . So when we were told some no's to catch for Bibenwadi , we were like a lost puppy situation we got a mail with this screen shot on the phone thanks to Sana Khan .

We came to the shani mandir where mihir picked us and dropped us at Shubhmay's house because hostel wont have hot water . First thin to notice were 3 stacks of T shirts . A big discussion on Debian Tshirt has started and I decided to wear the diaspora t shirt for day 1 .

My big bag where 1/2 of the t shirts were put up was carried by Shubhmay while others carried other bags of T shirts and we went by auto to the venue , We entered the backstage and came on the front stage . It was quite big and scary ( lol yeah also to me )

Breakfast of some pune food like puneri ( or something with boiled circles :D ) ( correct name was sabudana khichdi ) and the default vadaa paav happened with shirish and praveen with whom the issue of Tshirts was raised and Yeah didn't want to stress much because the printing was already finished.

On the way back to venue we met sana who was quite tensed to give the talk , shilpi her BFF was trying to give her some confidence while I tried scaring her lol there happened something which should scare her more , her spectacles broke and I called shubhmeyi to fix it , it was done by quick fix thanks to volunteers. We discussed on where to go , I showed my one slide and told them to include it . Sana did that and was reading her notes while the video of actual debconf telling about the video was playing .

I was preparing my edu talk and was quite busy typing and collecting feedback . praveen just sat on first seat while feedback had come that the video was going over the head , we made shirish start , shirish in fact has got very good examples usecases while explaining debian but unfortunately the audience which comprised of new to FOSS ecosystem , Ubuntu users who dunno anything , ubuntu users who don't care about Foss etc weren't interested at all .

I joined in between for an explanation of stable,testing , unstable,experimental while praveen made me tell about package . I dunno if I correctly told it but the message did go across . Back to shirish who gave the con to sana she started with bug tracking , she was quite loud and clear but she went too fast cause she was tensed . I came out to speak again with package managers and then told about desktops in Foss world . Had to lift and show fluxbox on netbook .

we breaked for lunch at canteen where I hated the jeera rice, it was too oily , we did have some photos and I had a cha with abhijeet and another college lecturer . There was another chap from PICT who was actually supposed to make the event happen in their college unfortunately college has gone so strict that even this chap had to take a fake permission that he was speaking at the event .

Post lunch abhijeet has to start his FOSS discussion .

I was told to stand at the diaspora stand , was able to tell some groups who walked over about diaspora . I told about how important decentralised information is . There was a diaspora board with a place for people to ask for joindiaspora invites . I did send them some invites .

Went inside to get my talk straight , took lot of time and I was feeling sleepy . I came out and again had a chat with volunteers and a dejavu discussion with sana which I am getting tired of .

My edu talk covered about debian blends and how people could help with the debian Jnr blend for kids. Also about success stories of skole linux . It was a dull afternoon and I had seen some coep people taking notes hence took the extra effort to show some screenshots of kde edu and gcompris .

praveen took over the con while I went out for a small chat with volunteers . He was explaining about debian packaging and other stuff which he will be dealing the next day . There was also a rapid Q & A .

Evening aka the end of the sessions came on quick and while prajakta and her buddy was leaving , told her to get laptop for packaging session . She told that her wifi was not fixing and hurray the volunteers know about the model and hey had a drriver ready for it . 30 minutes later prajakta walked out with a smile that it is working :) well that makes one person who would come for sure the next day( she did come and is ready with her package ! ) .

we split up , me praveen( 1 and 2 ) , abdul and muneeb went to the city to have some non veg food . It was really nice to see the congenial muslim atmosphere . Having grown up very close to them all my life , it was very pleasing and the food was nice . Abdul and praveen teased praveeen illa for eating beef instead of mutton lol

way back couldnt find auto , the volunteers made sure we got one , I agreed for meter +30 casue hyd is more extreme in pricing during rare auto cases like this . I checked via GPS to see if weren't take for a ride . actually the auto went on a very optimal route the shortest one :D

Shubhmay came to pick us up and we slept soon( 1 hr of talking) as we were tired. Much surprising to all of us . we all got up early . we started discussing about how many would come . We did take some estimate of who definitely would turn up for the event .

Amazon EC2 ( AMI alestic) fix for debian

2011-06-21T09:40:00.000-07:00

As many of the people , I started using Alestic AMI which is quite popular among debian users . A simple apt-get update and upgrade gave me these issues .

Issue with locale .

dpkg-reconfigure locales will fix the issue if you select the proper local type and encoding .

en_US and UTF8 will do for most of the users ;)

Next issue was a bit major because it was not allowing me to install anything before initscripts was configured correctly , it was because of the scripts written by alestic guys . A google search on the issue gave me a debian bug http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=589238 The solution suggested there solved my issue .

All the scripts from Aelestic missed a initblock on the init.d scripts . Hence add a block like this
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides: ec2-ssh-host-keygen
# Required-Start:
# Required-Stop:
# Default-Start:
# Default-Stop: 0
# Short-Description: Generate new ssh host keys on first boot
# Description: Generate new ssh host keys on first boot
### END INIT INFO

After adding the lines for all the ec2 scripts in /etc/init.d/ and running dpkg --configure initscripts I could finish with my apt-get upgrade !

Export osm files to shape files

2011-05-22T23:16:00.000-07:00

Shape files of ESRI is a standard geospatial way of representing points, lines and polygons . Its maintained by ESRI and is a open specification .More details at shapefile @ wikipedia .

I have used Qgis before but remember that was on a debian box where everything worked . Now on ubuntu 10.10 Qgis did work but without the python support . Python support is needed for OSM plugin to work .

I tried some things like :

* Use a latest version via ppa
* Use a dev version via dev ppa

Finally fed up searching for a solution , I downloaded the source and built it via the instructions in INSTALL file .

After the python support enabled I was lost looking for a python plugin location .

OSM plugin did come by default and I had to tick it to enable it .

Then importing an OSM file and exporting it to shapefile was baby steps .

Virtual box is nice

2011-05-09T00:38:00.000-07:00

I have used qemu before and also glanced at virtualbox but this time I was using it for real .

encountered this when booting a 64 bit edition iso :

VT-x/AMD-V hardware acceleration has been enabled, but is not operational. Your 64-bit guest will fail to detect a 64-bit CPU and will not be able to boot.
Please ensure that you have enabled VT-x/AMD-V properly in the BIOS of your host computer.

I thought a reboot would load all required kernel modules , but I rebooted primarily to get into BIOS which I could not in first attempt .

No a reboot didn't help , hence went this time patiently to the BIOS and enabled the intel virtualisation support and hurray it worked !

Networking: The default NAT mode is suitable for basic usage like : ping outside and connect to internet . But I wanted to ping from my machine to VM which I couldn't do with the NAT mode . Hence I had to go for bridged mode .

For which I installed bridge-utils package and configured my /etc/network/interfaces to add bridge entries . Then in my VM config I changed it to bridge where I selected the bridge device br0 . Now both real and virtual machines have Ip addresses !

The rest was plain simple .. everything was matter of clicks , things did come a long way !!

Drupal : Rules Module

2011-01-29T04:48:00.000-08:00

I hardly am impressed with drupal considering my irritability in configuration . It would have been because of the poor usability in Views and CCK modules . The ironic part is that both those above modules which I have been complaining about are the most used and many drupal developers would say it as "gods gift" !!

So I am surprised and very happy with the module "rules " . It is an extension of the "trigger" module and also a newer version of "workflow-ng" module .

It works on a simple policy of Event + condition = Action . And before someone thinks that its too geeky to use , this little picture would show how simple it is .

I was able to create a new page each time a user comments and also send an email thanking him for the comment in that particular page . It was also easy to substitute variables like user who commented ,user who recieved comment etc .

Kudos to Wolfgang Ziegler aka fago who made such a nice module and has added great documentation with future plans coming as a research article !!

Chamba - swatanthra movie project

2010-11-30T23:23:00.000-08:00

First time when j4v4m4n called up and told me about the "chamba project" I was not interested because making a animation movie is a very expensive process in terms of time and efforts as learnt by me in previous LUG meets of Hyderabad where satish goda has explained us about Blender & big buck bunny . I also learned about models and how to create small animations with them .

Well that makes me kind of 'aware' of the direction in which chamba project is heading . I did see some mails in ILUGB and some updates in FB on it . Well it is gathering some momentum . I was only worried about the momentum in actual blender users . Because blender users are not just your normal computer users , they are someone who understands graphics,lighting ,motion etc and most importantly can move around the complex interface of Blender.

Bar camp Kerala 9 : There was a quite long discussion on 'blender vs maya' which did bore me , but interestingly there was sintel movie which I think has evolved a lot from Big buck bunny movie kind of drove this thought into mind that lot of the tools have improved .

Chamba Operations team meet :j4v4m4n sent me an SMS that there is going to be a meet at sooraj's house in thrissur on sunday . Well I decided to go despite sooraj's low priority to that event ( lol he is busy with something else ) . After bugging him for directions , hosting me etc we made it to 'Sahitya Academy ' Thrissur .

There was Manoj K Mohan from "VAST" , Alex from GEC trishur, Jishnu from MESCE and nirmal from Thrissur , we stood there talking when hiran came and lead us to sit right on the corridors of the academy ( after taking permission ) . we sat in a circle and the discussion started with sooraj introducing the project while I reminded to introduce the concept / story of "chambaka" the name of the project and why its important .

The discussion went on with script which has not been decided and is more or less the business of creative team . I was stressing on how low the time of the movie should be because I believe "less the time of the movie the more easier it becomes as the frames decrease " . There was also a point on multilingual nature of the movie where it is going to be dubbed into other languages which means getting all the teams from other states involved .

The task ahead for this team would be by promoting it by showing sintel and driving in the concept of "open movie " . I pitched in by showing a sample video of "chambaka" we could explain the goals of the team especially the openness involved . There was also a talk on blender sessions and we would be having one on December 1st week .

We were pinged by the sahitya academy person that its late , we then moved on to a ritual where hiran took some pics , in between we discussed with two persons from arts/documentary side . I also took some pics which came very bad with my camera . I slipped with Alex into an english drama which was quite nice .

We tried calling j4v4m4n , using GPRS on my phone via bluetooth of a netbook and we left to Akshaya hotel in the city centre for j4v4m4n . We met him opposite the hotel who was FBing via mobile . We went upstairs for dinner and our discussion went on from script, creative team to english vs malayalam etc . we ended our conversation with chambaka fruit which j4v4m4n has brought from a tree in his home .

Forgot to mention that the Hash tag for chamba is #chamba . Tweet with it :)

Dist & Desktop Upgrade/Change !

2010-11-16T01:03:00.000-08:00

Yes its the debian language , and I did do a change/upgrade of distros while the desktop was more or less changed .

I am talking about lenny to squeeze which asked me to download lot of stuff . Since I am on a low bandwidth I went on removing all packages . And I had a hell of a time relating X related packages using both aptitude and apt-get . The clever thing is when you dunno any solution go for aptitude but aptitude in my case didnt support the regular expression '*' .

After removing OO ,vlc,gnome and other electronics app the download was decreased to 400 M . I couldn't go less :D

Well since gnome is gone after the dist upgrade we shifted to kde . The package to do is kde-standard .

So to get KDE on to your machine

#apt-get install kde-standard

Well that got the desktop running . An install of amarok and ugly plugins of gstreamer did the rest . Well sarath .. Happy ?

#bck9 the tag !

2010-11-15T01:31:00.000-08:00

My first barcamp in India was here . I am very thankful to Amrita group for arranging bus facility and providing us free lunch which IMHO in a barcamp is quite surprising .

After a small fresh-up I met some important people like Kenny Jacob and obviously my first complaint was the screen . Its quite too small for the auditorium . It also disappointed me when we were showing sintel movie of blender , when we had great sound coming out the movie in a small screen and different frame ratio was disheartening :(

I called up suraj & hiran to ask when they are coming . well they are on their way and they came right in between the "supposedly FOSS" talk . They were late because ' we are always late' lol I kind of agree.

Coming back to the events sessions , the wordpress plugins talk was quite short and I didn't care much as I couldn't see anything in the small screen plus I need to reengineer my talk because sajjad anwar wont be coming for his OSM intro talk .

Next one was by praseed on "FOSS " in kerala . Note the quotes on FOSS . It was also called " a case of inmates running the asylum?" I couldn't catch it with the mallu accent in the beginning but later WTF did he really mean that and Yes he did !

Apparent a MS user group user who desparately seeks for BSD licensed stuff isn't particularly new and he expressed his anguish over how linux users group became libre users group and how they all became stallman's preachers or something of that sort. I cut his short telling not to use the word stallman inappropriately .

His blah blah blah went on like that and I bet its a 'deja vu ' for me because even MS PR agents do the same thing , the same arguments nothing new or creative about . The relatively naive audience in the room as per the blogs and tweets were quite pleased by the talk which when finished for Q & A . I asked his in 'open source' and 'free software ' what do you prefer . His answer was on expected lines ' open source' :D He then went on to tell how libre user groups restricted him to discuss on wine . I simply told him its off topic in a libre user group and its your mistake . I am not sure how many of the audience caught it .

Cetly Live by Hari Krishnan was one talk which really interested me , it sounds like a simple example of campus blogging but it actually is a competetion and cetly people did do it nicely . They have made the students participate which means a heavy inputs to the blogging and having it on their own web platform is amazing thing to do , and yeah it always works well in a campus envoronment and its high time other campuses copy this style .

Blender Py API discussed by unnikrishnan a cool guy was well recieved and I didn't have time for it as I was thinking of getting map rendered and I again failed :( Anyways there was an open movie by unni which was a trailer next followed movie which had first issues rendering and it was good sound and I liked the story of dragons . Sintel is also cute but it looks more 'anime' was it some japanese contribution ? I didn't Know .

Just like the talk on " supposedly FOSS" there were also questions and assumptions on "blender vs maya" , which were slightly amusing but nonethless irritating . I kept my peace and concentrated on talk while hiran and other took it up .

The lunch was "ok" but the sweet was good . I also carried it on my way back . People commented that this is what you get out of a Kerala 'vegetarian' meal and we should not forget that this is an ashram !

I had to start post lunch and the talk went on as planned with some huge Q & A . After my talk I remember listening to phonegap thats it nothing much from me as I was down entirely (lack of sleep the earlier night ).

Ohh yeah suraj the free software enthusiast has given a malayalam talk highlighting the goals of free software movement countering the voices against it .

Hiran and co left to thrissur while I waited till the end ohh yes I went to that village I guess its called amritapuri and the rural kerala environment which I am experiencing for the first time is quite amazing to say the least .

Fuel Telugu workshop @ ANU , Guntur

2010-10-28T22:23:00.000-07:00

This is how it all started . Rajesh Ranjan has called me and we had h to organise FUEL workshop during Mukt.in 2008 . We couldn't oragnise a discussion on telugu aspect of FUEL because of lack of interest in the language .

2 Years back when I returned to #l10ncappune at RH I met Rajesh Ranjan who discussed with me and Karunakar about how he or karunakar or me couldn't organise a FUEL workshop in telugu at Hyderabad .

Now that I am back in the state , I wanted to do it and I kind of liked the concept of guntur or vijayawada as I always believe in telugu language neutrality,quality in that region one because vijayawada is where the press /print telugu has origniated .
Well one fine day in my grandmoms village I was going to meet a friend in guntur so made a plan to go to the college . Thanks to my friends contact venkat adaka who is a telugu tweep has taken me on bike and assisted me in forming our initial talk .

After some initial discussion and rajesh ranjans discussion one fine day we thought of deciding a date . And then after a call to the HOD who asked me to come to the dept to finalise the date . Well Guntur is almost at a stone throw from khammam a train to vijayawada and a bus took me directly to the department .

Then in 5 minutes we decided the date to be the last weekend of the december . We called the caterer to decide on food . I called rajesh & anjun rao chavala and told him about the confirmation . We then focussed on getting travel and rooms in vijayawada . I ended up deciding a stupid hotel called 'shri pada '

Well then was the entire conference calls from Krishna in RH to arjun and me ,later joined by Rajesh Ranjan .. we went on planning schedule , press letter which took most of our time .

Installed Fedora 13 ( again ! )

2010-10-19T13:55:00.000-07:00

I started with F13 Alpha Netboot long back and today the same CD failed during installation probably due to bad media or some bug , anyways I reinstalled F 13 KDE live ISO and everything was so smooth because I had installed previous F13 as /home and / . Hence a format of / did make lot of things easy :)

The reason why I had to re-install is quite a strange one and might be funny . From F13 alpha I was regularly updating to observe the changes ,and as I had previously mentioned , it was becoming very stable . It reached a point where I couldn't stand it . Hence I choose to go to rawhide and that was at a very wrong point of time when F14 is no more the raw hide while F15 is becoming rawhide. It would still have been very easy if I hadn't the rpmfusion repo's . Well I did enter into a yum mess and I am amazed yum behaved very well , only that I messed it the wrong way .

Before any one reading has doubts like " how complex GNU/Linux or fedora is ? " . Well I opened my firefox to restore the tabs of last session which I had in my previous installation !

Mapping companion

2010-10-19T06:10:00.000-07:00

You know how much it helps to have a companion during mapping ?

Well its a BIG thing to have someone who is your friend and understands whats going on . We could share the driving , recording POI's , catching the GPS device and lot more of things . My compoanion here is a person with similar backgrounds hence didnt take much time to even edit the trails .

We did cover a lot of roads . Despite one roadblock and a dissapointing evening which led us to a mountain peak where the wind did give us the right idea for us . We didn't have enough time to finish it as per our expectations and plans but we did get into a cool template which we would be using for the future :)

FSUG de VJIT

2010-09-14T12:46:00.001-07:00

Well why am I mentioning a group as a title of a blog !!

Dominick the mind and person behind the Free Software Users Group - Vidya Jyothi Institute of Technology met me incidentally at #debian on irc.oftc.net . Just like the nick he turned out to be an alien to Indian free software comunity .

And wow he is a huge debian fan from hyderabad .. I already had 2 Tshirts from Mini Debconf India 2010 held at COEP , Pune . One definitely was for krish , the other I bought just to see if anyone(dominick ? ) was interested . Hence the deal with krish and dominick was ' to justify me coming to hyderabad lets meet ' the meet turned out be a full fledged event with 4 speakers and yeah VJIT-FSUG !

Another name worth mentioning was Sarath MS from Swecha team . It was really nice to meet someone from the team which made 'swecha the distro ' and is now 'swecha the team' >> "Team" is the word for the entire group which works to carry forward the free software movement in Andhra Pradesh .
Check out more about swecha .

So these three people have agreed to be at the event which more or less went on the lines of ubuntu,free software and debian installation on text mode . We couldn't cover most of the topics due to the time limitations we had . But I felt nice that we didn't cover the things planned as the audience are more n00b's than expected ( excuse the bluntness ) . It definitely takes time to get this deep into them .

so the obvious question : Outcomes ?

As expected not many good news . Well the student who made the logo had his sticker sold for 10 bucks . We could also sell one more sticker on software freedom . Well on the real side , dominick was approached by three girls for a Debian DVD .

One person who couldn't come to the event had mailed back to the group expressing his annoyance on us unable to mention the correct room . Poor guy was searching in other rooms , there was some miscommunication from our side :( On the brighter side he tried out ubuntu .

Things I liked : Me , sarath ms , krish and dominick - our participation was like a great team which worked together despite all of us coming from 'different' backgrounds . Every one of us gave our best :)

During debian installation which I kind of handled , the installation was done by girl who knew least about computing/participation . All the installation steps were handled by suggestions from me,dominick,krish and sarath MS . There were also some questions to the audience .. the interaction was going on superb but for one thing !

Here I introduce another great personality called 'pranav' aka ppc as he calls himself lol :D So he is the great graphic designer and the volunteer who made 'things happen' from the college side . Before dominick kills me lemme get to the story .

I was telling that "everything was going fine except for one thing" . There was this pranav who was staring outside window with a desperate look on his face :O He keeps on bugging me & lol also krish right in between the debian installation session . The whole 'high tension' tactics of his started almost 30 minutes before the official time which kind of are damn irritating for the event itself.

I felt that I was being hard on a poor kid , but we(atleast me and dominick) felt that things need to end properly . we did finish the debian installation but the machine was unplugged even before we could reboot to the installed debian :( .

Well the sticker sale as krish said was not up to the expectations . 2 stickers out of the hundred we bought .. and here I have to mention the lady who had walked and waited all the time at printer shop to get the stickers printed . She works at cognizant and has tried out various distros and she is going to try out more thanks to some empty DVD's and CD's which I gave her in exchange to the price of stickers lol . Dominick told that he would distribute the FSUG logo stickers for free as in free beer .

Unfortunately at the last moment when we couldn't complete the installation there was no time for students to take/buy the stickers . They had to run for the bus .

We had a feedback session before we closed . The feedback as expected was the same ' it was nice ..blah blah blah ' but some instances I heard we want to learn more about free software , want to try debian .. which did give me "some" satisfaction .

PS: The basic prerequisite for attending the event was a mail to vjit-fsug mailing list writing their computing experience, and only 5 came without that and surprisingly they all have written back after the event !!

Also since it was my "birthday" /me and dominick went to his home , took some rest packed my things and went to paradise for a treat and before you ask about krish , he was very near to paradise .. munching bytes .. err hertz whatever for his AMD phenom lol !

some stylesheet mess

2010-08-22T08:59:00.000-07:00

The words on the picture above mean nothing ! Anyways I think that picture is a step ahead for me to work on stuff !

Mini Deb Conf India ( telugu తెలుగు )

2010-08-11T00:07:00.000-07:00

నేను నిన్న నే వచాను పూణే నించి . అక్కడ నేను చిన్న దెబ్ కాన్ఫ్ (Mini Deb conf)ని నలుగు రోజులు నిర్వహించి మరియు పాల్గొని వచ్చాను . అక్కడ చానా మంది పాత మిత్రులని కలిస్నాను . కొత్త వాళ్ళు కూడా అయ్యారు . చెప్పుకోదగ్గ వారంటే ముందు ప్రవీణ్ .. నేను అక్కడికి వెళ్ళటానికి ముఖ్య కారణం ప్రవీణ్ ని మళ్లీ కలిసే ఛాన్స్ ! అది కాకా విక్రం మరియు కార్తీక్ వస్తున్నారంటే చానా हंगामा ఉంటాడని ఉహించాను .. మరి ఉండ లేదా అని మీరు ప్రశ్నించోచు ! ఇక్కడ ఇంకొక వ్యక్తి ని పరిచయమ చేయాలి .. అది అభిజీట్ అభిజీట్ కి ఒక 'hatsoff' చెప్పాలి . అలాంటి ఉపాధ్యాయులుంటే చాలు మన దేశము లో ఫ్రీ సాఫ్ట్వేర్ చానా ముందు కి వేల్తడి . నా వంతు గ నేను మాత్రం ప్రభుత్వ నిధులు గురించి చెప్పాను . ప్రభుత్వ నిధుల చే CDAC అనే సంస్థ BOSS అనగా భారతీయ ఒపరేటింగ్ సిస్టం సొల్యుషన్ డెబియన్ ని వాడి ఒక బాస్ సాఫ్ట్ వేర్ గ విడుదల చేస్తది . అందుకే ఈ సరి బాస్ తో డెబియన్ సంబంధం గురించి మంచి बातचीत అయ్యింది :)

Mini DebConf India Day 2 ( le finale)

2010-08-10T01:58:00.000-07:00

I had a hell of a time having health issues which made me come late to the venue . Praveen the early bird speaker (aka come at 8 to learn more ) had already started and some 30 people have turned up was the ooutput I got from swapnil via sana's cell .

I hurried up and saw nice activity going on with interested people on day 2 on packaging .

Well praveen's way of debian development could be said to be like this .

A review of the important terms and then like get into an upstream package find a man page bug and then submit the bug to debian . The coolest thing which happened .. and which never happens at any place is

Kushal : the upstream guy .
praveen: finds a bug patches it
Kartik : approves it in debian as a DD.

Also as praveen said to me it was a great live interactivity as Kushal and praveen worked together live in front of people by arguing on the package,bug license and with the Debian developer chipping in .. it really made an awesome combination whose demo could the best someone could ever get !! ( Yeah COFSUG ,PICT and other pune students - I envy you )

FOSS in Education was handled by Vikram by using the ekalavya example .

There was a BOSS<--> Debian discussion which was interesting

MiniDebConfIndia Evening 1

2010-08-08T19:16:00.000-07:00

Me and Vivek walked to the lab from the seminar hall where j4v4m4n was taking a session . After his session we planned to go somewhere to eat . Well vivek wanted to learn more so did I as we don't know what happened at this place.

Anyways as we were getting down vikram was returning from a visit to MG road . The cool thing was some new students were turning up by 8 PM :)

But we were leaving ! Kartik just returned from his hanging out with kushal . So kartik took care of the students while me , praveen,vikram,vivek,raghavendra and vipul have gone to eat again somewhere near MG road. I remember us fighting for locations,gprs ,opus on the main road it was fun that we were all damn tired.

After the dinner we had a small walk to get an auto where vivek left and a phrase of mine triggered a flame war lol ( I do that often :P )

Me and praveen took an auto to foss lab where kartik was still going on with the students . Nice to see motivated students staying till 10 in the night andd they were not local hostel students they have come from different colleges and we asked them about the user group status and they are very interested to expand it in college while abhijit gave them suggestions and all of chipped in with more advices lol .

It was so late in the night but I still wanted to blog about the event made a call to the eternal volunteer swapnil who came and collected me to show his machine which unfortunately has a very bad motherboard and a overheating processor from pentium4

Well we browsed photos till the router collapsed and I couldn't blog anymore .. atleast got the pics and their metadata right :)

The sad thing and horrible part of me was to see swapnils eye lids dropping .. OMG what a pest I was !!

j4v4m4n becomes a debian maintainer

2010-08-07T22:55:00.000-07:00

As we guys were going down to boat club canteen for a quick breakfast .. kartik gave the good news which came in time :)

Boat club canteen is right on river bank .

Nice mushrooms are growing below a tree :)

DebConf India Day 1

2010-08-07T21:17:00.000-07:00

Well how did it start ? It started with a debian developer waking me up calling my name ! Abhijeet who had to hurry to the venue at 8 Am while me praveen and the DD had to go to the Modern cafe for our breakfast ( 3 idly + 2Cafe+ 1T ) which we finished quickly and after some crossing of the road ended up at the seminar hall2 where we heard from abhijeet that vikram has arrived well it was a small meetup of old friends .

Then I came inside and started bugging people about the network .. well it looked like I was the network guy !

The funny thing was the router was set up in the middle of a hall with no wired connection to it . Abhijit requested other faculty's own network which more or less was a lifeline . I kind of shared the password with very less people .

I was more or less trying to get Wifi working . Peeking in a little bit to hear praveen & omkar - the deb and ubu guys speaking together .

vikrams talk was attended by me . Well it was energetic .Vikram in his L10n and I18n talk he showed a POT file and also showed the amount or contributions needed in each language . He also encouraged a new language proposal for rajasthani .

We breaked for lunch when I went with shirish we had a discussion about calendars. Is there a free web application alternative for google calendar and a bit about all LUG's.

I met karunakar with whom I discussed about debian installer work being started . Also karunakar has told me that there is a simple guide to install fonts.Post lunch discussion was with vikram when we had some catching up to do .

Then Kartik after the lunch in 'how to contribute' session he showed us how to classify bugs and how to report them . He showed a sample bug which was a comment that something was not working .

Kartik had an issue with buggy wicd to connect to the wireless. I even made my router unencrypted which unfortunately didn't help .

Then people with and without laptops were divided . The machine less people went to the lab which was handled by praveen and omkar.
Lab_foss (inputs from COFSUG student): He started by asking people to google for 'maintenance guide' so as to make the students self sufficient . He explained the new words in the guide like 'sponsors,mentors,upstream etc'

Licensing issues while packaging were exlained . After that the steps of packaging in debian were explained. We downloaded the source package of lekhoni which was written by kushal . He explained the code compilation process and how to resolve the dependencies which might occur during compilation .

One bug which involved correct version No's of lekhoni in readme was found and are kept for reporting tomorrow .

A small interview with COFSUG student : How to contribute session and the practical session on source code compilation and fixing bugs during packages was interesting .

compared to other tech events its more technical and it was done in small time ..the response was not expected.

Finally the credit goes to abhijith and his team of volunteers who made it happen !

MInidebconf India Day 0

2010-08-06T09:08:00.000-07:00

It all started in morning when I met piyush and swapnil the local COFSUG members .

Our discussion started on Ubuntu,debian ,fedora. and why they were still on dual boot . The limitations of running VS.net is there . Its all ubuntu dominated world on COFSUG which is a good place for getting debian contributors ;)

Then I got a call from pravi with instructions on things to do . After that I went to the FOSS lab which kind of was our adda all the time . Its a lab of 50 Ubuntu machines .

I started on the live image and virtual box .. but was told by praveen to use th existing one . Added to that mine didn't boot . So we kind of added to that machine . The lab had some cleaning and teaching going on we guys ie me some volunteers started working on stuff. I on the meanwhile gave a nice introduction to sana khan on how X,GTK,QT,KDE and gnome are inter dependent . She also had got a good practice on apt,sources.list, & vi which more or less will be helpful for tomorrow session .

Madhur and Avinash are the main guys working of rthe live image sometimes assisted with swapnil . Some girls were also trained on ubuntu and gpg keys.

By the time praveen and kartik came it was getting dark but volunteers who went for a breakfast returned and there was an informative session on GPG keys where lot of questions on cryptography were asked . I also had a silly doubt on what is a 'fingerprint ' and how do you relate it with public key .

Well before that we had an introductions session in which abhijit sir was given all the praise :)

Finally the most important thing was water was arranged and yeah there was a discussion on putting map posters sign boards ... the virtual image and how do we share it .

Will be blogging back properly !

hmm hmm hmm

2010-07-02T04:51:00.000-07:00

First time I am adding a strange title to this blog :)

How does the above image look ? a bit weird . Well to some it might look as a road junction . To some people it might look as a secondary road joining a primary road .

To some it looks exactly like a Z17 tile from osmarender :D

What about this ? any difference ?
Some people can see a black things on the red line which looks like a insect. Some can identify it as some icon ie POI near the road .

whats with the image now ?

Every one can see it as a name . but the clever can identify as the name of some amenity :)

My own fedora rant

2010-04-29T12:15:00.000-07:00

I have been using Fedora 13 for some time . I installed it with a netboot CD for which I had to get DHCP running on modem itself ( normally runs on ADSL) .

I got XFCE as the desktop as its the lightest . I couldn't get Graphics running by default which was not much of an issue as I just installed the noveau packages for my Nvidia graphic card . I was very happy by this release because I will be using free drivers from the Noveau project

Then there is this packagekit package manager which I thought would be amazing but sadly it was buggy . Anyways the best thing is yum . Yum really rocked this time(from fc4 times) . Never a bug,it felt wonderful using the new yum :)

I got KDE 4.4.2 running which obviously should have bugs as its released in march and it did crash plasma couple of times because I tried searching inside widgets . I went to #fedora-kde to ask but no one responded . #kde told me to ask them in US timings . I left it alone after a couple of updates it started being stable as the release got near. No wonder fedora developers are working day and night squashing bugs so that the release becomes usable .

Feeling tempted ? The question does arise as I haven't used a debian distro for quite some time . I am still unfamiliar with some package names in fedora . A bit of yum searching with grep or googling is helping me get adjusted ;)

Kpackagekit ( different from packagekit) is still buggy maybe I will report it . My network is damn slow and yum likes to load its package lists . The strangest thing today is packagelists are more heavier than the package I want to install . By the way I did yum update just 20 hours ago , I was a bit surprised and felt homesick ( debian I wanna come back :D )

PS: One more rant .. I have changed all the theme packs from fedora-default to KDE-default !!

Revisiting L10n

2010-03-23T03:39:00.000-07:00

क ಕ ക கே క

Frankly speaking its been a long time since I translated a string . I felt like re-connecting the community hence called up praveen to tell that I am coming for #l10ncamppune .

My travels both to and from pune deserve a separate blog of its own . I met Mintos at praveen's place. Learned that all RH employees stay in that flat of Jasmenium , Magarpatta city . We both walked to RH office which is located in the same city .

By the time we reached , the session already has started and people were having a discussion on foss and business value . Ani gave me a notes and asked me to fill a form . Before I sat down on the seat I remember having signed 3 times ;)
Support based revenue and also dual licensing were discussed . I just stayed calm because I got the feeling of 'deja vu' and was silently hoping that we move forward to l10n and i18n .

Naveen from RH started the talk on i18n . He went on a bit deep on how character encoding is done and I kind of liked that talk as I was learning something new. There was a discussion on proprietary vs unicode fonts and I mentioned my experience with telugu newspaper eenadu .
There was also a discussion on indic rendering and rendering engines and why gnome-terminal couldn't render the indic fonts. On the other hand praveen showed emacs rendering it properly ! ( GNU emacs :D ) . Most of the naveens session the terminal was used from emacs .

During the break I met ankit from Gujarati team . I heard of him but never got to meet him . He told me that krishnababu from telugu team couldn't be here as he had to go to his home town . We went to cafeteria where coffee day coffee was being served ! I was introduced to rajesh and our discussion went on to fuel telugu .

Back to the session students needed help in typing . We tried to push forward inscript typing which is relatively easy . we gave some sample sentences and made them type. Ankit asked them to open a sample po file of a small application . He showed them the various translation tools like poedit and lokalize. some of them also opened them directly in gedit . Students then were asked to translate it . Those translations were compared to the one actually translated by hindi team . That was a cool way of doing things .

some of the students felt that they were typing very slowly because of inscript. Karunakar asked them to remember the ordering of letters from ka kha ga gha ( क ख ग घ ).. so on . The next day he made them say loudly so that they could remember the ordering on inscript keyboard easily . Thats really a good idea and I am guessing that it came out of his huge indic experience ;)

The morning session continued with students translating po files. They also created accounts in gnome l10n and uploaded their po files . That IMHO took them directly to contribution . I sat down on tuxpaint po which I translated long back . I opened lokalize to see that it was not rendering telugu . I asked ani and shankar who are the back benchers(lol nice term for people who were helping out all students ) . Shankar told me that it was a bug with spell checker and indic scripts. He told me that the bug was fixed in the next update .

After the lunch runa's talk was very interesting . She showed some strings actually almost all the scenarios which a stating translator faces .
The students were asked on how to translate ' bordeaux' the colour of french red wine !! She then suggested us to see the closest locally used colours . She gave some examples which I couldn't grasp because I am not that good in hindi .

Rajesh Ranjan gave a introduction to fuel and showed how simple those words in the po file are and why its a need to have them discussed and agreed upon by various teams of translators,linguists and press. The topic got deviated by translation database which kind of ended the session .

There was also a discussion on 'why translate' which really bored me cause I am a bit neutral to both the arguments. I finally say that while bringing desktop to a rural person , it is expected to be in local language which that person could comprehend .

computers are not just for अँगरेज़

The above sentence is also coming from me who almost learnt typing english on a french keyboard and having used a localised french windows XP desktop !

The session ended with shankarshan collecting feedback from students. There was a plan to do another session but this time to be planned at the colleges .

Cent OS woes

2010-02-17T10:24:00.001-08:00

A sad title .. hmm

Well I am back to a redhat based distribution after a long time and getting it to run my way did take some effort :)

It started even before I downloaded the Centos 5.4 DVD . My Ubuntu File system installed by a certain friend has only 8 GB on its root partition . I had to remove/move all the files so that I could successfully download the DVD .

I was shocked by the anaconda when I selected text installation .. WTF things haven't changed at all !! I selected basic installation because I wanted things to finish fast . I carefully selected not to install Grub . Though it gave a warning I kind ignored it .

Booting centOS via grub legacy became a nightmare. Ubuntu forums some oe suggested that chainloading is the best way to go . Actually its the worst way to go for a centOS .

To chainload I did two things one was to install grub in centos root partion .. next I messed it up to such an extent that I wanted it on my MBR. but the grub in centOS itself is in a mess .

Left desperate I went to Grub2 . Things were smooth . I found someone telling me that I need to install centOS again but without any grub . I did that and was unable to boot because ubuntu's perception of root partition sda6 !=hdb6 which was centOS perception . I was left with kernel panic's for some time . Then I tried out with noacpi knowing in heart that it has nothing to do with it. Finally looking at my own grub config I realised that CentOS entry was missing a initrd line .

Adding the initrd line was simple to figure out after so many tries. Anyways Grub2 Rocks !

By the way CentOS 5.3 looks just like RH9 :D

Mapping

2010-02-09T06:48:00.000-08:00

Well OSM rocks big time !!

There are huge number of tags to select and I really love both the tools

Potlatch : Good for intermediate web editing
JOSM: Good for advanced and B/W conscious user ( like me )

One thing is true . Its hard to begin :(

Availablity of GPS traces is the only way you can map places in India .

Here is my map

View Larger Map

There are still lot of things to do :)

First trace

2010-02-04T07:12:00.000-08:00

Hurray .. here's my first trace ... finally a line on my home town :)

The blue line beside the previous road marking is mine . I am a bit confused on the previous markings . They have marked a well known road. But I doubt the accuracy . It also didn't coincide well with google's mapping . ( just a comparision )

I will be posting more. By the way this is not SE 'yari' as previously posted. I have got a nokia N82 sooner than the Yari .
I used 'sports tracker application and it could export to gpx easily .

Mapping $HOME

2010-02-01T21:38:00.000-08:00

I am not happy to see that one of the top contributors for $HOME in google maps was a user called 'pavi' LOL

'Efforts better utilised' Yeah I get the feeling . I tried many times to use the potlach editor for mapping . But the Yahoo satellite imagery zoom level is so bad that I couldn't even identify the place.
The same was with google 2 years back . But now the satellite did come and take some snapshots . I can identify even buildings . That made easy the mapping of places . Anyways now I have got some practice using google maps.

One day I sat down mapping using potlach . I could change the population so that my place would be visible in OSM on a particular zoom level . I also added grand ma's village and some places like hospital . But it is a very cumbersome process.

The only way to get $HOME on OSM is via GPS . Luckily I could find a SE 'yari' mobile with a GPS inbuilt. I haven't yet seen the device. But I found some software which works with it .

Mobile Trail Explorer is a free software which can export gpx and kml files . I installed it on my SE 'z550i' which doesn't have a GPS inbuilt but it anyways got installed because the software can use a GPS device built on a external bluetooth device.

As of now waiting to get my hands on SE 'yari' !

Drupal - the power of the community

2009-10-12T07:21:00.000-07:00

Well I am amazed :)

The first impressions on drupal were "it looks sick!"

Actually the default template is an "eye sore" ,now I am least bothered about it.

But what I wanted to say here is

I have looked at joomla and wordpress and believed that it has the biggest community of followers and drupal is for mostly the "GNU" people ! I was wrong , it has an amazing community behind it :)

I still remember the preparations for mukt.in event 2 when we had a big fight on content management systems. I was the most verbal opposer of drupal which was installed by atul jha. we have come a long way and now are using a "conference management system" from fossconf event designed in django :)

It took me some 4-5 days to get a real hang on the working of drupal but I am still not happy with the way administration is handled by drupal when compared to Joomla or wordpress .

Modularity is one reason why I still stick to drupal and its huge community makes it just more tempting despite the shortcomings like the ones I have mentioned above .

Just go to the drupal modules project page and search for the web tool you want to integrate with drupal .. voila its THERE !!

I'm Celebrating 1 Billion Downloads Firefox

2009-07-24T14:57:00.000-07:00

social networking sites becomes a profile site :(

2009-06-10T03:22:00.000-07:00

Yahoo is shutting down 360 , users are given an option to transfer content to profiles .

We might wonder .. why profile ?
This is what Yahoo say's

Today we began rolling out a beta version of the new profile. This is the first phase, as the profile beta is a work in progress and we will be continuously enhancing it over time. Read more about today’s development on the Yahoo! Yodel Anecdotal blog (http://ycorpblog.com/2008/10/16/your-social-control-panel)

The updated profile will be a central control panel for your online activity making it easy for you to manage your identity, activities, interests and connections. We want to help you better connect with the people that matter to you in the easiest way possible, whether it’s sharing your interests, connecting with people from your address book, or keeping on top of what your friends and family are up to. The launch of the profile beta is just the first step in a larger effort to make Yahoo! a more social and dynamic place.

The reason Yahoo gives for closing 360 is

Though 360 gained a strong core of loyal users (you) who enjoyed the service, Yahoo! has been reprioritizing some products to help us deliver the best possible experiences to consumers. The decision to close Yahoo! 360 and transition users to profiles is part of this larger strategy, but we had been waiting until we had an alternative solution that we could offer to our community of Yahoo! 360 users until we officially shut down 360.

Hmm so it's all for better user experience .. Yahoo does such strange things , it has some pairs of similar products .. looks like they are hurting it's business.

360 vs profiles
Yahoo photos vs flickr
Yahoo bookmarks vs delicious
Geocities Vs Yahoo briefcase vs Yahoo small business

I have lost some photos & will be loosing 360 and geocities content if I don't act soon !

I wish Yahoo all the best and hope your new strategies establish you as a viable competitor to google :)

Kubuntu 9.04 is released

2009-04-25T10:42:00.000-07:00

This is how Kubuntu Release announcement is

Kubuntu 9.04 Out in the Wild

What makes this release wonderfull is it comes with KDE 4.2.

This is what the release tells about KDE

On the top, KDE 4.2 brings beauty, innovation and updated software with new & improved features. Underneath, updated kernel and core systems bring stability and speed.

More information at Kubuntu 9.04 Release

/me still uses debian lenny with 4.1 :)

Bring down IE6

2009-03-17T16:32:00.000-07:00

I came across this Bring Down IE6 initiative from my favourite magazine :)

I must say thank you to twitter and especially neenaoffline's twitter page which made me know that such initiative exists .

Most of my blog readers know that IE6 doesn't follow standards,fails ACID tests and is quite an unstable browser which not only breaks down easily but also forces web designers to write some quick fixes and non standard compliant work arounds to make their site to work in IE 6 .

This is quite unhealthy for the websites, web designers and finally the users of the web .

So join us in this Bring Down IE6 initiative by first stop using IE6 , tweeting , blogging and digging about our initiative and finally asking your friends to do the same !

Mukt.in After the First event

2009-03-14T18:42:00.000-07:00

Dedicated to Team Mukt.in
Krish,Atul,sup3rkiddo,neenaoffline,shriphani all of us were satisfied with our event , but all of us wanted a change in event , to make it more better !

Krish and me when we went to CBIT were offered better venue and more cooperation at the event than what we could have recieved at GIOE. Hence we planned to get more out of the venue next time ;)

We didn't promote our event well and we mailed to ILUG Hyderabad just a week before event .

Well this thread at ILUGC was quite a education for us

Our list mukt@googlegroups.com started getting some good traffic and we started hangin out more at #mukt.in and we were joined by some new volunteers punchagan,jeevan ullas and shivaji at the channel and started gearing up for Mukt.in V2

Mukt.in The First event

2009-03-14T16:59:00.000-07:00

Dedicated to krish and Atul Jha

The Event

August 24th 25th and 26th ofthe year 2007 were the three days of the event .
The Banner which Krish designed with the help of a painter welcomed us at GIOE .

Krish and me used to visit Atul Jha at his uncle's place to discuss the event . The essential stuff we used to discuss were :

Speakers
Audience
Venue
Volunteers

We didn't have many speakers for the event :
Raju Aluri , Thejaswi,Thyagu and Sup3rkiddo were the speakers other than we 3 for the first Mukt.in . They did a great job :)

Audience : Other than few volunteers , few ilughyd people, some osmania students(less than 5 ) all the others are GIOE students .

Venue : The days -2 and -3 we had quite some issue with venue . The hall they promised us was not good for a projector . Krish didn't bargain well ( understand they were his ex prof's ) Somehow we talked over with prof's and got the other hall on 2nd floor which belonged to other department. ( tv and communication I guess)

Volunteers:
Now that venue issue is solved . we need volunteers, not those who hang out at #mukt.in the real ones, and Atul Jha was just awesome he really could gather them and make them do things .
I remember sup3rkiddo joining us just before the event , he was of great help . He and Atul did some groundwork at the venue with the help of these volunteers .

The Talks :
Raju aluri from Sun Microsystems spoke about FOSS softwares in sun like OpenSolaris & NFS . I spoke about various licenses which I think was not suitable for that audience. Atul Jha gave his inspirational talk on Linux . Krish talked About Linux on desktop.
On the day 2 we organised install fest of linux planned to coincide with Linus Torvalds birthday . we could have done better with install fest , we didn't test all the distro cd's before the fest.
Day 3 was aimed at contributing to FOSS with talks on subversion,localisation and ruby on rails . Thejaswi talked on subversion , I thought he was the apt one for it cause he was a Google Summer Of Code student . I handled localisation talk and did take some interested students email addresses . Thyagu talked about employment opportunities in FOSS and Ruby on Rails . Thyagu is a good PR guy , great talks from him ;)

Feedback :

What according to thyagu was the "no change in audience numbers on day 3" ! This was quite surprising as Hyderabad witnessed twin blasts on day 2 :(

"The team comprising Atul, Krish and Pavi pulled off an event which was wonderful, enlightening and inspiring." says sup3rkiddo in his post about mukt.in
"Krish, Atul and Pavitran did a good job on starting with this event. " says Raju aluri in his blog post about Mukt.in

More details of the days at Mukt.in day 1 , Mukt.in day 2 , Mukt.in day 3 from our own blogger shriphani !

And pictures are available at flickr from our own photographer neenaoffline !

Mukt.in before the first event !

2009-03-14T15:12:00.000-07:00

Dedicated to krish and Atul

Mukt.in where did the name come from ? It came from Atul Jha the key organiser of the mukt.in v1 .

Mukt ( मुक्त in hindi , ముక్తి in telugu ) means freedom - A better word then english "free" and is more near to the word "libre"

Yes the event really owes it's presence to Atul Jha ,without him it would never have happened .

where/ why did I come into mukt.in ?

I organised one LUG meet from JNTU called it JNTULUG and then renamed to JNTUGLUG . That meet was a damn good one ! I really owe this to venu,sowmya,sujana,nishi and keerthi ... withouth them there wouldn'y have been a event .

Then I organised one for my home town Khammam on software freedom day . It was great and I am really indebted to Katta Vijay who had bought volunteers and audience .

One day I organised a 2nd meet for JNTUGLUG where I invited praveen ! The meet was not much of success as there were hardly any audience.

Then one day while I was interning at NRCFOSS , Atul Jha calls me up and says that we would organise a event at hyderabad. I really wanted a event for my hometown seeing the way the ILUGC was working . ILUGC was damn active and I really wanted something at my home LUG ( hyderabad )

Then atul jha told me that he had a friend called krish who would help me , That was the moment when krish , me and atul Jha met on conference calls on cellphone . I still remember the nights on the Chromepet building when we 3 used to discuss the possibilities of organising a event . The venue was finalised to Govt institute of electronics at Marredpally on August 24 24 26 and what's important is 25th is Linus Torvalds birthday !

On 27th July the domain Mukt.in was registered !

guys have a look at these 3 organisers :

Atul Jha at le capital delhi , Krish at deccan capital Hyderabad , me at South capital Chennai .. and we were supposed to organise a event at hyderabad .

Then we all used to hangout in the channel #mukt.in where NeenaOffline,Shriphani & sup3rKiddo joined . Sup3rkiddo came all the way from chennai to give a talk and help us . ShriPhani helped us with promotion , though he tried some artwork he was helpful in writing for us.These were the volunteers of the event , they were behind us supporting us at every moment.

we 3 guys met at a bakery opposite our venue . We sat on the bakery table and started discussing the event drew up a list of things to do .. ( that was great )

Atul Jha, krish and me definitely remember the meeting and lunch we had with Raju aluri who was from sun at that time . He was the key speaker for the event .

These were the questions he asked which really are the founding stones of the event

Are you going to continue with this event ?
What is going to turn up with this event ?
Who is going to sponsor the event?

These questions did really bring us to real world !

Then we had this issue of LUG :

Hyderabad suffered from 2 LUG's which we learnt that there is only one LUG and Twincling is a registered society which has nothing to do with a LUG .
ILUGHyderabad the actual LUG of Hyderabad hardly recieves a proper traffic .

Sponsorship Issues :
We approached Sun,CSC,NRCFOSS,CDAC and other companies for sponsorship .
All our sponsorship efforts remained futile cause companies dunno who they are sponsoring .. huh

I being a intern at NRCFOSS knew atleast why one organisation didn't want to sponsor us .
We also met theju at Vasavi . Theju was a ILUGHyderabad volunteer who understood our issues with NRCFOSS for getting a sponsorship . Kenneth Gonasalves thought that IlUG Hyderabad was active , so it should be organising the event .

Let me explain the problem . We ( atleast me ) are organising mukt.in to involve the colleges in and around hyderabad to actively use and contribute to FOSS and revive the dying LUG .
So there was no answer for this !

So how do we popularise the event ?

Me and Krish went all the way to CBIT to give a poster of mukt.in . We also went to Vasavi as mentioned before on the same trip to promote the event .
Krish took care of banners and GIOE students while I and atul jha went to a engineering college near Clock tower , secunderabad .. Swami Vivekananda institute of technology .. the nearest engineering college for our venue .

Next stop was Osmania University( CSE dept ) where we gave the poster to a professor whom Atul Jha thought that .. "yaar yeh to poster nehi lagaayega " and Atul jha asked the boy to keep the poster in noticeboard. He took some pins and attached them himself (LOL)

You know what happened ? 2 posters were on the notice board of Osmania University and one student from OU bought his CPU for linux installation !

Krish aka Sri Krishna das was one more man behind the event . He did all the artwork , and he was working for CSC at that time . The website poster was all his effort . He was the allumni of GIOE ,which was the reason we got the venue for the event .

krish and his bike apache deserve special mention as it was our main transport for the whole event . krish and me celebrated atul jha's birthday at GIOE gates where Atul Jha became sentimental .Me and krish planned the surprise birthday ( it's really hard for the readers to understand , those were our moments - no sponsorship and a event before us with time approaching us .. )

we always want this event to be free ( both in terms of freedom and free beer ) .

My eee 901 on debian lenny !

2009-03-10T06:10:00.000-07:00

I realised that I never blogged about my eee 901 and debian installation .

I bought EEE-PC 901 from Amazon Europe . It came with the default Xandros installation which I am sure would look pretty cool for anyone who hasn't seen / used a GNU/Linux distribution before .

I was happy that everything (camera,sound,bluetooth ) works by default , I was afraid that I would break them if I go for any other installation .

I had two options .

Well I was a ubuntu user who migrated to debian and was quite content with debian's testing and stable . I choose debian which gave me lenny ( which was in testing at that time ) . I had to download a small image file and write into pen drive .

When I booted with the pen drive .. I was greeted with debian text installation screen .
The whole process was as simple as before . I had installed GNOME . I was thinking of compiling KDE4 ,but thought that this is not the right box to do such stuff ;)

Went to kde4 debian's page by ana and used her binaries ( felt ashamed of myself doing that )

I am kind of stuck up with old versions :(

Deleted posts

2009-03-10T05:36:00.000-07:00

I hate to admit it , but I deleted a blog posting of mine .. huh .. that's a bad feeling .

What I did was to express my opinions about a particular issue and a organisation .

Surprisingly it got highly indexed in search engines that my posting came up in top 5 not just for the issue but also the organisation , which I seriously hated , man this not the right thing to do if I care about the issue ( felt very bad .. )

Hence I deleted it . Hope the spider comes back soon !

KDE 4.2 is released

2009-02-17T20:08:00.000-08:00

The KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of "The Answer", (a.k.a KDE 4.2.0), readying the Free Desktop for end users. KDE 4.2 builds on the technology introduced with KDE 4.0 in January 2008. After the release of KDE 4.1, which was aimed at casual users, the KDE Community is now confident we have a compelling offering for the majority of end users.Read more about the release.

Here are some of the videos of the release .

Plasma Desktop

Window Management

/me is on twitter

2009-01-08T15:49:00.000-08:00

Maybe this is the first web application I am forced into .. LOL anyways I have to use twitter .. here are my tweets http://twitter.com/pavithrans

No it won't be updated frequently :P

A song which I missed

2008-12-17T22:01:00.000-08:00

The song "We are KDE" sung at Foss.in 2008 !! Thanks a lot for Aamod Nerurkar who captured and uploaded it

We are KDE! - FOSS.IN/2008 from Aamod Nerurkar on Vimeo.

The song is licenced by creative commons non commercial share alike version 2.5 license .

firefox debian iceweasel

2008-11-17T08:18:00.000-08:00

While I was using debian etch , I used to get the feeling .. why iceweasel ? why not firefox? I used to ask praveen , but I never understood clearly .

Mozilla Firefox is not a complete free software !

It's log and name are trademarked.
And the patches which debian wants to include in firefox tree are supposed to be approved by mozilla ! ( which ofcourse mean't upstream work )
What about the versions which are no longer supported my mozilla ?

Hence there rose a browser called iceweasel which I had to use and report bugs !

Sabayon Mini edition 3.5

2008-09-25T06:13:00.000-07:00

I installed sabayon 3.5 mini edition .

I noticed

Slow boot up time
No pppoe configuration utility ( I couldn't connect my BSNL BB )
Cool package management by spritz ( running equo,entropy in background)

blogging about mukt.in

2008-08-06T23:02:00.000-07:00

will be blogging about the event in three posts .

planning Mukt.in
The event :)
aftermath

Mukt.in The work starts

2008-07-26T12:39:00.000-07:00

I am back in hyderabad. Its high time I start contributing for the event . Tomorrow me , krish,rajz will be meeting to discuss about the roles to play . we will also be discussing about colleges to visit .

SKEC FOSS

2008-07-10T12:18:00.000-07:00

I organised a 1 week workshop in foss projects at Sree Kavitha engineering college on Qt & LAMP .
Bharathi , prakash and Sri Krishna helped me with the event .

BBC on Debian GNU / Linux

2008-05-07T17:28:00.000-07:00

I wanted to listen to BBC especially the drama's in BBC radio 2 .
BBC needs a real player installed to run it's online radio :(
I tried to do so in amarok as I use KDE .
I couldn't :( , tried googling got one useful result .

Try running
mms://wmlive.bbc.co.uk/wms/bbc7/lo_s1 in VLC . You could only play BBC 7 but it really did satisfy my ego as 7 is about drama and books ;)

And those who want the BBC world service news use mplayer.
just
$mplayer rtsp://rmlive.bbc.co.uk/bbc-rbs/rmlive/ev7/live24/worldservice/livenews_v8.ra

will play the stream .
Happy listening and if you are more interested in why BBC doesn't use open standards please do check out http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2007/01/in_response_to_site_changes.html

Pengufest @ NIT trichy

2008-03-12T02:43:00.000-07:00

Pengufest is a workshop at pragyan 2008 .
Took a car to NIT trichy in the morning as the students who were supposed to pick me up got lost :)
I slept and had a bath.. then waited for suren to escort me to canteen where we met the LUG members of NIT trichy . At the breakfast I found out what people do with their linux boxes .
Then we went to spider to install OpenSuse ... tried a lot to boot from the external disk on the IBM machine .
We installed open suse KDE but inspite of all our cleverness we couldnt upgrade the packages due to proxy !
We learnt about libcurl :)
Then I met professor during lunch. We discussed about activities of NRCFOSS. He was interested in Syllabus change . I told I will discuss with him soon .
Then we started preparing for the talk used professors car for transporting our stuff :)
I Started exactly at 3 PM talked about KDE and GNOME and why there are two projects for the linux desktop and why they need to co exist .I talked about KDE4 and what changes it had .. started showing while explaining plasma , oxygen and for solid I plugged in a pen drive and plasma crashed :) I told that there are crashes as its a unstable version of open suse kde4 live cd.
I showed them how easy its to get the desktop back in its normal state after a crash .
Then showed education apps .. where a student asked whats so special about it ? The coolest thing is another student answered for me ( accurately!) we played some fraction and geography tests. Couldn't show them khotnewstuff :(
They liked plasma a lot ..
I went to the pragyan inauguration the block thing was cool after a boring management lecture went to stalls and had maggi and milo. I wanted to access net .. so the student escorting me took me to octagon and we did a remote login to a windows server from that to linux server and a vnc session so that I could use firefox on fedora :) (Amazing)

Day 2 :
Hariram came we prepared some slides about how to contribute to FOSS. I was amazed we prepared them with graphics at so less time :) After our talk we called GSOC and NOSIP guy to talk about their experiences .
The GSOC guy started with LDTP at NOSIP.. he went to novell and worked there. he applied and got GSOC
The NOSIP guy had lot of issues building evolution at a proxy connection :( but he succeded atlast :) He contributed a lot back to evolution
We had a small installation session with 3 girls & 2 guys getting their lappys. I installed kde3 edu packages for one lappy . All others were installing ubuntu .
Finally I hurried back to lecture complex after a bath & packing my stuff to Cheif Lecture complex where we had photograph session. I left back to trichy station feeling HAPPY :)

FOSS Event month !

2008-03-03T05:20:00.000-08:00

This month I have been speaking at various events .
FOSSCONF
INFINITY 2K8
Pengufest

FOSSCONF was held in the first week of febraury by NRCFOSS and ILUGC. It was nice to see a good turnout from students. There was an expo of student projects and demos of existing famous open source projects .
I spoke on mysql and plasmoids .

Infinity 2k8 was organised by Dept of CSE Osmania University . Me and krish organised a workshop on KDE 4 and Ubuntu. Since it is a technical festival of dept of CSE we got lot of CS students all over the state .. We unfortunately couldnt find any OU people attending the event as they were busy organising the event . We had some issues with the projector but krish gave the presentation in his laptop with people sorounding him . I took students to the lab and showed various technologies on KDE4 .I had to say thanks to santhosh,srikanth,swathi and one other organiser for helping us make the event success.
( I sold 3 cds of ubuntu for the tamil team :) )
krish burned out free open suse kde4 cd's .

Pengufest was organised as a sub event in Pragyaan 08 . Pragyan is a big tech fest by NIT Trichy sponsored by big names like google,de shaw etc.
Will blog about it in a seperate post as it has lot to say !

at last went to carte blanche which is MIT's open source festival .

Foss.in Day 1

2007-12-04T08:05:00.000-08:00

FOSS.IN Was cool ! really the bangalores chilly temperature lifted my spirits ...

Went talked to gopi garge got our registration thingy done (bulk one for NRCFOSS) .
Attended Debian project days ..
one by sam and the other christian ... both of them made me proud to be a a contributor .
I attended Bug triaging session that was cool feel like reporting some bugs for Debain :)

Had lunch with thejaswi .. had coffee with mehul and swapnil ..

Had a long chat with Kevin ottens from toulouse .. He is working for solid we discussed on various aspects from tolouse to Multi agent systems ... and of course KDE 4 .. I just wuld have been more hapy if aseigo had come !
Annyways annma's introduction helped me :)

Met pradeepto asked about KDE Stall ... and also asked tarique about NRCFOSS stall ..Finally came to Brigade road to do some shopping but ended up Blogging!!!

/me going to Foss.in

2007-12-02T06:50:00.000-08:00

Missed it previous year .. surely dont wannna miss it this year ...
For those who dont know whats foss.in here is a basic intro..
Its a congregation of all the people involved in Foss in India and outside. Now it has risen to the status of international conference but with very affordable price .
And students can rejoice as there is a concession of 100 Bucks for them!

I am going for the KDE and debian project days .. and afterwards will attend some sessions ... but will be more interested in attending BOF's .. ofcourse I have NRCFOSS stall to take care of ...

Will start blogging !

2007-10-16T11:54:00.000-07:00

Well I will restart blogging here .. I actually waited for some things to happen ... and they are happening now !
So here goes my blog!

pavithran guide to install GNU / Linux

2007-01-14T11:02:00.000-08:00

well its long time since I wrote this.
But Lemme start telling you about various & flavors of GNU/Linux available.
Debian - The best of all ! ( Not recommended for New users )
fedora- The most famous one from RedHat .
Ubuntu - The GNU/Linux for Human Beings( Highly recommended)
Open Suse- Simpler GNU/Linux from novell ( nice to look but hard in the complexity especially packages)
Lemme start with Ubuntu ..
1. Set Ur system to boot from CD . ( depends from BIOS TO BIOS)
2. boot from Ubuntu cd ( Get a free cd posted directly to your home ( No charges at all ) from www.shipit.ubuntu.com)
3. press enter and wait for some time ( 1-3 Minutes depending ion yopur processor and ram )
4. Use it and have a feel of linux ( Things run slow as u are running an OS from CD )
Do you want a faster OS ?
5. Click on the install Icon in the desktop
sleect language and select language and other settings give your username password (twice ) and other simple stuff till u come to partitioning
6. partitioning is complex .
BUT A SIMPLER ONE
boot using XP cd delete some "f" or "g" drive
using d key( after u delete u cant see that drive in windows before deleting move ur files to a safer place ie back up )
Then just select option "Use Free Space"
click next.
7. clicking next next will do ...
After you have your Ubuntu ready for use .. please go through
https://help.ubuntu.com/6.10/ubuntu/desktopguide/C/index.html

Software Freedom Day 2006 at Khammam by Khammamglug

2006-09-18T21:43:00.000-07:00

We had balloons and a nice banner! ( check pics )
afterwards...we waited for chief guest madame bhavani who had been using Comps for more than 18 Years while GNU/Linux is only 15 years!
I discussed the disadvantages of using propreitary softwares!
explained what free means?
and all other stuff like GNU linux,Histoy,sco batle,DRM,GPL,various distros..in linux..
The n after Five star chocolate and Ubuntu cds to everyone we had a practicl session where I showed them various alternate softwares ...
Stated with eclipse ...gone until ppl are bored showed some games,played mp3,divx in mplayer .
Then after some office ubuntu presentations..
I closed ubuntu.
Then after some sweets and snacks and cool drinks.
We started fedora ...and showed gnome ,kde merits and demerits.
showed yum and showed how command line of yum is better than synaptic of ubuntu.
well google ppl will like how we ended.
We showed the pics of the day in PICASA.
Then we showed the place where we are standing by google earth but they are dissapointed in seein the low clarity of khammam a district head quarter...while they liked hyderrabad ...they are angry that badhrachalam a small own in khammam district has more zoom level..had to cool them a biut by sayin that 6 months before nothin was available...we must be happy
Finally said adios to ppl and started uploading pics and writin blogs!

My Birthday

2006-09-03T11:13:00.000-07:00

The day has some significance ..
September 4th significance
I was born ..
I will have no sleep this day!
My wishlist!
IPOD with atleast 30 GB
Mac Book ( black)
digital camera ( 8 MP 16X zoom 1 GB memory)

GPL V3 Bangalore at IIMB

2006-08-24T23:01:00.000-07:00

Stallman was talking when I entered the auditorium of IIMB.
The auditorium was a up to down staired one ... air conditioned with wirelesss access points accessible only to IIM students... There was a video recording going on.
Stallman was talking abt tevolisation and digital restriction management.
There are two points covered lemme explain them in detail.
Tevolisation :In USA we have digital telivisions...
The digital telivision is made of gpl software and those guys restrict the users to modify it to their needs!
Its a straight voilation of GPL where source code is supposed to be provided with the program and it should be modifyable.
DRM: In the DRM - Digital Restrictions Management. people create a OS based on gnu/linux but they create the code such that its nearly impossible to modify.
Its also strictly opposed by FSF.
I did meet some great people of the foss world.
Danese,stallman,atul,herald,kallu,anush,praveen,kushal and many more.
I met some nice amunt of foriegners ... kavitha and alisa from california university.
A japanese guy . A swiss big CS guy. 2 spanish guys ... ofcourse stallman,danese and herald.

Kubuntu Rocks!

2006-08-19T11:31:00.000-07:00

KUbuntu has the coolest Desktop I have ever seen.
Got the kubuntu Cd's free from Shipit.
Its a live cum install cd . Installed kubuntu and now I am blogging from kubuntu itself.
check out the screenshot and tell how cool it is!

My New Desktop

2006-08-17T13:14:00.000-07:00

Again got bored by the looks of my desktop.As I have seen lots of windows users using style Xp .
If they can colour their desktops so can I with Higher level of costumisation.

PHP-Faster,Efficient,Secure,cross platform , Free & Open Source

2006-07-31T09:15:00.000-07:00

If you've never heard of PHP, you're certainly not alone. However, you've probably visited one of the many sites driven by PHP, such as the widely popular Linux application portal Freshmeat.net.

Introduction :

PHP is an HTML-embedded scripting language. Much of its syntax is borrowed from C, Java and Perl with a couple of unique PHP-specific features thrown in. The goal of the language is to allow web developers to write dynamically generated pages quickly.
What distinguishes PHP from something like client-side JavaScript is that the code is executed on the server. If you were to have a script similar to the above on your server, the client would receive the results of running that script, with no way of determining what the underlying code may be. You can even configure your web server to process all your HTML files with PHP, and then there's really no way that users can tell what you have up your sleeve.
PHP, which stands for ``Personal Home Page'', was originally developed by Rasmus Lerdorf as a macro tool for tracking visitors to his home page. It grew from its simple roots into a complete tool for building web applications by version 3. Released in June 1998, PHP version 3 (often referred to as ``PHP3''), was primarily developed by Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski.

Evolution :
The ﬁrst version of “PHP/FI,” called Personal Homepage Tools/ Form Interpreter, was a collection of Perl scripts in 1995.1 One of the basic features was a Perl-like language for handling form submissions, but it lacked many common useful language features, such as for loops.
PHP/FI 2
A rewrite came with PHP/FI 22 in 1997, but at that time the development was almost solely handled by Rasmus.
Zeev and Andi decided to completely rewrite the scripting language. They then teamed up with Rasmus to release PHP 3, and along also came a new name: PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, to emphasize that PHP was a different product and not only suitable for personal use.

PHP 4 came with a new paradigm of “compile ﬁrst, execute later.” The compilation step does not compile PHP scripts into machine code; it instead compiles them into byte code, which is then executed by the Zend Engine(Zend stands for Zeev & Andi), the new heart of PHP 4.

With the new superglobals in place, on April 22, 2002, PHP 4.2.0 was released with the register_globals turned off by default. PHP 4.3.0, the last signiﬁcant PHP 4 version, was released on December 27, 2002. This version introduced the Command Line Interface (CLI), a revamped ﬁle and net-work I/O layer (called streams), and a bundled GD library.

With PHP 5 comes the introduction of exception handling, the Standard PHP Library (SPL), enhanced support for XML, reflection, and quite a few enhancements to the object oriented features of the language. PHP 5 also offers a sizable list of new functions.

Comparision :
Both PHP and ASP are interpreted scripting tools that allow HTML and code to be mixed in the same file. Both have effective APIs for building database-driven applications. However, unlike ASP, PHP is open source and cross-platform. PHP can run on Windows NT under Microsoft's IIS web server or on any UNIX variant as an Apache module or CGI.

according to sean hull in an article in oracle: ASP.NET is expensive with respect to memory usage and execution time, which is due in large part to a longer code path. For Web-based applications, these limitations can be a serious problem, because on the Web, your application is likely to scale to thousands and thousands of users per second. Memory usage can also become an issue on your Web server.
I'll conclude that its strengths far outweigh its weaknesses. (See the summary in Table 1.) It boils down to price, speed and efficiency, security, cross-platform applicability, and open-source opportunity. Its only weakness is its lack of a pure and perfect OOP implementation; however, this is a minor drawback. Though language constructs do help, ultimately, good coding is a matter of practice, execution, good habits, and discipline.

Speed and efficiency. As I mentioned earlier, ASP.NET is a framework allowing you to use various programming languages. In addition, it is touted as having a great object-oriented model. All this is true, but it becomes a detriment as far as speed is concerned. For all that advantage, there is a lot more code to run through to execute the same ASP page than you have to execute in the PHP engine for an equivalent PHP page. PHP is the quick-and-dirty type of solution, the one to get the job done. And though a lot of robustness has been added to it since its 2.0 and 3.0 days, it still retains that core optimized high-speed approach. Speed is not the only consideration. Memory usage is also important.

Security. ASP.NET runs on IIS, which has been compromised innumerable times, as evidenced by IT news reports every other week. It has become such a liability, in fact, that in spite of all the marketing dollars spent on it, many IT professionals refuse to have their networks exposed with an IIS Web server. PHP, however, works with Apache, which has a proven track record of speed, reliability, and hardened security. Check www.securityfocus.com for more information.

Cross-platform applicability. ASP.NET runs on IIS and is starting to run on Apache, which can run on a whole host of platforms. PHP has been designed to work with Apache from the beginning, so you have many proven and reliable server platforms to choose from.

Open source opportunity. Open source is not just some philosophical torch idealistic programmers, or companies wanting to save a few bucks on licensing costs, are carrying. When you're dealing with bugs in the software itself, open source can be a serious godsend.

According to Marty Anstey Most of ASP's functionality now pales in stark contrast to PHP's gleaming capabilities, but still one must consider the multitude of developers throughout the late 90's who studied and learned ASP, went to school and even got jobs developing ASP websites.

PHP, while loosely based on C and Perl, has never faced the overwhelming complications ASP has.
ASP natively supports only Access and MSSQL, whereas PHP natively supports a huge number of databases.
ASP is significantly slower than PHP, for obvious reasons. Primarily, PHP runs on notoriously fast Unix and Linux servers which have for years outpaced Windows running on comparable hardware. ASP does not run on any operating system other than Windows, and even then, only in IIS and PWS. I could discuss countless reasons why IIS makes a terrible web server, but that would be a discussion all on it's own. PHP runs on almost any web server, on almost any platform.

And finally, cost. PHP is free. ASP isn't free. If you want to use ASP, you have to use IIS, and if you want to use IIS, you have to buy Windows. Traditionally, the cost of Windows has been high.

According to Charles Brown PHP has it's own language and syntax, the language is simplified due to the programs incorporation of a parsing engine that is especially designed to make short work of translating PHP code into machine language that executes commands.
ASP makes use of a language that was dying before Microsoft managed to breathe new life into it. Visual Basic Script is the language used in ASP and was formerly used (and still is used by some developers) as a client side scripting language that was in direct competitions with Java Script. This was back when Internet Explorer was still the #2 browser behind Netscape Navigator. During this era, Java Script was whooping the pants of Visual Basic Script with its wide acceptance amongst Web developers.

The bottom line is with the release of PHP 5, PHP is a more appealing technology than ever, offering you object-oriented features for building large, sophisticated Web-based applications, with the efficiency of a tool that will get the job done. What's more, you have as your Web servers solid, reliable Linux-based servers running Apache to bring you performance and unmatched uptime.
Employment opportunities:
There are lot of employment opportunities for PHP.
According to www.securityspace.com
73.24 of the market share of web servers is Apache while 21 % is of IIS( Microsoft ).
According to Netcraft statistics for June 2004, PHP is currently in use on at least 18.5 million domains.
So you can get a lot of Web designer Jobs if you are into PHP.
Some of the reputed companies that work on PHP are
1. Yahoo ( Rasmus lerdorf the creator of PHP works in Yahoo! The Search, Mail ,Groups etc works on
PHP )
2. Google
3. AOL
The other companies are SAP,Altavista,HewlettPackard ,Boeing ,Lufthansa, Dresdner Bank, Disney
Online, Lycos, Sprint, TMobile, Orange, Nortel Networks, Lucent, WallStreetOnline and Siemens.

JNTU Linux User Group Meet Responsiblities

2006-07-03T03:14:00.000-07:00

Iam organising a meet for JNTU Linux User Group..I with the help of my friend Sowmya, created a webpage for that.. http://jntulug.co.nr
I now have many responsiblities for the meet.
I have to first gather people ... next plan the events ...
I need to decide a place for the event.
A guy offered me a place at KPHB but its too far ...
Next about the guys from industry ...
The KDE guys have promised to come. They have also promised to give out FREE CD's
WHile a dude called kalyan is demanding a price for attending a free/open source event :((
shreyas is trying his level best to come... I hope he does.

I am pressured up ...
I hope things go fine ...
guys do reply soon

A peek at my desktop

2006-04-30T02:44:00.000-07:00

This is how my desktop looks.
Guys this is Fedora core 4 running on AMD 64 3200+ on nvidia nforce chipset and nvidia graphic card.
This Desktop is from GNOME .
I tweaked my desktop thanks to gnome arts It had a theme from Glossy P and Icon set from Dropline new.
These links on the themes will lead you to a desktop like mine ...

PHP and Its glory!!

2006-04-13T05:39:00.001-07:00

Have you ever wondered How the most used domain works ?
It is based on PHP.
Whats this PHP?
Its a server side scripting language like JSP & ASP.
Its used for developing webpages.
There are three main areas where PHP scripts are used.
Server-side scripting. This is the most traditional and main target field for PHP.
Command line scripting. You can make a PHP script to run it without any server or browser. You only need the PHP parser to use it this way. This type of usage is ideal for scripts regularly executed using cron (on *nix or Linux) or Task Scheduler (on Windows).
Writing desktop applications. PHP is probably not the very best language to create a desktop application with a graphical user interface, but if you know PHP very well, and would like to use some advanced PHP features in your client-side applications you can also use PHP-GTK to write such programs.
PHP can be used on all major operating systems, including Linux, many Unix variants (including HP-UX, Solaris and OpenBSD), Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, RISC OS, and probably others.
With PHP you are not limited to output HTML. PHP's abilities includes outputting images, PDF files and even Flash movies (using libswf and Ming) generated on the fly. You can also output easily any text, such as XHTML and any other XML file. PHP can autogenerate these files, and save them in the file system, instead of printing it out, forming a server-side cache for your dynamic content.
One of the strongest and most significant features in PHP is its support for a wide range of databases. Writing a database-enabled web page is incredibly simple.

HOW to create a Website

2006-01-25T05:01:00.001-08:00

The first thing you need to know to create a Webpage is HTML.
Let me create a sample HTML page which says Welcome to my webpage . Background is set to color BLACK . And text colour is RED.
I will also insert a Image present at http://www.harunyahya.com/kids/pictures/wallpaper1024/rose.jpg
Note that I am using some one else's image present at a website harunyahya.com . You might want to get some nice pic's for your website.I suggest you to google for them.
-------
here is the HTML code
------------


<html>
<head>
<title> Keep your own title here!!</title>
</title>
<bgcolor="black" text="red">
welcome to my website.
here is a rose.
<img src="http://www.harunyahya.com/kids/pictures/wallpaper1024/rose.jpg"> 
</body>
<html>

---------
save the whole matter as index.html or any name .html.
Next go to http://geocities.com

Enter your yahoo username and password . ( This step is not necessary if you have already Signed in to other yahoo service such as yahoo mail,groups etc)

Click on "Sign up " below the free web hosting plan.

Select the Options "as you like it" and enter the confirmation code.

You will get a confirmation page.
so your website is http://www.geocities.com/youryahooid/
you can mail it to your friends telling about your webpage.

Select the Manage Tab.

Select File manager .

This is the place where you keep your online files such as html pages and images.
If you keep a file tony.html Then your tony.html can be accessed by www.geocities.com/youryahooid/tony.html
To simply get a website www.geocities.com/youryahooid
1 . delete the existing index.htm
2 . upload your index.html

Before you ask me how to upload ... here is the solution.
In file manager there is a button called upload files . click on it to upload files.

UBUNTU experience

2006-01-06T01:12:00.000-08:00

I installed ubuntu . This was really a great experience. I inserted the install CD during boot time. I pressed enter . And It tried to configure DHCP . But as we all know that none of our internet connections are running on dhcp . It couldn't succeed . So I choose the option " do not configure network this time". Partitioning as always was slightly difficult for newbies but those who have an empty partition ... It will be very easy . It asked for a username and password . I gave them as "pavi' and "*******" ( Just kiddin) . Afterwards It automatically restarted ,ejected CD and over there is the new Linux standing before of me.
The coolest thing about ubuntu is the support I got ...
I could run my C- Program on ubuntu which kaushik has been complaining .."Arrey Yaar ubuntu mein C program compile nehi hota hai" It is a matter of 3 minutes I got My c program running !!

I first ran the command # apt-get install build-essential This command will build the essential libraries for c compilation.

#include main() { printf("Hello To UBUNTU"); }

Compiled it with the command

gcc -o hello.o hello.c

Afterwards ran the program

./hello.o

Got the output

Hello To UBUNTU

Immediately I opened Gaim and sent an instant message to kaushik about my success story. He can later check this blog if he has any doubts!!!

This is How I got introduced to Linux..... (part 2)

2005-12-25T10:41:00.000-08:00

I one day saw in IT magazine that Linux for you is giving SUSE Live for free.
I immediately grabbed it.
That magazine said SUSE 9.0 live is great for newbies. And it is true.
All I did was made my system to boot from CD using an option in th BIOS.
Thats it It asked which language I prefer and the linux is running..
The coolest thing with these Live CD's is you can run linux without installing it .
It means just run linux when ever you want it but the disadvantage is Live cd's are slow.
Stay tuned more to come ....

This is How I got introduced to Linux..... (part 1)

2005-10-29T01:48:00.000-07:00

I during my intermediate bought a magazine of pcquest. It contained lot of articles on Linux which I couldn't understand used to go to library to learn new things in windows but I was reading Linux stuff,My curiosity grew....

what's this Linux?

Is it an OS?

I know how to install win XP. Can I install Linux?

These were the questions that rose in my mind. I once daredly tried downloading Linux. So I googled "download Linux". One of the website told me to get a CD writer and burn CD's . I couldn't understand. Once I even downloaded it but couldn't understand what to do???

I was still reading these pcquest articles and want to install it desperately but having no PC of my own. I waited.
After joining engineering I started subscribing PCQuest and was reading more articles.... Then I somehow glimpsed a copy of redhat 9 bible at my computer lab. OMG what's it doing here ?
Enquired about that book.
Its available at pasumarthy's ( Local famous book vender)
......Continued in part 2

My Favourite book!

2005-10-22T07:32:00.001-07:00

Oliver Twist is born in a workhouse in 1830s England. His mother, whose name no one knows, is found on the street and dies just after Oliver’s birth. Oliver spends the first nine years of his life in a badly run home for young orphans and then is transferred to a workhouse for adults. After the other boys bully Oliver into asking for more gruel at the end of a meal, Mr. Bumble, the parish beadle, offers five pounds to anyone who will take the boy away from the workhouse. Oliver narrowly escapes being apprenticed to a brutish chimney sweep and is eventually apprenticed to a local undertaker, Mr. Sowerberry. When the undertaker’s other apprentice, Noah Claypole, makes disparaging comments about Oliver’s mother, Oliver attacks him and incurs the Sowerberrys’ wrath. Desperate, Oliver runs away at dawn and travels toward London.

I dont know Why I like this book but .... I did like it from childhood.
Click here to read the Entire Book

My Own computer

2005-09-24T07:27:00.000-07:00

I had build my own computer
I bought

Processor : AMD 64 3200+ (Socket 754)
Motherboard: MSI K8N NEO 3( With nvidia nforce chipset)
RAM : 512 MB Hynix
Graphic Card: 128 MB Zebronics Graphic card(on nvidia GE -Force chipset)

I opened the processor carton. It contained a fan and processor.
while I took the manual from the motherboard carton.
I used both motherboard manual and the processor's to fix the processor in the socket in correct orientation. I was tensed but eventually as I started fixing parts my confidence grew.
First I inserted the processor into the socket ( noting the warning that in improper direction the processor wont fit)
The processor slid into the socket and it has to be locked by a lever. That was easy.
Next came the part of fixing the fan . First I was confused of the direction but by observing the manuals of both the processor and motherboard and suerimposing both the pictures into my eye which is watching the real Motherboard and processor could fix the fan in correct direction.
Next I inserted the RAM into its slot . That's a kids game.
Then with my screw drivers and screws got busy removing my old motherboad and replaced it with My new one.
I inserted my graphic card and the next step was to keep the Front panel wires in correct orientation.
sadly Its the place where I failed as I am inexperienced . I brought my uncles colleague in hardware and allowed him fix those little problems.
I fixed hard disk and kept all the cables in their respective ports and Its all over in the hardware side.

In software My xp is not working even the bootable is not working.
But my PCQ Linux 2005 is working without GUI.
My fedora core 4 worked seamlessly.

Data Communications

2005-09-16T05:41:00.000-07:00

We had a guest lecturer from ECIL Hyderabad.
He was excellent as far as I am concerned . He has come to deal 2 units but he could lecture on only 1 1/2 units as my class children were not responsive!
I was impressed by the way he dealt me.

When I ask a doubt :
There is a Answer!

When I go agnaist him! :
He tells me to justify my views .

When My class guys chit chat ...
He tells us to use only one communication link , Thats a simplex communication from lecturer to student. We should close all communication links ! All the ports are closed.

finally I conclude that he is the first one in my total engineering college life who dealt a subject with lively examples!

Fedora core 4

2005-08-31T05:32:00.000-07:00

I installed Fedora core 4. This distro has been superb .
First I thought "lemme install it just for testing afterwards just remove it". But now I decided to stick to Fedora core 4 .
The looks are cool. And for programming they included Eclipse with cdt plugin!
I installed xmms using yum package manager.

Skec cse 2003 responses

2005-08-30T10:59:00.000-07:00

The group of skec 2003 cse has got some good responses. It has 20 members. I improved the design of sree kavitha engineering college cse group website. I added college photo and also some of the tour photos.
The message count is increasing. I hope the site ranks well.

NOSIP

2005-08-26T12:31:00.000-07:00

I will be joining in NOSIP for open source internship program . I got that required HOD letter. I will be sending the documents tomorrow to novell bangalore.
I am joining in GNOME project.

problem installing Linux

2005-08-26T11:41:00.000-07:00

Today evening I went to my senior "madhu latha's " house. I got a problem while installing linux.
I was installing suse linux 9

I never know that there was a other linux hidden in that same system after I installed suse linux that system I saw that in other place /dev/hda7 there was a other suse!
So I tried to remove that by fdisk
But what happened was the booot loader was installed and /boot was created in that /dev/hda7 which I deleted . so I messed up using command line and deleted existing partitions and had to re install the total linux ! I gave that work to her and I guess she could install it successfully. I will know tomorrow.

My works these days

2005-08-26T03:22:00.000-07:00

I have been designing webpages getting their rankings in search engines... etc.
I am now a web-designer in spirit.
Web dsigning is occupying 90% of my time.
some of the websites I create and manage are

skec 2003 cse group website

sree kavitha engineering college website

pavithran personal webpage

And ofcourse this blog !

college website

2005-08-26T03:17:00.000-07:00

I created that college website in challenge to the orginal college website. I will be improving it a lot.
I will make it compete with the orginal!

SKEC CSE 2003

2005-08-25T07:43:00.000-07:00

I had created a group called skec_cs03

That group of My class had recieved a good response!
And I am improving the group website.
The address of the group of sree kavitha engineering college CSE 2003 batch is http://groups.yahoo.com/group/skec_cs03

My connection BSNL BROADBAND

2005-08-11T12:24:00.000-07:00

Hi everone I am pavithran
I got a connection to BSNL broadband by paying advance amount of Rs 1,450 thats around 30$ .
The monthly charges are 500Rs /month and 100 Rs/month .

But the Biggest fault in the connection is Data transfer Limit 1GB

And one more thing that guy who installed me Bsnl broadband doesnot now how to do it in Linux .He told that it works onall the Operating Systems of Windows Platform but when it comes to Linux The answer is Flat NO

Ok atleast install in my windows xp so that I will try installing BSNL Broad band on my own on Linux Operating system .He installed successfully in windows xp and left.

My Linux connection of BSNL Broadband

What I did was I searched in google highliting the termsbsnl broadband google that gave some very good results

I solved my problem and I am successfully running my fedora core 3 in bsnl broadband.Well to everyone who checks this blog may face the same problems so I give my solution ofcourse its a copy but I guess this would be helpful

RP-PPPOE

#adsl-setup

#/sbin/ifup ppp0

to to bring up your xDSL link

now type #adsl-startTo start BSNL Broadband

now type #adsl-stopTo stop BSNL Broadband

Dont forget that the above 3 steps are to be repeated ..
Well hope U might have solved the problem but I may not explain well so there are some quick links

Chennai Linux user group

Pune Linux user group

Pcquest linux users

Atuls solution& evaluation of Brodband

BSNL Data One How to for GNU/Linux

Hoping you all enjoy browsing Open source
Take care of the bytes transfer they are finishing quickly! My mail id is pavi.geek@gmail.com
Waiting for Tons of comments

Will start Blogging

2005-08-11T12:19:00.000-07:00
I think I must blame myself for not blogging but creating a Blog.
Blogs are just being created and not updated!!
The reason I didnt blog is that I havent a net connection at home!
But today onwards I am connected!
Well bye everyone I am waiting for many comments!

About blogs

2005-05-28T12:02:00.000-07:00
Blogs have created a new way of expressing ones views or share his memories
I think blogs have come a long way from a simple webpage to colourful diaries of people

what do U say??

first blog

2005-05-21T21:14:00.000-07:00
I couldnt create a good webpage name as all were taken
seems like blogs are becoming very famous now a days