Posted by hatim
Thu, 29 Nov 2007 00:05:00 GMT
I have an inherent bias towards KDE and when I ponder upon it I really don't know why it is the case. Perhaps its because of softwares like Amarok, which give an experience not found in Gnome-land. I feel taht KDE apps are faster, but there is no factual basis for that. I have never actually profiled applicatinos running in KDE to Gnome or some other DM. In my core gentoo days I would spend hours figuring out most optimal CFLAGS so that my KDE/gentoo apps utilized most of my hardware. Crashes were inevitible, but I would blame those crashes on my own CFLAGS. For the last month or so I have been using Kubuntu on my VAIO and I have come across some bad behavior from apps like Amarok, kFlickr.
Perhaps even more disturbing is the crashing os supposedly stable compiz-kde. I did not have the time to look into stack traces of the applications to see what was happening, but the whole point of using Ubuntu is to used tested and tried software. I think Ubuntu/Kubuntu should put more emphasis on testing of different components, than adding goodies into the trunk which are unstable.
Posted in Technology | Tags kde, linux | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by hatim
Sat, 17 Nov 2007 02:32:00 GMT
I have a CentOS server in my home for linux practice. I have nicknamed this server as tivoserver as I plan to make it a TiVo box. I will later put MythTV on the system and station it in my family home in Abbottabad. But for now I had to install my D-Link PCI Wireless card onto CentOS 5. There are no linux drivers available for it so I searched for alternative solutions. Foryunately this card is supported by Ndiswrapper. I used the following two links to get it setup.
I downloaded ndiswrapper source and compiled/installed it. Then i put in the D-Link driver CD-ROM and got hold of Win2k/XP SYS file for the WiFi driver. It loaded itself easlity. I put in the configuration into
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0
and every thing worked smooth untill i got some errors due to differnet channel selection.
The thing is that even though I explicitly say to the server to use channel 9, it some how was using channel 6. Ofcourse I am using the wireless connection in Ad-Hoc more for peer to peer communication.
Posted in Technology | Tags linux, software | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by hatim
Sat, 10 Nov 2007 14:56:00 GMT
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
- Another problem which I faced was lack of touch pad control, for this I installed ksynaptic.
Posted in Technology | Tags linux, ubuntu | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by hatim
Wed, 10 Oct 2007 00:00:00 GMT
As an academic exercise I have been training IT staff of Muhammad Ali Jinnah University from mid August. This exercise got started while I was at my previous job. I am hoping to finish basic training of IT staff over CentOS linux and migrate their backbone system from Windows to Linux. For my time MAJU decided to financially compensate me. I was very please when I got my first pay check, as teaching linux has been one of my great passions. Training is still going on hopefully we will be finished with migration by end of December. Initially the timings which I was folloing was near lunch time. Now due to my new job I have to spend proper timings in my office from Mon-Fri, so lessons commence on my off days. These lessons have given me a good chance to update my RHCE prepration from RHEL-2 to RHEL-5 (it was long ago when I last prepared for RHCE exam). I hope to give RHCE exam in 2008.
Posted in LifeLog | Tags linux, Training | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by hatim
Sat, 30 Jun 2007 05:10:00 GMT
I now have the chance to move to 64 bit linux. There is a new Intel Core2Duo E4300 machine in my office. The specs are as follows (ill post detailed specs from with in the machine)
Intel Core 2 Duo, E4300, 1.8Ghz, 2MB L2 Cache, 800 Mhz FSB.
Intel D945 GCCRL Motherbaord (builtin video, audio,LAN)
It truns out that moving gentoo from a 32 bit machine to a 64 bit machine is not trivial. Also since I want to retain my harddrive and use it on the other machine at the same time , it would require some smart moving around data thingie.
I have the optiong of installing the 64bit version of Ubuntu Fiesty, but then it would not be the same as my current desktop would it :). Gentoo adds a whole lot of geek factor to my desktop, the main reason I am moving to 64 bit is to satisfy my geekishness, otherwise my current 32bit machine is more than enough for my needs.
I could also install 64-bit fiesty for the while and install gentoo at a slow pace, but that would be so not cool to both gentoo and ubuntu.
This time I plan to post a detailed blog on my gentoo installation procedure. This is just to share the various settings ect which I plan to do.
Posted in Technology | Tags gentoo, linux | no comments | no trackbacks
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
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
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
