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
When a person dies in a publicly broadcasted news item relayed on national television it is seldom that after his demise his soul is laid to rest in peace. In todays day and age of aggressive mass media, cut-throat fight to deliver the best, hot selling (dont care about true) news, new ways of getting your content delivered to the public helps a lot. The best example is Blogs. Technology may have changed but ethics have gone down-hill. Its just become as easy as type and push and you have your piece of written bit available to the public eye in a matter of microseconds. Talking about ethics, a recent shocking and ethically appalling news came into light recently.
The Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh and 4 other crew members including a Pilot and Co-pilot were killed when the helicopter carrying them from Hyderabad to Chittoor crashed in bad weather in Nallamalla forests in Kurnool district on Wednesday (2nd September) morning. The charred bodies and the wreckage of the chopper were found the next morning after a massive search operation. There were several questions raised after this tragedy. Like,
Why did the Chopper take off in bad weather?
Was the Helicopter airworthy?Why did the Emergency Locator Transmitter(ELT) not get activated upon crash?
Why is the communication framework in India still so poor that many parts of our country are inaccessible and have no means of communication
But probably the most bizarre and shocking question raised by a journalist put serious question on the credibility of Journalism and Journalism ethics. Vikram Sharma of expressbuzz.com (Part of Indian Express group) has written a blog entry asking if the Pilot was in a peaceful mental condition. Baseless and written in poor taste this article raises a finger on a highly qualified Pilot who has served in the Indian Air Force for 25years. He has commanded a squadron under high pressure situations and has over 7000hours of flying experience under his belt. The 2nd of September was just an unlucky day for him and others on board. Its a risky job and daredevils like Gp Capt. SK Bhatia face this challenge everyday as a routine. Writing such thoughtless and surreal articles without having concrete proof and accusing such a great personality is something the Journalist and his organization should be ashamed of. Have some compassion for what the families of the departed are going through. I do not say, burry the matter. Enquire, ask questions , demand to know the truth – but do all this before pointing fingers and accusing a professional of amateurism. Forcing his Son to come and defend his father is not something the Indian Express should be responsible for. Have some sanctity for the departed and not cloud his character by cheap publicity.
Human beings are a highly evolved life form on this planet. The word comes from the Latin, Homo Sapien , meaning wise man. And Wise he is. Today Humans have the most complex and developed brain capable of logic, structural thinking , ability to love , feel pain and numerous complex emotions. They can communicate use of gestures, by speaking languages. But perhaps the strongest and dominant of all qualities of Human Beings is that they are social primates. Sure there are other species and all most all are known to be socially active, but nothing as complex and deep rooted as the Human Beings. We are capable of living in groups, forming colonies, families, partners, involve in courtship, form social boundaries, governments, countries. Social interaction between humans has given birth to traditions, rituals, values and ethics. In a sense we are all connected by this human bond. It is also our biggest weakness. The Error in Humans. Its a well known fact that is also a popular expression (with numerous variations, but the meaning remains the same)- “The best way to be happy is to make others happy” Its true. We seek happiness in other peoples joys and sadness in their misery. In war the most effective means of torture is by threatening the prisoner’s most loved ones – his family, his children. No other specie is capable of such superior emotion and thought process. It is why we plead, take us but spare them. We are ready to face death in the interest of their survival. Man appears very selfless. But behind this selfless act is a very simple rationale. We are needy, we are needy for love for companionship for support for our basic existence. Solitary confinement is the worst punishment. It is why we are most disturbed when our near and dear pass away. They leave a vacuum in our lifves that can not be filled. A Void. This is man’s greatest gift and greatest folly. Its simply Human Error.
There are many ways to define our fragile existence. Many ways to give it meaning. But it is our memories that shape its purpose and give it context. The private assortment of images, fears, loves, regrets. For it is the cruel irony of life that we are destined to hold the dark with the light. The good with the evil. Success with disappointment. This is what separates us. What makes us human. And in the end, we must fight to hold on to.
-Heroes : 2.08
Written in memory of Gp Capt. SK Bhatia , may your soul rest in peace
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.
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!
My name is Aman Yajurvedi. I am a game design student studying India. I am passionate about new technologies in the field of computers, mobile devices. I am a Linux enthusiast (currently Using Arch Linux w/ Gnome 3). I also love Android and love fiddling with my Samsung GT-i9000(Galaxy S). Check out my portfolio
) 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 
A quick test on 
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 