Fudge » GNU/Linux

Gnome Shell Mockup : Sticky Notes

Aman Yajurvedi — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 19:49:59 +0000

Earlier today i was on my computer when i had a few ideas for a gift i have been planning for a friend. I thought i would quickly note them down somewhere. Back in the Gnome 2.x days i used the Sticky Notes applet, which was quite useful. It didn’t have any fancy ‘cloud sync’ features but it did the job. Each time i would see my desktop i would see a yellow post-it like note reminding me. Since then, i have upgraded to Gnome 3.0 and with it came the Gnome Shell. I love most parts of it (even if it is similar to the OS X design). So i thought to myself, if we could have a Sticky Notes extension. So i made up a quick a quick mock-up using Mockingbird. I wish i could implement it too, however i neither have the time at the moment nor the skills (well the latter can always be learnt). Here is the mock-up :

Sticky Notes extension mock-up for Gnome Shell

Ubuntu 9.10 Blazing Fast liveUSB boot

Aman Yajurvedi — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 19:42:13 +0000

Halloween meant two things, Saw and Ubuntu ! So i downloaded a copy using BitTorrent ( always chose this over http, avoid server load). Plugged in to boot and closed my eyes. When i opened my eyes, Ubuntu had loaded and the bright orange wallpaper was staring at me. Surprised i rebooted again and this time, took a video. Less than 35second (using Unetbootin ,so syslinux time can be deducted). Watch it here

Hunt for the perfect Operating System

Aman Yajurvedi — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 11:32:29 +0000

I was spending the last bit of my vacations with my parents at home. In the afternoon i sat down on his laptop, opened Firefox and saw a suspicious 3rd party toolbar and addon (something to do with browser history) When i asked him if he knew exactly what that was doing, he replied No. Enraged i scolded them for being careless. Then i scolded them for using Windows. Lol. My mum does a lot of online banking and manages her stocks and funds from home. Considering that i told them they should be extra safe and that they should run a ‘safe’ Operating System. So i decided to end the reign of Windows Vista (eurgh) on his laptop (a Compaq F733AU). Since i was not carrying my Linux CDs (i usually carry a stock) i thought of going out an buying the latest copy of LinuxForYou and since they almost always include a Linux distro. Sadly, I could not find it at the bookstore in Chennai at that time. Surprising since a lot of Open Source activities take place here. Next choice was PC World. In the August issue was included PCLinuxOS 2009.2. Since they claim to be the simplest OS i thought of installing PCLOS first.

Day 1 : PCLinuxOS 2009.2
Claimed to be the closest-to-windows Linux distro, PCLinuxOS is quite a popular Linux distribution. Its built on Mandriva Linux with RPM(apt) as its pacakge manager. It comes with a good range of softwares pre-installed. Multimedia codecs, Flash are amongst the packages included to give runs-out-of-the-box use. However open-office is missing, installable just one click away. With KDE 3.5 as its default; it prefers to stick to the older version of KDE-perhaps new users find KDE 4 intimidating. Installation was not very smooth though. The partitioner was very ambiguous about which partition it has selected. I selected a spare windows partition and asked it to delete. On hitting delete nothing happend. So i hit delete twice. Still nothing. After some hunting i finally manged to delete the partition. Selected / to be formatted as the new ext4. Clicked next. Error: Could not mount the partition / (Not exact words). Quit insaller, started again. This time in the partitioner i selected – Use existing partitions. I thought it would automatically detect the existing Liunux partition and install on that. It understood as : Delete D and C drive. WTF! It swiftly deleted both partitions before i could do anything. Oh bugger! With no OS left i installed Linux with a heavy heart. (Of course at this time my dad was busy admiring his son hard at work on the laptop drinking tea ) So the first thing i googled after installing the OS ( Oh after that the installer was smooth – already having done the damage! These Linux developers really hate windows!) on how to recover lost partitions. Popular links suggested Test Disk. I ran a preliminary check to see if its already installed on the system. It was! and After installing this distro i was pretty happy. Using it for about 2 hours it seemed to fade away the transition-gap between windows and linux. Firefox ran fast with all codes and java support.
Day 2: PCLinuxOS 2009.2 Still running smoothly I thought i had found the perfect newbiee Linux Linux OS. Another day where linux Just works!
Day 3: PCLinuxOS 2009.2 3rd day is a bug! The PCLinuxOS dream crashed. Firefox was acting strange. PDF files even though associated with KPDF in Konqueror kept opening in GIMP when double clicked from the Downloads section of Firefox. After a lot of googling and repeated instructions to Fx to open PDF in XPDF i gave up. And suddenly more problems came to light. They were all there, we just never noticed it. KDE 3.5 is painful at doing simple tasks. Just simply the fact the Konqueror wants to open all files inline was getting on my nerves. Fx crashed thrice that day. The PCLinuxOS 2009 dream had crashed. It was time to get rid of it.
Day 4: openSUSE 11: A quick test on www.zegeniestudios.com reveled i should try this popular Linux distro. I had a live CD iso file lying on my external harddrive so i went ahead and put it on a USB stick(instead of wasting a CD) using UNetbootin. However openSUSE handles live ISO differently. Spent 10 minutes figuring out how and why. Googling revealed this : http://en.opensuse.org/Live_USB_stick
Sadly it required a pre-existing openSUSE installed. Sad. I thought i should be able to tweak the pre existing ISO dump on the USB stick to make it boot. Yes there was a way! Thanks to this link on a blog i managed to tweak some files and boot the Live CD. Once in it i manged to start install. Install blazed through rapidly and i had a installed Linux distro ready. The first thing i did was of course make a backup of the ‘D Drive’ which contained all the important files. Also put all recovered images and files in the external harddrive. Next hurdle was the Nvidia drivers. While openSUSE offers a magical one-click install system it doesnt work all the time. So when i installed the restricted Nvidia modules X crashed on rebooting. Struggled for some more time to get the resolution right. Removed resintalled and removed again. Tried some more futile attempts but nothing worked out. Several hours later it worked, magically! Well once that was done, i started installing the multimedia codecs. Took me a while to figure out how to do that. Being a 2year Ubuntu user i was little confused. Something didnt feel right. You know how they say that the person who really loves you knows exactly how to make things right? Who says that, Uhm People do, People say it! Well so when i would not take my girlfriend;s call and talk garbage (Xorgs and Kernels) while talking to her, she mailed me a copy of Ubuntu 9.04 Live Disc. Lifesaver she is i tell ya!
Day 5: Ubuntu 9.04! I dont know why didnt i do this before. I took all of 10minutes to get this bad boy installed on the laptop and another 5 to get the resolution right and codes installed. In 1 hour this OS was merrily running with perfection. With a rich creamy blend of brown and red, Ubuntu is my perfect Operating System. I wish all Ubuntu developers good luck with the 100 papercuts drive and I will contribute to my best extent.

Ubuntu-Change Icon Size

Aman Yajurvedi — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 14:08:26 +0000

Here is a handy tip that i would like to share with all linux users. Often you like to change the size of your icons on the desktop to fit either a large monitor a small one. Either ways, its useful to modify the icon size. There is a easy way to do so for each individual icon. Right click and you have the option to stretch the icon size. However to do this as a default setting globally, you need to change the preferences in Nautilus. Assuming you are using Gnome/Nautilus as you default desktop environment and file browser, navigate to Preferences via Edit>preferences in Nautilus. Under that change the default size of icons. Minimize your windows and there you have it. Desktop icons are now re sized!

World of Goo Linux Version

Aman Yajurvedi — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 15:09:20 +0000

The Linux version of World of Goo is finally ready for download! It’s available exclusively from our site, in three different packages depending on what your computer likes. (tar.gz, deb, rpm)

If you already got the game from our site, you can use your same download link to get the linux version in addition to your Windows and Mac versions. A huge thanks to Maks Verver for getting this running on linux, and the beta testers for making sure it runs smoothly! The full game and demo versions all available here.

Update: Yes, still DRM free! And works on 64 bit systems too.

Yippe ! The best game of 2008 is finally available for GNU/Linux. This is an awesome step for all game designers and game developers, urging them to develop games for the linux platform. There are plenty of games out there for linux platform, but there is no way they can match up with the windows counterparts. Hope to see this change soon. Thank you guys (2dBoy)!

HP MIE Linux

Aman Yajurvedi — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 14:59:44 +0000

In competition with Asus EEE PC, HP released their Mobile internet (Mi) edition of notebook the HP Mini 1000 Mi Edition. Apart from being a really cool laptop the best thing about it is the OS. Its a slick media/internet centric OS with a shiny slick black interface. To being with it presents you three column with mail, internet and photos. It also has office tools like OpenOffice and allows you do do all these things on the go. Oh and the OS is based on Ubuntu Linux! Yep its a revamped edition of Ubuntu Linux called HP MIE (Mobile Internet Experience). This OS is being called the best thing that could happen to Ubuntu and GNU/Linux.