Whats up with Hatim!

I already have so many other ideas in the works that I should probably not venture into any new ideas. But this is some thing which I feel is very natural for computing in Pakistan. I realized this after coming to Sweden. I chose Sweden because almost all it's population could speak English but the thing which I didn't realize untill I came here was that how much importance Swedes still give to their own language. It is prevelent in computing and media and it comes vary natural to them becuase they have the same script as other Latin based languages.

The case for urdu is not the same. I guess there have been some attempts to make urdu an acceible language on an OS but I have not seen a very good out of the box solution which works on an old machine. For this reason I am scrapping the project of urdu-bb as a web based urdu input system and reusing the name to make it an urdu based OS. It will effectively solve the same problem, bringing urdu computing to the masses but it would make it simple to operate the whole machine. In this modern age of internet we some times forget that computer doesn't alwasy means being connected. You can do wonderful things with a computing device which is not connected. Primarily this device can be used as an instructional tool in schools and as an information device.

Following are some of the goals I have come up with for now. I will keep on refining them and if you have some ideas please make a comment.

Urdu-BB aims to be a an Ubuntu based linux distribution

• whose primary focus is users from Pakistan and India who use Urdu in Arabic/Farsi script .
• is very very easy to use (bringing computing to villages, madrassas, train stations, mosques, parchoon shops ,khokas, taat schools)
• is very low on resources (should be able to run on old computers, laptops easily)
• doesn't let end users miss out on any thing (like mp3, flash)
• can easily tap into the WiMax and mobile revolution currently happening in Pakistan and let people connect easily.

It is not aimed for high end programming, servers, high end multimedia etc (it is assumed that a person who requires such things would move on to Ubuntu or other more suited alternatives. It will be available in urdu only but can be used to browse english based websites and type in english if needed. This project will probably take a good deal of time to get some foothold but I think it's the step in right direction. Let's hope it doesn't take as much time as GNU Mach kernel did.

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

I have learnt a few things while having PGP the hard way. First is that one should read complete documentation before dwelling into serious things like encryption and security.  Thsi is becuase I didn't know few things like lost key certificates remain at keyservers. Second is that what ever you do with your keys, the deleted information always remain on the keyserver. The only way to get rid of a key is to revoke it, but it still shows up on a keyserver. So now on the key server if one searched my full name or email address, there would be many key IDs which are there (some are revoked, others are expired but still showing up as if they were active), so it kind of makes me look sloppy, but I have a key/fingerprint and its shared on my site and integrated with my mutt client, that's what all counts.

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 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.

I wanted to setup Trac on my server, but haven't found a recepie which only uses nginx for Trac and SVN componenet. So I decided to go for plain Webbased SVN application. I chose WebSVN because it uses PHP and is easy to setup, it's used by KDE project for their SVN view and most of all, its readily available in Ubuntu :). I found a nice tutorial from HowToForge.com for setting up svn and websvn on Ubuntu. My websvn repository can be found here.

These days mutt is my default email client. Even though I still use webmail for my service based accounts (gmail, yahoo) and Evolution at work I would one day like to merge all my accounts under one roof with IMAP, spam control and mutt as my 'Mail User Agent'. The first thing which I wanted to do with my mutt was to make it send PGP-signed messages. I found the following links to be interesting read.

• muttrcexample
• setting up mutt with GnuPG
• setting up mutt with maildir
• reading html mails with mutt

I requested my hosting service to migrate my virtual private box from a User Mode Linux setup to a Xen setup. Xen seems to be the de facto visualization solution for Linux. It has become a considerable part of new Red Hat Certified Engineer's exam as well (for which I am prepping these days). Interestingly I was having troube running jetty plugin on User Mode Linux but now I am ablt to run that plugin (jetty wont bind to port on the local UML machine, now it does).