Monday 08 November 2010 at 06:55 am
Hello World.
I am very pleased to announce apt-offline, version 1.0.
This release adds a Graphical User Interace to apt-offline.
Big thanks to Abhishek Mishra and Manish Sinha who did all the development work to make this GUI happen.
Help: I was wondering if there is a logo for APT that I could use in the big blank space on the main window.
Apart from the GUI, there are a bunch of bug fixes in this release (which have already been made available for the Squeeze release also).
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Sunday 07 November 2010 at 09:46 am
My recent experience with Mozilla ThuderBird, IceDove.
With KDE 4.x, the KDE team took a radical step of ripping apart most of the stuff and rethinking many of the designs. Quite a bold move. Many people appreciated KDE's efforts to start afresh while others moved away from KDE. For some reasons, I decided to stick to KDE. Maybe it was because of the awesome flexibility KDE provided provides to customize the DE to one's personal taste. Or maybe because I was too used to the KDE way of doing things. I stayed with KDE while 4.0 was released and stayed with it up till very recently.
I started to lose my patience with the PIM Suite. I know the PIM team is also going to some very radical changes which will bring very innovative stuff later. But, at the moment, the KDE PIM suite is very broken. Broken not in the first impress, but broken when you regularly use it. It leaks memory like anything and keeps doing lots and lots of I/O. I hope some day the KDE team decides that they do need a core team, a core team that could take care of important tasks, making sure that the imporatant tasks are Continuously Usable. It takes time to earn the reputation but it takes a lot lesser time to lose it.
Anyways, having been a KDE (PIM) user for long, I had been bearing the PIM torments up until, I recently saw a colleague using IceDove. There was a time when the Mozilla suite was in itself terribly slow. But things seem to have changed a lot. Both, the browser and the PIM suite, have improved a lot lot in terms of functionality and performance. Performance is very important. What good is a feature if its performance is terrible and it hinders the usability. Some of the things that really impressed me were:
Indexing: Nepomuk might be good one day but that day is yet to be seen. I patiently wait for that day to come. Well, don't have much choice. Have been patiently waiting for it since KDE 4.0 was released. KDE has great ideas with Nepomuk which is good. But realisticly, what all do you want to see indexed ? There has to be a realistic line drawn. The browsers already have indexing for the history. Amarok, the player, also does indexing. It can tell you when your last favorite song was played. For pictures, I have the awesome KPhotoAlbum that cannot be beaten by anything. But above all, the most important thing to index is your conversation. Those emails that you send daily. And indexing is no good if you can't find the information you need, later. IceDove has filled that place. It does an excellent indexing (in terms of performance) and presents a very user intuitive way to narrowing it down to, when looking for a particular information.
Organization: The other great thing about KDE PIM is its ability to break down its applications into small parts and glue them together into a new, well integrated application. Yes, Kontact. It is used to be the best PIM application. Used common libraries to make the suite more efficient than the rest. But all this was used to be. Today, kpart itself might be Kontact's problem. We have different applications glued together that if built with a common design, could have benefited a lot more. Take for example: kmail, knode and akregator. They are all very important parts of the PIM suite. Yet all three are different. The only thing common amonst them is is that they are available from the same Kontact shell. kmail has a different navigation. akregator has very nice aggregated folders but the same cannot be available in knode and kmail. knode, while still okay, has been rotting for some time. So it was time to see how IceDove performed when testing it up against this Use Case. The good thing about IceDove is is that it has one single uniform interface to most of the PIM needs. I can use the same window and the same interface for all my rss feeds, my emails and my leafnode newsgroups. That has a big benefit in itself. I have only 1 integrated interface to look at and only 1 interactive method to learn. There aren't different keystrokes for different applications. All is one in IceDove.
And I think one of the main reasons for Mozilla's success is its plugin architecture. It is very difficult to satisfy everyone's needs. In the same way, it is very difficult for one group of developer's to be able to innovate differently. This is where Mozilla rocked. They provided a solid foundation with basic standard interface and let new fresh minds to do the rest of the innovation. Turns out it has worked well.
So, with my PIM needs satisfied, I thought KDE was serving as nothing but just a mere shell. So, now was the right time to do the thing I always thought of doing. Switch to GNOME. GNOME looks elegant at first look but that is it. I wanted to take a screenshot of an application to report a bug. I fired up PrntSc key to let the screen capture utility pop-up. It did not have the opiton to select just the application window. Hmmm! Time to return back to KDE and use the Mozilla PIM suite and hope the KDE PIM team learns and does the right thing.
Thursday 21 October 2010 at 02:57 am
Well most must be knowing by now that Samsung is rolling out the Android 2.2 FROYO update in phases. And it would be available through Kies.
There have been numerous reports of Kies not detecting the Samsung Galaxy S phone.I think I have a pattern and know what has been causing the trouble.
Samsung Kies, by default, is set to auto-start and reside in the System Tray. The Kies application auto-detects the phone when plugged-in and starts up the applications. I guess this is where the problem lies.
In Windows (at least on my XP), when a PnP device is connected, Windows:
- Detects the device
- Loads driver and initiazlies the device
- Executes appropriate action related to the device (Like open a folder if it is a flash stick)
The phones, when connected, are also detected by Windows as storage devices. So, if we can make Windows have 1st access to the Samsung Galaxy S phone upon connect, it can follow the above steps and detect the device.
This is where the catch is. On typical installations of Kies, it is already running. So as soon as the phone gets plugged in, Kies tries to access the phone first. I have no idea how bloated Kies is. Does it also hinder the driver initialization of the phone ? From the looks of when Kies is running and phone is plugged, yes.
So, simple steps to get your Samsung Galaxy S detected on Kies
- Kill Kies
- No Kies instance in System Tray
- Connect Phone and select "Samsung Kies"
- Let Windows detect the phone and initialize the device
- Let Windows pop-up an action Window
- After all this is done, now start Kies.
Leave a comment on the blog is this works for you.
Wednesday 01 September 2010 at 12:13 am
When I wrote the autoEqualizer plug-in for the Amarok (1.x) media player, to the best of my knowledge, there weren't any media players with this feature nor were there any plug-ins.
Recently, I came to know that the Samsung Galaxy S's media player looks to be having the Automatic Equalizer functionality. Not sure if this player is specific to Samsung Galaxy S or the Android Platform in general.
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Wednesday 30 December 2009 at 10:10 pm
It is holiday time and so finally time to installing Debian onto the Sony PS3 box. The installation was smooth as most of the stuff is already documented. The Debian Installer has all the support needed, to install onto the Sony PS3. As of now the only thing not working perfectly is the boot loader. It seems to be taking default is the kernel that was booted last. Even if I change the default in /etc/kboot.conf, it still boots into the kernel that was booted last time.
Wednesday 14 October 2009 at 12:15 pm
It all started long back when I worked for a giant computer manufacturing company. Certain IT policies led fo the need for an Offline APT Package Manager
While I got it working for a long time, I didn't have the aggression to polish and push it for general usage. Thanks to my friend appaji, apt-offline (a.k.a pypt-offilne) is now part of Debian.
Thursday 06 August 2009 at 3:06 pm
Given the recent switch to a stronger key by everyone, here's mine.
The old key that I'll still keep using till I get the new key signed by a good amount of people.
pub 1024D/04F130BC 2003-08-18
Key fingerprint = CF0F EDEF 1052 83D2 62A4 0549 E118 62EA 04F1 30BC
uid Ritesh Raj Sarraf <rrs@researchut.com>
uid Ritesh Raj Sarraf <riteshsarraf@users.sourceforge.net>
uid Ritesh Raj Sarraf (NetApp) <rsarraf@netapp.com>
uid [jpeg image of size 52128]
sub 1024g/A876BF8F 2003-08-18
sub 4096R/5D93A273 2009-04-25
sub 4096R/7FBB6077 2009-04-25
And here's the new key, that's been duly signed with the above old key.
pub 4096R/F00A2BE6 2009-08-06
Key fingerprint = 43DE F582 F9E6 7111 CE00 8917 F2F1 1C23 F00A 2BE6
uid Ritesh Raj Sarraf <rsarraf@netapp.com>
uid Ritesh Raj Sarraf <rrs@researchut.com>
uid [jpeg image of size 52128]
sub 4096R/0B488290 2009-08-06
Friday 29 May 2009 at 01:34 am
I've been using KDE for a while now, probably 9yrs. I've also been an early adopter of KDE 4.x. While KDE 4 is still far way behind in proving its worth of the radical core changes it made (take for example: Nepomuk, Strigi, Phonon, Decibel - I still wonder when they are going to be ready for the *user*), I still find KDE apps far far ahead of GNOME.
Probably, many would disagree. Possibly, they might flame me too.I mean everyone supports GNOME as the default - Red Hat/Novell/Ubuntu. And I always wonder WHY.
Was it the licensing ? I can't think of anything else. Anyways, why I still think that the GNOME design sucks, I'll give an example.
Evolution: Many call it the real killer app for GNOME. Maybe. There's one small feature in Evolution, that I've tried many times and I just feel that it is a UI design with stupidity at its best. The NewsGroup plugin of Evolution. Ever tried ? How fast can you subscribe to newsgroups there. Take these examples. I'd be interested to know how Evolution users subscribe to newsgroups.
I personally use leafnode to cache the news contents. In Kontact Knode, when the Gmane newsgroup listing appears, it appears with thousands of newsgroups. But KDE allows me to run a search on that list and find for the relevant newsgroup that I need.
Such a basic feature and I wonder what was there in the mind of the GNOME Evolution devs when they were designing that interface.
Saturday 04 April 2009 at 02:41 am
Once upon a time CPU power was low. In those days, what we have today, was termed to be Super Computers.
Thanks to tough competition and great engineering, we now have CPU in the range of Gigahertz and multiple cores. But on Destkops/Laptops, do we really have applications that utilize the ability of these processors ?
So I thought about making these powerful CPUs to do some work.
There are different views about Backups. My preference has always been that my backup should be an identical image of my entire OS. That'd include the cache, the packages installed, my personal data, my mail spool et cetera. Given the requirements, my preferred choice of Backups has been LVM Snapshots.
And now to add to that is this
rrs@champaran:~$ dd if=debian-500-amd64-i386-powerpc-netinst.iso | bzip2 -v > /tmp/bzip.test
(stdin): 965192+0 records in
965192+0 records out
494178304 bytes (494 MB) copied, 291.708 s, 1.7 MB/s
1.058:1, 7.559 bits/byte, 5.51% saved, 494178304 in, 466933711 out.
rrs@champaran:~$ du -h debian-500-amd64-i386-powerpc-netinst.iso /tmp/bzip.test
472M debian-500-amd64-i386-powerpc-netinst.iso
446M /tmp/bzip.test
rrs@champaran:~$ dd if=/tmp/bzip.test | bunzip2 -dc | dd of=/tmp/bzip.uncompress
911979+1 records in
911979+1 records out
466933711 bytes (467 MB) copied, 135.861 s, 3.4 MB/s
965192+0 records in
965192+0 records out
494178304 bytes (494 MB) copied, 136.115 s, 3.6 MB/s
rrs@champaran:~$ du -h debian-500-amd64-i386-powerpc-netinst.iso /tmp/bzip.uncompress
472M debian-500-amd64-i386-powerpc-netinst.iso
472M /tmp/bzip.uncompress
rrs@champaran:~$ md5sum
md5sum md5sum.textutils
rrs@champaran:~$ md5sum debian-500-amd64-i386-powerpc-netinst.iso
6c8cdaeaff65741a6fd37366a1ecc1b0 debian-500-amd64-i386-powerpc-netinst.iso
rrs@champaran:~$ md5sum /tmp/bzip.uncompress
6c8cdaeaff65741a6fd37366a1ecc1b0 /tmp/bzip.uncompress
Now, the thing I need to verify is is wether D-I ships bzip2 utils on the CD.
Wednesday 04 March 2009 at 5:25 pm
Backups
Most of the users using computers have a very high dependency on it. Day-by-Day, our data is getting digitized. Everything is getting into electronic formats (Movies/Pictures/Music et cetera). If you are one, you know how important it is to have a backup. :-)
Lately, I haven't been using Microsoft Windows on a daily basis. So I'll comment on Linux here.
The definition of Backup can be different. People like backing-up only the Important data. The problem is that the term Important is very volatile. What is important to X is not necessarily important to Y.
For my backup solutions, in the past, I've relied on a KDE Backup tool, Keep. It internally uses rdiff-backup. It was good. It allowed incremental backups. There were some hiccups here and there but overall it was pretty good. But it was very difficult to tell the application about What all it should backup. And then, it needed to do a diff verification for every file that was a candidate.
Restoration from rdiff-backup was not always great. Especially the incremental backups. If something was messed up, it was tough to recover. For example, assume that the backup was in progress. And you needed to rush for home immediately aborting your backup. Keep wouldn't play good there.
Then came LVM. I've used LVM for years but never really looked at it as a backup option. To start with, I'd say, LVM is the Best Backup Tool for my needs. I described Important above. For me, Important is my HOME dir, my /var/tmp/kdecache-rrs dir, and my /tmp/kde-rrs dir. Apart from that, my /etc/ dir, my /usr/loca/ dir. And many more that I can't recollect. If there was one simple tool to backup all without worrying of Permission, Security Labels et cetera, that'd be LVM.
And LVM allows Online Backups. So I can have my / volume online and still go ahead with the backup while I'm working.
And depending on I want, I can do a File or a Block based backup.
Recovery
So we know how important our data has become for us, depending on how dependent you are on computers for your day-to-day life. I hate thinking about it but increasing dependency on computers gets me worried about security. Yeah!! You'd say Linux is more secure. (Wouldn't want to discuss in that direction)
I really like the SELinux Security Features. Most of the people (including Enterprise Customers) I know, disable SELinux on their machines. Currently SELinux doesn't see a widespread integration into the entire Application Stack. Thus apps just fail as SELinux restricts their access.
On my Debian Box, SELinux is miles away from the kind of integration packages have through apt. That sometimes makes me run to Red Hat based distributions to see what their state is, on SELinux.
So yesterday, I wiped off my Debian setup and installed Fedora. Used it for a couple of hours and decided to go back to Debian again (More of a personal taste).
That's what I do once in a year. :-)
The thing I have the most, is to lose data. Data being - My Settings and other stuff I mentioned above.
So to recover Debian was just a couple of hours. Just had to do a Block Restoration of the Block Backed ROOT LV to the new LV. And then, a minor grub and kenrel installation. And voila, everything was back just as it was yesterday.
Nothing much to say. Thank you Alasdair and Team Device Mapper @ Red Hat
