We come across various articles, blog posts and speeches in which the people supporting open source advocate about its benefits and try to attract more and more people into the brotherhood.
Being a Linux enthusiast I felt my responsibility do some thing of the same kind to spread the word a bit more.
If we think about it then the first question popping up in our fleshy brains would be what exactly is the crap called OPEN SOURCE? Many people have a misconception that all the softwares that we can download and use (legally) for free some how defines OPEN SOURCE. So lemme tell you that this is just a small aspect of the tech movement. Open source means that the source of the software is available for free and that you are allowed to modify it as per your wish or needs.
The second question would be ... Why the heck would some one make whole of his hard work available for free? How would the person or the company make profit out of it? And if there is no profit involved .. why are the people working? The answer is, its not the software but the support that is sold. Big Open Source players pay their employees with the money they get through the customer support they offer and donation they get.
So this fairly leaves the pockets of home users unaltered. The corporate people, however, have to pay for the support but this is near about to nothing when compared to the cost of lisence for using proprietary software.
For more information one can surely go and visit these pages :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source
http://www.opensource.org/
http://www.gnu.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux
As there are infinitely many linux distributions, a first time user is bound to get confused over choosing the BEST linux distribution for him/her self. So here is a presentation that i gave quite a few months ago as one of the OSUM sessions. :- link to google slide show
Friday, April 30, 2010
Friday, April 9, 2010
Problematic ACPI on new Dell Studio 1450 laptop
The Wipro Laptop had seen its good days, but its keypad went wrong (worked fine at night, and in the morning it was screwed up) and started displaying two characters upon one key press, its lan port and memory card slot wouldn't ever work, its CD/DVD drive would get screwed up every 2 months and most recently its screen cracked ( dunno how it happened) and a vertical white line hid two characters behind it in text mode and equivalent area in graphics mode). The width of this white line was going on increasing and presently it covers area equivalent to 2 characters in text mode. These developments ( -ve sense) pushed me to get a new laptop for myself and this time I decided not to make the mistakes I had made the last time. I went for a Dell Studio 1450 laptop.
Specifications:
Intel Centrino Core 2 Duo 2.26 ghz 1066 mhz, 3MB cache
4GB RAM
500 GB SATA HDD
512 MB ATI Mobility Radeon 4530
The ACPI problem:
Its on this new laptop that I am facing a problem with Linux OSs. However Windows 7 that was shipped with the machine works fine. Initially i wasn't even able to boot into a live installer CD. During booting (into a live CD or hard drive) the screen would go blank right after loading ACPI module and the computer would not respond to anything including Ctrl+Alt+Del, the only option left out would be hardware power off. I went around on forums (my linuxquestions.org post) begging for help but ultimately it was a teenage linux magazine columnist (Shashwat Pant) who helped me out on gtalk. The solution was to append acpi=off as a kernel parameter in grub. This got linux up and running on my laptop but was not a permanent remedy. acpi=off ended up disabling a lot of options eg - battery was not recognized, function keys behaved in the opposite manner etc. It also caused power button to function as the ones on computers of 90s - i.e when pressed, the laptop would not ask for what is to be done rather it would get switched off ( without the process of shutdown - or holding the power button for a while) right away. And the computer had to be switched off manually even after choosing shutdown from the power menu. Here is the link to the forum I used for all my problems till then.
Attempts to resolve it:
On OpenSUSE, just for fun and learning, I compiled and installed linux kernel 2.6.32 and to my surprise the acpi problem had vanished :). However there were other problems that I had been facing on it (specifically - installing the graphics driver caused display - dragging windows or scrolling text all were jerky and without the driver compiz fusion won't work :( ). And in the process of trying to solve the graphics problem I screwed up OpenSUSE. Arch Linux seemed to be attractive enough and I reckoned that installing every thing one by one on my own might help me recognize the root cause of problems. However the new kernel trick didn't work on Arch, and I was again chasing the same problem. (My post on arch forum.)
I found that while compiling the kernel, the ACPI module can either be compiled into it or as a separate module to be loaded later. I tried both ways and what I found was really demoralizing. Without the acpi=off option the OS behaved quite randomly i.e sometimes it would boot fine and sometimes not. I also tried compile the kernel after disabling those options (in the menuconfig's submenu about acpi) which had deprecated mentioned beside them, with no luck. (i.e not specifying acpi=off causes the same problem that it used to cause initially, irrespective of the options I choose while compiling the kernel).
Recent Development
Today I found that the computer does not hang !!. its just that the screen goes off if I do not specify the acpi=off option. That is while it is booting, the screen goes off right after loading the acpi module but the boot process continues. I knew that after booting the arch installation ( which presently has no graphical desktop environment) prompts me for id and password. Although it was not visible, I keyed in my id and password and then fired reboot command ---- and --- the computer rebooted !!!.
I have not lost hope and am still pursuing the ghastly outline of solution. Any kind of help is welcome !!
Specifications:
Intel Centrino Core 2 Duo 2.26 ghz 1066 mhz, 3MB cache
4GB RAM
500 GB SATA HDD
512 MB ATI Mobility Radeon 4530
The ACPI problem:
Its on this new laptop that I am facing a problem with Linux OSs. However Windows 7 that was shipped with the machine works fine. Initially i wasn't even able to boot into a live installer CD. During booting (into a live CD or hard drive) the screen would go blank right after loading ACPI module and the computer would not respond to anything including Ctrl+Alt+Del, the only option left out would be hardware power off. I went around on forums (my linuxquestions.org post) begging for help but ultimately it was a teenage linux magazine columnist (Shashwat Pant) who helped me out on gtalk. The solution was to append acpi=off as a kernel parameter in grub. This got linux up and running on my laptop but was not a permanent remedy. acpi=off ended up disabling a lot of options eg - battery was not recognized, function keys behaved in the opposite manner etc. It also caused power button to function as the ones on computers of 90s - i.e when pressed, the laptop would not ask for what is to be done rather it would get switched off ( without the process of shutdown - or holding the power button for a while) right away. And the computer had to be switched off manually even after choosing shutdown from the power menu. Here is the link to the forum I used for all my problems till then.
Attempts to resolve it:
On OpenSUSE, just for fun and learning, I compiled and installed linux kernel 2.6.32 and to my surprise the acpi problem had vanished :). However there were other problems that I had been facing on it (specifically - installing the graphics driver caused display - dragging windows or scrolling text all were jerky and without the driver compiz fusion won't work :( ). And in the process of trying to solve the graphics problem I screwed up OpenSUSE. Arch Linux seemed to be attractive enough and I reckoned that installing every thing one by one on my own might help me recognize the root cause of problems. However the new kernel trick didn't work on Arch, and I was again chasing the same problem. (My post on arch forum.)
I found that while compiling the kernel, the ACPI module can either be compiled into it or as a separate module to be loaded later. I tried both ways and what I found was really demoralizing. Without the acpi=off option the OS behaved quite randomly i.e sometimes it would boot fine and sometimes not. I also tried compile the kernel after disabling those options (in the menuconfig's submenu about acpi) which had deprecated mentioned beside them, with no luck. (i.e not specifying acpi=off causes the same problem that it used to cause initially, irrespective of the options I choose while compiling the kernel).
Recent Development
Today I found that the computer does not hang !!. its just that the screen goes off if I do not specify the acpi=off option. That is while it is booting, the screen goes off right after loading the acpi module but the boot process continues. I knew that after booting the arch installation ( which presently has no graphical desktop environment) prompts me for id and password. Although it was not visible, I keyed in my id and password and then fired reboot command ---- and --- the computer rebooted !!!.
I have not lost hope and am still pursuing the ghastly outline of solution. Any kind of help is welcome !!
Thursday, April 8, 2010
links - text based web browser
It was around midnight, that my room-mate (who is a budding linux geek) saw me downloading kernel files using wget from a terminal without the help of any kind of grahpical web browser. Then we wondered, how cool it would be if we could use a text based web-browser for our general work like checking mail, facebook status, attendance over college's intranet etc. I reckoned, it would be quite fast too because no imager or flash ads would be downloaded.
A few hours later I had accomplished installing xfce4 desktop manager on Arch Linux and was fiddling around with its features (which were nothing except a text editor, a terminal emulator and few configuration utilities). Just then a shortcut for a web-browser caught my eye and I couldn't recall having installed pacakges of firefox or anything. Out of curiosity I clicked it open and bang a terminal window opened up !!! there it was !! I had discovered a text based web-browser !!!
Little bit of fooling around got me familiar with its UI which is nothing except a few menus that emerge when escape key is pressed. I opened google.com (dunno why but google.com is what comes to mind even when what I want to do is just check internet connectivity). There was no limit of his excitement when I introduced Abhinandan to my marvellous discovery. Together we tried exploring a lot of sites on it. It was a new kind of experience looking at the usual web content in text mode. We searched wikipedia for the creator of "links" and checked our gmail accounts. However the intranet utility of our university wouldn't let us log in ( a few months ago we could't log in even from mozilla - only IE was supported :P so no worries). Regular facebook didn't show up properly, however m.facebook.com which is its mobile version, was wonderful, I updated my status and checked notifications.
Then my room-mate suggested how about downloading something .. so we opened an ftp site and pressed enter (which was equivalent to clicking there) on a link. A pop up menu appeared asking what I would like to do with the file ( display or a save). Actually display option opened any file in text mode and displayed its contents - which wasn't something I wanted. Upon choosing save, another popup window appeared which displayed the progress of download. This one even contained an option for continuing the download in background which seemed to be quite useful for this kind of a browser.
And now here I am writing a blog post at about 6 AM using the same geeky browser.
Its not a very impressive but is quite wonderful (atleast for a comp-geek who had never seen something similar). Links sports a download manager, bookmark manager, short history, and a very helpful user's manual:). It can come quite handy when we need to access internet while fixing up something on our linux box. For example I was using my other laptop for accessing the arch linux install guide for installing the distro and now I won't need to. I can visit forums, check facebook status, mail, search for stuff even when I am fiddling around with the OS or am trying to get it back on after screwing it up ;)
A few hours later I had accomplished installing xfce4 desktop manager on Arch Linux and was fiddling around with its features (which were nothing except a text editor, a terminal emulator and few configuration utilities). Just then a shortcut for a web-browser caught my eye and I couldn't recall having installed pacakges of firefox or anything. Out of curiosity I clicked it open and bang a terminal window opened up !!! there it was !! I had discovered a text based web-browser !!!
Little bit of fooling around got me familiar with its UI which is nothing except a few menus that emerge when escape key is pressed. I opened google.com (dunno why but google.com is what comes to mind even when what I want to do is just check internet connectivity). There was no limit of his excitement when I introduced Abhinandan to my marvellous discovery. Together we tried exploring a lot of sites on it. It was a new kind of experience looking at the usual web content in text mode. We searched wikipedia for the creator of "links" and checked our gmail accounts. However the intranet utility of our university wouldn't let us log in ( a few months ago we could't log in even from mozilla - only IE was supported :P so no worries). Regular facebook didn't show up properly, however m.facebook.com which is its mobile version, was wonderful, I updated my status and checked notifications.
Then my room-mate suggested how about downloading something .. so we opened an ftp site and pressed enter (which was equivalent to clicking there) on a link. A pop up menu appeared asking what I would like to do with the file ( display or a save). Actually display option opened any file in text mode and displayed its contents - which wasn't something I wanted. Upon choosing save, another popup window appeared which displayed the progress of download. This one even contained an option for continuing the download in background which seemed to be quite useful for this kind of a browser.
And now here I am writing a blog post at about 6 AM using the same geeky browser.
Its not a very impressive but is quite wonderful (atleast for a comp-geek who had never seen something similar). Links sports a download manager, bookmark manager, short history, and a very helpful user's manual:). It can come quite handy when we need to access internet while fixing up something on our linux box. For example I was using my other laptop for accessing the arch linux install guide for installing the distro and now I won't need to. I can visit forums, check facebook status, mail, search for stuff even when I am fiddling around with the OS or am trying to get it back on after screwing it up ;)
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
wvdial on Arch Linux
Oh well.. that was a very long break from blogging, but I realized that just jotting down what I did to solve my own problems might help me too some time later. What happened was that I had successfully installed wvdial ( the ppp dialer for my Photon plus - oh yes I got one quite a while ago) on Arch Linux approximately 2 months ago. And now when I am trying to install it once again ( just for fun) I am again stuck at the same errors that had taken me whole night to sort out the first time. So I am just trying to keep a record of my own actions :)
Both wvdial and wvstreams are required to be downloaded as wvdial depends on wvstreams. I got wvdial-1.60 and wvstreams-4.6 tarballs which are probably the most recent ones.
wvstreams is to be compiled first.
# ./configure
# make
make halted with an error saying that it needs libdbus-1.so for compiling libwvdbus.so . There was some error in configure file due to which make was looking for libdbus-1.so in the root directory. After a bit of fiddling around I figured out that the configure.mk file was making it do so. So I went around and changed the value of LIBS_DBUS in configure.mk to /usr/lib/libdbus-1.so . and that made it compile fine.
# make install
# ldconfig
Now I moved to compiling and installing wvdial
It created a slight problem by asking for .pc files which I made available by copying the contents of wvstreams-4.6/pkgconfig/ to usr/libs/pkgconfig/ .
Then I came across a serious error in the source code of wvdial-1.60. I looked around on the internet and found a patch for it. Downloaded it and applied it using
# patch -p0 < wvdial-1.60-dirent.patch
this made wvdial to compile fine and run fine too.
# make
# make install
However, I had to add /usr/local/lib to /etc/ld.so.conf and fire ldconfig in order to get the newly installed libraries identified.
And there I was with my internet dialer working fine :)
Both wvdial and wvstreams are required to be downloaded as wvdial depends on wvstreams. I got wvdial-1.60 and wvstreams-4.6 tarballs which are probably the most recent ones.
wvstreams is to be compiled first.
# ./configure
# make
make halted with an error saying that it needs libdbus-1.so for compiling libwvdbus.so . There was some error in configure file due to which make was looking for libdbus-1.so in the root directory. After a bit of fiddling around I figured out that the configure.mk file was making it do so. So I went around and changed the value of LIBS_DBUS in configure.mk to /usr/lib/libdbus-1.so . and that made it compile fine.
# make install
# ldconfig
Now I moved to compiling and installing wvdial
It created a slight problem by asking for .pc files which I made available by copying the contents of wvstreams-4.6/pkgconfig/ to usr/libs/pkgconfig/ .
Then I came across a serious error in the source code of wvdial-1.60. I looked around on the internet and found a patch for it. Downloaded it and applied it using
# patch -p0 < wvdial-1.60-dirent.patch
this made wvdial to compile fine and run fine too.
# make
# make install
However, I had to add /usr/local/lib to /etc/ld.so.conf and fire ldconfig in order to get the newly installed libraries identified.
And there I was with my internet dialer working fine :)
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