Goals/Objectives

Recently I came across this site called 43 Things I think it is a great way to list down the things one wants to achieve. I've seen people use this for very petty things, which personally I wouldn't consider objectives, less even goals. But to each his/her own.

What I found even more interesting is the fact that there are lot of people who either share same goal as yours or have already achieved that goal. You can also ask for advice from someone who has Done it..

You kinda form a community of like-minded people, which I think is a great motivator.

I've started using this site. For now, I have not listed all my goals. I'm just testing the waters.

BTW, if you are interested, please see the link to my page in the sidebar. Read more!

Disaster with Ubuntu 5.10 Release

Following my experience with Preview release under QEMU I did not get enough time to play with it anymore. Later 5.10 was released. I downloaded LiveCD first, tried it at worked in native mode (not in QEMU) Everything seems to work, so I got bit more adventurous and burned the install CD.
Mind you my previous experience with Ubuntu was always limited to LiveCD version, so I didn't know what to expect, but with all the good publicity ubuntu was getting, I thought, what the heck. Well, thats where I was wrong I guess.

I'm not sure what went wrong, but for some reason when I asked the installer to format my existing ext3 partition, I started getting errors which indicated names of files on my windows partition. After selecting ignore, couple of times I got scared and cancelled the whole thing.

Result: My windows is rendered un-bootable (if there is such a word)

So what do you do ? Knoppix to the rescue. I burned knoppix 4.02 and booted my machine with it. To my relief, all (I guess I should say most ... more about is later) my data on windows partiotion was intact.

I tried fixboot and fixmbr from XP recovery console, but to my dismay, it did not help. After further investigation I realized that not all my data was intact. Ubuntu had done something to at least three files on system partition, so ended up with files like found.000, found.001 and found.002. Looks like these files (under their original name) are required for XP to boot.

So that is long and short of it.

Plan of Action : Backup important data to USB Stick, re-install XP Read more!

Ubuntu 5.10 Preview LiveCD from within QEMU

I've read umpteen reviews of various distros on various sites and always wanted to write one myself. But burning a CD just to try out a distro is not my cup of tea. First of all it seems ecologically unfriendly that people keep burning CDs for a small stuff and later they won't use it (except for may be Tea-coaster. But how many coasters do you really need ?) Other reason is I know I won't using a distro unless I really really like it. So I prefer LiveCD distros anyday, over the install-and-see-if-you-like breed.

So when I discovered QEMU few days ago, it was best things since sliced bread :)
So now I can try any LiveCD without having to burn a copy. Coming back to Ubuntu 5.10 Preview, Here is what I discovered.

About Ubuntu 5.10 Preview LiveCD
As the name suggests, this is still a preview so expect some bugs to be there. The help screen shows the Date/Time Stamp of this image as " built on 20050317ubuntu15". This should give you some idea about which preview release this might be if you are comparing against subsequent preview releases.

Booting and Setup
Initial bootup seems faster compared to 5.04 version.
During the bootup/setup process, when I selected "India" as location, it went into loop of choose language/choose location.
When I selected default United States as location, it went ahead with hardware detection part.

Later I got error on the console, although it seems harmless:

Bummer, could not run '/sbin/debian-installer' : No such file or directory

Later part of setup/install is graphical with message in graphics font and a small progress bar below the "ubuntu" logo. The choice of the colour of the font is weird, since it is difficult to read on black console background. White text message on black are easy to on eyse, compared to brown colour which is default for ubuntu.

More about Ubuntu 5.10 Preview later ....

Read more!

QEMU

After my previous post, I've been trying to get all the information that I would need to create my own version similar to DevelopGo.

I have already downloaded knoppix 3.9 LiveCD ISO image.
I have got hold of the Remastering Howto , and now all ready to go ahead with my changes.

There are some of the road blocks, although not major ones though. I need a machine with CD Writer, to install knoppix which I'l be remastering. I am planning to do it on my home machine, but I don't have a CD Writer. These days CD-Writers come in very cheap, I'm planning to buy one soon. Then I'll be able to install knoppix and make required changes, and then remaster.

While I was doing this research, I came across an invaluable tool called qemu. This is open source CPU and system emulator. Without going into too many details about QEMU, which I'm sure you can find out from google, what I want to stress is how easy it is to use.
I downloaded qemu windows installer from here. Installation itself is very trivial, just asks for install folder, and then it copies files there. Thats it.
I had couple of LiveCDs burned on CD as well as their ISO images. To boot each ISO image all I had to do was run following command from the command prompt:

qemu.exe -L bios -cdrom //./e: 

Where E: is my CD ROM Drive. I had put the LiveCD in the CDROM and qemu booted from the drive. Similarly instead of using actual CD (which seems a little slower, due to I/O speed of CD drive) I can also point to ISO image directly. like:

qemu.exe -L bios -cdrom D:\download\DamnSmallLinux-1.4.iso

I tried DSL 1.4, Ubuntu 5.04 LiveCD as well as OneBase NetInstaller CD using Qemu. All of them worked very well. Off course, typical to each of these distro, they took less (DSL) or more (ubuntu) time to boot.

One annoying thing I noticed during my experimentation is that when using mouse pointer in ubuntu, qemu goes into what it calls grab mode. Title of the window changes to Press Ctrl+Alt to exit grab I'm not sure if there are any side effects of this (I didn't notice any, during short time I played with qemu) but it is annoying none the less.

Thats all for now, about qemu. I'll continue to post about my progess with free version of DevelopGo, in coming days, and any tools like qemu, that I might encounter. Read more!

DevelopGo - How about a free version ?

Last week, I read a review of DevelopGo -A Programmer's Platform. Here are some of the thoughts that came to my mind.

About OneLinuxBase:

It is very clear that the organization is out to make money, it doesn't seem like it is some idealist's pet project. The website looks pretty professional and polished, unlike some website created by reluctant geek(s), who would rather code that make pretty looking website.

Why did they choose yet another package manager, when perfectly well package managers like apt and YaST exist ? Sure they would have there own reasons, the website doesn't mention whether OneLinuxBase is based on any existing distribution, so I can give them benefit of doubt and say that the distribution is built from ground up, so it is likely that they need to have there own package manager.

The basic version is free, other special versions need a small fee. I want to try DevelopGo LiveCD but since it is not free, I did not try it myself. After all, no one is paying me to write the reviews of various distros, yet. I have already tried too many distros, mostly LiveCD ones, so don't want to try one-more.

About DevelopGo:
I think it is pretty cool idea. I have already mentioned that if it were free (as in beer), I would have tried it in a heartbeat, but $10 (converted to local currency) is big sum which I would rather use for something better. So here is what I am thinking now.

The website has a list of applications shipped with each DevelopGo'. I agree that the concept and the selection of software is pretty good. So why not come up with knoppix based LiveCD remastered with the assortment of the applications from the DevelopGo CD ? The idea could be extended to other Go versions. Off course, then release this version for free (as in speech and beer). In order to update existing or add new software, one could include klik client. This could be our free version of DevelopGo.

I think I might just start with this project myself. I can see a lot of learning potential in this project. Now I am thinking of some kool name for this project. Any suggestions ?

Read more!

Which Fantasy/SciFi Character Are You?

I came across this cool survey : Which Fantasy/SciFi Character Are You?
Here is how I was judged based on the questionaire.

Enjoy taking taking the survey !!

Jean-Luc Picard

An accomplished diplomat who can virtually do no wrong, you sometimes know it is best to rely on the council of others while holding the reins.

There are some words which I have known since I was a schoolboy. "With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably." These words were uttered by Judge Aaron Satie -- as a wisdom, and warning. The first time any man's freedom is trodden on, we're all damaged.

Jean-Luc is a character in the Star Trek universe. This The Next Generation fan site has an outline of his career.

Read more!

What should you expect from this blog ?

I was contemplating opening blogger account for quite some time now. Finally I went ahead and opened the account. I already have a personal blog but I don't want to mix the personal and technical blog, hence this new account. Somehow I did not like LJ interface as much as blogger interface (which looks sleek and professional, in my opinion).

I intend to use this blog for technical postings. Publishing technical articles is one of the objectives I have setup for myself. So what better way to publish technical articles without having to wait for someone's approval, than blogging ? BTW, what qualifies as technical is really open to discussion. But suffice to say I define it as non-personal posts, opinions etc. You won't find things about my personal life here for sure.

As such I do not get enough time even for my personal blog (which I opened more than year ago and has really low number of posts). But here I am hoping that just because I have opened blogger account, I now have a responsibility to post frequently. Read more!