Obama… getting powerful!!

Looks like Obama has more followers than God himself!!

Suffering from the cluttered-gnome-panel syndrome??

Are you suffering from a cluttered gnome panel because you have the habit of experimenting?? Well, I am!! Here is a screenshot of my panel:

These are what flood my panel: The standard gnome menu, My application launchers(Firefox,Pidgin,Deluge,Bluetooth file sharing,Synaptic,Terminal), Music Control Applet, Eyes, Netspeed Applet, Tomboy, Force Quit, Notification Area (Banshee,Bluetooth Applet,Receive Files Via Bluetooth,Pidgin,Tracker,Gnome-Do,Power Manager,Network Manager,SCIM), Volume Control, Brightness Applet, Clock , a separator and the Fast User Switch Applet.

I just got my Ubuntu CD…

I just got the free Ubuntu CD shipped by Canonical! Thanks to the Canonical team for the help. I will make sure I will “Pass it on!”.

To request free CDs goto https://shipit.ubuntu.com/

A post on two ads…

This is something I have been wanting to write for a long time. At least, a part of it. I would like to share with you two advertisements, one which is my favorite and the other which I hate the most!!

1.Harpic

Yeah! I am referring to the one in which a guy goes door to door cleaning toilets! I don’t know why they have advertisements like these. Imagine having to see this when you are eating… Yuck!!

2.Vodafone

Vodafone ads never ceases to amaze us. No one would have forgotten the girl with the dog. The cute white people of the new vodafone ads have achieved more glamour than the IPL players themselves. My neighbour has a boy who is in Kindergarten. I don’t think he understands cricket. But he watches IPL with his father and laughs with the vodafone people. I recieved a forwarded message this evening. I’ll list some of the content here. (The author does not bear responsibility for what is mentioned below).
The cute white people are named zoo-zoo. Vodafone has made 30 ads at 30 crores featuring this zoo-zoos. Already 15 has been released. Rest will be released between the IPL matches. Little known is the fact that zoo-zoos are not animation. They are actually humans inside costumes.  They are all females who are short and thin and they were selected from drama theatres in and around Mumbai.

Taming the jackalope…

Ubuntu 9.04,

Jaunty Jackalope

I have been waiting to reorganize my hard disk for a month. Release of jaunty was of course, the best time for this. I can’t still believe I broke my wrist on the day of the release… Now I have to install Ubuntu ‘Single-handedly’ in my laptop(Lenovo Y410)

The torrent was well seeded. The CD image was downloaded within a litte over an hour. I couln’t find a blank CD, so I created a bootable USB drive using the USB startup disk creator in Ubuntu 8.10.

The live usb-stick booted without any trouble. The installation was a breeze with a few welcome changes to the installer. The time zone selecion method has changed. Also the partitioner. This time I obeyed the tech-gurus and gave a seperate partition for /home. Of course all the partitions were ext4 (the default was ext3, but I couldn’t wait to try it out). A cup of coffee and the installation was done. Now to try out the the long awaited release…

I was greeted by cool new usplash and GDM themes… and the boot time…wow! less than 20 secs…

But oh! no compiz! I tried to enable that and failed. A bit of googling told me my graphic card was blacklisted or something. So i created a file ~/.config/compiz/compiz-manager with content “SKIP_CHECKS=yes” and then ran compiz –replace. Presto! My desktop was all flashy again!!

Next thing I indented to do was to customize my firefox and pidgin. I had earlier taken backups of .mozilla and .purple folders from my home folder in intrepid. I simply copied this to my home folder. I could not believe my eyes when I started firefox. Everything was there like before.. my bookmarks, addons, saved passwords, everything. Pidgin was restored too. I had to install the plugins again. But all configuration was restored.

I installed deluge instead of the default torrent client Transmission. I could continue the unfinished downloads without difficulty. Cheese was needed to take pictures using the webcam. For those who like small games, install frozen bubble. It is one of my favorites.

The new notification system is awesome. Brasero is now the default CD creator. The indicator applet is good. But I got tired of it after some time and removed it. The tracker search and deskbar applet are missing. I installed tracker and indexed my home folder.

I installed all multimedia plugins along with vlc. My whole music collection is now OGG. But I knew I would need these codecs for later. Vlc really disappointed me. It opened all the videos in two seperate windows and there were no controls in full screen mode. I couldn’t find a way to change this. May be I’ll have to wait for an update.

I was actually going to check whether gcc worked when I found out that vim was absent. There was vi.. but still..
It was a good thing that I read A byte of vim by Swaroop C.H. Or else I wouldn’t know navigation could be done using h,j,k,l because vi didn’t support the arrow keys. gcc worked fine. I installed vim with the plugins and wrote the .vimrc configuration file.

Ubuntu developers have disabled Ctrl+Alt+Backspace Combination for restarting X.  Problem was solved by running sudo apt-get install dontzap && sudo dontzap –disable.

The computer Janitor is a welcome addition. But here is something funny.

I dont think any end-user will cleanup  after this message.
I use replacements for certain default applications now. Like vlc instead of totem, banshee instead of Rythmbox, Deluge instead of transmission etc.

I have been using this for over a week now. I will have to say this is yet another fantastic distro from the free world!!

Happy GNU year, readers…

I wish all my readers a FREE and Happy GNU year…
Now, a word about my New year resolution!! Well, I have decided that I will make frequent blog posts this year.
If you don’t see too many posts after this one, blame it on the non-availability of internet connection..
Good Night!!!

Testing the blog applet for gnome panel…

Just came across a gnome panel applet.

Package name : gnome-blog

FSUGTSR : A WINDOW TO FREEDOM

FSUGTSR

I have never been this happy when writing a blog post. We just returned after the very first, successful event of the Free Software users’ Group, Thrissur, ‘A WINDOW TO FREEDOM’. The program was a big hit. Finally all the hard work payed off. The registrations were around 400.

Prof.Manoj Kumar, HOD, CSE, GEC,Thrissur inaugurated the function.

The talks were all illuminating(with an exception of mine. …well, a demo of compiz fusion has some limits). The following people handled the sessions.

Hiran -Free software philosophy

Mahesh – Introduction to GNU/Linux

Hussain – Introduction to malayalam computing

Aswin(me) – Compiz fusion and desktop environments

Suresh – Malayalam Input Methods

Jain -Commonly used GNU/Linux tools.

Devidas & Alex -Ubuntu Installation Demo

Unni – Troubleshooting

DVDs of various distros were provided to the attendees.We provide them Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian Lenny and BOSSlinux. C-DAC provided us the DVDs of BOSSlinux. The install fest was a success. People came with laptops to get them installed with GNU/Linux. We installed Ubuntu 8.04.

The ‘developers’ had a little talk after that. And then we had a masala dosa each.

Future plans of FSUGTSR wil be promptly posted. For those who have not yet joined, please click here to join our mailing list.

The next planned event is Insignia 3.0, Hackerdom conducted by the CSE Dept. of Govt. Engineering college, Thrissur.