Prakash Advani's Blog

Todays computer have more power than what is required by a single users. Thanks to the Gigahertz race, processors are getting faster and faster. The result is that an average Joe uses only 10% of the processing.

The best way to harness this underutilised power is to get multiple users to share the resources of the same computer.

One way is Utilise NComputing device or to setup a dual-head display on your computer and follow this howto.

Amazon has released the source code for its e-book reader Kindle.

And guess what it runs Linux.

Have a look if you are interested in the source.

Way to go Amazon!

When I boot up my Ubuntu system, it often says Routine check of drives and takes forever to boot up.

This is because the routine check is set to a number which is not very high if you don’t reboot often Which may be the case in a server but for a Desktop its an overkill, specially if you boot up a couple of times a day.

With a small change, you can boot up quicker and save time as well.

So here is the solution:

sudo tune2fs -c 100 /dev/sda5

Where

100 is the number of counts after which it should do a routine check.

/dev/sda5 is my ex3 file system, replace this with whatever is your partition number.

If you have more than one, you need to do this for all your ext3 partitions.

Read More if you need more details.

Jackalope is finally released in the wild.

The best way to get it by torrent as the download mirrors are going to be busy.

Torrent Link for CD releases:

Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope i386 (32-Bit).

Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope AMD64 (64-Bit).

Rest of the torrents if you are looking for other releases.

Download Link. Please use the mirrors In case you can’t use torrent for some reason.

If you are already running Ubuntu and want to upgrade, just type.

Press Alt+F2 and type in “update-manager -d” (without the quotes).

If you want to get faster downloads, you can update using P2P (peer to peer). Read this article for more details.

What’s new in the release:

• Cool new notification system improves usablity.
• Faster boot time, no more waiting for it to boot up.
• Open Office 3.0, provides better compatibility with MS Office documents and also has other enhancements.

Its been raining high speed internet in India. Tata, Reliance and BSNL have started offering 3G USB Data Cards which offer high speed internet. Tata and Reliance claim 3.1 MBps speeds while BSNL claims 7.2 Mbps.

I have tested both Tata Indicom Photon+ and Reliance NetConnect Broadband+ on Ubuntu 8.10. I didn’t get much time to test everything but this is my initial feedback.

They claim to offer 3 Mbps but in reality I got 300-700Kbps download speeds. Which is still not bad.

Note: Even if you take the unlimited plan, you are still limited to 10GB of download per month as there is a fine print of fair use policy. This is an  irritant for people who do lots of downloads.

Tata Indicom Photon+ offer Huawei

Reliance Netconnect Broadband+ offers a choice of  Huawei and ZTE.

Reliance Huawei was the only one that works out of the box on Ubuntu and gets detected as  /dev/ttyUSB0.

After that you can edit /etc/wvdial.conf and put the following lines.

[Dialer Defaults]
Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0
Username = yournumber
Phone = #777
Password = yournumber
New PPPD = yes
Stupid mode = yes

Replace yournumber with your number (provided at the back of the box).

ZTE didn’t even get detected,  and strangely enough there was no message on dmesg either.

lsusb shows: Bus 005 Device 002: ID 19d2:fff6

Tata Indicom Photon+ (Huawei based) also didn’t get detected.

lsusb shows:

Bus 005 Device 009: ID 12d1:140b Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.

Moz has tried this and has got this working using the following steps.

$ sudo modprobe usbserial vendor=0x12d1 product=0x140b
$ sudo mknod /dev/ttyUSB0 c 188 0
$ sudo mknod /dev/ttyUSB1 c 188 1

Add the following lines to the /etc/wvdial.conf, customise phone number, username and password as per advise of TataIndicomm.

[Dialer Defaults]
Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0
Init1 = ATZ
Phone = #777
Username = cdma
Password = cdma
New PPPD = yes
Stupid Mode = 1

Try connecting with sudo wvdial

If you want a graphical dialer, install gnome-ppp

Go into setup, select your modem as /dev/ttyUSB0

Put your login/password depending on the service provider. Put the number as #777 and you are ready to connect.

Links to tariffs/plans:

Reliance

Tata Indicom

The currently global economy seems to be getting better for Open Source. After enterprises adopting Open Source now software outsourcing Major says:

“We won’t have as much work for all our employees right now, so we’re encouraging them to contribute to projects on open source and do more innovative work,”

Nandan Nilekan, Co-Founder, Co-Chairman and CEO Infosys.

This is a great way to polish their employees programming skills at the same time keep them busy.

Read More.

The BJP, India’s biggest opposition party has released its IT vision which states that they will use Open Source and follow Open Standards.

They also plan to give 10 Million Laptops loaded with Linux and Open Source for Rs. 10,000 US$200.

Their IT vision is very impressive and looks like its well thought out strategy talking about local hosting, higher broadband speeds, lower PC costs, single Identity and many more.

If you are interested, download the IT Vision (3.5 MB download, not a worry if you are already on Broadband 🙂

French fighter planes were unable to take off after military computers which were running Windows were infected by a computer virus.

France is a big user of Linux. The French police and the French Parliament is already using it, so now the military should also switch.

This is an interesting article comparing various features of Ubuntu with Vista and Windows 7.

It covers the following:

• How long does each operating system take to install?
• How much disk space was used in the standard install?
• How long does boot up and shutdown take?
• How long does it take to copy files from USB to HD, and from HD to HD?
• How fast can it execute the Richards benchmark?

Read the whole article.

Ext4 is here and it rocks! It a faster file system and expect it to show up in upcoming distros such as Ubuntu 9;04. Finally we have a file system that gives faster performance and is widely accepted. ReiserFS had good performance and I have used it in the past, but today is not been used widely. Ext4 should fill in the void pretty well.

Read this article for more details.

A software startup called Marketcetera has released an open source platform for building automated trading systems.

Since the world economy is at a situation where everyone wants to reduce cost, specially in the finance sector, this could be a big win for the company as well as Linux and Open Source.

Vinayaraj has created some very cool Linux wallpapers. These can be downloaded from here.

This ones’ already my wallpaper 🙂

Nokia plans to expand its use of Linux beyond Its N800 series.

“In the longer perspective, Linux will become a serious alternative for our high-end phones,” Ukko Lappalainen, vice president at Nokia’s markets unit, told in an interview on the sidelines of the “Nokia World” industry conference.

The Linux Foundation published this excellent article:  Estimating the Total Development Cost of a Linux Distribution

Some very interesting stats :

Linux is the most popular open source operating system today, didn’t you know that already?

Total development cost of a Linux distribution in 2002: $1.2 billion

Cost to build Fedora 9 in 2008: $10.8 billion

Cost of developing the Linux kernel: $1.4 billion

Total: 3200 kernel developers representing 200 companies.

Active for every release: 1,000 kernel developers from over 100 companies.

Linux ecosystem: $25 billion

(which means if you are in the Linux business, you have a huge market already)

Red Hat Linux 7.1 (2002): 30 Million lines of code.

Fedora Linux 9 (2008):  204 million lines of code.

How to estimate the cost of development:

Most end users wanting to move to Linux, expect to play MP3 music and sync their music with their iPods, iPhone, and XXX (put your favourite mp3 player here.)

Apple does not have iTunes for Linux, its only available for Windows and Mac, I wonder why.

iPhone being extremely proprietary, makes it incredibly difficult to write open source software to do what iTunes does. We will get there someday, but for now, here is a work around.

Install Virtual Box.

Then Install Windows within the Virtual Machine.

And then install iTunes on Windows.

Run a script to enable USB connection and you are ready to go.

Here is the link to the script, its been tested on Ubuntu, but may work on other distros.

As some of you were expecting that Ubuntu 8.10 will be including OpenOffice.org 3.0, but as a matter of fact its still has OpenOffice 2.4.1. If you wish to upgrade to 3.0, check this out.

You can still go and upgrade to OpenOffice 3.0. Read the instructions in this article.

Ubuntu 8.10 just got released and here is a summary of What’s new:

• Guest Session: If your friend comes over and wants to use your laptop, you can give guest access which is completely locked down so the guest user can’t see or touch your data.
• Support for 3G data card. This becomes easy with the new Network Manager 0.7. It also makes it easy to configure Broadband connections that rely on PPPoE.
• Encrypted Private Directory. You can create an Encrypted folder and store all your confidential data there. If you ever lost your laptop, then this will ensure that someone else can’t access your data.
• BBC Content: Totem now has a plugin for BBC content which makes it easy to find and stream BBC content.
• Automated Printer Driver install. If you have a new printer, Ubuntu will find the driver automatically and install it for you.
• VM Cloning for testing. You can convert your current Ubuntu image to a VM to do any upgrades/testing. This way all your testing can happen in a VM before actually deploying.
• Kubuntu Users would find that the new release is now using KDE4.

Go here to download the ISOs or better still download the torrent: ubuntu-8.10-desktop-i386.iso.

All the Ubuntu torrents.

If you are already running a previous version of Ubuntu, you can upgrade:

Press Alt+F2, and type

update-manager -d

Now click on the Update button.

My friend Arun Khan told about this great way to improve the download speed of packages and updates for Ubuntu users.

Start Synpatic, go to Settings-Repositories.

Under Ubuntu Software tab, there is “Download from:” and next to that it will say Main Server/Server for India/etc. Click on that and select other.

Now on the right there is a button which says Select Best Server. Click on that.

Synaptic will ping all the servers, run a couple of other tests and automatically select the fastest server.

Now Click on Choose Server – Close,

You are done!, Next time you run an update or try to install any software, it will be faster.

Happy updating 🙂

For ISVs that are writing Linux applications, the Linux foundation has launhed a killer development tools. Some of the highlights of Linux Application Checker (AppChecker):

• Its open source
• It checks .rpm, .deb, tar.gz and tar.bz2 files.
• Checks the application for LSB compliance.
• And check against all the Linux distribution.

So you can check if your app will work with all Linux distributions without actually installing all the distributions. Now that’s something that should excite all the developers.

Foxconn has quickly fixed the famous Linux bug found in their BIOS which was causing Linux to crash.

Here is the update from the Foxconn team.

Thank you foxconn.