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December 3, 2024

Category: linux

September 22, 2014

No more reinstall campaign #AvoidedReinstall

by viggy — Categories: FOSS, FSMK, linux, ubuntu — Tags: , , , , , , , — Leave a comment

How often do you screw your GNU/Linux based system such that you decide to reinstall your system? Are you the go-to person in your group for any issues with any GNU/Linux based OS? How often do you suggest to people who come to you that there is no other way to recover than re-installing?

I have been helping people to migrate to GNU/Linux based distribution, mainly Ubuntu. And its quite often that I come across people who while doing something or other have messed their system and need to help to fix it up. More than often, I used to give up quite quickly and ask them to take a backup using live-boot and reinstall the system. Many times, I would just search for first error I noticed and see if I could get solution online and if that didnt work give up and ask to reinstall. Though this is quick, it actually meant that I wasnt learning anything new. It also meant that many things in Ubuntu which might have been actual bugs might not be getting noticed due to this.  And it also contradicted one of the popular examples I used to mention as to why Free Software is better than proprietary? Have you noticed the Blue Screen of Death, Can you fix it on Windows? Because Free Software allows you to study it and play with it, you can know why your system has actually crashed and try to understand how to fix it. Really? How often do we do that?

Hence I have decided to start this self-campaign and if possible motivate others to also follow it where in I put my maximum whenever I come across a messed up system to recover it without reinstall. The way the success of this campaign will be judged is by maximum number of systems I can avoid reinstall before coming across a system I am forced to reinstall as I cant find any other way around it. Hopefully as time goes on, the gap between every two systems forced to reinstall will increase which would mean I am improving/learning and avoiding many more systems from re-install.

I am already successful in doing it for 1 system. Hoorrrraaaayyyy!!!!! Hence #AvoidedReinstall 1 I spent 3 nights on it, close to 8-10 hours in all but finally it is recovered and system is now working without having to re-install Ubuntu. Hope to find sometime and blog about it also.

 

August 14, 2014

Feed of the blogs based on tags

by viggy — Categories: FOSS, FSMK, linux — Tags: , , , , — Leave a comment

For the FSMK Planet, we are asking students to give us Feed links based on tag FSMK. I will use this blog to explain how to do the same in WordPress and Blogspot.

For WordPress:

If your blog in WordPress Platform is “http://ssrameez.wordpress.com” then the link for the ATOM feed for FSMK tag is

http://ssrameez.wordpress.com/feed/atom/?tag=fsmk

Please note that in WordPress, tag is case-insensitive, so FSMK, fsmk are both the same.

For Blogspot:

If your blog in Blogspot platform is “http://sneakpeakintomyworld.blogspot.se” then the link for the RSS feed for FSMK tag is

http://sneakpeakintomyworld.blogspot.se/feeds/posts/default/-/FSMK

Please note that in Blogspot, tag is case-sensitive, so FSMK, fsmk are different.
So ensure that you are using the right cases for the tag so that all the blogs are shown in the planet.

 

March 18, 2014

December 12, 2013

Using jhbuild to compile and run gnome applications

by viggy — Categories: debian, FOSS, FSMK, linux, software — Tags: , , , — Leave a comment

I have been trying to compile and run gnome-chess from source. The first way, I tried was by downloading the source tarball and then running configure, make and make install. This worked fine after I fixed the dev libraries dependencies. This is one of the first point that you need to remember if you are compiling anything by source on any GNU/Linux distribution.

Point 1: If the compilation fails due to bad dependencies, it is generally because the dev library of that package is not installed.
If on debian, use apt-cache search to check which pacakges are available to download and apt-cache policy to check which package version you currently have installed.

This worked just fine and I was able to run gnome-chess with the latest code. Now when I modified few lines of code and tried to build it again, I started getting errors and that too in files which I hadnt even modified.

After looking a lot around for answers, I decided to use jhbuild and try compiling the source using it. I had hoped that it will help resolve all dependencies issues and hence I will be able to run the modified code.

I do not understand jhbuild yet completely, however I started following the manual in the gnome website.
Downloaded the jhbuild source from git repo.
build is using autogen.sh, make and make install.
Copied the sample jhbuildrc to my ~/.config directory.
Ran jhbuild sanitycheck and fixed the issues that were shown.
Then ran jhbuild build. This again gave me close to 60-70 missing packges.
Went through each one of them and again installed all the dev libraries.
Then when I ran jhbuild build, it started the process of downloading the source and building each of the gnome packages. In all 175 of them.
Finally I was loosing patience as some of the packages were as big as 300MB say for GTK+. It didnt make sense that just to build gnome-chess, I needed to build complete gnome from source.

This is when I met Mario(maweki) on #gnome-chess on IRC. Frustrated, I had sent a mail to games-list@gnome.org few minutes ago and he pinged me on IRC to help me.
He explained to me patiently what I exactly need to do.

Point 2:
So if you need to just compile and build gnome-chess,
Add the following in your jhbuildrc file which should in ~/.config directory.
ignore_suggests = True
This will reduce what needs to be build as much as possible

You can use the following command of jhbuild.

jhbuild build gnome-chess
Note: I had not given any module name in my previous command and hence it was downloading everything required for gnome.
This for me downloaded only 21 packages.
In some cases you may have to first build gnome-standard-themes package first. This is when the application doesnt use graphics but css-rules.

You can run jhbuild it using
jhbuild build gnome-standard-themes

However this might not always be necessary for all applications. So you can skip it safely also.

Point 3:
If you make changes to the source file and want to build the application again, use the following command
jhbuild buildone -n 'application-name'

buildone just builds the single application
-n switch is for networkless building and this will ensure that the source from your local directory is picked rather than checking out from the repo.

Point 4:
If you want to run the application from the newly build source, use the following command,

jhbuild run 'application-name'
By this, you should be able to see the changes, if any you made in the source directory.

Most of the pointers above were what Mario suggested me. I hope this would help you to get started with atleast downloading, compiling and running gnome-applications from source.

October 18, 2013

Being committed to free software is the only way forward

by viggy — Categories: FOSS, FSMK, linux, software — Tags: , , — Leave a comment

One of my friend shared this article about how Facebook is now a leading open source contributor and how most of the web giants are encouraging open innovation. The article also mentioned about how this trickle down is helping the community in general. Though I largely agree to the points mentioned in the article, I think the author missed one main point.
It only makes sense to open source your changes rather than maintaining forks
Its a common practice for any start-up to go with free software tools. When you are experimenting lot of ideas, free software tools help you to quickly come up with prototypes which you can get it validated with potential customers. The teams can also work independently without having to deal with licensing costs and other agreements with proprietary software companies.
What I think the article missed to point out is that when companies start developing their infrastructure around free software tools, it becomes a necessity for them to contribute back their code to the parent repository. Else maintaining and merging different code bases as and when new released for the particular project is released becomes very time consuming defeating the whole purpose of using free software tools. Hence I think it is not that Facebook and Google want to open source their technologies(Definitely, it can be that they want to contribute to the community), but the choice of becoming free software users ensures that you also contribute your changes back to the repository.
For example, we know that Google dumped its Google Compute Engine Linux and shifted to Debian as per this report.

September 26, 2013

Project Idea: Hacker of the week through github and gitorious performance

by viggy — Categories: FSMK, linux, project, tech — Tags: , , , , — Leave a comment

Technology Required: Php/Python web frameworks like Django/RoR, Git, Mysql/MongoDB/Any other database.
FSMK has many students who have started using github and gitorious and keep working on their own projects or contribute to any existing free and open source projects hosted there. The idea is to have a web portal which keeps tracking the contribution/activity of various FSMK students on gitorious and github and rank them based on various factors. Ultimately, every week, Hacker of the week will automatically be announced. The project is to have a web portal to do this automatically every week without needing any manual intervention. There should be one way for students to register to this portal along with their github/gitorious id and the admin of the portal will approve the student’s registration. Similarly College of the week can be announced. The portal should also maintain a record of all the previous week results.

In Version 2, When a new user is registering, certain criteria needs to be met like number of active days on github/gitorious, number of times contributed to projects, minimum score based on various other criteria. Also whenever the coder of the week is announced, it needs to send email to fsmk-discuss mailing list and also update in FSMK Facebook group.

February 9, 2013

GNU/Linux uptime worldwide

by viggy — Categories: FSMK, linux, tech, ubuntu — Tags: , , , , — Leave a comment

Wont it be great to see what is the total time that users across the globe are spending on their GNU/Linux Desktops. What if every time a user signs in a system, their usage time is recorded and once in a while this usage data is uploaded in a server. We can then extract lots of data like how much time is being spent totally, which are most popular operating systems based used, based on average uptime, we can find out the type of users and their preferred operating systems.

For example, we can may be find that people who are using say 3-4 hours a day on GNU/Linux are mostly Ubuntu and people who are using say more than 12-14 hours a day are mostly on Debian or Mint giving an indication that new users choose Ubuntu but they slowly shift towards Debian or Mint. Again just a hypothetical example.

We can also plan to have a competition at GLUG level to see which GLUG is spending most of their time on GNU/Linux.

August 8, 2011

How to use mail command to mail the contents of the file to somebody

by viggy — Categories: FOSS, linux, programming, shell, tech — Tags: , , — Leave a comment

$cat “Filename” | mail -s “subject” “mailid”

The assumption here is that you have sendmail configured in the system and the mailid that you have provided accepts mails from unknown addresses. Gmail doesnt.

April 11, 2011

Kannada Localization

by viggy — Categories: debian, FOSS, linux, localization, tech — Tags: , , , , , , — 1 Comment

As always, this is my another new attempt to do some contribution to Free Software community. Hopefully this will give some result unlike all my previous ventures. So let me explain how to start.

I have taken up debian-installer package for localization. No specific reason other than that the person who introduced me to localization was already working on it and hence it was a good starting point.

So to start with, you need to get all the packages which help you type kannada in your system.

Packages that you need to install are:

  • Scim : Smart Common Input Method (SCIM) is an input method (IM) platform.  Input methods are needed to enter complex characters in many non-latin languages.
  • Scim-bridge-client-gtk : scim-bridge is a wrapper libray for SCIM, written in C.
  • Scim-m17n: M17N (Multilingualization) Input Method Engine enables SCIM to input many non-latin characters from the keyboard using libm17n library.
  • ttf-indic-fonts: This package merely depends on the various Indian language font packages available in Debian. Use this if you want fonts for every official Indian language.

This should get the system ready. To test it, Open Gedit. Right click on a new page and Select Input Methods as Scim-input-method. Now Press Ctrl+Space. You should see the icon of scim on the bottom right of the screen. Select Kannada in the list and in Kannada select Kn-itrans. Now type something in english and you will notice that it will get converted to Kannada while you type.

Different type of Kannada input methods:

There are mainly two types:

Kn-itrans: In this, you will be typing in english and that will be automatically getting converted phonotically in kannada. So if you type in english as “nanna hesaru vignesh”, you will notice in the screen as “ನನ್ನ ಹೆಸರು ವಿಗ್ನೆಶ್”. This is good for people who are planning to use kannada only occasionally and hence dont want to understand the complete keyboard layout of Kannada. There are problems also in this method. Like I have not yet been able to find a way to type in “swanta” the way it should come in kannada with a “n” circle. I am able to get “ಸ್ವನ್ತ” but this is wrong.

Kn-inscript: In this, you will be typing in kannada itself and hence you will have to know the exact layout of kannada keyboard. Obvious way is to replace the English alphabets with Kannada alphabets on the keyboard. This is useful for those who regularly use Kannada for typing and hence will soon get to understand and memorize the layout.

With this understanding you will be able to start typing in Kannada.

November 16, 2010

Split .avi video and .mp3 audio files in Ubuntu linux

by viggy — Categories: linux, tech, ubuntu — Tags: , , , , , — Leave a comment

I am presently thinking of bringing out a collection of music which I like very much. It wont include any voice but just music. For that I mainly had two issues, first to split video files that I had in .avi format and second to split audio files that I had in .mp3 format.

For video files, I used ffmpeg utility

ffmpeg -i input.avi -ss 00:01:10 -t 00:04:45 output_file.avi

where input.avi is the file from which you want to extract the music.
-ss is the start point of the music
-t is the duration from the start time till when the music is to be extracted
output_file.avi is the file in this the extracted music will be stored.

It will be in .avi format only. If required you can also convert it into audio files.
This gave me the exact chunk of the music video that I wanted for collection.

For Audio files, I used mp3splt utility. I used its gui, mp3splt-gtk which is very easy to use.
All I need to do was select the file from which I wanted to extract music. Select two splitpoints, one for the start and second for the end. And select split button given at the top of the gui. Its as simple as that. Since this utility was available in Ubuntu Repository, I didnt have issues even with installing it