After a small break

Its going to be 10 days since I posted last and it seems to be long. I have been literally doing nothing and hence nothing much to post (though I have been reading a lot).

Tomorrow am leaving for a day’s trip to Coimbatore, participating in a workshop at PSG Tech. on FOSS. I will be joined by Aanjhan and Bharathi. I plan to talk on “GUI Development with Glade3″ (as Bharathi wants to talk on Qt Designer) and Collaborative development tools. Then we also plan to have a Panel discussion to end the week long things, organized by NRCFOSS. The audience are limited to 15 staff members from CSE|IT|EEE|ECE branches and 15-20 ME students.

This time am not blessed with luxury of traveling in train, as I was a bit lethargic in booking the tickets due to personal uncertainties and hence have ended up with traveling in the bus on both ways. The ticket cost, am afraid, is more than what would have been in an A/C chaircar (A/C Sleeper Volvo to CBE is 530 INR). This is going to trouble my back, even though I have booked only in A/C Sleeper Volvo bus. God save this poor soul

A guide to deal with us

Its been a fact that rules are bit different in the FOSS world, than the commercial/corporate world that people are used to. This has been one of the reasons that newcomers take time to get accustomed with, and if there is some acrimonious experiences in the way, they walk off. Even the press media had been not able to fully understand our way of life, our jargons, our ideologies, and as a result we have always have the probability of mis-interpreted.

This has made Troy Unrau, a well known writer for KDE, to come with “An Informal Guide to Dealing with Open Source Culture (for writers)“ whose first draft has been posted in his blog. I happen to read it through KDE Planet and thought of sharing it in my blog as well. He has addressed a few important points for others to understand us better.

Installation Successful

It was time for shock and excitement when Nee told me she wants to move to Linux. It happened suddenly that I couldn’t believe my eyes. I have shown Ubuntu on my laptop to a lot of ladies but till now no one was ever ready to say, “why don’t we install it in my laptop/PC?”. I did not want to lose out this chance, rather an opportunity to break the ice and show people that we can indeed use Linux for our day to day computer needs. She indeed did say that she was thinking Linux to be all “black and white text”, though she had worked with Open Solaris a year ago. This sudden excitement and interest in trying out Linux has come from seeing a 3D desktop live.

So, we decided to install Ubuntu in her laptop this weekend. As hers’ was a HP laptop, I first decided to try it out with a Live CD of Feisty Fawn before installing it for ever. As she had 1GB RAM, I was too sure of Live CD to install without much problem. Booted with Live CD, she tries using the new GNOME desktop for some time, before I got the approval to proceed with the installation. I asked her to click the install icon and start the installation. Other than the partition stage, she did everything without my intervention. I also explained some basic things about how GNU/Linux system works and even a bit of philosophies behind. She, being a geeky girl, very well understood the hard part of “free” software and Ubuntu using some “non-free” drivers to make a few things work.

She had an empty F drive under NTFS, which was around 30GB. We deleted it, and used it to install Ubuntu. The installation was smooth and got done in 10 mins. We booted into the newly installed system and next 30 mins went in showing her some basic configuration stuff. As we did not have internet at that time, we could not download and install something.. But I thought her about using apt-get to search for packages and install them.

She was very happy for having a working Linux system. But as we did not have internet, we could not install and try out Beryl (3D Desktop). Later, when she had internet, we tried to connect her laptop to the broadband connection she has. First, it wasn’t working and when she called up the Hathway customer service, they said they do not know about configuring it for Linux (the expected reply ). Then, I asked her to get the configuration details for IP address (they have static IP), mask, gateway and DNS. The new mask they gave made her connection work. I told her to ring them up and tell them she did configure the connection and can teach them how

One mistake I did was, forgetting to check the sound after installation. Sometimes it doesn’t work right away and we have to check the alsamixer. We tried to do it through online interaction, but it did not work out. And as a result, she will be using Windows sometime for her music needs before I get her sound working. Besides this, everything seem to work and she is so excited that she can forget Windows soon and start using GNU/Linux full time

Will the leader answer ?

The latest hot talk in the FOSS world has been about the latest deal between M$ and Linspire. Many had expected it, especially after the bashing of GPLv3 by the Linspire lead. This follows similar deals with Novel and M$ which had provoked large scale debate over the actual intentions of M$ with respect to its publicly proclaimed enemy, GNU/Linux.

Though the new deal has similarly kicked on another round of debate, I was a bit excited to find a number of posts in the Ubuntu planet, from some of the top bloggers there. It was started by Aaron Toponce, followed by Richard Johnson, Jonathan Carter and Christopher Denter. The one common thing with all these 3 active Ubuntu guys is that they all wanted to know what Mark Shuttleworth thinks. Its because Ubuntu project is being financially supported by Canonical Ltd. and the same nightmare can be created by them too.

But we Ubunteros have our hopes, mainly at the bug #1 filed by Mark. We all believe that Canonical and Ubuntu are committed to solve that bug and we will not fall prey to lure of $$ by M$. Also, we have Mark’s comments in the past in which he had been certain that there won’t be an Ubuntu-M$ deal. But nothing is impossible in this world.

Hence, the Ubuntu community is looking ahead to hear from its leader, a reassurance that we will also be not embarrassed with a similar deal. And, many of the Ubunteros who had commented to one of the posts in the Planet had mentioned that if some thing like that ever happens, they will not have a second thought in walking away from Ubuntu. With respect to the passion we have within the Ubuntu community and think of the past years since we joined our hands, we hope that day won’t come.

/me joins the Ubuntu community and waits to hear from our leader.

(Bash) My Top 10 Commands - June 2007

Following the posts in Planet Ubuntu, I thought of trying out the same to find out which commands I have often used recently. So I tried..

$ history | awk ‘{print $2}’ | awk ‘BEGIN {FS=”|”}{print $1}’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail | sort -nr

And the result was..

81 ls
68 sudo
64 cd
33 apt-cache
26 exit
24 screen
22 vim
12 ping
10 cat
8 svn

Flied to the west

It was a fun filled weekend at Pune, the Ubuntu Indian team meeting informally for getting together. 8 of us met - Aanjhan, Anurag, Barkha, Baishampayan Ghose, Gaurav aka tazz, Onkar Shinde, Sneha and me. We had nothing but fun, did not freak out much other than an afternoon at a mall.

I left to Pune by Indian Airlines on Friday evening and laned at Mumbai around 19.30 hours. Anurag, baks and tazz were there to welcome me and 4 of us rushed to Dadar to fetch a bus to Pune. After standing for 2.5 hours at the ticket counter, we managed to get into an A/C Volvo bus and started our journey towards Pune. We reached there around 2.30 a.m., having got down at a wrong place and waited till Onkar came up and guided us home. Tuxmaniac aka aanjhan arrived around 7.30 a.m. in the morning.

We started the day with a quick breakfast of dosas and watching few series of ‘The IT Crowd’. We then proceeded to a mall called E-Square. We got tickets for ‘Bheja Fry’ and had a nice dinner. It was an awesome movie which made us all laugh during the entire 1.5 hour duration (though tazz had a nice sleep and was waken up when the entire theater was in laughter). We returned back to be joined at home by G0SUB and June.

We went for dinner at “Horn OK Please”, after trying to fix with a restaurant for an hour. We returned back around 00.30 a.m. and crashed. We left for Mumbai the next day morning and me got a chance to spend a day at my brother’s place before returning back today morning by IC-0972. The route back to Mumbai was fantastic, as we missed it all during our way to Pune as it was pitch dark night.

Traveling by air has really made it possible for me to have a weekend in Western India, 100s of kilometers from my home, but still return back without feeling much tired of travel. I still wonder how I would have felt if the journey was by train instead. Next time, gotta make sure I stay at BOM at least for a couple of days, pre-inform my brother well before and see Mumbai more than a brief bike ride on my way to airport. Also, plan to trip to Lonavala

Mutt in Feisty

Have been trying to make mutt work since dapper days, did not quite get it right. After seeing a post in ilugc mailing list today, was determined to try again. It did not take me any more than 5 minutes to get mutt working with exim4. Here are the steps..

[1] install exim4 (+exim4-base, exim4-config, exim4-daemon-light) and mutt

[2] configure exim4 as follows,

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config split configuration into small files ? YES

choose "mail sent my smarthost; received via SMTP or fetchmail

System mail name: localhostIP Address to listen on for incoming SMTP connections: 127.0.0.1

Other destinations for which mail is accepted: <blank>Machines to relay mail to: <blank>

Machine handling outgoing mail for this host (smarthost): smtp.gmail.comHide local mail name in outgoing mail ? NO

Keep number of DNS queries minimal(Dial-On-Deman) ? NO

[3] Now configure the password client

$ sudo vim /etc/exim4/passwd.client gmail-smtp.l.google.com:yourAccountName@gmail.com:y0uRpaSsw0RD

*.google.com:yourAccountName@gmail.com:y0uRpaSsw0RD smtp.gmail.com:yourAccountName@gmail.com:y0uRpaSsw0RD

[4] Specify the port,

$ sudo vim /etc/exim4/conf.d/transport/30_exim4-config_remote_smtp_smarthost # add the following line after the line containing 'host_try_auth ..'

port=587

[5] Add your outgoing email address,

$ sudo vim/etc/exim4/email-address # myuser@localhost: mymail@gmail.com

yourUserName@localhost: yourAccountName@gmail.com

[6] Update the exim4 config

$ sudo update exim4.conf

[7] create a ~/.muttrc and add the following,

# mail check options

set pop_host="pops://username:password@pop.gmail.com:995"

set pop_last

unset pop_delete

# mail send options

set sendmail="/usr/sbin/exim4"

# check for new mail on startup

exec fetch-mail

[8] The necessary configurations are done. Open up a terminal and issue the following command

$ mutt

This will ask you to accept a security certificate and then check your mails. If the configurations are done as given above, you should be able to get the list of mails in your gmail inbox.

If it shows the error “/var/mail/UserName: permission denied (error-13)“, then send a test mail to ‘Username@localhost’. This will create the required /var/mail/UserName and make things work fine.

Happy mutt’ing

Sources:

[1] Gmail and Exim4 - Debian Wiki

[2] Using mutt with Gmail

Words of the day - 16

As an advent of getting this month’s RD, here are some more words into my list.

chafe : verb : to become annoyed or irritated.

reticent : adjective : uncommunicative; reserved.

modicum : noun : moderate, token amount.

minion : noun : follower; subordinate.

foment : verb : to instigate; to promote the growth of.

middling : adjective : ordinary; mediocre.

ascertain : verb : to find out definitely.

proponent : noun : advocate; adherent.

contemplate : verb : to observe thoughtfully.

austere : adjective : stern or severe in appearance.

fractious : adjective : unruly; quarrelsome.

raucous : adjective : harsh; rough-sounding.

piedmont : noun : area along or near the base of a mountain region.

mercenary : adjective : motivated solely by monetary or material gain.

am on the top!!

Pretty surprised to know this - My recent post “Who Uses Python?” has hit the “top post of the day” on 07th June, 2007, while my blog is at #2 in the “growing blogs” list. Although I had got into growing blogs some 6 months ago, I was in #13 then. The post has hit 4588 views yesterday, making the total views cross the 20,000 mark and now stand at 23643.

Thanks to the OP at comp.lang.python and all those who replied with interesting *uses* of Python. Thanks also to the linuxer who posted it on reddit and all those who commented at my blog. Yesterday was the best day for my blog and wish I can continue this momentum

Who Uses Python ?

I happen to see an interesting post in the Python mailing list. The question was to know who uses Python, other than sys-admins and web developers. And here is a consolidation of the replies till now.

• For login scripts, locking down PCs, automating backups, GIS, and more.
• Electrical engineering. It’s pretty handy for writing programs to talk to embedded systems using various protocols/interface (async-serial, ethernet, etc.). It’s also good for analyzing communications, analyzing performance tests for analog instruments, and so on.
• The Technical Artists are using Python more and more for development needs.
• For digital art (music visualization). It’s excellent for data analysis (I’ve done everything from stats on lines in an SQL database to mining flat text files of data for statistical projections of MLB baseball player performance). I know a couple of
  people who sell a double-entry accounting system written in Python, which is presumably “finance”. Web analytics is very common (I’ve seen several such projects)
• we use Python for controlling fully automated logistics solutions (conveyors and stacker cranes), for generating PLC code etc.

There is also a very long reply on how Python has been used for Railway Computer-control Simulation which lists the use of Python 2.5 as,

• The main database where all states are kept (signal aspects, given and actual turnout states, track occupation …). It’s a simple binary protocol using TCP; the server maintains string:int pairs in a Python dict. It’s made with Twisted and running under twistd.

• The automatic drive controlling software of the model trains. It listens for changes of signals and track occupation and controls the model trains using a commercial digital model railroad controller attached to /dev/ttyS0. Also using Twisted/twistd, and
  pyserial.

• Various helper scripts and little servers for small functional units (tramway reverser, level crossings)

This is the latest one I read,

• To manage the database application, data integration, and reporting
• to shuffle and sort important files around, to convert reports into formats necessary for various import and export functions, to reconcile data between database systems, and to maintain little text databases for various business processes.

Some other common replies includes text search, data mining and biotechnology. Nice to hear about some real time uses of Python, different from the usual administration and web stuffs.

At last, I will be in Pune

Till yesterday evening, was feeling bad that I won’t be joining my buddies at the Ubuntu India Team meet at Pune the coming weekend. There were no tickets available in any of the 3 trains to Pune, with waiting list numbers around 240-280. Earlier searches for flight to Pune was found to be too costly for me to spend from my pocket (which is already empty). There is also no Volvo bus plying between Chennai and Pune. There were possibility for reaching Pune from Bangalore, but that would increase my expenses. So, I almost dropped the idea of going to Pune and was thinking of attending the Chennai LUG meet next week.

Thanks to tuxmaniac for giving me the last hopes of being at the meet. He found me Indian Airlines flights to Mumbai and said either baks or devmodem will pick me up from airport and proceed to Pune in volvo bus. The whole air travel cost me around 3000 INR (thanks to the additional discount if booked with ICICI credit card). This sound to be a good deal and a chance to travel by flight almost after 10 years. I booked tickets for Chennai–>Mumbai in 8th June evening IA flight, while am returning by the early morning IA flight on 11th from Mumbai. Nothing goes without a bit of confusion. I got a call from yatra.com informing me that the return ticket I tried to book was for last ticket in economy class in that flight and it unfortunately got booked before I could. So, I had two options of taking another flight or pay a 1000 bucks more and get a ticket in the executive class. He also said that there are no tickets in the morning flights, but only in an afternoon GoAir flight. As I need to be at Chennai for sure on 11th morning, I decided to pay a 1k more and come by the same morning flight in executive class.

Its going to be more than 10 years since I made an air travel. So, tuxmaniac briefed me about what I should do on entering the Chennai airport, till I come out at the Mumbai airport . I am not planning to take any luggage as my back pack can hold the necessary clothes for the 2 days, along with my laptop.

Looking forward to the journey and especially to meet all the buddies of Ubuntu India team. Another opportunity to match nicks/names with faces. This is a very informal meet of the team, just to get more closer with one another so we can work together in a more effective way. We have ideas of making half-a-day outing on 10th. I have to somehow return to Mumbai by night of 10th June, so I won’t miss my morning flight on 11th.