LINUX Workshop @IMS Ghaziabad

Again a new post after a long time

Anyway , this is all about my experience of delivering a workshop outside my college to all unknown peoples @IMS Ghaziabad organized by Young Engineers IIT Kanpur. Its great to be a part of that , Rest i will add later as it important to give the download link of presentation now.
Click here to download that:
linux workshop @IMS Ghaziabad

DR. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam ’s Speech in Hyderabad

Well this Article is not at all technical but much more important than that ………. So,

*Please read this article by giving 10 minutes from your busy life.
Really good…. ** *

* The President of India DR. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam ’s Speech in Hyderabad . *

Why is the media here so negative?
Why are we in India so embarrassed to recognize our own strengths, our
achievements? We are such a great nation. We have so many amazing
success stories but we refuse acknowledge them— Why?
We are the first in milk production.
We are number one in Remote sensing satellites.
We are the second largest producer of wheat.
We are the second largest producer of rice.
Look at Dr. Sudarshan , he has transferred the tribal village into a
self-sustaining, self-driving unit.

There are millions of such achievements but our media is only obsessed
in the bad news and failures and disasters.

I was in Tel Aviv once and I was reading the Israeli newspaper. It was
the day after a lot of attacks and bombardments and deaths had taken
place. The Hamas had struck. But the front page of the newspaper had
the picture of a Jewish gentleman who in five years had transformed
his desert into an orchid and a granary. It was this inspiring picture
that everyone woke up to. The gory details of killings, bombardments,
deaths, were inside in the newspaper, buried among other news.

In India we only read about death, sickness, terrorism, crime.

Why are we so NEGATIVE?

For full story http://gpraveenkumar.wordpress.com/2009/09/05/dr-a-p-j-abdul-kalam-s-speech-in-hyderabad/

Debian is sweet 16

Just 3 days back, the Linux distribution Debian reached 16 years old.I know i am bit late to post this still , its never late to share information.

Debian creator, Ian Murdock, first announced his new distro to the Linux development news group on 16th August, 1993. In his initial posting, he promised a sleek, slim distribution with the most up-to-date of everything! I’d say he succeeded in his aims. Google Groups has archived the message and you can read it here.

It’s been a long road from there to here, but Debian is one of the best distros out there, so Happy Birthday Debian!

Virtualization : Booting a OS inside another

Most important thing for me that i am back to My Blog

As a majority of users still use windows and Linux on same machine but the main problem is we have to restart our machine again to use other OS, like if we are using LINUX(UBUNTU my preference) ,then to boot Windows(Vista) only option available is restart

But now by using Virtual Box , i can boot my installed Vista from UBUNTU.
Here is how I did:

1. Install virtualbox package: “sudo apt-get install virtualbox-ose“

2. Locate your windows partition: ”sudo fdisk -l”

This is on my system:
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 6445 51769431 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 6446 10270 30720000 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 10271 13491 25872682+ 5 Extended
/dev/sda4 18415 19457 8370176 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda5 10271 13309 24410736 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 13310 13491 1461883+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris

So here windows partition is ‘dev/sda1′ (the one with NTFS filesystem format and active marked as *)

3. Now need to create a .vmdk file (file format used by virtualbox to emulate hard-disk) and make it point to our real disk sda in our case .
Run:
sudo vboxmanage -convertSettings internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename ~/.VirtualBox/vista_physical_partition-sda.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/sda

4. change permissions of .vmdk file to your own user
sudo chown ~/.VirtualBox/vista_physical_partition-sda.vmdk

5. Now start virtualbox as root and create a new virtual machine.

New –> Next –> enter your virtualmachine name & choose windows vista as OS type –> Next
Allocate at least 512MB of ram (1Gb will be good, but LINUX also require atleast 500MB so be careful while allocating RAM), –> Next
Hard-disk, click EXISTING –> “add” and go to ~/.VirtualBox/vista_physical_partition-sda.vmdk –> Select –> Next –> Finish

Further configuration :
Machine –> Settings
Under General section, allocate at least 50Mb of ram for video
Under Advanced tab ensure “Enable IO APIC” is checked and click on OK (check other options also like enabling sound in corresponding sections)

ALL DONE !! Start your machine and enjoy!!!

Comments welcome !!
IMPORTANT : While creating this machine i had used whole disk so when you start this machine it will boot as your normal system.With GRUB and other options. Please dont boot LINUX from LINUX or WIndows from inside Windows, else you will face serious problems.

Ubuntu Mailing List Archives

Ubuntu is a complete Linux-based operating system, freely available with both community and professional support.

People generally search google and other forums for solutions of UBUNTU related problems.
There is a place can be useful for many of UBUNTU related problems.Visit http://www.nabble.com/Ubuntu-f12717.html
for details and for archived mailing list.

UBUNTU 9.04 Released.

Wow, after a long time i am back to Bloging with UBUNTU 9.04.

Yes finally UBUNTU 9.04 is released and available for download, i had tested the alpha and beta also and the final version is surely a better experience and a nice stable improvements over UBUNTU 8.10.
Boot time is much faster than Win XP, Vista and even than previous SUSE UBUNTU and FEDORA also. Fast, secure, lite system with all needy applications and with a great customization features.

I personally suggest every LINUX or Windows user to at least use it once.Some important upgrades or improvements are

* GNOME 2.26 desktop environment
* Latest X.Org server
* Linux kernel 2.6.28.
* Ext4 filesystem support
* Included in Jaunty is a simple menu which can be used to set preferences for notification icons, such as where they pop up on the taskbar.
* A number of improvements to the Ubuntu start-up process bring significantly improved boot performance to Ubuntu 9.04.

You can download it from following locations :

From Our GLUG Server :
http://lug.nitdgp.ac.in/download/linux/isos/

Other Sources :

Ubuntu ISO image 32 bit i386 DVD ISO (4.2 GB)
Ubuntu ISO images 64 bit DVD ISO (4.3 GB)
Ubuntu Linux Desktop 9.04 CD 32 bit i386 (697M)
Ubuntu Linux Desktop 9.04 CD 64 bit (697M)
Torrents:
i386 32 bit Desktop DVD

If you are facing any problems regarding usage of UBUNTU , you can contact us on our mailing list at nitdgplug@googlegroups.com
or on our IRC , written aside in my blog.

“Join the next generation of computing, Open Source, and Linux/GNU! “

Google Summer of Code – Custom Search

Google Summer of Code is Just to start for students and every one is looking for their interests.Here is a custom search which search along all the organizations involved in GSoC.

It is really helpful to figure out projects specific to some fields.

http://tinyurl.com/gsocideas

For example,
Try to use C language or java or python as keyword to search! Hope it can help all to find your project.

THE Secret of GMAIL Timer

Hey every one of use who use GMAIL had noticed a timer at side of every mail but do you know the secret behind that.

My friend G Praveen Kumar had explained all this.It was really interesting to know that Gmail’s timer is simply awesome.
I also haven’t noticed how it works.
Actually When ever we receive or send a mail we get the information about time when the mail was received or sent as shown:

7:04 AM (7 hours ago)

Do you know what it means ?

Just check here for all your answers here.

The Myths about FREE and OPEN SOURCE Software

Many of us had heard about FREE and OPEN Source Software’s, and people related to it are very familiar with these words.But still we have some myths and misconceptions about them.

Some common ones are …..

Does Free and Open Source means Zero Cost?

                   This is one of the first question and most important one.But Free does not always means Free of cost. This freedom is basically related with freedom to reuse the code , to modify and redistribute it and even resale it but may be with some restrictions.

Is Free and Open Source Software’s always related with LINUX?

                   Simply NO. There are a lot of FOSS projects available for Windows and other platform’s also. Almost all Open Source software’s available for LINUX are also available for other Operating Systems like Windows.For example Firefox is growing as a strong replacement of IE in windows.

So open source software does not means that we can only use them on LINUX, We can use them on windows also.

So why we are paying for software’s even if we want to use Windows only?

Open Source means No Licensing.

                This is a very interesting question as most of the people even dosnt care about this.But the truth is that there are tones of licence used in FOSS world. GNU GPL, LGPL, Apache, BSD  are just few names to mention (More details at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_license)

And these licences have some terms and conditions for using the software and also regarding modifying and redistributing it.

 

                 Finally i just want to mention that Free and Open Source softwares are not only meant for LINUX. They are availiable for us , and most of them are free of cost and also with tme more and more large companies are moving towards FOSS world SUN , Microsoft are some big names.

 

(*SUN is moving towards making JAVA completly open source)

(*Microsoft also had shared lots of codes with Apache and Samba)

 

————————————————-”USE FREE and OPEN SOFTWARES “———————————————-

——————————————————-”And FEEL the FREEDOM”—————————————————–

Installing VLC in UBUNTU 8.10

I was using ubuntu from a long time back and i personally feels that it is one of the best LINUX OS.

Well VLC is a cross platform media player and streaming server also.I liked it because of its support for various audio and video formats (ogg,MPEG, DivX, mp3, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols also.I also had used it as a streaming server and most important thing is that it is an open source project. So question is how to install it on your machine(Having UBUNTU).

INSTALLATION on System with Internet Connection

There are many ways of installing VLC, either download it from site and install it manually(may have dependencies problem) or using apt-get.

Using apt-get :
% sudo apt-get install vlc vlc-plugin-esd mozilla-plugin-vlc

It will install all necessary packages and also mozilla plugin for VLC.

Also you can follow the Graphical way also :
Open Synaptic (System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager).
Make sure you have a “multiverse” repository activated.(In Settings -> Repositories,)
Search for vlc and install it.

INSTALLATION on System without Internet Connection

This is very important because this method will work with almost every package(But i only had tried it with VLC and MPlayer) . First find a machine with ubuntu installed and with INTERNET connection.Then use following command.

%sudo apt-get install vlc vlc-plugin-esd mozilla-plugin-vlc –download-only

All files downloaded after above command are found at /var/cache/apt/archives/
Copy these files into a single folder and install them using command’
%dpkg -i *.deb (pwd must be that folder where you copied the files)

(Suggestion : Please remove/move all files in /var/cache/apt/archives before downloading the new files)

Also VLC is available for other distros also.
For any problems you can mail me at nit.abhi85@gmail.com
VLC Site : http://www.videolan.org/