Dare to Dream?

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After working nonstop for more than 12 hours on F7, I would be spending my night @ Sandy’s place to setup & test my Wifi & maybe reuse an old 1-click script I wrote long back to join my home network (Wifi-Radar should be also good enough)

But a desktop with 1 Gig or RAM & no gDesklets -  umm, it was missing _something_ hehehe So I spent another hour fetching some desklets - was surprised to find that now using gDesklets was as simple as dragging the tarball link into the gDesklets Manager - some gnome-vfs magic I assume

Actually, running gDesklets with 256 Megs RAM on a Celeron 800 MHz machine (my old PC) gets to be an overkill sometimes Hence, I’m loving my 1 Gig RAM

‘After fretting full day over why isn’t Fedora 7 showing both of the Cores of my processor, I finally managed to find the solution & as it turned out, it was mentioned in the Fedora7 Common bugs. There’s a bug filled too - Fedora devel bug 241249.

The solution, as suggested in the bug report is simple - just append  “clocksource=acpi_pm” to your kernel options in /etc/grub.conf

Nice!!!

Just managed to get the webcam on my Dell XPS M1210 working in Fedora 7 - many thanks to the Gentoo Wiki…

LuvcView in action…

LuvcView also supports still picture capture & AVI capture

However, I’m still unable to run the same Logitech camera with any of other apps. Kopete just shows a green box in the webcam placeholder as of now

Yesternight, I finally installed Fedora 7 on my laptop - only to find the boot process was hanging at “Uncompressing linux kernel” message. Adding an “acpi=off” to grub did the trick.

Out of the box support for Dell XPS M1210 with default (& full) installation of Fedora seemed a bit lacking to me.

• The Wifi interface, though was shown detected, was not working (ipw2200 was installed by default)
• Sound did not worked - on & after Firstboot
• Graphics were not sharp, although F7 did picked up the max default resolution for the laptop - 1280×800

Other issues were

• NTFS partition, containing Vista were not available (obvious reasons) [Update - ntfs-3g is indeed available on the Fedora install DVD, I might have overlooked the fact that its already installed.]
• MP3 could not be played (obvious reasons)

However, the function keys & the touch pad worked quite as expected.
I did though of trying Ubuntu for a second, but then Fedora was not bad atall - specially when I get all the *-debug rpm’s prebuilt So I decided to plug in my ethernet jack & solve all the problems one at a time - & as it turned out, people had already faced & solved these problems for FC6.

Some very good links that I found were FC6 Tips & Tricks (v1.3) and Personal FC6 Installation guide

More information about XPS 1210’s hardware is on Gentoo Wiki - here & here.

So, after spending some time on internet, I managed to solve audio, video problems. Audio just started working by itself since I ran system-config-soundcard & clicked “Reload Audio Drivers”. Video is now crisp & clear with Nvidia Drivers installed. NTFS partitions can be easily mounted using ntfs-3g. For MP3 support, please head over to the above two links.

I also did managed to get ipw3945 on my system, wifi is up again - I still need to test it at Sandy’s place tonight with his Wifi router.

The leftovers now…

• The Ricoh card reader
• Dual headphone jacks
• Logitech Cam & Mike - detection, hotkey, video streaming…
• The touchpad seems to be a bit scary when doing horizontal movements. Even the slightest touch sometimes makes FF to go back/forth in history. My Bro’s HP has one of the softest & best touchpad I’ve ever used. It just seems to magically know that when you want to click & when you want to scroll… wow!
• Media control buttons on the laptop
• Power management, Suspend to RAM when laptop’s lid id is closed, etc…

If I can somehow finish this list, the support for Dell XPS M1210 might be F&F!!!

Planning to buy a digital camera any soon? Baffled by so many choices available? Need advice?

…Have a look at 25 things you mush know before buying a digital camera

Bored with your mouse cursor? Try DMZ (i’m currently relishing on the bigger sized ones!)

If you had been in my shoes today, you would have loved this idea - which just struck me!

My ATI display had a compatibility problem with the projector in room 407 @ GNUnify & I had to resort to using the laptops available with the organizers - which had a series of problems! How to get past such a thing if it happens again?

Very simple!

Start vino-prefrences on your laptop

Run organizer’s laptop with the projector

Use vncviewer to connect back to your machine for a full-screen display!

Voila! You’ll have your own desktop in seconds! - thanks to a cross cable or WiFi

But whatever problems or not, the organizers & about 97 student staff (as I was told) did an awesome job on the day one. Never was I left alone - a volunteer was always in touch with me, be it for breakfast, my badge, a copy of schedule, setting upt the laptop or anything!

Great job guys!

The Official GNOME 2 Developer’s Guide

After reading a few pages from Ritesh’s book, I was simply mesmerized! If offers just the details you need to understand the what & how of GTK+ and GLib libraries.

The saying goes correct… Good books are worth all the investment.

Order your own copy for INR 495 (~= USD 10) with free shipping anywhere in India from FirstAndSecond

…waiting for the delivery… which is promised in 3 days!

I had to wait for one full day for this update to apply… after resolving numerous deps, waiting for Python 2.5, Gnome 2.17.2 rocks!

I assume that you are running a version of FC

1) Import the GPG key from the fedora server

Assuming you are doing it on a FC6 base system
wget -c http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/6/i386/os/RPM-GPG-KEY
rpm –import RPM-GPG-KEY

2) Once import is done, check your rpm with

rpm -V rpm_name

…thanks to paranoid Lap_64 to bring this up!
lolz!

I managed to squash one more Evolution bug - (downstream bug) 203058, (upstream bug) 324604. This fix has one of my biggest patches …infact, this bug required two of them, one for evolution & other for evolution-data-server.

I wonder why this bug creeped in when we already have a Quoted Printable strings parser in evolution-data-server code.

Chk this out…

The buggy screenshot!

The not so buggy one!

BTW… if you have a good look at my patches (patch for - e-d-s, evo), you’ll realize that i’m very bad at managing strings! I had to deal with lots of segfaults before making this patch run! …one more reason i love python!

We just now manaed to get Parag’s yum working… the rpm command was hanging like anything. A quick google search revealed that it can be solved by doing

rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db.00*

So just wanted to document this for me… so that I wont have to ask google again for the same problem

Another nice link…
http://people.redhat.com/berrange/notes/rpmrecovery.html

Yesterday night, I cooked up this small python script that can parse Orkut’s scrapbook & let you know who all scrapped you & what.

The script takes input a static file as “Scrapbook.html” and reads it from your current dir to parse it. Very rudimentary parsing as of now… but it does works! …using BeautifulSoup

This is a very early version of what I’ve planned - the script should be able to login to Orkut & fetch this page automatically for you to parse it.

Script available for download or view

Oh, that reminds me… I was also searching over the net this morning for a syntax highlighter for my code. Either it can be a wiki style thing to which I can paste my code or anything which gives me code in colored form!

I dont want to resort to external hosting websites to upload my code…
But too bad, I cannot host a CVS server (viewcvs) on my own domain…!!!
Or can I?

Example ouput

Scrap from => Saurabh Jindal
Scrapper's link => http://www.orkut.com/Profile.aspx?uid=57760040398415534
Scrapper's image => http://images3.orkut.com/images/small/146/14084146.jpg
Scrap => hey mayankyaar i need to run Solaris on Fedora .plzz reply soon
Scrap from => Procrastinator
Scrapper’s link => http://www.orkut.com/Profile.aspx?uid=5446527540430408093
Scrapper’s image => http://images3.orkut.com/images/small/400/16622400.jpg
Scrap => ji asi bhi vadiya ne….aap sunao kaisi chal reli hai job??????

I’ve been long using FC on my system, not to mentioned installed it about a hundred times… but I never came across this option (actually I never knew it untill I saw Aman using it).

When at the boot promt (during the installation), use this

linux vnc

With *vnc* as an arg, the installation will drop you to a shell, asking you to do a vncviewer to the machine on which installation is going on.

Chk this out…

Taking screenshots of installation process is now as easy as “PrntScrn”

PS: I’m sure that other distro’s might also have this feature…

All in all… Tux Rox!

Lots of time I’ve seen & answered this question…

“How do I enable language support for my XXX language”

So let me answer this once more & i’ll point everyone back to this post… lazy me

The word “support” might mean getting fonts for your language, seeing correct rendering for characters of your language, getting to type in your language… etc

So follow these generic steps…

Assumptions - We are setting up Hindi support, we have an internet connection

*1)* Fire up gnome-terminal & execute “su -”
*2)* Perform “yum install scim scim-m17n”
—> Scim is “Smart Common Input Method” and is an input method engine which we’ll use to input language characters.
*3)* Update pango with “yum update pango”
—> Pango needs to be kept updated always as newer versions have a high possibility of more & more bugs being ironed out.
*4)* Install hindi fonts with “yum install fonts-hindi”
—> If you see boxes in the interface when starting gedit as “LANG=hi_IN gedit”, its a sure shot sign that you are missing fonts for your language (hi_IN in our case). Fedora uses Lohit font family.
*5)* Now install m17n support for HIndi with “yum install m17n-db-hindi”
—> This is the package for keyboard layouts.

Now,
*1)* Run gedit, right click in the editor area, go to “Input Methods” submenu, select “SCIM”
*2)* Hit [ctrl]+[space] to activate scim. Select Hindi (inscript) from the scim toolbar & start typing Hindi text.
*3)* To stop & switch back to English mode, hit [ctrl]+[space] again.

If on right clicking in gedit, there’s no submenu as “Input Methods”, try running

gconftool-2 --type bool --set '/desktop/gnome/interface/show_input_method_menu' true

from the terminal.

How to tackle problems you might face…
*A)* Rendering issues
—> Log onto Fedora Bugzilla & file a bug. The more bugs you file, the better support will be for your language.

*B)* You cannot find your language’s fonts in Lohit project
—> Google for your fonts, put them in /usr/share/fonts & run “fc-cache”. Otherwise, Fedora bugzilla is always there.

*C)* Inputting problems
—> Check if the keyboard layout for your language is correct. All m17n layouts are stored in /usr/share/m17n/ as .mim files. You can ping me or file a bug in Fedora bugzilla if you need any help regarding this.

*D)* All others…
—> Join fedora-i18n discussion list & let the concerned ones know that you have found a bug or are facing a problem. You’ll be amazed at how readily you’ll get help
—> You can also log onto #fedora-i18n channel on irc.freenode.net IRC server for instant help.

Good luck

*Comments/suggestions welcome :)*