Whats up with Hatim!

I was unable to contain my self into not trying Ubuntu 810 Intrepid Ibex. Just 3 days before the actual launch I wasted a perfectly good DVD late at night to make room for a much smaller sized Ubuntu 8.10 x86_64 ISO. Now that I am posting from the new system there is no going back. I did how ever dedicated a 20 GB partition for ubuntu as 10 gb was not enough for my set of programs.

The first thing which I noticed in my machine was slightly faster booting time, but that could just be less services running. Another thing which was a pleasant surprise was that during installation Ubuntu was able to pickup my other installations and asked for importing various settings like Bookmarks, Contacts etc. But there are few things which are bothering, one being slow firefox and other being really sloppy synaptic in GUI mode, but probably these small imperfections will be take care of soon. Another small hitch came when I tried the RC DVD on a neighbor's laptop and it didn't get a configured X screen even while having a standard Nvidia GPU(one of the new generation ones).

I really like the new Ibex default wallpaper, reminds me of my first days of experimenting with Photoshop. Lets see how this release works out for me till next April

My telephone line at home was out of order for about 3 weeks now and I was in need of an internet connection at home. I decided to give using internet through my cell phone (GPRS) a try. The reason for this was simple, I needed an internet connection which would make me truly mobile and was cost effective as well. And ofcourse an implied requirement was that it should work with Linux(easily). So I searched up the internet for tarrifss of local cellular companies and compared them with other options which I had. I decided to go with Zong's (a China Mobile comapny) unlimited GPRS package. I was skeptical about the internet speed and was not even sure how I would be ablt to connect my laptop with the internet as it was only recently that I had begun using internet through my Mobile.

First I got hold of a Sony Erricson data cable as I had lost the one which came with my phone. This cost me 200Rs (3 US$), then I purchased some Zong credit for testing. Then using another internet connection I searched on how to use ubuntu with GPRS enabled phones. I found an article at softpedia to be very helpful. I found through dmesg that on my system, my phone was registering itself at ttyACM0 as well

Then I installed gnome-ppp and used it as per described in the article. The APN for Zong is zonginternet and apprently there is no username and password, but I still used zon/zong so that gnome-ppp could dial out. I also had to ensure that my user was in the modem/dial_out group. I tested the internet connectivity and was delighted to see that after dailing in there was nothing else to be done. Later I called up Zong customer services after feeding in some extra credit of 550 Rs (roughly 8US$) and activated my monthly unlimited internet package.

Later I tried watching a Youtube video, the bandwidth was not enough for me to stream it live but I was able to download a 9 MB file in a relatively short time compared to dialup connection. I was able to go to a download speed of 15KB/sec which I think is more than enough for day to day browsing and coding related tasks. I am looking forward to using this connection for my summer of code activities.

I have always wanted to try out skype. I had an idea about it's excellent voice quality from guys a Twit, but today I witnessed it first hand. The thing which was holding me up was the unavailibility of Mic (input sound) on my laptop. Today I figured out what the problem is. On my Acer 7720-6604 I have an internal mic, for some reason it does not work, but an external mic does. I for some reason was thinking that no mic works what so ever. I added a line in /etc for proper module loading (I didn't have it in my fresh Hardy installation) and in options for volume control I chose Mic as input source. When recording from Gnome's sound recorder I chose Digital as input of recording. So atleast I am able to record sound now (although not with my internal mic)

Then I checked out this link for installation of Skype on my linux box. On 64 bit machines you have to fool the thing to use 32 bit libraries. I made a test call and it soudedd perfect. Then i even tried a call with webcam and it worked well too. I actually have a conference call with browzow from OpenNMS regarding my summer of code assignment, which has started since this Monday. I have not coded any thing worth committing yet and lets hope I have some small stuff cooked up by the end of this week.

I had been reading up on the Ubuntu security breach since this Tuesday and was concerned that my system would also have been compromised. A little searching yielded a site which described the venerability in some detail and shows how to exploit it. It also has a bunch of private/public keys which were generated on a 31 core machine (some thing which only a serious computer venerability researcher would do).

I looked up into the keys and I was not able to find my public keys. Perhpas the vernerability is more than it seems (or perhaps lesser). But In any case I have changed my keys :)

In the last few days I had been reading reviews and hearing some good things about Fedora 9, so I decided to give it a try. I downloaded the 64 bit version of fedora kde-livecd. The CD booted easily on my Acer Aspire 7720-6604. I was greeted by a dark theme (which is not my taste). I then tried out some preinstalled software and frankly I was not impressed. The KDE version comes with Koffice and Konqueror. Since I have not used KDE for some time now I had not realized that I had grown used to Gnome. Overall there was nothing mindblowing about KDE 4 and it was yet another Fedora release. I then tried to do a dummy install to check that how ext4 support works, again to my disappointment there was no ext4 option available (i later tried with the kernel parameter ext4 but without any luck) I think ext4 is only available on the full installer version.

The lack of packages in precompiled distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora is prompting me to move back to Gentoo (or some even flexible operating system choice). Lets hope that Gentoo guys release 2008.0 before the start of 6th month of this year (its already behind schedule)

I tried Ubuntu 64 bit Alternate Installer on a brand new desktop with core2duo and software RAID (i previously wrongly reported it as Ubuntu Server). The installation was a brreze but for some reason I was not able to install GRUB out of the box. Once I realized what I was missing I staright away copied the grub files (stage1 stage2 files etc) and installed grub and I was on my way.

Installing RAID on ubuntu is easy with server installation, but one has to make the software RAID partitions manually before the install. I also  made the unused space after RAID as part of  LVM so as to utilize the disks effeciently. I also installed webmin through a deb package, I realize that its not very secure, but from webmin one can learn alot of configurations and can supplement some user based managament of the server.

As for Ubuntu's latest offering, I am fairly impressed. This distro is getting better with every release. The other day I was having a discussion on #opennms about using customizable distros like "Gentoo". I think I have done good by trading in felxibility for stability so I can concentrate on the real problems at hand. One learns alot on Gentoo, but one could also learn much stuff on gentoo as well becuase kernel and other packages are essentially the same.

I have yet to install Ubuntu Desktop 8.04 on my laptop but I think I will probably wait for Ubuntu 8.10 to come to make the swicth. With summer of code and other devlopment activities, I dont have the time to meddle with new installations.

Edit: I did install te 32 bit version on my laptop for a test run and was not convinced of its stability. I would be sticking with 7.10 for some time now. It atleast works.

more pics here

A friend of mine who was coming to Pakistan from USA for vacation was kind enough to order an Acer Aspire 7720-6604 laptop from newegg.com. I have previously used newegg.com and like their service. Initially I had waited for the launch of Apple Mac Book Pro with Penryn processors, but after the launch I was not very impressed with the specs. It was same MacBook Pro with a little better processor. I searched for the first few laptops and decided to buy this Acer machine for my self.

This laptop comes with Windows Vista Ultimate and an HDMI connector, but it does not come with a BlueRay. I am suspecting that with the recent new of impending demise of HD-DVD, upcoming high end Acer laptops will come with BlueRay as an option.

Overall I am satisfied with this laptop. It has a nice exterrior and an OK interior. Its finish is not as bad as it looks in the pictures. The real deal is in the specs. It has whooping 3 gig of RAM. I have nver worked on a machine with this much RAM before so it would be intresting. It also has 512 MB Geforce 8600 GT graphics card which would be very good for PC gaming. But I am no longer interested in gaming.

Windows Vista comes with trail/crap ware, alot of games from Oberon media with 60 minutes demo. The first thing I did was to uninstall them. They left their shortcuts, which I would delete once I log back to Windows. Windows Vista has neat looks, but Ubuntu's compiz is way much more configurable.

After having few hours with Vitsa, I wasted no time and installed Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy on to my machine. Apprently the 64-bit version of live CD was not able to work properly so I selleted for 32-bit one. Every thing worked fine except for sound driver. The sound card in this particular is based in intel high definition audio. I tried few Ubuntu recipies here and there, but I guess the real problem was that snd-hda-intel module had to be loaded with correct parameter, which was essentially one small line at the end of /etc/modeprobe.d/alsa-base

options snd-hda-intel model=acer

I chose for Ubuntu (and not Kubuntu) because of its better integration options (in terms of compiz and multimedia). I plan to make a Gentoo machine out of this laptop, but frankly Ubuntu fulfills most of my needs.

As for the bads of this laptop, I really don't like its keyboard. Perhaps it is because I am used to keyboard of previous laptop. Also this laptop get heated to some extent. I always thought that upcoming chips would probably produce less heat as they consume lesser power, but it is almost the same. I would recommend and one who has a need for a serious devlopment machine to get this laptop. I actually got it for a very good price (1368.51 US$, or around 83000 Pak Rupess at the time). Hopefully this laptop would be a good investment.

During the weekend I ventured to install Ubuntu 7.10 on my Sony VAIO VGN-FS18GP. This time I decided to go with Kubuntu becuase of Amarok. Kubuntu is a nice Ubuntu derivative, but perhaps it's not as looked after as Ubuntu is. For instance, in totem (which is the default media player in Gnome/Ubuntu) if I were to play a media file, it would get update it's codecs itself on need to need basis. I had to look around on the web for the installation of codecs for kaffeine. Luckily I found the following links to help me out Overall I am satisfied with the OS and its utilities, there are alot of cool feaatures in new Kubuntu. I have yet to put my system with the new compiz package of ubuntu. But I sure do miss the fun and excitement of using gentoo as my primary desktop. Perhaps that will change soon as I plan to get my own Mac Book pro by early next year.

There were a few issues which I faced.

• One was lack of compiz support out of the box. This was easy, I installed compiz, compiz-kde and compizconfig-settings-manager. The last package was not showing icons out of the box so I also installed gnome-icon-theme which solved the problem.
• As for codecs I followed the following links
  • Non Free Codecs on Ubuntu
  • Five Tips for Ubuntu
• Another problem which I faced was lack of touch pad control, for this I installed ksynaptic.