Experiments with Technology

For quite sometime, I had been trying to make my ubuntu desktop more and more cool. First I stumbled upon macubuntu script. This is single no-hassle script that will make a Mac blush. And now, I found something more interesting - Conky. I was aware of conky earlier but not in the same incarnation. See the attached screenshot of my desktop. Isn't cool? In case you are wondering, conky provides the nice looking sidebar on the desktop. This sidebar is heavily customizable in terms of what you fit in there. The desktop is inspired by this link . I did some customizations of my own and made a few things working. In doing so, I realized how easy it is build upon this nifty utility called conky. Here is How: Install the programs  sudo apt-get install co nky hddtemp lm-sensors python-feedparser Download Scripts Download the scripts that I used from here . Extract these files into ~/bin/conky directory. I generally keep my programs in ~/bin but feel free to customize the location....

What: Virtualbox is a nice desktop virtualization software from erstwhile Sun Inc.  I used the personal use as well as open edition of it for quite sometime. However, could not resist the temptation to migrate to KVM, given its increasing roars in the virtualization space - both for desktop as well as server side. Not having a good tool to manage the VMs was a shortcoming of KVM for sometime. However, with Virt-Manger, this seems to have changed quite a lot. And so I started to migrate my windows image to KVM based. Source: Host OS: Ubuntu 10.04 Virtualization tool: VirtualBox Guest OS: Windows XP Sp3 Target:  Host OS: Ubuntu 10.04 Virtualization tool: KVM Guest OS: Windows XP Sp3 objective is migrate this guest image to KVM so that the migration is seemless. How: Pre-planning: Shut off windows XP gracefully. It probably might make a difference. But in anycase, will be a good idea rather than land up in surprise You need reasonable space. nearly 3 times of ...

Tethering my modem on ubuntu was one thing I was postponing to do for quite a while. One of the reasons for not attempting it was that on windows too, it did not happen quite easily. And I was n't going to kid myself to believe that it will be breeze on Ubuntu. The ease of tethering on the same laptop with iphone took me by surprise today - more about that later. So, today is the day to try it on my blackberry... First some versions etc. so that you know if this is a good match to your situation... Ubuntu Lucid Dev (kernel - 2.6.32-15-generic) pppd (version 2.4.5) berry4all (latest from berry4all.com) Blackberry Curve 8320 T-mobile unlimited data plan (Enterprise) Installation: No brainer.. just follow http://www.berry4all.com/install.  sudo apt-get install python libusb-dev ppp python-usb python-wxgtk2.8  Last one is for GUI and I dont think thats an optional package even if you are using a netbook. You want to make life easier - Don't you? Using it: tar -zxv...

When 3D effects came to Linux with Compiz and Beryl - much before windows - Linux made great news. MS tried hard with Vista to take on this challenge but we all know how these compare. They hardly do. do they? :) Anyways, fast forward to Gnome Shell . This is another first from Linux (oops Gnome). Windows 7? It will take Windows 9, 10, 11 to reach there - if at all it did :) Gnome Shell... My initial reactions Its super coooool way of working with desktop. Nice gimick there Best part is - the speed. Its so much faster to locate things - files, folder, commands, programs, places etc. Combine it with Gnome-do and its nice look dock at the bottom, the efficiency in navigating around the desktop is awesome. it is simple. Why do we need 2-3 drop downs at the top. Just have one launch point. Neat! No more trying to figure out where recent files are, network is etc. But where is the System Administration stuff? It did not take much to realize that I have an expanded ve...

While googling for linux equivalents yields many results, I thought it was a good idea to jot down a few ideas on what is suitable for corporate rather than for public in general. The below list is based on my experience with products and/or public experiences of others. I published it here. This is in draft state as i buiild it over a period of time. http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tNimbGu_4GYFmPu1NX7vtQQ&output=html Some of the references used for this post include: http://www.linuxrsp.ru/win-lin-soft/table-eng.html http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Linux_software_equivalent_to_Windows_software

After having trouble with high CPU usage in the newest version of Ubuntu - 9.04, I finally managed to get it in control. The culprit is 'vino-server'. This starts running when one will enable Remote desktop on ubuntu. I did not intend to use it. I prefer nx-server for the remote desktop connection - far more efficient and secure. Somehow, vino got enabled. The problem is that it does not show up as Vino usage but as xorg process usage - and thats hard to diagnose. But finally, googling worked :). Go to system -> Preference -> Remote Desktop to disable this. I used - sensors-applets - CPU Frequency monitor applets (perhaps part of cpufreq-utils package) to switch the cpu to powersave mode and keep the cpu from overheating due to this unneccessary cpu usage. Having killed the vino server and disabling it altogether, I dont have to restrain my laptop cpu to a lower frequency anymore. Got tipped from here... http://www.eigenmagic.com/2009/05/23/fix-high-cpu-usage-in-ubuntu-90...

I recently purchased Belkin's N+ Wireless router. It worked great. Easy to set up and comes up LEDs that should help troubleshoot where the problem is. One of the other features is that it comes with a mount point for USB drive. This is good since it just provides an easy way to create a local NAS. You keep the drive in one place and access it from any of your laptops. Connecting it from Windows is easy. The usual \\belkin N+\Drive Name works. However, on linux, it did not work out of box. Looked like trouble with space in the name at first. But when I tried with IP address and it did work. I inferred space may not be the issue. I tried few suggestions from ... http://alittlecharm.blogspot.com/2009/06/connecting-ubuntu-to-belkin-n-usb-drive.html .. this did not work for me. Not as it is, at least. One reason i avoided to implement these suggestion as is that it required to install smb4k which would have also installed base kde and I wasn't in big favor of installing the whole t...