Jun
23

Feisty Fawn – Ubuntu 7.04

I’ve tried installing almost all flavours of Linux on my old system. Starting from Red Hat and going all the way till Ubuntu. Each installation came along with its appended troubles, thanks to my ignorance then. One main constriction I had was the hardware configuration of my machine. It was a pentium celeron running on 128mb Ram and a 20Gb hard disk. I had several issues with the mouse and configuring my internet connection. With passage of days I realised my mouse was designed to work with windows and finding device drivers for it in Linux was a big time pain. On the whole I had to restrain myself to low end operating systems.

Last week I upgraded my Hardware config. From then, installing Linux has never been a problem. Installation gets done extremely fast but for a few glitches here and there. Tried installing Solaris 10 but for some reason the video device wasn’t identified (I’m still hooked with a 14” LG monitor :-) ) and I had quite a problem running a graphic installation. Realising there was no point going in for a non graphical interface setup , I put in bay the Solaris installation. I had a FC4 DVD and I tried installing that . You wont believe me! The whole installation got done in just over 10 minutes!  :-) The main reason for installing FC4 was that I direly needed a net connection in the OS and my ISP gives me a provision for installation only though the Red hat Packet Manager ( RPM ) setup. Before I tried out the FC4 I forked in the Ubuntu 7.04 CD and tried booting from the Live CD to partition my HDD using the in built GParted software. But for some apparent reason the Live CD never booted and always led to the command prompt. Frustrated, I gave up and installed FC4 without properly partitioning the HDD.

A few days later with a bit of googling I found that Ubuntut 7.04 had a bug that prevents it from booting on a SATA hard disk. They was a small fix up for that and once done, the setup was done with at lightening speed! Just six minutes on the clock! :-)  Feisty Fawn has a Desktop Effects feature that can be enabled once you log in.  You need to see to believe it! Once this feature is enabled  the desktop gives you a wobbling sort of effect. There’s also this extremely cool Cube effect which helps you in organizing your workspace into four relative graphically independent desktops. The desktop swirls to the correspondin desktop on your command! All this for a single CD Distro!!! Just one backdrop of this distro is that you need to have an active net connection to download the other softwares that you may need to accentuate its working…But for that Ubuntu 7.04 rocks!!

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Jun
22

Linux

I’ve upgraded my old system (the 440 Lx) to a brand new Core2Duo ! If you’ve read a few of my previous posts you’d definitely have come across my ventures with Linux on my old system. I’ve been and I still am a hard core fan of Linux for the past three years and I’ve learnt to find my way through it ( at least the setting up of the OS) the hard way. Innumerable number of formats, deletions, screw ups and what not. But finally when you are done with all of that troubleshooting and googling and finally setup up your machine with a flavour of linux. It’s sweet!! Pretty sweet!!

Well, atleast now I can say, I’ve got a feel on how to install an Operating system. Exploiting it to your  requirements and getting a hang of working on it is a totally different experience. Nevertheless as I told you it all depends on how you take your experience. You get bogged down once and you take the hit, your done for good! But then you recuperate and strike back to take more hits, you learn stuff!

And now , the million dollar question…Why Linux? Well, I learnt using linux for fun and just for the heck of experimenting, though now it does serve other purposes too. When I happen to tell people I’ve tried a flavour of linux and ask them to try it too, more often than not, I get the response – “I’m fine with Windows dude. I don’t want to change.” Well, there’s no point blaming them for that. Rather I’ll blame the rampant piracy in India. Had you been compelled to buy the Windows OS and given noother option I’m sure you would look out for other cheaper equivalents. Linux is FREE! It’s open source, It supports most of your hardware devices, It’s got a huge support database, It’s got a huge fan community, It is in no way inferior to any Windows OS, It’s robust, It’s just as easy to use as any other Operating system once you get a hang of it, It’s much livelier, It’s highly interactive, It looks much more appealing than any other OS and I’ve heard it’s much more secure. What else could you want from an Operating System? I believe that justifies!!   

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Jun
18

Yahoo Photos goin’ down!

I happened to sign in to  my yahoo photos for no apparent reason today and this is what  caught my attention

 Yahoo Photos is Closing down by September 20th 2007 

 To be frank I was shell shocked! It was just out of the blue that I’d signed in and they would have deleted all of my photos had I not dropped in by September 20th. They could at least have sent me a mail regarding their change in stand! 

Fortunately, they’re giving you three options. One to directly transfer all of your photos to Flickr (Yahoo acquired Flickr in 2005 ) or a few other sites like kodak , butterfly et al , the second to download all the photos one by one yourself  and the third and most interesting- forego them ! 

 I have about a thousand photos in it and downloading all of them is  way impractical. I was always considering transferring all of my photos to Picasa. But then Yahoo Photos never had an option for direct transfer. So I’m sort of obliged to transfer my photos to Flickr, which I reluctantly have accepted to!   :-(     

 

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Jun
16

The 440LX is no more!

My first off the system post from a friends machine.

My dear system buckled down totally today and looking at the symptoms there’s every reason for me to believe it has breathed it’s last! :-( The final moments it did throb to the core and when it missed the beat hell went loose.

Moments before entering the comatose state, it showed sporadic electrical activity. Dementia soon crept in and repetitive resuscitation techniques ;-) too failed. The arterial links on the MB paved way soon failing to identify not alone the HDD but also other vital devices.

Aged 9 when she passed out and survived by none technically, She’s been a wonderful piece of assembly by the years. A brief look up into her distant progenies reveals a number of branched out prospective replacements. Though due consideration is being given to the suitable replacement, it goes without saying, the memories that she leaves behind.

May her soul rest in peace! Amen!

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Jun
02

End of my Engineering at UE-Kanchipuram

My Final theory papers were done with by 15th of last month and my friends and I had plans to go to an amusement park the next day and have a blast one last time, before we bid our final adieu. All was fine till the end of the examination but when we reached the rooms ppl started slowly lamenting of the heat and finally withdrew from the plan! :-( Got pissed to the core!!

At around four pm, Calvin and I decided to leave to Hyd. We only had the option of leaving by bus. We generally take a bus to Tirupathy and from there a Hi-tech to Hyd. For some reason this time we decided to go via Chennai. The Bus service at Chennai to Hyd is sometime around 8:00 pm. So we had ample time! We boarded a 76BExpress service from the Kanchi Bus station and started placing calls to people in the hostel just to complete the final formalities! Was actually still fuming :-(

 The bus had just come out of the town outskirts when I realized I hadn’t called the Hindi trio [Black Bombay, White Bombay and Rahul ]. The moment I called them, they started abusing me literally :-) !! Somehow they managed to change my mind and I got down at Meenakshi Hospital. Well the bombayz had told me that they were planning to have a party that night in the hostel ,that was the main reason why I’d changed my mind! :-) The Bus driver was kind enough to accede to my request! (Being an Express service he is not supposed to stop in b/w ). This was about five kms from the University and on the NH7. Rahul said he’d be there within ten minutes. Calvin carried on in the bus to Chennai as he said he had some important work to attend to. True to his word, Rahul picked me up and I was in the Hostel in twenty minutes.

 

We pooled money for the night’s party from the Hostel inmates. Bala and the Bombayz went over to the town and managed to get Fire crackers, a huge cake and Appy packs! The Administrative Officer was invited .He’d come with his grand daughters. Was fun with the kids around! All the crackers were burnt by 12:00am. After the Cake cutting, distributing and not to mention the smearing, people started getting back to their rooms. Junior’s had their Semester exams the other day so they got back to their rooms pretty soon. A few other non active members of our batch hit their bed after munching their share of cake. With nothing much left to do even we guys got back to our rooms. It was then that Bala removed the Rocket’s that he’d hidden. Around ten of us and a couple of juniors moved over to the Hostel terrace. The girls’ hostel was about 400yards away from our hostel! So you could very well expect the target! :-) . Hit the bed sometime around two o’clock. Man! We had a blast that night!

Evening the previous day I again proposed a trip to an amusement park. Rahul readily accepted and we decided to go no matter what! Somehow we compelled Black Bombay ,SGP and Akka too. They reluctantly accepted. We initially thought of going to MGM but later for no apparent reason decided to go to Kishkintha! Both are amusement parks, MGM being much away from the city when compared to Kishkintha. I had to dump my bag in CMBT ( the main bus terminus in Chennai ) as I decided to leave directly to Hyderabad that day and I didn’t want to carry the luggage with me to an amusement park. Our plan was that I would wake Rahul and leave to CMBT at around 6:00 am. Rahul would wake the other guys and they would come to Tambaram by 9:00. I would come down to Tambaram from CMBT by 9:00. But as luck would have it, the Express bus which I was traveling by broke down mid way and I had to catch another bus to CMBT. Tried dragging Sooz to join us but he had some other important work to attend to. It was 10:00 by the time I reached CMBT! I deposited my air bag in the Cloak room and got myself a ticket to hyd for that night’s service. Nevertheless, Rahul, Black Bombay, Akka and SGP got delayed too for no apparent reason. We managed to meet at Tambaram only by around 12:00pm. Kishkinta was around 10kms from there. We took an auto and reached the park by around 12:30 .Bought the tickets and sat on a few rides. Kishkintha is much smaller compared to MGM and has much lesser rides too. We had a feeling that we should have been to MGM. But soon realized that since we were already here, there was no point lamenting!

The water pool here was definitely different from the one’s we’d seen at other parks. Spent much of the time lazing, sliding and not to mention ogling! :-) There were only two attractions at Kishkintha that I feel makes it a different amusement park. One is the Chennai Kuttralam. This is  cave sort of entrance which sprinkles water in miniscule streams on you when you walk by and the other is an artificial  waterfall which Kishkinta has developed to emulate the Kuttralam falls in Kerala. I’ve no words to explain how good the emulated falls was! The very beauty of the falls left us so very enthralled that we forgot taking snaps there!

 

Quite aware that travel back to CMBT would take me around an hour from Tambaram, I wanted to leave a bit early. Moreover I didn’t want to take any sort of risk with Chennai Traffic! :-) SGP and I caught the 18:10 service from the park to Tambaram. Black Bombay, Rahul and Akka got back to business! You know what I mean! :-) I reached CMBT just in time to catch the Hyd Hi-tech. Placed a call to Rahul and was  to hear that they were not successful in their mission! :-) They’d picked the 18:50 service and were on their way back to Kanchi! Had an extremely comfortable journey back home! Literally,  My last trip back home after my Engineering !

 
All set and done, I had a wonderful end to my Enggineering life! Thanks to that one call that I’d placed to the Hindi trio! Three Cheers to them :-)

 

 

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