Posted by hatim
Thu, 24 May 2007 23:56:00 GMT
I have been busy as hell in the past few weeks. but I did find some time to install Fedra Core 6 and Ubuntu 7.4 on my home machine. The primary reason was just to try the thing out. I was expecting alot of new goodies since I last tried these out and my expectations were met. First thing which I was pleased to find was the correct automatic settings of X for my intel motherboard. Both of the X configurations in question were 3d enabled. Other things which impressed me was the new 'Desktop Effects' option of Gnome. With the integration of Beryl/Compiz componenets in Ubuntu and Fedora desktops, one can now have the same kind of eye candy which is only found on Vista or MacOS X.
Although new Fedora Core comes out in a few days, I will probably stick with Core 6 for the rest of summer. I have decided to stick with Ubuntu on my laptop for the followin reasons.
- What ever you do , there are still issues with products on fedora , which get easily installed on red hat entrprise linux. fedoa != red hat.
- Ubuntu has become a ditro of choice at many places including Google. It is also being preinstalled on Dell laptops, soon it will be on other laptops
- Ubuntu has server and 64-bit editions of their distribution (I even got 64-bit version CDs shipped this time)
- Last and most important, Ubuntu gets shipped free, no one can beat that.
Posted in Technology | Tags linux, software | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by hatim
Sun, 29 Apr 2007 06:23:00 GMT
These days I am working on adding the support of oracle stored procedures to freeradius. Earlier I compiled and configured freeradius CVS on my machine. Oracle drivers were also built during the compile (correct ORACLE_HOME varaible needs to be set , which in my case was '/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server/' under the oracle base directory). A good piece of stored procedure code should be generic enough to handle multiple parameters. (more on this later)
Posted in Technology | Tags coding, opensource | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by hatim
Sun, 15 Apr 2007 19:21:00 GMT
Solaris was my first direct interaction with UNIX(first college lab session for introduction to computing in which we were taught how to send/receive our email through pine). Since then I have always been fascinated with Sun machines and Solaris. It may be long time before I own a kickass Sun Server for my own personal use, but with Solaris_x86 in picture, I can play with one of the most advanced operating system on the planet on my old P4 box (I also plan to install Minix, *BSD, and lots of other open source OSes).
I ordered a free Solaris Express DVD of solaris from Sun's website. I was surprised to get it within 2 weeks as normally these things reach pretty late in my locality. I popped it into my Intelx86 machine and fired it up. It booted kind of slow, but that could have been my DVD drive. It was not pleasant to find out that the default X server which the installation DVD loaded was not showing up on my Intel D865 based vga.
I booted again in text mode and started the installation process. After a reboot I looked into how to configure X and network. I was unable to get both working in the first try. I went to Sun's support chat site and I was mentioned the hardwae compatibility link. I tried the Solaris device detection java webstart applet. Every thing checked out (except for my bt878 based tv tuner card). The JNLP mentioned a link for third party network drivers, which I later downloaded (but was only able to get working after some beating around the bush)
Then I decided to visit #solaris on irc.freenode.net (from my other machine)and boy was that an eye opener. First this I learnt is that Solaris is not Linux ( I knew that, but if you even mention name of Linux in #solaris you get flamed easily), second #solaris has lots of rude shrews. They help less and try to establish that their "brain size" is more than yours since you asked a question. Although looking up on google before you ask a question is always recomended, but it is possible to not find answer to a simple question from a Google search. Any ways I decided NEVER to goto #solaris. I would like to leave the self contained so called UNIX admins to their own sad lonely existance. I went to #opensolaris where people are friendly and enthusiastic (like any open source project).There I got some good pointers.
Solaris has two kinds of X servers;Xsun and Xorg. Xsun is probably a good choice for Sun machines, but Xorg produced better results on x86 machines. The problem I encountered was that the default configuration produced by X -configure was only good for higher resolutions. A utility called kdmconfig lets superuser choose between the two servers. The configuration of Xorg is similar by the use of 'xorgconfig'.
Solaris x86 express edition comes with alot of goodies which include StarOffice 8, Netbeans 5.5, Sun Studio Enterprise, Gimp, Firefox to name a few. It has two desktops CDE and Gnome. Gnome based desktop looks quite polished (just like Ubuntu).
Overall my first impessions of solris are quite positive. But these impressions are superficial and very cosmetic. In reality I am more interested in knowing more about the internals of Solaris (Kernel and TCP/IP stack and things like DTrace).
Posted in Technology | Tags review, software
Posted by hatim
Tue, 03 Apr 2007 06:14:00 GMT
I have been working to extend my typo based website. Firstly after a discussion over the latest features of Typo in #typo channel of irc.freenode.net, I decided to give the SVN trunk a try. I also looked up a decent theme from typo garden to fulfill my needs (until the day I make my own theme)
One thing which I have not been able to work out is an easy way to route the main page of my site to /blog/pages/home..I am now able to route easily to pages within my typo blog using proxy option ([P]) of mod_rewrite.
Following '.htaccess' file is similar to what I have used...
Options +FollowSymLinks
Options +Indexes
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^$ http://site.com/path_to_view [P]
The result is that I have pages which can be accessed from outside URL, but are still controlled by Typo.
Posted in Technology | Tags programming, Rails | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by hatim
Thu, 29 Mar 2007 15:57:00 GMT
On my job I have been hitting my head with configurations of Net-SNMP, OpenNMS and Asterisk. Asterisk v 1.4 has introduced some SNMP support into their core. I used this tutorial from VoipMagazine.com to get SNMP/Asterisk working for me on my Gentoo box at work.
Next step was to make collection of statistics from OpenNMS. OpenNMS lacks polished documentation and things are rather scattered. After some playing around with the configurations I have been able to make OpenNMS work on my local network. There are still issues some issues involved namely the addition of an Asterisk category to the front page, auto discovery of SIP and monitoring of statistics which are not provided but have to be computed (ie. no of bridged SIP channels on any given system).
I will hopefully post a detailed HOW-TO on gentoo-wiki very soon.
Posted in Technology | Tags linux, software | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by hatim
Sun, 11 Mar 2007 16:50:00 GMT
One of the primary reason I have my blog on a personal domain-name/server is that I don't have to deal with arbitrary outages to blog services. Blogger was banned in my country after the cartoon scandal in early 2006. I can understand why my government would ban some blogs, but an unconditional block on all blogs is plain absurd. Now with my own websapce and domain name I have more control over my web presence.
I have many tasks for my new blog. Most important of them is to import entries from blogger. My current plan is to manually post stuff one by one. This way I will be able to clean stuff from around 260 posts I have done on blogger. I have looked into RSS based migrations from Blogger to Type, but since my previous entries are unstructured I definitely need a migration_by_hand
I did try to post an entry with dates of publishing for Dec 2006 (by manually changing MySQL for contents table of Typo),but It didn't work as it was expected to. It would definitely be a great help to me If I get hold of a desktop publishing client for Typo which can also manipulate date of blog posting.
Posted in Technology | Tags Blog, Typo | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by hatim
Tue, 27 Feb 2007 17:11:00 GMT
After almost a gap of 10 months I have a gentoo system up and running. I got a barnd new p4 3.0 Ghz as my new work machine. Its better than the Mac eBook I had at my previous job (although I do miss the solid MacOS). But the best thing about this machine is that I have gentoo on it.
I still have to fine tune the system to its full multimedia glory which requires enormous amount of tweaking ( which I plan to do over the coming months).
It was a bit disappointing to learn that gentoo is no longer supported for stage-1 compilation. But stage-3 isn't that bad (after all I was able to emerge every thing again with my new CFLAG and USEFLAG settings).
Posted in Technology | Tags gentoo, Job, linux | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by hatim
Tue, 13 Feb 2007 18:05:00 GMT
It so happened that when I switched my hosting provider and reset my domain entries, my automatic forwarding of email some how got reset. Some one tried to send me email on hatimonline.com domain address and it failed to deliver. This is the kind of silly thing you read about, you know about it, but don't do any thing untill you have experienced it. So lesson here is always make sure to check that your MX entires/email forwarding point to the right direction, if there is any change in your hosting server.
Note: The problem has been resolved for now. Sorry for any inconvenience.
Posted in Technology | Tags Email, Notice | no comments
