Prakash Advani's Blog

From a Rough Guide to India:

“It is impossible not to be astonished by India. Nowhere on Earth does humanity present itself in such a dizzying, creative burst of cultures and religions, races and tongues. Enriched by successive waves of migration and marauders from distant lands, every one of them left an indelible imprint which was absorbed into the Indian way of life. Every aspect of the country presents itself on a massive, exaggerated scale, worthy in comparison only to the superlative mountains that overshadow it. It is this variety which provides a breathtaking ensemble for experiences that is uniquely Indian. Perhaps the only thing more difficult than to be indifferent to India would be to describe or understand India completely. There are perhaps very few nations in the world with the enormous variety that India has to offer. Modern day India represents the largest democracy in the world with a seamless picture of unity in diversity unparalleled anywhere else.”

One more reason to use Linux, if you aren’t already.

From a CNet article.

“Microsoft has begun patching files on Windows XP and Vista without users’ knowledge, even when the users have turned off auto-updates.”

Wow. Updating Windows without your being aware of it? And after telling it not to? That’s what spyware does. It’s what the bad guys do. And now, it’s what Microsoft does.

There’s a saying in the computer security field that if a bad guy gets physical access to your computer, it’s not your computer anymore. If Microsoft can silently update Windows against our will, whose computer is it?

Interesting!

“The mobile wireless routers on board the company’s “Connector” employee bus system, made by Seattle-based Junxion Inc., use the open-source Linux operating system”

Read More.

There is a lot of invisible Linux that touches your life but you don’t see it, Linix powers  routers, Tivos, several other devices and services as well such as Google and Gmail as well.

“We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made.”

- Albert Einstein

One of the SUSE experts pointed out that Linux is reserving space which can be reclaimed by using the following command.

tune2fs -m0 /dev/hda5

Where /dev/hda5 is home directory.

Type mount to see which is device for the home directory.

Type df to see the free space before and after running this command.

Note: This space is been reserved so that it can be reclaimed in case of bad blocks. So reducing this may give you some free space but at the cost of some redundancy. So do this if you are running out of disk space and if your computer data is not very critical.

I have tried this on SUSE Linux and it worked, should also work on other Linux Distributions.