How to NOT build a PC in 200 bucks!

Something caught onto me, may be some old d-i-y testosterone still lying around. And then I was just infatuated with this idea of building my own PC. The primary reason is that I'm just sick tired of using the macbook, its all shiny and sleek, but you can't tweak. Well that's as bad a reason could be.

So here I went off in my pursuit of building a decently powerful machine in as little as 200 bucks. I had few things in mind

1. Small form factor
2. Should not suck on my patience like my laptop

Getting point 2 covered was not much of an effort, at least so I thought. So I went web-shopping to get the nuts and bolts. After spending few hours spread across couple of days I realized three things that you shouldn't miss

a. Keep your configuration which "sounds" like made this year aka bleeding edge
b. Get the cheapest one in that
c. Find the one which comes with free shipping!

Point c is very important, you end up getting better stuff for lesser price overall. So based on this I got a dual core processor, 2 gigs of memory, 320g of hdd and a dvd writer and a motherboard which is reasonable enough. (I'm not a gaming person, so I skipped the graphics card and settled for on-board, otherwise the budget would have been over-board).

Now comes the tough problem of point 1. I wanted my desktop to be portable and not look like hey-I'm-from-the-90's boring box. Small things come at a price and I had to shell out a good 50 bucks for a compact case. A little more could have got me really cute cases, but I wasn't building a Wall-E per se.

After the groceries got home, I started with recipe, which last time I had covered in a flat half an hour. But surprise, this time it took me good 2 weeks to get it to work :( Two of the one-in-10-or-100-thousand things happened, damn two of them, how bad is my luck! The RAM didn't work, cause some pompous companies like Corsair make higher frequency sticks than what the spec says (running at 675Mhz instead of 667Mhz) and I learnt it the hard way. I got a Kingston (1000Mhz) finally which is doing great.

And finally I had a working desktop, or was it...the second coming was the the WD hdd, it was just plain dead, and getting it replaced took ten days.

And finally I had a working desktop, or was it...no the Windows CD was not right. I had to replace it.

And finally I had a working desktop, or was it...no the cheap wifi card that I bought doesn't work. I gave up trying to make it work, and settled for a shared internet connection through my laptop :(

And finally I had a working desktop, yes this time for real, with good old Windows(which has caught a malware and already become unsuable as I write, which made me to write this blog in gmail's composer) and the bling with the greeny Opensuse running KDE 4.2.

If you are interested in the details, the approximate break-up

AMD Athlon X2 4200+ & AM2 socket mobo - 90
2G Kingston - 20
320G WD - 50
Slim case - 50
DVD RW - 25
USB Wifi - 15

Round about 250 bucks..not bad eh? So what if my macbook serves as the router.

Mac quack

This post is for the make benefit of fellow mac users.

I have a dual boot system, with Mac OS X and Ubuntu running. I had read somewhere that you need to turn off journaling on Mac's HFS+ filesystem to use it from Linux, so I had religiously done that. Yesterday, I used something from my Mac volume in Linux, hadn't done any writes. Today, when I booted OS X, it just refused to go beyond the initial grey boot time screen. I gave it 20 minutes, then I shut if off. I tried it again, gave it 1hr 30min, my patience called off, and I again shut it off. If something was taking so much time at boot, I was pretty sure there was some pain in the filesystem, and turning journaling off was causing hopelessly long recovery times. But I hadn't expected to wait this long! It was getting ridiculous.

Then, I booted Linux, looked for a possible fix. Found a feasible solution, on Ubuntu forums, it was a bit broken so reproducing it here with fixes. Run the following script as su to fix inconsistent hfs+ volumes. You need build tools and libssl-dev to use this, I had to learn it the hard way.

cd /usr/src
mkdir hfsplus_support
wget http://gentoo.osuosl.org/distfiles/diskdev_cmds-332.14.tar.gz
wget http://www.mythic-beasts.com/resources/appletv/mb_boot_tv/diskdev_cmds-332.14.patch.bz2
tar zxf diskdev_cmds-332.14.tar.gz
bunzip2 -c diskdev_cmds-332.14.patch.bz2 | patch -p0
cd diskdev_cmds-332.14
make -f Makefile.lnx
cp fsck_hfs.tproj/fsck_hfs /sbin/fsck.hfsplus
cd /sbin
ln -s mkfs.hfsplus mkfs.hfs
ln -s fsck.hfsplus fsck.hfsn -s fsck.hfsplus fsck.hfs

Then do a "fsck.hfsplus /dev/your_mac_vol". It will take some time, depending upon how much of the fs is screwed, but much much lesser than OS X's boot time fsck. My volume was repaired in around 10 minutes. Reboot, and your shiny OS X should run like a happy kid after a nap.

I simply can't believe that OS X is incapable of fixing its own stuff. If you read the FAT fs code in Linux kernel, somewhere on the top there are two interesting words "fscking l'users", they need to be replicated somewhere.

The Pursuit of Snappyness

Ubuntu Feisty had me tamed. My distro hopping was down for few months now. Its a great distro, which gives you that rare to find smooth-ride. But I have a big grudge against Ubuntu due to one single thing. Its all i386 code and doesn't feel snappy enough, particularly when my latpop runs on lower frequency of 800Mhz. At 1600Mhz it feels ok, but still not snappy. So I was looking for a able i686 replacement. And PCLinuxOS fits the bill, its a ultra-polished distro. But it has this problem, since the last 4-5 versions that it never completes a shutdown on my laptop. So it was out of question.

Then I read about Fedora 8 test release. I had given up on Fedora for desktop use long back when it was in versions 2 & 3. Something or the other used to be broken all the time. But this time they have changed their minds. Since last version they have started coming up with live-cds, it took them quite some time to realise that stuff in 4 cds can be packed in a single live-cd. And now they also release "desktop" versions which are i686 optimized. Exactly what I was looking far.

So I burnt the stable Fedora 7 desktop live-cd, and took it for a test drive. Liked what I saw, so decided to install it. But I was still skeptical whether it would be good for desktop use. Installation was quick, all hardware running fine, including cpu frequency scaling. I googled how to put multimedia things in place. In a matter of 5 minutes all packages were downloaded and installed by yum ( if there is any contender to apt-get and Debian/Ubuntu's repository size its only yum and Fedora/Redhat). I fired up the browser, flash played fine, so did stage6 divx videos. No copying around plugins or fixing broken symlinks. 5 minutes, and Fedora was running fully loaded! That took more time even on Feisty. I have yet to setup wifi, but with Gnome's Network Manager around its has as easy as it could get. There are some finishing touches that are seen in Ubuntu which are not present, but considering that Fedora has newly ventured into desktop arena, that can be waived.

As for the snappyness, its all there. Nautilus file manager never felt so light nor did the window manager Metacity. Fedora has gained back the lost confidence, and I'm glad. Its nostalgic to see those bluecurve colors once again, which were my very first sights of what Linux looked like way back with Redhat 7. I hope Fedora will soon cater desktop needs better than Ubuntu. But even right now its as good a shining new desktop it can be.

On a side note, with Dell, Acer & Lenovo now shipping Linux installed machines, Linux penetration will definitely soar. And let not those idiots fool you who think you run Linux on desktop just because you want to be different. Tell them to get a better excuse for being out-of-touch with the state-of-art.

What a Feist!

The distro hopper, hops again. I have been using Zenwalk for quite some time now, almost 5 months...wow, thats a record of sorts, I don't really stick with a distro that long. But Zenwalk has had me. It still does. But just out of curiosity (which eventually killed the cat!) I decided to try Ubuntu, Feisty Fawn alpha release 4 (called Herd 4). This is its story.

I was never that impressed with Ubuntu, it always goofed up something or the other on my laptop, in spite of boasting very good hardware support. But Feisty provides state-of-the-art out-of-the-box hardware support. And in spite of not liking Gnome I'm using it since 2 weeks now.

Firstly its not that slow as it felt in previous releases, compared to other distros. It could be because I'm using the 64-bit release which could be bit more optimized compared to the standard x86 one, which is i486 (though the release claims i386). Feisty has great ACPI support. The laptop fans turn on and off at the right time, on my HP laptop's buggy ACPI bios support. The frequency scaling is perfect. Full marks here.

Other hardware like ATI graphics card, touchpad with scrolling, ethernet, usb everything works. USB plug-in and plug-out gives nice balloon messages on the desktop, and a single click on a device name mounts it. CDs, DVDs autoplay. Installing wifi drivers using ndiswrapper might be bit tricky for novices, but thats the only hitch. Again you get all Windows drivers to be used with ndiswrapper on Ubuntu's extraordinary package repository. So even that should be fairly easy for newbies.

Multimedia keyboard support is surprisingly better than in Windows XP! Theres also layouts of Indian languages installed by default...though I'm looking for phonetic layout which is much easier to use.

The wow is now
Play a .avi file that needs some xvid video codec. The media player initially says it doesn't find the right codec. Ubuntu then spawns a search in its repository by itself, finds the right codecs with all dependencies, downloads and installs them on a single click. The media player now plays your file, flawlessly.


NetworkManager applet in gnome now gives a list of wifi networks in range, and you can connect with one click, with WPA/WEP support. Its as good as it can get.

Other work around that is needed for 64-bit are running Flash, which is still doesn't have a 64-bit version! There is wonderful thing called nspluginwrapper that wraps 32-bit plugins and runs them under 64-bit Firefox. Ultra neat.

Suspend and hibernate worked initially, though I did something due to which it no longer works...still have to find out. But it should work on most machines, as it worked nicely even in past releases.

Overall, this release nails all things right in place. Finally Linux is ready for the laptops, its been for desktops since ages, but laptops need lot of good hardware support to work efficiently, and its in very good shape now. With open source community offering free development of drivers to hardware firms, on providing the specifications, the reverse engineering effort behind that should reduce, and we'll see much more hardware that supports Linux from its very first release.

Suse 10.1: a dot one for Suse, a giant leap for Linux

Suse 10.1 has been released after some 14-15 alhpa-beta releases. The look has been changed, though consistent with Suse's typical glossy-glassy look. The boot-splash has improved, so has the UI look-n-feel. Some of the bleeding edge technologies have been incorporated in this release, and they just work!

First is Beagle, the indexing daemon. It has been integrated into browser, mail everywhere so that it can keep track of all information. It has now got a good frontend, including a Google desktop search like applet in the taskbar. This is a direct competitor of searching-indexing tools in OS X and the upcoming Vista.

Second is a new system called Rug to manage system and software updates. Its a higher level service that can have different types of services like online updates below it. It also shows up in the taskbar.

Third is offcourse XGL. All you need is a driver for your graphics card(which should support 3D acceleration) up and running. After that running XGL is a matter of some configuration changes. Novell has even made a XGL control panel nicely placed inside Gnome control panel(and probably KDE too, but i haven't installed KDE). So now i have fading, wobbling, transparent windows and rotating desktops with some rain drops too ! Aero who?

All good, Suse seems to fail where it comes to snappiness of applications. Everything feels a bit sluggish. Booting time is still considerably long, and so is halt time. Yast2 continues to be THE control panel an OS can have but is still slow in doing things.

Novell is also working on some breakthrough technology that can install drivers without the user needing to compile it on his machine. This is required for kernel drivers as the module's and kernel's compiler version, kernel version and architure has to match. With this new technology all versioning information is conveyed to the remote repository which will then provide the required kernel module. This will very much ease out things for both users and hardware providers, at the cost of some irritation to purists, as this scheme allows and advocates binary only drivers.

Category [ _Linux_ ] [ _Review_ ]

Xubuntu, XGL and the road ahead

Xubuntu is a Ubuntu distribution with Xfce as the desktop environment. This should say enough on how good Xfce is going. Recently i had posted a review of Xfce 4.4 beta. It has evolved a lot. The newest Xfce can be configured to look like Gnome...and even behave like it. And you won't even know the difference ! Compare the install size of Xfce to 18-20MB to that of Gnome, 200-300MB. And Xubuntu excels in proving how productive and nice-looking a Xfce desktop can be.

Using Xfce has made the Xubuntu to be sized to some 380MB compared to a full cd required for the standard Ubuntu Dapper...all because of the bloated Gnome. Xubuntu has all the things required to make the distro a Ubuntu. And yes you can use utilities like EasyUbuntu and automatix to install all the non GPLed things, like graphics drivers, java, flash, dvd codecs and stuff.

The part where Xubuntu scores over other *Ubuntus is offcourse speed and the low memory foot print of Xfce. May be its the Dapper thats making all the difference, seems a lot has improved since Breezy Badger that i had last tried. For me things like out-of-the-box frequency scaling on my Turion 64 and suspend are charming. Hibernate still fails, probably because of the ATI graphics driver that still needs to be installed. But this is good progress.

All the recent distros that i have tried like Suse 10, FC 5 and now Xubuntu all seem to be making great strides in taking Linux to the next level. And as the rumour is Linux is already prepared for the onslaught (really ??) that Vista might bring, with things like XGL, Beagle and ever increasing number of drivers.

Novell is so bullish of their yet-to-be released Novell Linux Desktop (NLD), that they say this will replace Windows desktops in corporates and they are even planning to ship NLD as OEM software. If theres even some part truth in this that is very good for the Linux Desktop since components of NLD will eventually come to the open community, as did XGL.

For those who don't know what XGL is, check this out.

Update:

I installed XGL after a lot of fight to get ATI proprietary drivers operational... the problem was that Ubuntu Dapper is broken atleast when it comes to kernels and kernel sources. 64-bit kernel didnt work, kernel source had an error in some usb device file and something called DRM was turned on which is not good for ATI drivers. After going through these issues and reboots, and more reboots, finally ATI fglrx got up. Then it was a 5 min tinkering to get XGL and Compiz showing off, that too on Xfce !

XGL can provide a lot of eye-candy, but it can be tamed down to make everyday productive desktop a bit merrier, something like Mac OS X does. XGL will and does beat Vista's graphical fancies. It is important to note that XGL, Vista, Mac all use 3D hardware acceleration to achieve all the effects. Enlightenment doesn't !! Now you know why E is E !

Category [ _Linux_ ] [ _Review_ ]

Xfce 4.4 : Nice

Xfce 4.4 beta1 was out. I decided to try it.

I have found Xfce as a very productive desktop since the first time i tried it. But somehow the sad file manager, xffm kept me away from using it as the default desktop environment. But the new Xfce 4.4 sports the new file manager Thunar. Lot has been said and heard about Thunar, its UI design principles and the way it was designed to be non-intrusive from ground-up.


Thunar looks good, is pretty light weight and the frame structure looks friendly. There is a way to add right-clock options to the menu, so you can add things even like "Enqueue in XMMS" using xmms -e command ! But, there is no samba and ftp support. These features could be added i guess as it supports extensions. But due to this it falls a little short of being as usable as Nautilus or Konqueror, which do tons of other tasks too. But again, Thunar does what a file manager should do, why should it burn cds and mount remote shares ? But convergence is the wave; integration of applications with the environment is near to seamless in DEs like KDE, and Xfce is way to behind in this respect. But one should not expect such things from a light-weight, 18MB sized desktop environment.


As for Xfce, the desktop, there are lot of small improvements ... like better panel controls, panel resizing in pixels, Xfce window manager provides newer borders, ALT+TAB window seems to be improved to show things like user's picture for gaim chat window etc.. Other nice but very different feature from a traditional desktop is that now a desktop icon is created for every window running on that desktop ! So you can resume work in a window by clicking the icon. I dont know if this is according to some UI guidelines but its a feature i would rarely use, mainly cause its not my habit to click desktop icons to restore windows. Mousepad is now the default text editor and its just the right Notepad clone ever.

But as a beta release this is pretty stable, not a crash yet. The thing i found missing was some icons on the Xfce-settings main form.

I have been on Freerock Gnome ( a Slackware deviant of standard Gnome) for past few days and i can say that Xfce is catching up fast to be a full fledged replacement of Gnome and still be a lot lighter. But Gnome will be going the heavy-duty way in future with 3D-acceleration equipped window manager and all.

Category [ _Tech_ ] [ _Review_ ]

Vector Linux...think speed

Yes. I have tried a new distro again. I wouldnt call this exactly new, because i had tried it earlier. It hadnt really impressed me then. The linux distribution i am talking about is Vector Linux. It has different editions, the one i am using is SOHO 5.1 (small office and home use). About an year ago i had tried Vector, i think version 4.2. Then i felt that it was good just for old computers.

Installation

The installer is text based, and has little options, and it doesnt make intelligent decisions like what software to install for what space, like YaST2 of SuSE. But it does what its basic purpose is, and thats that. The installation time is pretty small, for all the installer does is copy huge tarballs to the disk.

Configuration

For a relatively small distro like Vector the system configuration is pretty nice. It has a thing called VASM, that is the central management unit. It is concise, no frills like flashy icons and animations like in Mandriva's control center or even YaST2. It gives control of most of the things that are commonly configured, and you dont need to run any commands or worse, edit any configuration files.

First Boot

Awesome. Graphical lilo, boot splash and all. It detected my sound-card, the ATI graphics card, the laptop's lcd display...everything, without a single hitch. I didnt even have to configure the 3D acceleration support. ATI's open-module is alive and kicking ! Mind it this is the only system where i had never to fight for any hardware detection. Even biggies like Ubuntu and Fedora cant boot without proper boot-time options on my system.

First look

The SOHO edition comes with KDE and Xfce. I installed Fluxbox and IceWM too, just too check things. Vector Linux is a fine tuned distro with customizations all over, in all desktop environments. That gives it a consistent look. The most striking thing you notice is the speed. Applications startup really fast. Be it KDE's qt-based applications or GTK based ones, or even bloats like Firefox and OpenOffice. OpenOffice startup time for when invoked for the second time is hardly 1 sec. That rocks ! Even in non-qt environments like Xfce, the KDE apps startup real fast.

I donno what the Vector guys have done while bundling packages, but packages seem highly optimized and it shows. Great work. May be its the Slackware genes it has that has made Vector that fast.

Multimedia

Now this is one distro that gives you completely multimedia support, out-of-the-box. The mp3 files play, and so do all-known-formats in the universal mplayer. Firefox comes with properly configured plugins which is a very nice touch. 10 out of 10 on this front.

Small things

Vector pays attention to the small things that make a difference. Like, good theming of GTK-1 applications that otherwise look as bad as Motif based applications when used with default themes. GTK1 and GTK2 theme switchers have been provided as well.

Applications

Vector comes with a wide variety of applications for all things one can do. It has some 6-7 different editors, for varied tastes. Though i didnt like the fact that vim is missing in the default install, it comes with just vi. Then there is the Bluefish editor for web page design and editing, gmplayer and xine, OpenOffice and KMyMoney a MS Money like accounting tool. There some 3-4 types of image viewers (including gqview that i like very much, its fast). Theres Sylpheed too, for mail, its a lightweight mail client. And about everything for chatting/downloads/wifi. The only thing i missed badly was AmaroK. Its THE music player, hopefully Vector has a package for it.

The SOHO install came with all the development packages required. I compiled some plugins for Xfce and i didnt need to install a single devel package. I really cant believe Vector comes with so much in just 2GB of install, and a single-cd default installer.

Conclusion

Well theres one more good thing that it comes with the 2.4 kernel too, so you can use your older drivers. This distribution needs some more publicity and i am damn sure it will climb the distrowatch charts to be in the top 5. I rate it the best, cause of its pre-configured settings, out-of-the-box functionality and sheer, raw speed that Linux is boasted for.


Category [ _Linux_ ] [ _Review_ ]

GoblinX

No sooner i get some time to spare i am back at my regular business...

GolinX the newest distro i am playing with. I must admit that this the very first distro that has got me impressed, as in impressed.

Lets start with installation. Its a live-cd that boots cleanly ( more or less ). There is a small utility GoInstall that will install the system to a hard drive partition you choose in a matter of 2-3 minutes. The good thing is that it comes with all necessary applications and a handful of window managers namely Fluxbox, KDE, Window Maker, Enlightenment-16 and XFCE, all packed in a 330 MB cd ! You wont find development packages, its not really meant to be development platform.

Right from boot time you realise that this distro has a personality of its own...a custom carefully desinged look that is consistent across all UI that you will see including GTK, Qt themes, icon sets, splash screens, bootsplash...and even things like application makeovers like for Gaim they have changed its icon set to match the overall theme and the Gaim main window image. Gkrellm, a system monitor that resides on the desktop has some good custom made themes too. This is called attention to detail.

You may feally dreary initially of the colors used ubiquitously, shades of orange, yellow and red and even the iconset. But once you are a bit accustomed to the kind of look they want to create it feels very appealing. And believe me they sure know how to design the looks when Goblinx has prestigiuos affiliations like DeviantArt.com and it shows, everywhere. The wallpapers are very DeviantArt types except for one.(the fluxbox default wallpaper, it is artistic but obscene...things like this shouldnt be put into something like an OS distribution when it is so public)

It has its own style of installing software in form of modules, .mo files. Originality and creativity is seen in every nook and corner of this distro. Even the console mode has a designer look. Beauty seems to be their primary concern and that is well understood from their motto "Because beauty is basic...". KDE Desktop has been changed to an extent its not recognizable...thats very cool. It uses a Karamba theme called K-tower that has been made specially for GolinX.

It comes with finest variety of games you can find packaged with any distro. Though am not a game fanatic, not even a intermittent enthusiast, i found the games pretty cool particulary Abuse and Cube, it feels so nice to see such kind of graphic rendering on Linux platform.

Overall GoblinX is a desinger distro and they have a lot of room for improvement and i am expecting some outstanding work in their future releases.

Somethings that i would want in GoblinX are...

1. A GTK theme switcher which is missing.
2. A generic theme switcher...which can change themes across all toolkits, be it GTK Qt or something else.
3. A central configuration manager.
4. A sleeker theme with colors admirable by common users.
   

Categories [ _Linux_ ] [ _Review_ ]

More reviews

I have discovered that i find it pretty interesting to write reviews. Reviews about just anything. Be it a movie, a book or any damn thing over which i feel i have a opinion to state. So here i go again.

Xplorer²

Xplorer² is a windows explorer replacement for file management. Most of you people might think why would you need a better file management tool. Its my bet try this and you will know why! And you will never look back. It really has redefined file management for me. Its very light weight, has a lots of interesting features like

Really cool keyboard shortcuts.
Mutli-pane interface like Mozilla Firefox.
Quick viewer
Mass rename
Split & Merge
Shred
Nice viewing filters
Highly configurable

and a few more. The most interesting part of this little application is the memory usage drops drastically once you minimize it. In all a very well thought of utility. If its makers are listening, please add this to the wishlist: a linux port.


Elive

This is a live-cd linux distribution with up-n-running Enlightenment 17. If you dont know what E17 is, chullu bhar paani me dub maru. Thats what i would say. On a bit moderate front check my previous posts 1 2 . Well what can i say about E17, its just ahead of time, quoted by many as the most jazziest piece of software ever written. As for Elive, it looks good only when booted live. If you install it to hard disk, you run into the most broken release of a software ever. Even the E17 desktop isnt configured if you check it after hdd install. The X server is way old, Xfree86, and it doesnt configure well on my machine atleast. Leave alone this, you even find the "Morphix CD" as the cd name, probably the distribution from which Elive started. Guys...guys, please dont release things if they look as hap hazard as a godown with glass walls.

Dont even try Elive till it has a "beta" release atleast. And if you are so desperate to see E17 in action, compile it from source, yes that has become a bit easy than it earlier was ;)


Category [ _Tech_ ] [ _Review_ ]

Introducing: CloneD

In the last 1-2 years i have installed, tried & played with a lot of linux distributions. Right from the very small ones to the big-b's. I got to see where all they shine, and where decline. I once toyed with this idea of making a distro of my own, I even sent out the proposal to some colleagues at work, unfortunately only two responded & i dropped it there.

But i maintained that one day i shall make my very own distro. The thing that was the missing then was the enthusiasm, but that was a phase. Now the idea sprung back to life again, this time i thought i would do it alone, heck if nobody is with me.

Offcourse when you make a distro, there has to be purpose for it, it has to be different. It has to have that "value" tag very much there & most importantly the users should gain from it. This is not for me, or the distinguished *nixers, it is for them, it is for making-life-easy. So here it is finally, Clone^D

The zeroth build is up & the baby runs, more details on project Clone^D <-- here. More to come & more to go...and it will be a while before the first build is released.

PS: If this project goes down the history line of Linux Distros, theres one more idea, its called Clone^E

Category [ _Linux_ ]

Putting older computers to use...

My Dad's machine (600Mhz Celeron, 64 MB RAM) was ill. The doctor has hospitalised her. Till then he has given a legacy Celeron 266Mhz as a substitute.

He gave it with Windows98 loaded. But it came with a virus & my Dad was frustrated. So i thought why not put some old-machine-compatible linux. I tried Vector Linux...nope its not all that lightweight & Abiword (Dad uses a computer for Word processors) runs like a Titanic in shallow waters. Then i thought lets try MiniSlax. But then i thought i should put something with a striking resemblance to Windows.

Just by coincidence I came across Puppy Linux. Though the name may sound weird the distro has been made with a lot of sanity.

>> Its just 60MB, live-cd that can be installed.

>> It copies the entire 60MB to ramdisk & your CDROM gets free to use...unlike any other live-cd distro i have heard.

>> Since it runs from RAM, its as they call "blazing fast".

>> You wont believe me if i said it comes with Word processors, Spreadsheet, Accounting softwares, Browsers, Image viewers-editors, Instant messenger, Games, Vector graphics applications, Text editors, File managers, Audio players, Video player ( again with all formats support), cd-dvd writers, Backup utilities, Dialers(3 or 4) the list just goes on.

>> The better (for Dad like users) part is that it uses FVM95 as the Window manager that looks exactly like Windows interface.

>> It frees the Windows user from knowing Linux internals. Comes with mounting utilities & the like. The X configurator is pretty good & simple & by magic or what just works for older computers. It ran X on a vintage Vintron analog B/w monitor !!

>> Installation on disk is easy & comes with full partition as well as Windows-file type(UMSDOS) partition support.

The most important part was whether it ran faster when i installed it on disk. And bingo it did.In some way it has restored my losing faith in Linux being the "fast thing that can run on old computers". The ease-of-use factor of Puppy Linux rivals that of Windows itself & this statement has been made with beta tests [by Dad :)].


Category [ _Linux_ ] [ _Review_ ]

The MiniSlack - cut the crap.

Continuing the string of LIGHT n SMALL. This time on linux. After some googling I came across a distro called as MiniSlack. This time lets do the review a bit formally.

Why MiniSlack:

1. Small install size, 1.1GB if everything is installed. And inspite of doing this you aren't left with good-for-nothing just-desktop-linux like Ubuntu & the clones. Its a complete development platform that you get installed, loaded with all development tools & languages(Python, Perl, Ruby,..).

2. Based on the rock solid fame Slackware.

3. This is for those who think installing 4GB of crap is unjustified, so what if its a 5 star flagged distro.

4. It feels better if disk space is used for non-system stuff.

5. The name.

Inside:

The policy followed by MiniSlack is that there should be just one application of each type (exceptions are text editors & terminal emulators). So you wont see 10 different audio players & 3 different movie players.

1. Theres just one BMP(Beep Media Player, a fork of xmms) audio player & all-ends-here GXine video player. They do satisfy all the multimedia needs with support for almost all formats.

2. And theres a better default text editor called Leafpad(in which i am writing this) say bye bye to gedit, kedit ,kwrite, kate etc. If you want to write code its vi, dont expect syntax highlighting & the related with Leafpad, its meant to be light & simple, not full featured.

3. The default desktop & window manager is Xfce 4.2.2 & believe me it is as much usable as any other & you do feel at home with it. Its plugins like the Xffm (file manager) are packed with usability improving features.

4. It comes with Anjuta, the IDE & Bluefish HTML editor. I have never setup Anjuta but people say its good. Bloggers, theres Bluefish.

Considering the range of applications covered it doesnt feel like anybody would need anything more, except for may be OpenOffice that is substituted by Abiword & Gnumeric(spreadsheet).

Suited for:

1. A person who has used linux before. It doesnt really come with click-n-run config tools for novice users.

2. Its a developer's linux, but one who wants everything from it. Its like a MUV compared to a SUV.

USP:

1. All up & running, featured packed Linux with a Single CD install, that too 400MB.

2. Its light like a feather & runs like a horse.

PS: The universe is available in Slackware's repositories so dont worry about finding your favourite app's package. If not theres a utility to convert rpms to Slackware tgz's, rpm2tgz. And heres a screenshot.

Category [ _Linux_ ] [ _Review_ ]

Being a SuSEr

Doing more firsts in my life...bought, yes you read it right, bought SuSE 9.3. Its kinda weird, but the first software i ever bought happens to be from open source.Obvious question people ask is

Why ?

> Firstly its cheap. Just $15.45 shared among some eight people which comes to around 100 bucks. I dont mind paying 100 bucks for a state-of-art Linux. And here the term holds more than true.

> Everything in SuSE has been fine tweaked to near perfection. Be it boot splash, Xen virtualization support, UML (user mode linux) support, the look-n-feel. Xen & UML support turns up even in the control panel & by all means SuSE YaST control centre is THE best centralized management tool u'll see in any os.

> SuSE 9.3 is much better improvement over 9.1 that i was using earlier.SuSE always represented a linux where everything just works & it really does, with 9.3, better.

The new & improved KMail 1.8 has made me switch from Thunderbird. Importing your mails & address books from any mail client is supported in KMail. It is packed with a lot of settings & integrates very well with KDE, goes into the systray & displays number of unread mails as an overlay over the systray icon. Only thing i missed was the RSS feed support. But with Akregator you dont feel like using anything else for collecting feeds. It too comes with full KDE integration...KDE has become a benchmark when it comes to usability & productivity of desktop environments.

Dare anybody say linux is not ready for desktop ( the guy on BBC Clickonline
show did !)

a SuSE user.

Category [ _Linux_ ] [ _Review_ ]

The future is DEFINITELY Enlightenment

GTK developers are talking about improving X rendering. They want seamless blending, desktop grass that is swooshed gently by mouse movement, snow flakes flying around nautilus n all. Rasterman replies, Enlightenment has it all n much more,now. E17 is going to be revolution in desktop graphics. The futuristic desktops you see in movies are just a breath away...

N heres my desktop with the good old E16.

Category [ _Tech_ ] [ _Review_ ]

The Future is Enlightenment.

Am a wanderer. Always searching something new. different. I tumbled upon something i had seen earlier but didnt notice. The visit this time has made me settle there, for some time to come. Am talking about Enlightenment, THE ENLIGHTENMENT. Its a window manager, desktop rolled in one.

KDE, GNOME have so predictable looks, behaviour, besides being heavy, yes GNOME too. XFCE is like a lighter GNOME, but is still very...what can you say...so much like a DE should be. Fluxbox, WindowMaker though very light, themable n all look very primitive. Then spare some moments, have a look at a beauty called Enlightenmnent. Its strikingly aesthetically appealing, stylish & highly configurable & interoperable with other desktops. Its themes absolutely rock.

For people who dont like to change their default desktop looks even by a pixel, statutory warning, Enlightenment is not for them. Its for people like me who like to customise things upto the limits permittable, & sometimes beyond.

The surprising fact is that Enlightenment has these futuristic kinda looks since some time. The next version E17 is due since ages, but the team is working on it. Rasterman must have been GOD.

Category [ _Tech_ ] [ _Review_ ]

The Omnibus blog

I missed a thousand things that could have gone on this space.So let me touch everything...

Nowadays am on a roller coaster ride as far as watching movies goes. I am watching films, all genres of them, and most importantly at an enormous devouring rate. Watched National Treasure...its an ok doke.The plot cannot be said as inspired by The Da Vinci code, but a lot more than that. Though the good thing about the movie is that you dont get distracted from it at any time. Then came Sky Captain & the World of Tomorrow. The entire picture is stylized, including its name to depict the science fiction types of the 70s n 80s. The artwork, FX are astounding, a lot of effort has gone onto it. However that effort does not reiterate in the storyline or storytelling, either.

Followed by this was Finding Neverland. Boy, what a film. Great story, the making of Peter Pan, great camera work & one of the most eye candy work can be seen in the way the director uses special effects, subtlely yet impressive. The scenes blend from fact to fiction n back seamlessly.A shot where the characters are in the midst of a ocean is really cool. The waves are shown of something like curved metal pieces moving up n down...truly amazing. Johnny Depp rules, be it this, Pirates, Hell,Sleepy Hollow or Chocolat.

Am reading two books...Carl Sagan's Cosmos, supposedly the #1 bestseller in science fiction history. Its about astronomy, humanity n a lot of rich language. The other is Richard Bach's One. Its philosophy a lot of it, inspirational, rolled into science fiction n implied introspection.The vastness of its context is breathtaking. Here too he keeps on mentioning that Jonathan Livingston Seagull is his "fireworks" book. It is surely my next read, another one waiting is a sci-fi by Arthur C Clarke.

As this blog has now turned more into a review magazine of sorts, let me add one more review to it. SuSE Linux. Great installer, something they call YaST, still to figure out its meaning,maybe Yet Another Suse Terminal:) Suse is way ahead of other distros when it comes to making a complete, rich os. Everything in SuSEland just works. Be it mp3, video or even Wine, the windows emulator. Though Linux is no longer in a position where it would need Wine, but it is a good application to have. The default look is ...very eye candy, nice glossy crystal icons ( for those who dont know crystal icons are a SuSE property), nice themes. Many features that RedHat seems to have plugged in these days in Fedora Cores, are there in SuSE since some time. The nice thing is that u get a feel of a complete os in SuSE, which somehow i feel is absent in Fedoras though Mandrake comes close, very.A detail i noticed is that the /boot comes with a symlink of initrd too, unlike all linices i have seen which have ones only for vmlinuz n system.map. Attention to detail, thats SuSE.

Category [ _Review_ ] [ _Linux_ ] [ _Film_ ]

FC

Linux surely needs a lot of uniformity & integrity to
be plugged on. I was trying to install RH9 but it
crashed while installing boot loader giving disk
geometry errors, but when i did the same with FC3 it
worked, the reason was...i had installed FC2 earlier.
Thats really really frightening.

The troubles dont end here, just cause i thought
installation of FC3 would fail too i selected minimal
packages...n i installed the XFCE desktop. Now comes
the real fun...theres no way in XFCE by which i could
install gnome or kde from my cds. I tried running the
autorun script from the disc 1 which brings that
install screen of packages (the place where u select
kde, x, dev tools etc). But it asks for other discs,
for that you have to umount disc 1 & hey autorun loses
its base !!

This is ridiculously frustrating !!

Finally i had to settle by doing
yum install gnome*
( for further disgust "yum install gnome" doesnt work)
Now this is ok just cause i have more than enough
bandwidth here at work..for otherwise the only
solution would have been to copy the required
discs/rpms on hard drive....n curse the people who
thought of including XFCE in FC3 & not installing
"gnorpm"(a package handling tool for installed system)
when u install just XFCE.

People, we need some more lateral thinking here !

Category [ _Linux_ ]

O-Yes

Its a interesting thing, what to write, lets go technical for a while....changing gears.. khatak.. khatak. Recently in the free time that i get at work i have been doing a lot of exploring...quenching my thirst as much as i can. I went through installing a lot of OSes, played with them till i got bored and am back to my 2 os state, Linux ( generally some flavor of RedHat / Fedora) and Windows( good old nice clean pleasing Windows ).

First was Mandrake. i had this tremendous crush on Mandrake...its good, nice n undoubtedly the cleanest, user friendly ( thats an important term ) Linux. The best part is it looks a million bucks
with the Galaxy look, sleek, shiny silver. Everything is a finished work in Mandrake world. U want to install something...on other Linices u'll have to go through getting source tgz's , compiling and
installing if at all it comes out clean.Phew !! On Mandrake u always get a .rpm, the community is so strong, they keep there interests well protected. I donno why the Mandrake people dont market it for servers and enterprise uses. Its a, all included, for everyone kinda distro. Its time will come...

Next was Lycoris, a less heard distro around here. Its the Linux with WindowsXP experience. The default desktop is very well customised, the control panel astonishingly looks like WindowsXP's.
Its a very nice looking, neatly customised os. Installation is easier than any other distro i have seen. The artwork is appealing, professional. Microsoft supposedly is porting MS Office to Lycoris.

Then i checked out a very small Live linux, DamnSmallLinux( DSL ). Its just 55MB !! N it has everything from X, browser, pdf reader, xmms...everything a normal user would need. It manages to be so small cause it uses something called as FluxBox for desktop instead of heavy weights KDE or GNOME.( in RTC i found two desktops, IceWM and Xfce which are very light n look cool too, Xfce is a serious competition to KDE / GNOME n it runs with a base of 21 MB only ! )

DSL also has a hdd install option which needs 200MB space, n its all in one command. Way Cool.

Then was FreeBSD....@##$%$%^*. People say its fast, runs Linux /Windows binaries, n more its the REAL Unix. Believe me when i say its pain to install it even for those who know Linux in n out. Damn it doesnt install on a non-primary partition. If somebody can configure its X...lets bet. May be after all the trouble its worth...but who cares after so much grey cells frying...It needs a serious makeover.

I hvent still mentioned Windows Live, its nice too on the ways of Knoppix, Freesbie.