Finally, made the switch. I am now entirely a linux user. Of course, I do have Windows installed on the Laptop, and don’t have plans of uninstalling it. I use Windows once in a blue moon.

I will share in this post with you my experiences and hindrances I faced (and to date facing) while using Linux.

The distro I use is Ubuntu Hardy. I work on my HP-Compaq Presario CQ50 laptop which has an AMD Athlon X2 64 bit. When I was at home, there was no problem. Just plug in the ethernet cable, connect to the internet and install the required software using apt-get or synaptics.

But after coming to college it’s not that easy. I can access Internet only via a proxy. Hence even if I plug the cable into my laptop, I need to connect to a different server and use internet on it. Hence my laptop is not ‘directly’ connected to the internet. Hence

sudo apt-get install

simply won’t work. I have to manually download packages, copy it to my laptop from the other account on the server and then install. If there are any missing dependencies, then I have to hunt them up again.

I figured out that there were repos available on the college lan. That’s good, and that should do. But unfortunately, the repos were of i386 binary. I needed amd 64 bit repos. Can’t use those repos either.

So, chuck that for now. I will go home at the end of this semester and get all I need.

The next thing I notice is that my laptop doesn’t have a proper sound driver for Ubuntu. The sound is all cracked up and popping. So it isn’t a nice idea to run multimedia on Ubuntu. That helps in some ways for now.

And, my wireless. The red glow never turns blue in Ubuntu Hardy. So can’t use wireless either. Again it is because of the absence of some driver or other, which can be installed only with a direct internet connection. Well, it’s ok for now.

The most irritating problem I face is regarding the touchpad. There is some malfunctioning with it (of course on Ubuntu). Doesn’t entirely work the way it is intended to work.

Now that’s too much of problems. I look at them as challenges rather than trouble. It has made me read a lot on a lot of topics. It’s made me wiser.

If it was on Windows, just a click and it would have repaired everything itself. It would have never let us properly know, what was wrong and how it was rectified. For the comman man that may be more than what he would have expected. Well, not for me, cause I am not the comman man, I hate to be just the comman man.

Currently I am typing out this post from Ubuntu, and I am happy for choosing Ubuntu over Windows. It’s free, safe and beautiful.

P.S. : Waiting for October 10th, waiting for Ubuntu Intrepid. Hope it will put an end to my woes.

Please don’t come to the conclusion that this post is some sort of negative campain for Linux. In fact I love Linux. I have just tried to tell all of you that, when starting to use Linux, everyone shall face some problem or the other. Don’t be a coward and move back to Windows. Face them and Learn from them.

One of the most important reason for me to not stick with ubuntu initially was because, I had no idea of how to access internet from ubuntu. Today I learned how to do it.

It wouldn’t be a great idea if I didn’t blog about it, right!

I have a broad band connection at home. ADSL internet connection using an ethernet PPPoE modem. Read on ADSL and PPPoE from wikipedia.

So soon, I have my laptop running and plug in the internet cable from the modem. I log into ubuntu and open the terminal.

How to Access the Terminal?

Press Alt+F2, and then type gnome-terminal. Press enter, and you have your terminal running.

Alternative: Applications>Accessories>Terminal

Configuring PPPoE

1. Type sudo pppoeconf into the terminal.

2. You get something called a text based menu program. It guides you through the remaining steps. What you basically do is, confirm if your ethernet card is detected. Then your provide your username and password for authentication. Keep pressing Yes through the remaining steps.

Note: Password will be displayed as ordinary text. So make sure, no one is peeping from behind!

3. Finally you will be asked if you want to establish connections. Of course that’s the whole purpose right!

4. The menu goes off, and this info appears on the terminal. Plugin rp-pppoe.so loaded.

Starting the Connection

Now just one more command between you and internet. That command is pon.

sudo pon dsl-provider.

Done. Open firefox, and oh! well you know what to do!.

Yeah guys. Finally, I have got a laptop (HP Compaq Presario CQ50) for myself with Ubuntu 8.04 installed! I installed it myself! (Of course, under the supervision of my father, so that I don’t screw up stuffs again. ). Well, it isn’t entirely Ubuntu, of course there is Vista Home Premium installed.

I haven’t worked with Ubuntu before, only Fedora (no super powers , I mean no root access). There are some differences in the way you get to execute commands. In Fedora you have the substitute user (su) command. (Some call it the super user command). The su command is used to log into another account without actually logging out from the account you have initially logged in. So you type in the root (the god or the administrator) password, and gain system wide access to do anything you wish to do. This is a level of security, as only if you log as root can you cause drastic screwing up. But if you forget to log out of root, and absent mindedly set a command to do something naughty, BHAM!, there goes your system.

In Ubuntu, we have the sudo command. This ensures that you run certain commands as root. If I jump into the details I might start boring you. There are many other documents that have interesting tutorials for Ubuntu. Well, got one point to start loving Ubuntu over Fedora and Windows. It’s secure.

Well, I am what I am, so I just can’t avoid messing up things even with all this security. I wished to get high level graphics, and hence downloaded some drivers from the internet (Yes! Thanks to Papa, I am indeed accessing internet on Ubuntu. Finally I can now stick to Linux! (Meeting GNU/Linux, read the post-script). Ubuntu wanted me to restart, I obliged, and then? Display won’t work! Yes, successfully screwed up the display! My dad, quickly came to the rescue. He said he could recover it, using the recovery mode, but I had other plans. I wanted to install Ubuntu myself once (That’s how I ended up installing Ubuntu in the first place!). 

Ubuntu back on track and am still looking for new ideas to screw it.

So what next?

The most obvious thing was watching some movie on linux, but I thought otherwise. Let me learn some shell scripting. And that’s what is keeping me busy now. 

More on shell scripting the next time!

P.S.: Want to know more. Here’s more : Tux Magazine

After Spider and Delta web design classes in the second semester, it’s time for another class. This time I it’s about something new, something I also wanted to mess my hands up with. It’s about Linux. I had always used Windows and have been happy with Windows. But since the day I heard about Linux, and it’s Free Software Movement, I got curious to know more and actually use this Operating System. But, because of reasons I do not know, I have never used linux for more than a day. I remember using Ubuntu then. I got bored and quickly shifted to Windows XP, loaded up IE or FF, and surfed, till my hearts content (or till my father finds that I have been burning holes in his pockets ).

But still I longed to completely shift to Linux from Windows. With that initiative, I bought a Linux Bible book and started reading it. But due to installation problems, I couldn’t try out the shell commands effectively. And hence the makeover to Linux never happened. At college, my experiences with linux were while working with the sangam server running on linux. I could access a linux desktop using vncserver from a windows computer. I tried out a few shell commands, but still to no avail. I still didn’t know much about Linux.

Finally Linux Users in NIT-T arranged these blessed Linux classes. I had also been inducted into Delta, the college Webteam, and linux knowledge would definitely come in handy, I felt. The classes were cool, as cool as Linux is. Except that we were accessing Linux, via a Windows computer. It’s the terminal all that we needed. The umpteen number of Linux shell commands, the bash scripts, the enthusiastic seniors, the cheat sheets were all quite an experience. I also got a Ubuntu Live CD and a Fedora DVD. Thanks to the MGL (Meet GNU/Linux) classes. I am now feeling confident enough to shift from Windows to Linux.

Linux isn’t for hard core games, at least for now. It has it’s own reasons. It’s for people those who love to learn, experiment and contribute. It’s free, it’s linux and it’s fun.

P.S. I finally figured why I couldn’t stick to Linux at home. We didn’t know how to access the Internet via Linux at home. So there wasn’t much stuffs for me to do in Linux. That’s why I had the urge to jump back to XP and surf.

So friends, try messing your hands around with Linux. It’s cool and it’s fun. I am planning to write more posts about my Linux encounters. Do try out Linux and share your experience.

I am a Google fan. Yes, like many around, I am dependent on more that two free Google services.

Among all those services, e-mail service is a necessity now. It is essential when setting up a profile in social networks and forums. E-mail id is the first internet address. After that there can be websites, blogs and profile that marks an individual’s online presence. Today’s tech world demands at least one email address, to identify you.

jkrw…@yahoo.co.in :- This was my first email address. This was before gmail came into existence. I used it for creating a website. Those were the days when I got my hands dirty with web design. No, I didn’t mess with HTML or PHP. Simply MS Frontpage. It was fun.

Then came gmail.

It was the invitation days. Got an invitation from my father and made my gmail account. The second Google service I was using after Google Search. This email address was jith…@gmail.com. This still is my personal and most frequently used email address. Orkut and Facebook profiles are related with this.

Then I was introduced to newsletters. Most of my time online was spent just with orkut and google. Newsletter seemed interesting. They made general reading a habit. Back then I didn’t know about RSS and Google Reader. So I received subscriptions via email. Subscribing to the above email id, flooded my inbox. The solution was a new email address. And then I registered a new one, and that was jith…@gmail.com.

As though this wasn’t enough, I had to make a new one, when filling up my IIT-JEE 07 form. Instead of writing my actual email id, I wrote jithin@gmail.com, and that was an address I didn’t have access to!. There were reasons to panic. I wrote with pen, I didn’t have a pen eraser, even if I had a pen mark eraser, I couldn’t use it. The registration for was a OMR sheet and there shouldn’t be any stray marks. And overall, that sheet was worth a 1000 bucks and wasn’t available at any nearby post office! To add trouble, the last date for registration was fast approaching.

I quickly went online and tried to register for krji…@gmail.com.

Thank God nobody had taken it. I added two more characters to jithin@gmail.com on the IIT-JEE registeration form. Phew, tension free.

Finally I was into blogging, and I thought, to give a professional look I had to own a seperate email id for comment notification and trackbacks. Hence a new email id was registered which is mentioned in the About page.

If it goes on like this, I thought, I would need some infinite email ids for the umpteen number of services and “register and use” websites available. In fact with the first gmail account I registered, I had some infinite accounts at my disposal.

Get More From Your GMail Address

For orkut now the Mail address I use is “myusername+orkut@gmail.com“.

Just append any text to the end of your user name with a ‘plus’ signand have mails delivered to your mail account! How kewl! Also jithin.k.rajeev, jithin.krajeev, jithink.rajeev are all mine!

Just one account and you have infinite number of account. Hats off to GMail!

I have been blogging at several venues these days apart from my own blogs. My first venture was when Satish bhaiya invited me to blog on his blog Genius Hackers. I was overwhelmed and it gave me that confidence that my blog finally had readers and not just visitors. In the beginning, I was the only one visiting my blog and sometimes visitors who were lead to this blog via search engines. Well, I do find a slow and steady growth in the number of visitors, depending upon the frequency and quality of posts. Then came the official blog of the orkut community Hackers Library (http://www.thehackerslibrary.com).

Every experience teaches me a lesson, gives me a suggestions, and makes me wiser.

When blogging the most important thing to remember is to avoid copy pasting. It will affect your image and tag you as a copy cat among the netizens. Instead, if something amuses you key in what thoughts it brought to your mind. After all, we are all human and we can all think. Every human DNA is different from each other and similarly every human thought can also differ. Every piece of literature can be given an entirely different meaning under your perspective, something which the author or poet might not have thought of.

When I begun blogging at Genius Hackers, I began by copy-pasting my own posts there. But that was not welcomed. Because every blog owner expects it’s posts to be unique, when I copy paste, the uniqueness is lost. A post can have websites linking to it, but not it’s own copies in other blogs.

Every blogger tries to increase traffic to his site. Because a blog without readers doesn’t serve it’s purpose. Every person has his own thoughts and innovative ideas, but for some, the spark or the writing spree doesn’t last for long. Such people do not go for opening a blog for themselves, because they know that they have many more commitments to chase. For such people, guest blogging is a great idea. Here there is no need to create a new blog, instead they can post for another blog, who permits them to register and post. And when there is a contest around then, the time spent to post might return as prizes. It’s a great way for non-serious blogger and also for the blog to earn traffic and posts. It benefits both parties.

Such a venture is here at Genius Hackers. The GH.com Contest.

Just register and blog on a related topic, blog what you know. Who knows you might be the lucky one to bag the prize!

Just register and let your heart speak!

Internet Surfing has been revolutionized in this new era and a major contribution is from Google and it’s myriad tools and services. The main reason for it’s wide spread domain is because of the ‘free‘ tag. Most of it’s services like orkut, gmail, gearth basic and gtalk are available free of cost. So, were does google find its profits? It’s advertising services is the answer to that. Google’s powerful bots don’t just crawl the net to get you the best search results, they can even crawl your mails to display relevant ads on your mail page.

So how private is your life?

Let me look at the google services I use. iGoogle, Gmail, Orkut, Gtalk, GReader, GEarth, Google Blog Search, Picasa, YouTube, GVideos, GGroups, GBooks, GAnalytics. That’s a good long list, would have cost me a fortune if these weren’t free.

My online life is so much dependent on Google. No doubt there will many others like me. Now lets look at how gOOgle’s eyes follow you.

iGoogle - Customisable Search Page. It knows what you search for, what you want from the internet, and hence your fields of interests. I remember using Google search to know about my ailment during illness. So based on the search history, anyone who has access to it can know of my physical and even mental status. With such information, the lifestyle of any individual can be constructed.

Gmail and GTalk - Google’s mail and chat services. Again your interests, contacts, friends are there in your mail box. I know of an incident when we gained access to our friends gmail account by keylogging. From his chat history, we gained so much of personal information, like his new crush, reasons for observable changes in his behavior etc.

Orkut - For Indians, social networking got a new meaning through orkut. Your profile represents your online self. And you tend to make your profile as unique as possible, ending up giving more of personal info, sometimes info that shouldn’t be that public, like home address and personal phone number. You can closely follow a profile and get to know so much about the person in real life.

GEarth and WikiMap - You will be thrilled to find your place of residence on them and mark them as say “My House”, but it also permits strangers to know of your physical location. Well, I guess that’s dangerous.

Youtube and GVideos - These service changed the way we watch videos on the internet. Again it logs your video interests, letting people know more about you.

These are just instances, few examples I realised out of my Googling experiences. I myself know people who get information about others just based on online data, sometimes just from Orkut. The only hindrance they faced is the new privacy settings. Hence, it may be difficult for unauthorized people to cross your life, yet people with authority and permission to access Google data can construct the complete life of any individual simply from online data even without having any contact with the individual. He will never know his life is being watched upon.

It might be scary to realize that there could be someone watching every step of yours, knowing your little secrets and understanding your weakness more than the best of your best friends. But we can pacify ourselves :

“We are just one in a billion Google users. Who is jobless to trace our tracks? “

Noticed this just now. Yet another intelligent inclusion from orkut. Now no need to worry about the spam messages that is sent to you via scraps and messages. They end up in your spam folder at http://www.orkut.co.in/UserSpamFolder.aspx

Find something that shouldn’t be there in your spam folder? Found something that was not a spam? You can always send it back by flagging it as NOT SPAM.

WordPress has introduced, XML sitemaps for all it’s blogs as an initiative to increase the number of visitors to wordpress blogs, via search engines. It is indeed difficult for search engines to search thousands of pages, but with a map about the various links in the website, the pages and posts can be properly indexed and crawled, so that quality posts are more easily identified and they come up when searched for. That’s a good initiative and thank you wordpress team, for taking up the effort to automate the necessary steps in this concern.

Read what they have to say, here if you haven’t read about it yet.

That’s when something struck me. For the past few days, I have noticed that my visitor counts went on a low, a drop from about 120 to 50.

I don’t remember to have made any major changes that could have resulted in this drop. But now I get to co-relate events.

Investigating Possibilities

1. The sitemaps are indeed doing a great job, but for my blog it’s the other way round i suppose. When many other posts from other wordpress blogs became prominent or of more importance on the search pages, my posts lost position and were pushed down.
2. It could also be thought that the XML sitemaps has not been submitted to the search engines for all the wordpress blogs, as of now. The search engines are being informed in batches. So my blog’s sitemap has not yet been submitted to search engines and hence it’s posts are not making up to the front page of search engines, as it used to.

I shall wait for a few more days, and if I find a rise in the blog stats, then I can confirm #2, else #1. Do you think there could be any other possibilities? Do comment if you think something else could also have happened.

Sandboxie

Thanks to StumbleUpon!, because of which I stumbled upon this software’s website while surfing. It’s simply perfect for anonymously working on a computer. Leaves no traces of your session while working within something called the sandbox. Sandboxie, permits you to make sandboxes from within which you can open any program and work with it, just the normal way you do. Be it web surfing, games, new softwares, handling “might be harmful” files, anything. When within the sandbox, the changes that should be happening to your system when you work actually do not happen. So, when you break your sandbox, the entire session goes with the sand, without any trace. Nothing remains to tell what happened during your session!

I played a game from within a Sandbox, and when I deleted the Sandbox, and opened the game the normal way without any sandbox, the game look new, as if it untouched. No traces of someone playing the game! So, don’t do that mistake - If you aren’t trying out a new game and are actually playing it, trying to advance in levels, do it outside the sandbox, else your hard earned levels, just dissaparate disappears. But, it doesn’t mean that files modified or created, while within the sandbox can’t be recovered, Sandboxie provides the facility to recover the files too.

I found Sandboxie extremely useful while surfing the web. I faced the problem of rough softwares like spy-wares and ad-wares frequently, due to which my system slowed down quite often and I had to spend time removing them. Now, I don’t have to worry, cause, just deleting the Sandbox used, everything, that got into the system without my consent is thrown into the dump, never to return!

Give Sandboxie a spin now!