Long Live CLI !! (CD Burning with CLI)

Whenever I tell non-FOSS people about Linux, the first question they ask me is “Does Linux have a GUI?” or a slight variant, “Isn’t Linux all command line?” Mostly, I don’t asnwer in words. I rather show them my laptop and ask them try moving around. The next thing they mostly ask me is, “How to install this on my computer?”

But, right from my own Linux guru, many have emphasised exposure and proficiency in CLI (Command Line Interface). Right from the day I started learning to work around in Linux, I always felt it nice to use the terminal to do some basic things. But, I haven’t really used some utility in CLI other than working in Vi in the terminal.

Today, I had a guy from HCL who had been asking for a copy of Dapper Drake and I had asked him to get it burnt from me. He came today in the after noon. The first mistake I did was that I forgot to copy an iso image of the Ubuntu CD to my system. I was in a hurry as I can’t make him wait for too long.

I fired up K3b, from the terminal, and copied an iso image to my home directory. It took some 15 mins to create the iso image of a 698 MB disk. Then, with all enthusiasm, I inserted the empty CD the guy gave me and tried to burn the iso image into the CD. What I got was that an error message that i do not have write permissions over the CD R/W drive. It asked me to check some k3b setup where I had no clue to give the drive a write permission for k3b to work.

I ran to #linux-india and codemarauder (IRC Nick) was there to help me He told me how to burn the iso images using the “cdrecord” command. I fired up a terminal and started issuing commands..

technofreak@dapper:~$ sudo cdrecord dev=/media/cdrom0 speed=4 -v Downloads/k3b_0.iso

It resulted in an error saying “/media/cdrom0″ was a dir. Then, on his advice i did,

technofreak@dapper:~$ sudo cdrecord -scanbus

This showed my CD RW drive to be dev 1,0,0. Then, I modified the cdrecord command and fired it once again,

technofreak@dapper:~$ sudo cdrecord dev=1,0,0 speed=4 -v Downloads/k3b_0.iso

This time, it was all fine and it asked me whether i can proceed with the write action. I agreed and it started. As I was burning a 698 MB image at 4X speed, it took some 15 minutes. I felt that I should have atleast given a 8X speed. Atlast, after 50 mintues of activity I got one hot copy of Ubuntu Dapper Drake on my hand and it brought smiles in the guys face. Won’t it be, he showed patience for around an hour to get it in his hands. Community, lets welcome another Ubuntero on board !!

Remember, CLI can really help you out at times. So, never neglect learning to work with command line. “Know both the ways (GUI and CLI), let situation decide which will serve the purpose better” is the moral of this experience! B-)

Semma Reply!

Its been happening for quite sometime, that people have been asking to be removed from the ilugc mailing list. Though every mail send to the subscribers contains a link for unsubscribing, not many look into that. We people get so much annoyed of such people continuously pestering us.

It happened again this time and to my surprise, got one fantastic reply from a buddy, here it is…

On 9/25/06, Support <support@inspacetech.com> wrote:

please dont send me the mails

There are two ways to go about doing this:

a. you can contact our support team to get your id removed
from our mailing list. we charge $1000 per id for this service.
( visa and mastercard accepted, option available for paypal)

OR

b. You can follow the instructions at the footer of every email
from this mailing list. this process is free of charge.

–
saha

ROTFLOL!! Saha, fantastic reply!! Kudos!!

And here again, Raja ‘the superman’ has added something

As a permium service, for a low one time fee of $699, we can also
ensure that your email ID never gets included in our mailing list
in the future*.

* Terms and conditions apply.

- Raja

Man, can a mailing list get entertaining than this ?!

Software Freedom Day 2006

Sorry, I had been a bit late in drafting this post due to loads of personal and official work. Tuxmaniac’s blog about SFD in Bangalore has finally yielded me to stop procastinating further and write this post. Here I go…

Software Freedom Day or SFD, as it is famously known, is a day for Free Software Enthusiasts to celebrate as an awareness creation day. The main aim is to carry the message and benefits of embracing FOSS to the general public, who otherwise are in the mist of proprietary software. This is not celebrated only in India or one part of the world, its a universal celebration to mark the success of Free Software worldwide.

What is Free Software ? Its the software which offers its users four freedoms which bestows the user the right to use the software as he/she wishes and share it with others. The 4 Freedoms are,

1. Freedom to run the program for any purpose the user wishes to,
2. Freedom to study and adapt the program, with the help of the source code of the program,
3. Freedom to redistribute copies to any one we wish,
4. Freedom to modify the code and improve the program, release the program to the community so as to benefit the entire community, along with the modified source code.

These Freedoms are consider very important for software to grow, develop, mature and reach the far ends of humanity. The community which was built around this 4 freedom philosophy is the Free Software commuinity. And, this community has grown stronger and larger that the Free software has really started reaching the common man. To add fuel to this fire, SFD is aimed at taking the benefits fo Free Software further to the comman man. To know more about Free Software visit FSF.org.

So, as a part of FOSS community what did Indian Linux User Group Chennai or ilugc do ? A lot things were proposed in the past couple of months, most of which melted in air. The main thing amongst them, which is still being displayed an yet to be replaced, is Freedom Walk. We actually planned to go for a walk, atleast a kilometer or two, enchanting the philosophies and benefits of Free Software. We did have enough men to join, with a few engineering colleges around the town supporting us. But, as there more political measures needed to make this happen, it was dropped down. But, another plan was proposed by one of our LUGie, who also runs a Lynus (Training) Academy, was a small public show in a avenue near his training center. So, we finally decided to settledown with this plan, a 2 hour show encompasing Philosophies and Benefits of Free Software at Asiad Colony, in Anna Nagar - West.

SFD 2006 by ILUGC started at the community park named “Asiad-Rohini Park”, a quite spacious greenary situated inside the boundary of Asiad Colony. To say the truth, this was the first 100% public show that I had participated as a part of ILUCG in the past two years. so, it was indeed a different show this time. And, as the audience was non-techy general public, we decided to have 99% tamil show. The show started with Thamizh Thaai Vaazhtu (Prayer for the Tamil Mother) and then Raman gave a brief introduction, followed by a special duo show by Thaygarajan (aka Thimingilam Thayagarajan and Thalaivar Thyagu) and ILUGC’s SuperMan Raja. It was an interactive play, where Thyagu played the part of a computer-negligent father who wishes to get his son a computer but doesn’t want to spend much and Raja as a Linux community representative. The show was awesome, but restricted as we were running out of time. This was followed by display of 3D desktops by Shrinivasan and Bala Vignesh of ILUGC, further followed by briefing about Open Office tools by an enthusiastic student from SRM. The show was compered by Priyadharshini and Srini from Jaya Engineering college. Raman also had a quick hands on session for kids with GCompris.

The another notable part of the celebration was, we had quiz competition where questions were asked based upon the topic which was last discussed and the prize was a 6 month *free* subscription to LFY magazine. There were around 11 people stealing away the prizes and this made people come out of their shells and participate in the show Thanks to LFY. I had to thank the people involved in making the arrangements, the projector and sound system people , and all those physical volunteers invovled in the show.

urgh, forgot! There was a surprise presence of two foreigners who saw the advertisement in the news paper and came to watch the show. Kudos to both of them

So, it was a different but indeed a great day to celebrate the Software Freedom. We are determined to continue our efforts to create awareness about FOSS in nook-and-corners of India I have posted the snaps in my flickr album.

Channel Op Kicks Himself Out!!

Have you ever seen a channel Op kicking himself out of the channel ?! Here is tuxmaniac kicking himself out from #ubuntu-in! How frustrated he should have been…

ChanServ gives channel operator status to tuxmaniac
<tuxmaniac> techno_freak>
<techno_freak> tuxmaniac:
<techno_freak> tuxmaniac: yes mr. channel opp
<techno_freak> op*
<tuxmaniac> at the cost of Mr. Nice Guy G0SUB
<techno_freak>
* basanta (n=basanta@202.79.37.177) has joined #ubuntu-in
* indranil_ has quit (”Leaving”)
* S1NGH (n=xavier@168.167.236.251) has left #ubuntu-in
* basanta has quit (”Leaving”)
* tuxmaniac has kicked tuxmaniac from #ubuntu-in (Get lost into the real world. Its fscking boring)

Urgh, sorry to those who didn’t udnerstand a bit of this! This is something which happened in Internet Relay Chat, which you wouldn’t have heard of if you were never into Open Source world. Its pretty much like messenger chat service, but its like a open room where people can join over the discussion. All you need is a nick and some basic idea about hanging around in IRC. Am sorry, if its still a bit geeky to you. Its indeed intended to add some geekiness to my blog

Let Google explain it to you…

Internet Relay Chat. A live chat area of the Internet in which real-time conversations among two or more people take place via special software. Each specific IRC channel begins with a # and is dedicated to a different area of interest. IRC is considered another part of the technology of the Internet the same way FTP, Telnet and the Web are.

If you still don’t have a clue… err.. forget it. Its just another post!

Glimpses from the “Bustling” Metropolis - 1

Been thinking about starting a series to catch the glimpses of the city I dwell, its citizens and how our lives move along with time. From now on, “Glimpses of the Bustling Metropolis” will stand as a portrayal of the world around me. It will report on what my eyes see, what my ears hear and what my heart feels about happenings which this human soul is exposed to.

Everday morning I rush to the bus stop, a 7 minute walk from my home, to catch one of the early morning bus enroute to my laboratory. The reason for me to go to work at such an early hour is that, as the sun rises up so does the crowd in the buses. The bus I usually catch comes to my bus stop any time between 6.30 AM and 6.50 AM. So, I have to make sure am before the minimum time value.

Its been a well known rule that if you are travelling in early mornings, please take some change to buy the tickets. Because, probably you will be getting into a bus which is on its first trip for the day and hence, the conductor will have no change with him. But, is it possible to have change at all times. Leaving out exception circumstances, think of those people who have such one as a routine, like me. The fact is, until people give the conductor some change he will not have change. But, when you have to do otherwise most conductors are humble enough to ask you to collect your change back before you get down in your respective stops. Hope you would have got an idea of what my first glimpse is going to be ?!

There are certain humans on earth, who will get into an early morning bus and with all pride give a 20 Rs note for buying a 2 Rs ticket. Urgh, won’t this make the conductor lose his cool. It does. Adding to this are people, who inspite of giving a 10 Rs note for a 2 Rs ticket, will cribb that the conductors are irresponsible for not giving them immediate change. In this issue, I rather support the poor conductors. My opinion is that, when you know that you are going to need 2 Rs to buy a ticket and its a daily morning requirement, why don’t you get change for a month or two from the bank. Why piss off the conductor who had just begun his day and he has to see more blockheads like you ? I personally make sure that I carry enough change for the day, even 50p coins to render exact change of 4 Rs 50 paisa for my travel. Once I get my salary, the first thing I do is to convert atleast a 1000 Rs into various denominations (Rs 10, 5, 2, 1 and 50p).

So, what’s the moral of the sotry !? Before tagging some one to be irresponsible, we must make sure that we are a bit responsible (citizens or humans). We complain that condutors are rude. But, instances like these justify them to have lost their politeness. If you are a routine traveller and you do know how much you will need for your tickets, please take proper change!

A Day at Stella - Contentment !

Stella Maris College, one of the famous and top ‘Arts & Science’ Womens college in the city of chennai. There is a word among the public that guys aren’t permitted in here, but today we went as guest. Rather call us as mentors. We went to talk about GNU/Linux to the students of BioInfomatics department, as they are intended to use Linux for their work.

It was planned to have our usual session consisting of an Introduction to FOSS, an installation session, moving around in the desktop (KDE) and basic system tasks. Usually we would have faced an incompatible or otherwise old hardware. But this time, we should rather say it as a Bleeding-edge hardware. It was workstations for IBM, not 1 or 2 but 21 in total and all were intended to be used as local machines (mean for ordinary student practise purposes). The installation process went pretty smooth and fast, thanks to the 2GB RAM ( ) and the smart “G-parted” which shrunk the dominant NTFS partition to a meagre 20 GB junk ;). We installed Kubuntu, as they had only KDE in their syllabus (Ohh GNOME, sorry dude!).

The installation was followed by a basic introduction to the KDE desktop and applications that come with Kubuntu. Then we started a Debian installation and slipped away for the lunch. Had a simple yet satisfying lunch from saravana bhavan. Rushed back to the lab, as students were enthusiastically waiting for the next session. One of the girls was called and asked to try her own hand installing Linux, this time RHEL which the college had bought (remember 21 systems!!). While the installation was on, we used the time to enlighten them with basic bash commands. The installation was followed by a brisk introduction to Perl programming and shell scripting by Raman. We called it a day, having done something useful this weekend too.

The reason to include a ‘contentment’ in the title of this post is, the following few reasons…

• The students where enthusiastic and more importantly responsive. They asked us intelligent questions and responded to us well.
• Not only the students were interactive and participated in the session, but also the staff and admin people took active participation. They had some previous exposure and had indeed tried their hands on GNU/Linux prior.
• They were eager to know as much as they could from us and this made us also to interact confortably with the people.
• Usually, when we are about to call it a day we used to ask the participants that how many of them were confident to install Linux in their homes, we used to get only a few or no hands risen. This it was a big “YES!” and this makes us feel content that we indeed did something useful to the students

Long Live Tux!! Long Live the Free/Open Source Community !!