Random Thoughts

It takes more than 30 seconds for acroread to load on my Opensuse machine the first time and the startup time gets shorter in subsequent attempts. Why? This is not the first time I have come across this problem of slow application startups in OpenSuse. Apparently a lot of people had encountered this problem and they found a simple solution - uninstalling the version of acroread that comes with OpenSuse and installing one from Adobe site yourself. Fortunately, that prescription seems to have solved the problem. My acroread startup time is a few seconds now. Why does a very good Linux distribution like OpenSuse with its wide support and following make so many of these mistakes?!?! Over the years, I have seen Suse/OpenSuse sending buggy distributions that make you wonder if they do much testing before releasing their distro. Here are a few bugs I have come across: The extremely slow startup of Openoffice in OpenSuse 10.0 was one of the reasons I switched to Fedora Core for a while...

It's nothing long or complicated, but it might save someone a few minutes. The stable version of Picasa for Linux is 2.7 as of today(01/02/2009). You can install version 2.7 following the instructions in the download page or add Google repositories to your sources as down outlined here . If you are like me and you want the latest [beta] version, here is how you would do it. First, download the RPM for Picasa 3.0 from the download page. If you try to install to install the RPM, your efforts will fail with errors indicating that you are missing some dependencies. Namely, you will probably need to install sane-backends, libgphoto, libgsane, libksane or some combination thereof. In my case, I was fortunate enough to have had all those programs installed. The one I was missing was lsb . I went ahead and installed lsb and Picasa 3 installed on my OpenSuse 11.0 perfectly.

Anyone using VMware on a Linux host knows that keeping VMware working after every kernel upgrade is rarely a picnic. So, my problems with VMware 5.5 on Kubuntu 8.10 host were expected. My usual route to solving VMware google for tips and patches. This time, none of those tips quite helped. So, I decided to upgrade the free VMware Player I was using (v. 2.0.4) to the latest version (v. 2.5). Much to my surprise, the new VMware Player bundle has some engine that fixes the usual issues with compiling kernels modules for VMware. The simple solution I just reported has not been posted anywhere on the web as far as I know. So, let me share that nugget free of charge to my readership of one. Just upgrade to the latest VMware player and it might make everything work.

PROBLEM: Audacious on K/Ubuntu Doesn't play my mp3s:: On my kubuntu 8.04.1 audacious is not playing any audiofile. I've tried to run my mp3s with amarok and it works. Also audacity is playing mp3s. SOLUTION: Click on Preferences in Audacious; Select Audio Tab; Set the 'cCurrent output plugin' to 'aRts output plugin'. __________________________________________________________ PROBLEM: File associations in Firefox 3.0 disappear in Kubuntu SOLUTION: Install firefox-3.0-gnome-support . . . more to come

NBC and Microsoft have formed an intricate partnership in which Microsoft serves to expand and maintain NBC's presence in the online news and entertainment market while promoting its products. NBC online integrates many of Microsoft's products. MSNBC is co-owned by GE's NBC universal and Microsoft. I have no problem with the partnership, except for the way Microsoft pushes people to use Microsoft products while other alternatives do just as well or better. Let me provide some examples. You can't access NBC online videos unless you have a Windows media plugin. What about using Flash like everybody else. If you want to access Olympics games online at NBC Olympics, you better be using a Windows or a Mac because Microsoft does not have a Linux version of the Silverlight plugin that it is pushing hard in competition with Adobe Flash, the industry standard. Suppose you are using Windows, you pay a huge penalty for not using Internet Explorer!! Try watching videos with In...

I found some data on the market share of OS 's, browsers , and search engines by the major players. I was particularly interested in the market share of Linux in the OS realm. The data is collected using web hits for the month of June 2008. First the OS data. Operating Systems Assuming the data is reliable, it is surprising that Linux's market share is less than 1%. Considering how much more user-friendly Linux has become, the many distros that are available for people's choosing, and the great stability Linux has achieved, it is disappointing to see it failing to make serious inroads. May be vendors need to provide customers the option of buying machines with Linux pre-installed. Better yet, computer vendors should provide the option of buying a computer without an OS. Search Engines The other piece of data I was curious about is the search engine market shares. Google is clearly the leader and its dominance will probably continue for some time. I expected MSN ...

SuSE 9.2 was my first OS I installed on my laptop 3+ years ago within an hour of getting my much-awaited notebook. SuSE 9.3 lasted me for almost a year before Novell's decision to fork a version of SuSE into the community-supported OpenSuSE. Like most SuSE fans, I tolerated the buggy and unstable nature of OpenSuSE for a short while before ditching it for other distros, particularly Ubuntu. Thus, the announcement of the highly anticipated OpenSuSE 11,0 was a very welcome news. Having played around with OpenSuSE 11.0 for the last five days, I am very convinced that SuSE is back to where it used to be -- leading. Here is a brief review. The installation is very easy and smooth. I performed a network install without a hitch from the TDS mirror in Madison, Wisconsin. YaST doesn't break as easily as it used to. At least it hasn't happened yet. Installing software repositories used to be a pain. One would have to look up the info about the repos and enter it manually. Mos...

I'm sure everyone has seen the Mac vs. PC ads on TV where the Mac appears to be confident while th PC is in denial about its deficiencies. Missing from that picture is Linux which is robust, but seeks no attention because it has no commercial ambitions. This Mac vs. PC vs. Linux model can serve as a analogy for many things/phenomena. I would like to make a list of those analogies here. For example, The New York Times recently characterized Hillary as a PC and Obama as a mac on the basis of the design of their websites. The analogy would also work if you think of Hillary as the status quo much like Windows, and Obama as the new thing with great promise, cachet and appeal like the newly reborn mac. It is not obvious who would play the role of Linux, but my choice would be Ron Paul. He has some bold and independent ideas along with a very loyal following even though he has no chance of winning. PC Mac Linux Candidate Hillary Clinton Barack Obama Ron Paul States Northeast West Co...

I have been anticipating the release of a stable version of KDE 4 with my distro of choice which happens to be Kubuntu. Kubuntu 8.04 provided just that. Just to be on the safe side, I installed Kubuntu 8.04 with KDE 3.5.9 as a base and added KDE 4 later. Here are my first impressions of KDE 4: It has a lot of eye candy and look of sophistication. If you like style (over substance), you will be very impressed. It is nowhere as customizable as KDE 3.x!! Some of the options you select don't get used either. What I have always loved most about KDE over GNOME and other desktop environments is the fact that it has so many configuration options that make it possible for users to customize their desktop well. KDE 4 provided very few customization options. My hunch is that later versions will incorporate more control knobs because KDE without its many configuration options will note succeed. KDE 4 didn't appear to be a memory/resource hog despite its sophisticated look. All in a...

Problem: I often need to have some files readily available online so that I can access them from any computer. There are many ways to go about solving this problem and each comes with its set of shortcomings: Yahoo! Briefcase - 30MB limit Online storage services like Box.net, Xdrive, MediaMax - usually cost money; signing up is cumbersome Email to myself as an attachment - enough said there It's time to find a home-made solution. The solution I am about to suggest is intended for -- A *NIX user someone with access to a *NIX web server Solution: I am a linux user and I have user level access to a web server. The web server is configured such that the public does not have access to directory structure. So, I would need to write a script that copies my files to the web server and creates an index listing my files. Password protection of the storage would follow after that. Client Side: Use the following script to transfer file to server, make the file readable by public and execu...

What can someone do to fine-tune and streamline a Linux system in order to make optimal and efficient use of limited resources. Here is my take: Check service configuration - for each runlevel, remove services and daemons that are not needed. CAUTION: Don't turn off any service whose purpose you are not completely aware of. Turn off automatic software update or schedule it to run less frequently. Turn off fancy animations and graphics - the eye candy costs ye. If you heavily use KDE applications, stick to a KDE environment and ditto for Gnome. Since KDE applications commonly use Qt libraries and Gnome apps use GTK+, sticking to one or the other saves you from expending a lot of resources loading both sets of libraries. Downgrade to less resource hungry desktop environments like Fluxbox, XFCE, or enlightenment. Upgrade memory; having a lot of memory makes your computer run faster and conserves battery. For notebooks, monitor the power management scheme. Sometimes cpuspeed and c...

I have always wanted to be an avid reader, but that never happened. So, I recently decided to take a little shortcut and become an avid listener of audiobooks instead. Sure they are not the same, but listening to audiobooks while driving has been one of the most rewarding experiences for me as of late. Here, I intend to write some reviews of audiobooks I have gone through lately. The World is Flat , by Thomas Friedman ( A ) It is a great [audio]book describing the flattening of the world in the information age, allowing everyone from the globe, particularly India and China, to participate in the world economy along the dominant West. The author lists the forces that led to the flattening of the playing field, and suggests ways Americans can cope with and compete in an increasingly competitive global economy where more and more people can compete for resources and services. I highly recommend it. 1984 , by George Orwell, read by Frank Muller ( A ) I have read the book in high sch...

I have always wanted to keep an active and up-to-date to-do list and be always reminded of the things I have to do. There are lots of choices out there, but I wanted to stick to simple commandline driven tools to keep from wasting valuable RAM on non-critical utilities. After a few hours of playing around, here is the solution I have adapted. Todo/devtodo I use ' todo ' to make a list of my tasks. ' todo ' is a reminder/task program aimed at developersis, but it is very easy to use and has a good set of features. For our purposes, we can generate the list shown below by simply entering the following commands: todo -G -a "Jobs applied to:" -p 1 todo -G -a "To Learn and Review:" -p 3 todo -G -a "Daily to-do list" -p 5 If you enter, ' todo ', it will list your to-do list. Feel free to explore more of ' todo ', but the example above suffices for out little demo. I want my extended to-do list to hit me in the face every hou...

Did you ever want the capability of live spell-checking inside vi ? Well, I did and I googled the subject and found this simple solution. Assuming you have some sort of spell-checking software like ispell and agrep installed on your machine, you can use the " Engspchk " set of scripts for " multi-language", "on-the-fly spell checking." While the package documentation is pretty good, I will go ahead and narrow it down to a clean procedure. 1) Download the scripts , Unzip/untar them into your .vim directory. cp engspchk.tar.gz $HOME/.vim/ cd $HOME/.vim/ tar zoxvf engspchk.tar.gz 2) Open your ~/.vimrc file and add this piece " This piece enables live spellchecking inside Vim" set nocp if version >= 600 filetype plugin indent on endif set mouse=a let g:spchkmouse = 1 let g:spchkautonext= 1 let g:spchkdialect = "usa" 3) Open a file using vi and enter ' :helptags $HOME/.vim/doc ' 4) To invoke the English spell-checker for a ...

I always interesting pieces I never get to share to avoid creating a million little posts about non-original material. So, I will instead contain them all in this one post. Browser market Shares - Firefox Hits 400 Million Downloads "Firefox hit another milestone this past Friday, when it passed the 400 million download mark . From its launch in 2004 it took one year to reach 100 million downloads, hitting 200 million downloads just one year later. According to figures released by US consultancy firm Janco and the IT Productivity Center, Firefox currently has 17.4 percent of the browser market — up 5.6 percentage points in the last year. Also within the last year, Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser dropped 9.6 percentage points to a market share of 63.9 percent." Smarter-than-Human Intelligence & The Singularity Summit "Brilliant technologists like Ray Kurzweil and Rodney Brooks are gathering in San Francisco for The Singularity Summit . The Singularity re...

Slashdot led me to an interesting article from which I wanted to share a few gems. The original article can be found at http://www.cio.com/article/135700/Seven_Wonders_of_the_IT_World/ Biggest Paradigm Change in Enterprise Software: Linux kernel Created by: Linus Torvalds, in 1991, helping open-source developers collectively craft a viable alternative to Microsoft operating systems. The Linux kernel contains 8.2 million lines of code, with approximately 86 lines added every hour Number of developers: Total since 1991 is unknown; 3,200 developers for the kernel as of release 2.6.22. New releases: Every 2.6 months.* Quick change artists: 2.89 changes made to the kernel every hour. Lines of code: 8.2 million and growing (about 10 percent per year). Amount of code added every hour: 85.63 lines. Revenue diverted from Microsoft: Perhaps only Mr. Gates knows. *Unless otherwise marked, statistics reflect Linux kernel releases of the past 2.5 years (version 2.6.11 through 2.6.21). Wor...

Adapting Linux as the main OS for personal computing does come with some issues since there is a lot of software out there that is simply not available for Linux systems. One would then have to rely on Windows/Mac for short periods of time, or try to run Windows applications in Linux using Wine or Codeweaver Crossover Linux , Cygwin or seek virtualization solutions using software like VMware . Before resorting to the solutions proposed above, one should consider a Linux analog of the Windows application one would like to use. A neat resource for that purpose is this website . I came across this site while trying to find a free Linux alternative to the Origin package for plotting and graphics. Time to give Scigraphica a try! UPDATE: Here is an interesting list of 50 annoying proprietary programs and their open-source alternatives .

While there are many options(cp, tar, simplelinuxbackup, fwbackups, rsync, unison, bacula, keep, karchive ... etc) for backing up Linux systems, there does not seem to be a consensus number one option. So, I went through the frustrating process of trying out a lot of options and found my number one. While the particular needs and intentions of specific systems ultimately determines the best backup tool, I went for the simplest solution for my simple problem. First, I don't need data compression since I have plenty of space on my HD. Plus, date compression consumes a lot of CPU which becomes a huge hustle when I am trying to do real work while performing my backups. Second, automatic/periodic/scheduled backups are not needed in my case because I will invoke the backup process whenever I plug in my external HD and am in the mood to perform backups. Third, I don't feel the need for file encryption. Fourth, I don't need incremental backups -- I simply want the latest copy ba...

The 60GB disk on my laptop has become a huge limitation recently and instead of having to burn my movies onto DVDs regularly, I opted to shell out a whopping $65 (thanks to a BestBuy sale and $25 coupon) to buy a 120GB external mini-hard drive. It is not only tiny (weighing 7.2 oz) but it does not require an external power source as it can simply plug into my laptop's USB port. While this hard drive does come with a lot of cool features like one-touch backups and file encryption for Windows and Macs, one would be lucky to just get it to work for Linux. For one, it comes formatted in NTFS format and is not writable initially. I will describe how I got it to work below. For starters, here are some specs of my system: Pentium M 1.5MHz Banias, 60GB HD, 768MB DDR SDRAM, Linux version 2.6.20-15-generic (gcc version 4.1.2 (Ubuntu 4.1.2-0ubuntu4)) #2 SMP Sun Apr 15 07:36:31 UTC 2007 First, power up the external HD simply by plugging it into your computer. Most recent Linux sy...

I reviewed some material on IPtables, SVN, and NMAP just for the sake of keeping my mind busy. Here are some useful notes: IPtables - best resource found at HERE SVN - best, as in the quickest and simplest intro could be found HERE NMAP - I honestly don't see in using it for more than port-scanning in a few instances. Anyway, here are a few other options that might come in handy at some point. nmap -sT/sS/ sX/sF/...[-P0] IPADDRESS(range) == to check which ports are open nmap -sP IPADDRESS(range) == a simple ping scan for availability nmap -sO IPADDRESS(range) == check what IP protocols are available nmap -sV IPADDRESS(range) == a scan with version detection Other useful flags: -O == detects OS, part of -v (verbosity) flag as well -A == detects OS and versions -v == request high verbosity/detail -F == performs a fast scan of only a few common ports Installing Perl modules Perl modules may be installed using the CPAN module or from source. SOURCE...