Archive for the ‘GNU/Linux’ Category
Linux Creative Group
October 27th, 2008
After a long gap, the guys at Linux Creative Group (LCG) met again today @ 3PM at Mocha Cafe in Koregaon Park in Pune. We discussed stuff ranging from girls to virtualization, startups including 
Rati, Subu, Manoj and Abhishek (behind Subu)
Ofcourse, I was there too 
Feel free to join in at the LCG Orkut Community.
Posted in GNU/Linux | Comments (0)
Meeting Entrip.com guys…
April 19th, 2008
The day was very hectic… was up @ 10 AM, saw “Horton hears a who” @ 11 AM, had a quick breakfast @ 1PM, started for LCG meeting @ 3PM and then finally met the Entrip.com guys at 6PM - all as I planned yesternight
…and by now I am dead tired - just enough of me left to write this post 
The meeting with Entrip.com founders was special because we were kind’of resonating at the same frequency, the same enthusiasm and that energy. Of course, the thread which tied us all together was Rails
EnTrip is an integrated travel utility which enables you to:
- Plan or map out your entire trip, using our intuitive map-based interface
- Capture the experiences and vivid memories that make up your trip, within their geographical context
- Easily share your adventures with friends and family around the world, in a meaningful way
If you are interested in how it works, try out the founding team’s trip to India.
I wish them a ton of good luck for their project.
Posted in ApnaBill, GNU/Linux, Startups, Web 2.0 | Comments (1)
Finally made that little sticker…
January 17th, 2008
After setting up the feed aggregation at ApnaBill.com’s Blog, I now had an uphill task in front of me - to tell people that such a blog exists. Writing about it at my blog was one thing, letting it known to ApnaBill’s users was another. And those small sticker like graphics on the topmost right side of the pages used to fascinate me alot.
But having a left hand - when it comes to graphics designing - was a major problem which I had to overcome! As always, I resorted to OpenOffice Presenter to utilize its drawing tools - though they suffice from a presentation viewpoint, I found out that they were not atall suitable for the task I had in mind. Infact, it was pathetic. I was so depressed - I had high hopes from the Presenter’s drawing tool.
Using Gimp or such stuff was not atall on my mind because I wanted to get this done dirt quick - but should look good at the same time. On top of that, my knowledge of Gimp is very limited - resizing images, cut/copy/paste is all what I know
I was sad! Adding a text link on the front page of ApnaBill.com would have sufficed, but it wasn’t what I wanted… 
Just then, I remembered that Sameer had tipped me about the improved drawing tool/imaging in Microsoft Office 2007. Not interested much, but still I decided to give it a shot. And to my surprise, it was actually pretty good and fast. I must say, it has improved by leaps and bounds!
I was able to create this in just 10 minutes!
So this goes into OO wishlist from my side - please add more graphics with better look & feel. I never wanted to boot into Windows yesterday - if I had a choice…
Note - I still am and will be an Open Office user
Update
I just found out about Open Office Draw - am going to give it a shot today…
Posted in ApnaBill, GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments (4)
Fedora 7 on Dell XPS 1210
June 22nd, 2007
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!!!
Posted in Dell XPS M1210 - my laptop, Fedora Core, GNU/Linux | Comments (9)
Would OLPC work on my old PC?
May 3rd, 2007
If OLPC is designed to run on hardware which is very minimal - & considering my old chap PC is almost as minimal on hardware - 800 Mhz CPU, 256 megs RAM (though it sports a 100 gig hdd) - only Gentoo manages to run well, all other - FC/Ubuntu crawl - Giving a shot to OLPC’s images would be worth a try.
Though i’m bit oo much preoccupied with other things as of now, lets see when can I try writing these images to my overloaded USB…
Posted in GNU/Linux | Comments (6)