Linux tricks, tutorials, hardware, politics and philosophy

CX 55 review.

2012-02-10T06:58:00.000-08:00

If you believe the online reviews, this earphone has a fantastic base, good noise isolation and is great value for money.

Considering the price, there's no way Sennheiser will bribe the reviewers, specially looking at the number of people liking it.

So this earphone should be ----------good-----------.

BUT that one that I got was worst than the cheapest ones I'd ever own. There was practically no bass, but noise isolation was good (better than CX 200).

I doubt that one that I got was is not genuine, this may be the reason.

Active vs passive TVs.

2012-02-06T06:24:00.000-08:00

I'm writing here to share my personal experience with both these technologies; although there are a lot of scientific claim and tests stating that passive is a lot better than active, I'm sharing my personal experience.

To explicitly state, active polarized technology is a complete loada crap; Samsung lies when they claim active is better than passive and the reality is dead opposite to what Samsung claims, Samsung is lying.

Passive has --

1) ~4 times brighter than active.

2) glasses that cost less than 1/200 th of active

3) No health hazard -- active communicates to the TV wireless in high frequency which's bad for health (chances of brain, blood cancer, brain hemorrhage increases by 2 times), remember mobile hazard? It's the same thing.

4) Is a bit cheaper than active

5) Comfortable glasses whcih's a lot easier to wear light

5.5) Verity of frames available with polarized glasses.

6) Flicker-free -- Active is unusable cause of this reason.

7) Free from vendor's monopoly; you don't have to buy the additional pair of glasses specifically from this vendor. The vendor may hike prices a few months after you buy the 3d TV forcing you to pay at times.
8) No risk of discontinued glasses. In active, there's always a risk, you're at the vendor's mercy.

So, all in all, all the 'advanced' expensive 3d technology is like a lead acid battery with golden anode and silver cathode with lead coating on it; it's expensive yet useless.

Anyone buying a passive TV or even monitor appears to be a complete idiot and has too much money to spare.

Nokia N72 video encoding.

2012-02-01T04:33:00.000-08:00

Nokia has only a history of good phones but no future.

The mighty N72 plays quiet a large no. of resolutions for it's screen resolution. It supports mpeg4 with flac audio in 3gp container.

It supports flac? Surprising? I though Nokia hated software-for-non-profit with the exception of QT of course.

I'll place the ffmpeg parameters on demand, I'll even make the winff presets for N72 for you if you ask and update this post.

Samsung Guru 35, Samsung metro 3530 supported video formats.

2012-02-01T04:26:00.000-08:00

Like with most other mobile devices, these 2 phones supports MPEG-4 Part 2 streams (xvid vtag) with aac audio in mp4 container.

Guru's screen resolution is 128x160 and it easily plays videos around this resolution.

Samsung Metro's screen size is somewhere like 320x240 or 220 I guess (in a flipped state) but it's incapable of playing videos in this resolution.

It can play videos with maximum resolution at 320x200, otherwise it simply refuses to play. Also there's a limit to the video bitrate this device can process.

I'll place the ffmpeg parameters on demand, I'll even make the winff presets for metro 3530 and Guru 35 for you if you ask and update this post.

JXD 661 video formats.

2012-02-01T04:14:00.000-08:00

This device plays MPEG-4 Part 2 streams (xvid vtag) with mp3 in an avi container.

Limit the resolution to 320x240, otherwise the audio/video will be out of sync.

I'll place the ffmpeg parameters on demand, I'll even make the winff presets for JXD 661 for you if you ask and update this post.

KDE volume resets (pulseaudio)?

2012-01-27T20:50:00.000-08:00

Recently I'd face a problem with KDE + pulseaudio. On reboot, the volume would reset every time to maximum and the headphone volume reduced, it had to be set every time using pavucontrol or alsamixer.

The solution to this was to set the output to analog headphone or analog speakers (flipping the current output) in system settings > Multimedia > phonon > Devices

Benefits of piracy

2012-01-17T11:03:00.000-08:00

The law and companies openly claim that piracydoes no good; the opinion of the companies is bound to be obvioussince they're concerned about sales; this's similar to a politiciansaying the other party is bad and they are good.

However I've a different approach to this.

The no. 1 beneficial of piracy is the end user;it's tempting to download something which has a market price of $200(or even $4000) for free by just paying for your Internet connection.

This's beneficial in another way to the endusers – the companies wont hike up prices like crazy, cause ifthey did people wouldn't simply buy their product, bankrupting thecompany. This works specially well with monopolies like Microsoft andAdobe, otherwise your copy of Windows would start at $500 forcing youto pay it if you wanna use a computer, maybe people had to pay ininstallments cause of this.

Piracy controls the prices of these software to bereasonable; and if it is, people will not even download piratedinstead buy software/movie/album; there's a critical price at whichthe profit will be maximum. Every businessman knows that.

Equalize distribution of finance – Ifpiracy stops, the rich will get richer; people will be forced to payfor their movies and software breaking the distribution of theeconomy. Economy is good when everyone has money instead of all moneybeing at one hand; this makes a more of a 1 man rule instead ofdemocracy. Thus stopping piracy completely is bound to do harm.

Following the above stated facts of increasedrates of multimedia/software, it'll make the conditions still worstsince the price will also be a lot higher which means more profits.

Next comes ISP – they're rather silent onthis cause they know it's not good, but good for them. Moredownloading means more work for ISP, and more profits. Clear andsimple.

The pirates – Traffic to a website withads generates revenues, that's why there're so many websites offeringpirated content.

crackers – You know Windows infection.Pirated stuff and websites is one of the best sources of these. Thenwith compromised Windows systems comes spam > fraud and stolenprivate content. I believe, in Bittorrent networks, crackers attackWindows computers to compromise them.

Antivirus companies – If the world didn'thave piracy of any kind the probability of you having infection(though a pendrive, or the Internet) will be very less; thus lesswork for antivirus companies and less profit. On the other hand, it'sa bad idea to download pirated antivirus software cause it might beinfected and with the level of access the infected antivirus softwarehas in your system, your PC can turn into a bot and you can turn toanother Windows victim.

Software companies – This might be hardto believe, but if a software comes free of cost a lot of people arewilling to adopt it making a monopoly of the software, transformingit into a de-facto standard simply cause everyone can afford it.This's popular is countries with poor cyber laws or bad enforcementof the same. If piracy wouldn't have been there, Windows and Adobewouldn't have a monopoly in Asia, Africa, South America, and somecountries of Europe (I'm not sure about EU) cause people couldn'tafford these software; they are less willing to 'buy' a software,instead they would've simply used free alternatives even if they wereless in features (like Gimp, Blender instead of Autodesk or Adobeproducts). Thus, even though Microsoft and Adobe claim they wannakill piracy, they also know doing so will take away their monopoly,and if this monopoly breaks in one country, it'll break worldwide.This's the last thing MS wants – they solely rely on their monopolyfor revenues, otherwise there's no reason to buy any rubbish MSproduct.
Also, as I've stated before in this Blog, proprietysoftware is bound to always do harm to the masses in the long run.Similarly, software companies too claim that piracy harms people inthe long run but they ignore the fact that they are themselves doingharm to the world by 'selling' their propriety software. So softwarecompanies are loudmouth on piracy and silent when it comes to dealingwith disadvantage of selling their monopolistic software. I smellpolitics here.

Ground truth is, most companies want money andthey'll do anything to get it, they're least concerned about peopleand lie to the public that piracy is bad for everyone not cause theycare about people, but care only about money. Here I'm writing howit's not.

Helping the poor– Although poor people do not deserve too much entertainment, butwhat's the use depriving the same when you know they can't/won't buyit?

The concept lies bythe fact that, if you know that your multimedia/software will neverbe bought by Alex, why not give it to um for free? There's no harm tothe vendor/producer and no harm and benefit to the end user (sincethe end user won't give you a buck for it till the infinitely of time– nothing can be gained form um).

Search engines – No piracy means lessthings to search on the Internet, which also means less use of searchengines. That's why Google is silent on this, and if they do applypreventive measures, it's usage will downgrade exponentially like thecase with Bing, Yahoo. There're plenty of search engines to searchthe same content in.

File hosting businesses – Want todownload your free movie faster? Join today!! Although a report abusemight remove the video within a few days, but a lot of stuff goesunnoticed, so you 'joining in' will still reap benefits off theirdatabase of pirated stuff.

It's unnecessarily to mention that a lot ofrevenues of the likes of rapidshare, 4shared etc... comes frompiracy.

So what should be done?

The current state should remain the same.

Piracy shouldn't persist in real life – it'seasy to get that cop after that pirate and teach um a lesson; this'sdone in most developed nations.

Now, the question lies what can be done online?

Many governments like that of the US of A willeven go forward to crush people's fundamental rights to makeHollywood richer (or maybe with the intention of extracting more taxfrom them, no one else benefits); this method is similar to China's –a communist nation which uses the same tactics to crush rebelsinstead of piracy.

If countries adopt for it, they won't be lettingaccess to sites hosting pirated stuff; so what will be the differenceremaining between this country and China? China prevents people fromoutside it to gather information and form a thinking to rebel againthe government – this's a solid reason to restrict access toinformation which would otherwise be a thread to the government as awhole; but doing the same just to make the likes of Madonna, JamesCameron, Spielberg and Clooney to become richer from what theyalready are seems like an excuse.

What guarantee do you take that instead ofblocking just piracy sites, they start blocking anti-government sitestoo? If they do, how will you know?

Blocking any kind of information from entering acountry could be one of the reasons for a country to be taken over bya dictator, seeing this threat, it's sheer stupidity to do such athing to make the rich Hollywood richer.

On the other hand if the producer is intelligentand better than one of those management/finance guys, he can seal hisIP from piracy if he ponders a bit harder to understand what I mean.

SBS/polarized/stereo 3d to alaglyph/red, blue 3d

2012-01-15T05:10:00.000-08:00

If you have a SBS (side by side)/polarized/3d video, and you want to get the 3d effect without owning a 3d monitory (capable of producing polarized light), you can do so with the classic red-blue anaglyph 3d glasses; but first you have to convert the video to red/blue 3d format. You can use ffmpeg to do so.

ffmpeg has the capability to use mplayer/mencoder filter with -

ffmpeg -vf mp=[the mplayer filter]

The stereo3d filter of mplayer does the trick here, it converts sbs to anaglyph 3d, and I have to say conversion is good!

e.g. -

ffmpeg -i sbs.mp4 -vf mp=stereo3d -acodec copy -threads 10 -b:v 10000k -preset ultrafast -vcodec libx264 ~/test2.mkv

You can also use mplayer to play the SBS video by converting it to anaglyph in real time using the same video filter -

mplayer -vf stereo3d -vo gl_nosw/gl/gl2

The video driver has to be some form of gl for this to work. If you want to use xv, use the scale filter also -

mplayer -vf stereo3d,scale -vo xv

To get this working in smplayer, in the advanced options > options for mplayer > video filters

add -

stereo3d

to the filter chain.

Also you need to change the video output driver to gl/gl2 etc... if you're not adding the scale filter.

You need the latest mplayer for conversion to be fast. If it still doesn't work, you may try out mplayer2.

L420 on Debian Squeeze.

2012-01-02T02:57:00.000-08:00

Even if you have all the firmware installed, things wont work out of the box.

You have to install linux-2.6.39 and xserver-xorg-video-intel from the backports to get the right resolution.

For the wireless, you have to install firmware-realtek from the backports. Even after that the wireless LED won't work, but the wireless does work.

Bluetooth works out of the box.

Tech mags get bribed by MS for Windodws Phone?

2011-12-21T20:53:00.000-08:00

There're no mags or tech news websites which point out to major issues in WP7; they just point out trival ones.

With an intention to enforce monopoly by anti-competitive practices on both phones and desktops, WP doesnt support the following -

SD cards -- Only in a few Windows phones SD cards are installable, that too internally. Once you install it it becomes an internal part of the phone... i.e you cant use it in any other device -- you'll be forced to used this specific card on your WP like your're forced to use Windows to run Windows programs.

PC interconnect -- It'll only work on Mac and Windows; otherwise you can't do anything through your PC (this includes transferring files and media), also, the Mac version ain't good as the Windows one. The protocols are hidden and follow no standards by only Microsoft standards -- yet another reason to continue using Microsoft products (not cause they're good, but cause you're forced to use it).
Thus you're forced to use a MS software everywhere you use WP -- you have to be dependent on the company for even the simplest tasks in WP.

No bluetooth -- It doesn't support file transfers over bluetooth, cutting the phone off to all non-Microsoft PCs. Double the monopoly, double the monopoly and Bill Gates comes back on top again.

One magazine being a typical MS fanboy since the beginning of time is Chip which's mostly avilable in Europe and Asia.

Others include techradar.com

smplayer with mplayer2 (no video?)

2011-12-02T22:09:00.001-08:00

Apart form changing the binary location, there is a workaround for this bug, in custom mplayer options set -

-vid -1

And everything should work well.

Debian/Ubuntu markauto cleanup script.

2011-11-17T23:03:00.001-08:00

The Debian installer has a bad habit of marking packages 80% of packages as manually installed which causes a horrible dependency issue.

The script below lists packages which if marked automatically installed wont be removed. This also prevents listing of packages which are having important priority.

#! /bin/bash



# Script to print packages which if marked as installed automatically will not be removed (cause its it's a dependency of another manually installed package)

# This may give wrong output in circular dependencies, cause -

# aptitude why A -- B depends/recommends A

# aptitude why B -- A depends/recommends B

# this means both A and B will be included.

# in this case, one or both of them will have to be manually installed

list="$(aptitude search '~i' | grep --invert-match '..A' | cut -d ' ' -f4)"

# function to cut first line in variable list.

cut_first() {

 list="$(echo "$list" | tail -n +2)"

}

while [[ "$list" != "" ]]

do

 process="$(echo "$list" | head -1)"

 aptitude why $process | grep --ignore-case --regexp="recommends" --regexp="depends" &> /dev/null

 if [[ $? == 0 && "$(aptitude show "$process" | grep --ignore-case --regexp="Priority: required" --regexp="Priority: Important")" == "" ]]

 then

  echo "$process"

 fi

 cut_first

done

Before you use -- I warn, check if the package list is correct, to confirm, all packages if marked auto should not remove any packages as vacant dependencies.

After this you can have a clean system where you can check if the manually installed packages are ok or not.

ffmpeg -- maintain aspect ratio with fixed height/width.

2011-11-15T06:22:00.001-08:00

I found this in the ffmpeg man pages; 99% users thing this's not possible, but it is possible without calculating aspect ratio in mind.

Use the scale filter before specifying the input file -

-vf scale=www:www/a

Where 'www' is the desired width of the video you want. To maintain the height -

-vf scale=hhh*a:hhh

Where hhh is the desired height you want.

Openoffice/libreoffice template pack.

2011-11-11T07:59:00.001-08:00

Recently I'd downloaded all templates from templates.services.openoffice.org, so I decided to share all of them --

http://www.4shared.com/file/5DJTQ488/templates.html

Extract the file, you'll find 4 more archives with names to that of openoffice/libreoffice applications, extract them too to get the templates for the respective applications.

You may install the usual way using the templates organizer dialog, as an alternative you may place the extracted folders to ~/.libreoffice/3/user/template, the folders will act as categories of the templates (i.e. in the organize folder dialog, you'll see these folders and inside them will lie the templates).

Notice, these are a lot of templates, so opening the templates list in openoffice/libreoffice might take a long time.

Gentoo splashscreen howto (with/without KMS)

2011-11-06T07:21:00.000-08:00

To see a splash screen as you open Gentoo, youneed something called the 'frame buffer'...this is basically a driverwhich has the ability to display video from the text-only console.This's usually generic and not accelerated, i.e. does not take up theunique features of the graphic chip, although we do have a bit ofacceleration or device dependent framebuffers.

Framebuffers are involved in making of the console(or Ttys), since Fbs also have a resolution and you can even set theresolution, consoles too have a resolution which can be set bypassing kernel parameters. The parameters dependents on the FBdriver.

Different framebuffer -- Vesa, Userspace-vesa(generic Fbs), radeonfb, radeondrmfb, inteldrmfb etc....

So first you need to compile your kernel withsupport of some FBs.

If you're using KMS, you don't need to mark anyframebuffer, KMS provides it's own framebuffer. Once the DRM modulesload, a FB is provided. If you have compiled the kernel with otherFbs, it'll replace the FB with it's own. This KMS FB is hardwarespecific and fast. You cant use both KMS FB and other FBs -- only 1will work.

The mandatory sections to be selected in kernelare -

CONFIG_FB (in Device drivers>graphs support).In that, select -

CONFIG_FIRMWARE_EDID(Support for frame buffer devices>Enable firmware EDID)

you can select which frame buffer support you willcompile in -

*** Frame buffer hardware drivers ***

(not required if you're a KMS user)

If you wanna use vesafb, mark it.

In “Console display driver support” which isin Graphs support -

Support for the Framebuffer Console Decorations(CONFIG_FB_CON_DECOR) -- this option wont be available until youapply the fbcondecor patch or install gentoo-sources. Get it from -

http://dev.gentoo.org/~spock/projects/fbcondecor/

Apart from these, select

VGA text console (CONFIG_VGA_CONSOLE)

CONFIG_VGA_CONSOLE (Framebuffer Console support)

Map the console to the primary display

(CONFIG_FRAMEBUFFER_CONSOLE_DETECT_PRIMARY)

Disable “Enable Tile Blitting Support”(CONFIG_FB_TILEBLITTING)

Which is in Support for frame buffer devices.

Compile and install the kernel.

Now emerge splashutils with fbcondecor,png and truetype USE flags enabled.

Splashutilsis a cross distro method to implement splash screen, but it requiresan init script but only if you want userspace splash, thus this needsto be made for every fundamental distro.

Splashutilsrequires some kind of framebuffer to be present to work -- any willwork, it has the ability to start from the initrd.

Splashutilsthemes are set in 2 options, one verbose where you will get somesorta decoration with the output messages (a decorated console), andthe other silent...windows and Ubuntu style.

Splashutilscan start from 2 modes -- one initrd, where it start right from thebeginning and the other from userspace, i.e. it start after init hasstarted. Thus an initrd is completely optional but you don't getearly bootsplash.

Thispackages give you 2 main applications -

splash_geninitramfsand splash_manager

Thereare various themes available in portage -

media-gfx/splash-themes-gentoo,media-gfx/splash-themes-livecd and media-gfx/bootsplash-themes

Allthemes will be placed in /etc/splash...with their names same as thefolders in this directory. Each theme supports different resolutions,most common being 1024x768.

Youhave to append the following lines in the kernel parameters toconfigure the FB you intend to use and also define which mode willthe splash screen work on, silent or verbose. Apart from this, youalso have to define what theme to use (optional for userspacesplashscreen).

video=splash=,theme: console=tty1

Outof this, only splash= option is necessary even if you're using thesplashscreen that starts after init. Otherwise if the splash startfrom init, everything is necessary.

Dependingon what FB drivers you use, you will have to modify the video=option, I.e apart from specifying the video driver, you have tospecific options for the FB driver. From here you can set theresolution of the FB console too.

Withvesafb, you have to specify the resolution with various options.These are the defaults and safe -

video=vesafb:mtrr:3,ywrapvga=

Theoptions for vga are (numbers of 3 digits) -

	320 × 200	640 × 400	640 × 480	800 × 500	800 × 600	896 × 672	1,024 × 640	1,024 × 768	1,152 × 720	1,280 × 1,024	1,400 × 1,050	1,440 × 900	1,600 × 1,200	1,900 × 1,200
16 colors					770			772		774
256 colors		768	769	879	771	815	874	773	869	775	835	864	796	893
15-bit (5:5:5)	781	801	784	880	787	816	875	790	870	793		865	797
16-bit (5:6:5)	782	802	785	881	788	817	876	791	871	794	837	866	798
24-bit (8:8:8)	783	803	786	882	789	818	877	792	872	795	838	867	799
32-bit (8:8:8)1		804	809	883	814	819	878	824	873	829		868	834

Ascopied over from wiki.

If the number is wrong, the kernel willnotify.

e.g.-

video=vesafb:mtrr:3,ywrapvga=795 splash=silent,theme:Cynapses console=tty1

WithKMS FB, you have to specify only the resolution with option refreshrate as such -

video=1024x748-24@85

Where-24 is the refresh rate.

orsimply video=1280x1024

Theconsole= option should be set to tty1 (when using initrd basedsplash) otherwise you will not be able to see the splash.

Topreview a theme -

splash_manager--theme=one of the themes in /etc/splash --cmd=set --tty=.

Notice,for the theme to work, the console should be at the right resolution.

Thisprogram (splash_manager) revolves around a command -- the command isthe task that need to be done, either display, set, demo etc....themes. To specify the command, do it with the --cmd=option.

Thecommand 'list' displays all the splashes available with resolutions.'set' displays the decoration of the console and 'demo' will give ademo of the boot screen.

Afteryou have decided what theme you'll use, you have to generate theinitial ram image; if you're using initrd based splash, this's notrequired.

splash_geninitramfs--res --generate .

The--verbose option is useful for debugging.

Eachtheme supports different resolutions. The resolutions are in thedirectory /etc/splash/. You can also check it out using the --cmd=list command of splash_manager (as stated before).

Ifyou want to copy the theme to an existing image -

splash_geninitramfs--res 1600x1800 --copy

Ifyou already have a theme in the initial ram image archive, you mightjust like to append the new theme -

splash_geninitramfs--res 1600x1800 --append

Nowyou can see the reason behind the theme: kernelparameter, this specifies what splash to use during boot of themultiple available in the kernel.

Alsonotice, for initrd based splash to work, all the correct kernelmodules which're required to make the framebuffer should be builtinto the kernel or should be there in the initramfs. Also theresolution should be perfect from start.

Userspacesplash -

Foruserspace splash you have to start the service fbcondecor, forautomatic startups, add it to the boot or sysinit runlevel. You don'tneed to do this for init based splash... neither you have toconfigure the service configurations.

Theconfiguration of this service is done from the conf.d directory andthe fbcondecor file. Read the comments in it to configure. The splashstyle (verbose or silent) is read from the kernel's parameters.

Apartfrom this, you have to see the file /etc/conf.d/splash for furtherconfiguration and the theme you wanna load. It's configuration ismandatory.

Huawei EC1260 (12d1:140b) (reliance, tata, MTS etc...) on Linux.

2011-11-02T05:02:00.000-07:00

This modem works out of the box. Just ensure to have the usb_modeswitch package installed. lspci output -

Bus 002 Device 003: ID 12d1:140b Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. EC1260 Wireless Data Modem HSD USB Card

First you need to install usb-modeswitch, then plug in the modem (or replug the modem), then run (as root) -

wvdialconf

You'll now have a file name /etc/wvdial.conf, edit this as root, enter your username, password (usually anything will work), then the number to be dialed (usually *99# or #777). Uncomment these lines also. In an MTS connection, password is #777, username is internet@internet.mtsindia.in and you gotta dial #777. Here's the wvdial.conf for MTS -

[Dialer Defaults]
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Modem Type = Analog Modem
Phone = #777
ISDN = 0
Username = internet@internet.mtsindia.in
Init1 = ATZ
Password = mts
Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0
Baud = 57600

Next run wvdial command, and things should work fine.

As tricks -- in wvdial.conf, increase the BAUD rate to 57600, higher value also works. In case you're using gnome-ppp as the front end, set the modem type to USB modem otherwise you might see lower speeds; I don't know why this happens, although it shouldn't.

sysctl parameter reset

2011-10-29T06:50:00.000-07:00

Every wondered why does you custom kernel parameters in /etc/sysctl.conf doesn't get set on startup even after you add sysctl -p on boot scripts?

The reason might be kdm. It happens that when a user logs in using KDM, it resets the kernel parameters to default, making the init scripts's parameter settings to non existent.

I've reported a bug on this, as an alternative you can set the kernel parameters after you've logged in by setting a timer in the start up script -

sleep 40; sysctl -p

A better idea will be automatic login; for security, you might configure kdm to lock screen after log in (this can be found in system settings > login screen).

Linux and CD/DVD burning.

2011-10-27T06:53:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm disappointed. Agreed that CD/DVDs or any kind of optical media is a dying game, but it's also critical for professional/home media production.

We do have a lot of multimedia tools which work well, but what we don't have is a good CD/DVD burner, when it co
mes to graphical burners, things boil down to -
K3b -- the most preferred and the only one.
xfburn -- the second choice, if k3b doesn't work.
Brasero -- Most unreliable and most buggy.
xcdroast -- seriously, I never got this to work
Nero

The backends of all the apps except Nero boils down to -

cdrkit/cdrtools
libburn/cdrskin

Everything else is deprecated.

I have someone who has the work of converting very old cassette and LPs to ACDs (i.e. he has to burn the recorded tracks to CDs).

A few months ago Nero stopped working after an upgrade, ironically it could not add audio files (wav) to make ACD, everything else worked fine.
So it was rejected and the fallback was k3b, which a few months later (again after an upgrade) hit a bug where adding audio tracks randomly causes segmentation fault, this is a still a Debian bug.
Next fallback was xfburn -- but it didn't add any gap between tracks of the burnt disk.

Finally Brasero -- the most unreliable (don't ask why) came to the rescue, it did not segfault and was capable to adding gaps between tracks but I think this'll also end up in bugs some day or the other.

Not to mention, I had spend days to figure out the issue with CD/DVD burning on Linux a year ago and fixing strange problem with various hardware, specially pioneer drives and external devices (popular now). Things complicate more with fabulous cdrkit bugs and the dramatic cdrkit-cdrtools clash -- a licence issue, something which no one except Debian devs care about. The ultimate solution that I see is libburn and it's client cdrskin -- they never gave any problem on any hardware.

But cdrskin waits for k3b to add support, till this we only have xfburn. :(

LP120 on Linux

2011-10-23T08:50:00.000-07:00

Audio technica LP120's USB interface is basically a USB audio controller integrated inside the player and it's compatible with Linux, you need to do nothing specific in a Linux distro to configure the card, drivers are build into Linux.

Just configure it through pulseaudio GUI to make it work.

Humanity is a complete failure.

2011-09-27T02:01:00.000-07:00

So we have 'tons' of computing power under ourkeyboards (or behind your screen or under you, depending on whatsorta computer you're using :-P), lots of telescopes, super thindisplays and nuclear technology at hand, so common people might thinkof the human race as 'advanced'; but the major question is, to whomare we comparing ourselves to? Our neighboring species, cats and dogsor relatives in the jungle (chimpanzees and gorillas)?

Without any extraterrestrial reference we cantclassify ourselves in advancement in technology; the current issuewith us is that there is no good competition on earth for us (forsome debatable reasons), so how do we rate the success of humanity?

The rating can be done on basis of what have wedone till date to earth, how have we managed ourselves, how have wemanaged our population on earth and how have we managed the ecosystems (not by merely the apparent advancements thatwe see everyday), and rating from these factors, I come to oneconclusions – humanity is a complete failure, we were born on earth(point is we live in earth as of the current time) and we'll probablydie here someday unless something 'magical' happens. So let's see how-

What we think is the best is not the best.

We think that feeding the poor is good, democracyis good, not slaughtering animals is good, Buying Microsoft productsis nothing bad, and living under a leader is good... just to list afew examples; but is it actually good?... if you think so why do youthink it's the best possible way around? I've explained all this inthe headings that come under.

Most humans are governed mostly by emotions (I'mtalking about major decisions here) and less by mind which's notproductive as a leader, as a decision makers, if you go by the heartit'll just be like random decisions taken on basis of a singleperson's opinion.

In general life you can see, people ororganizations who make a successful living will decide things usingtheir mind more than heart (at least when it comes to work) so ingeneral it can be said, using mind more than heart is moreproductive... and that is what most humans don't do (including me,partially).

Take an example of Mr. Bill Gates... this guy hassuccessfully sold crap to the people and is now forcing them to useit.. and most people don't have a problem at all. By simplypioneering an eye candy this guy convinced people to drop thereliable OS/2 in favor of an unreliable shiny piecea crap(Windoze)... so was this decision his opinion or logical thinking? Itwas his logical thinking, this guy realized that people are utterlyfools.. all they see is eye candy and what not recedes beneath, as aresult he made such an OS to ensure that programs made for it willonly run in it, and proprietary file formats made by Microsoftproducts are only officially supported by MS products which only runon Windows... which is again a MS product, he knows that people don'tunderstand or care about anything else other than eye candy andirrelevant conveniences, as a result the code quality is horrible andMr. Bill doesn't care about spending enough to improve the same, whyshould he care about it, do the people care about it...? will itincrease their sales...? No it will not. So no use spending money oncode quality, instead let people buy rubbish proprietary crap like'antivirus' 'firewalls' (which's again a way to rob people), upgradetheir hardware every year to compensate for the horrible code qualitydeveloped over they years and buy bugfixes every year (Windows Vistato Windows 7); and people STILL don't realize they are not only doingbad to themselves by using Windows, but to the whole human race, it'sa Monique under Bill Gates. Mr. Bill knows that even if he does goodto the people they will not realize... they are too foolish torealize, they are not governed by the mind.

So, in the above example I've generated a contrastbetween a single individual who appears to be governed more by mindand the 89% of the remaining computer users (who use Windows) who aregoverned by heart... people think there's no harm using windows, justcause they 'feel' that way but Mr. Bill knows this fact (and doesn't'feel' it) that if he increases the code quality, it'll only do harmto the company, and the people wont even realize increasing the codequality is good for them. This is just a rough example, there muchmore to the picture, and not complete Mr. Bill's fault. By this weget the fact that what people 'feel' as a good thing might not begood to them at all.

We can see a real life example off this, peoplewill support these following opinions of mine (under the heading) -

Fame and beliefs

Financial distribution among types of people

How are we technologically backward, usingabsolute reference

Population and our kindness -

This point is a subset of the above.

Most of us love to feed the poor, we feel 'mercy'on them. We feel the fact that while we are enjoying, partying,eating lavish food, they are starving... and on the verge of deathcause of the same. As a result we donate, celebs raise money anddonate 'for the poor'.

But people haven't realize that feeding the pooris not the solution to the source of the problem – no one even hasan opinion on this, all they do is feel the mercy and donate and whatthe authorities do is is buy food off it and distribute it among thepoor... that's about it. No effort in solving the source of theproblem; ok so, these social science peopleclaim that the solution of the problem is to make the rich poor (inan ironical sense, we all know what it means); however this decisionis again governed by human feelings and emotions – people are toodamn governed by emotions to state or conclude the fact that mostpoor people are poor cause of their own fault and the solution ismore than just feeding them endlessly.

For anyone sensible, breeding is a thing to dowhen -

You have enough money
You have enough time
You're responsible and mature enough.

This is what the poor people don't realize, and wefeel mercy on that lady who got fucked twice on the streets, having 2kids and not a single home (roaming on the streets of certaincountries of Africa and south east Asia)... she doesn't deserved tobe fed! She deserves to be imprisoned to ensure that she doesn't getfucked again and make a thousand kids which the pity-pity people willfeed again to ensure she makes a thousand more! What I say here, islet her beg and starve and make her realize her fault rather thanfeeding the feeling of breeding. Of course, if she was raped, or hasa kid for some other forced reasons, it's not her fault.

Breeding should not be a human right... it's aliability there's no such solid rule made as a result the humanpopulation is way is excess for even the most noble intellectualindividual to manage, leave alone the elected democratic leaders whogot chosen by the same herd feeding the poor... what else do youexpect some divine 'democratic leader' to come up and explain thefact that what we humans 'feel' as right is necessarily not?

And what are the response of the socilists? Lots of names and theories made by more over emotionalpeople blaming the rich and often themselves for what has been doneto the poor. They give no facts (and if they do, I'll modify my postand place the new opinion).

And this doesn't have to do much with corruption.If the people of a country are not getting enough finances to raisekids, they should not, they should revolt against the government,kill the corruption and when they are having a stable state, thenthey should start a family. Now don't tell me it's their plan tofirst increase the population and when they all multiply, theyprotest together to make a larger impact.

As a result, as of the current time, and given thestone age technology we have (how efficient is the average IC or jetengine for example?) the human population is way in excess... whereit should have been a millions, and considering the advancement intechnology, it should have been at most a single billion but it's inthe order of billions.

There's not a place where humans don't reside,everyone's complaining about increasing food and land prices but as Iexpect from the stupid commoners and they haven't realize yet andwill never realize the source of all the problem is population...which we can control using economics (one of the few successfulthings we have made). Now you might say without enough humans around,how will the technology grow? Finally with increasing humanpopulation, the number of intelligent or talented people willincrease. If we look at this point of view, by the currentpopulation, today technology needed to be 10000 times more advancedthan what's it's now... we're growing as if we reside on the wholesolar system and our technology is no where close to doing that for50 centuries from now. However I don't blame this technologicalbackwardness to be the cause of excessive; I tend to think we onlyreap a fraction of the total potential of humanity as a result we'reseeing these days.

To reap the potential of humanity, the systemshould be good (currently, it's bad, I've explained that later),businesses should think about the people apart from money (cause onlybusinesses implement ideas) and lastly mindless breeding should bebanned cause if the right person is born in the wrong place (a poorsociety) he'll only be a weight on earth.

Of course people who were made poor cause of someother reason like a disaster, or very bad malpractices by politicians(that is had kids before hand) are out of this list.

Fame and beliefs -

The human population is full of ideas, we havepeople who have fabulous thoughts, opinions and ideas; an idealsocial system of a country or organization should be designed to takeup each of these ideas, analyze them and put them in action.

But that apparently doesn't happen. If plane Janecomes up with an idea X and sets up an opinion among people about it,it'll probably be ignored, but if a celebrity comes up with theidentical idea... or actually an idea which's not better than Jane's,it'll be thought about and considered instantaneously.

I call this human stupidity. People should realizethat people who are famous or rich are not gods and don't spit outthe best possible ideas and opinions, so no need to quote them or rubon it as if they where spells from god. Unless someone expertises ina field and talking about it the same, there's no need to think thatthe things that he/she speaks about IS the best or great opinion.

Let's take an example.. whatever the things I sayhere will be ignored and never be read, although it's something weshould all consider. Had I been a superstar, they would have takenall this seriously and many of them would have really put them inpractice rather than criticizing (a thing which's never going tohappen)... when it comes to famous people, the listeners don't evenhave guts to criticize.

Democracy/Leadership theory -

We live in a society which's usually modeled as aherd with a single leader which the herd should follow at least forsome period of time, this appears to be 'naturally' the best way(again a feeling), but it is really not. This is partially a Monique with an exception by which an apparently 'intelligent' person (fromthe herd) has the rights to slip aways from the herd to make himselfa leader with a bunch of people with similar opinion and then he'llstart gathering a crowd and make a thing similar to a 'country',something which's a manifestation of how stupid human beings are andwhat a failure humanity is.

Continuing with this leadership theory, questionis, why is this 'partially a Monique system'? Whatever the leaderthings as right he will command and do, apparently if the action hassome major flaw in it which the common people are not intellectualenough to understand and only a small portion revolts, it will beactually ignored and the useful opinion will go waisted unless somebig celeb revolts (see Fame and beliefssubtopic) which's just a matter of probability. If the peoplehave the rights to choose their leaders we call it democracy whichadds up to the series of failure. Consider the common foolish peoplewhich are mostly incapable of becoming the leader themselves vote aperson 'according to their opinion'.. which's clearly trash sincethey they don't have any intelligence at all. How are people with lowintelligence suppose to choose which person will be the best asleader... the leaders can simply conveniences them to believe theyare here to help them by seconding their stupid opinion and makinghypothetical false promises of reducing tax and doubling the economywhich the stupid commoners appear to believe (finally why are theycommoners?... why ain't they leaders convincing the commoners? That'scause they are stupid... they don't have enough intelligence to seewhat's right and wrong.). This is similar to what Bill Gates did.People want that leader to put under action their opinion and THERopinion is trash which'll finally do bad to the whole of earth.

In democracy the leaders might favor people onbases of supporting their religion a major advantage where people ofone religion form the larger majority (like Nepal). So the opinion ofthe common religious fools will overshadow the opinion of the 0.5%sensible, no doubt the leader chosen will either be -

Too foolish
Too selfish.

Let's take an example... people will vote for theperson who claims to do favors to them. So we take a crowd of judges,cops and prisoners and ask them to vote about 'Should the currentprisoners be free?'. Since prisoners are the much greater majority,the result of the voting will be a 'yes'.

In the real world, most people are selfish, whenthey vote, they only care about their advantage and not what problemswill this advantage cause to others.

Furthermore to vote for the right candidate youdon't need to see what they are doing now, or what they claim to do,you gotta see the background, the history of the individual anddecide on if he's really capable of doing the job. And 90% of thepopulation doesn't care about this, they don't even have enoughintellect to understand his aspects, leave alone the fact of lowerintelligence of the masses, no one even has time to do this, as aresult most of the votes are either random or just stupid opinion.

This is what we call democracy and the leadershiptheory "Let the majority stupid rule" and "You do whatI say, even if it's stupid" respectively.

Cause of this we have the concept of countrieswhich I define as a group of people with certain leaders and definedterritory where they live... a ridiculously stupid and unproductiveconcept. A reason for existence of a country is the fact that humansare competitive, they are designed to fight competition off, sincethere is no real competition to humans, we fight among ourselves. Soif an extraterrestrial species decides to capture earth, and thewhole world considers this as a real and major issue, there's noscope of doubt that the whole human population will unite and theconcept of the countries will be lost unless the threat is gone.Finally this is the definition of country I give -

"Groups of people separated by areas andleaders thinking only about their own good and possible harming othergroups for their own benefit."

Wild life conservation -

Considering Population and our kindnesssection, we can have either 2 things given a state of technology –Adequate wildlife or excess of human population. 90% of peoplereceding on earth want both however.

Yeah it ispossible but that's considering we are 50,000 times more advancedthan what we are now. Unlike each animal or tree born on earth eachhuman born will consume 50 billion times more resources and causeinfinitely more harm to the wild life looking at the current state oftechnology we are in.

So if you're awildlife conservationist and handing out hand bills to save thetiger, plant more trees or support our conservation efforts, it'sbetter to drop them off altogether and start convince people to stopmaking babies and support more R&D, and when the technology hasgrown advanced enough, THEN make babies. Doing this will aid all yourconservation efforts.

Furthermore,it's originally not human to save, or conserve any other species. Wesurvived on earth cause we had cut down trees, killed animals forfood and won over them when it came to competition for all – land,food and luxuries. We are so successful that we are actually keepingthem as pets... just for fun, and we even have mercy on them, we havemercy on the difficulties they are facing cause of the insane amountof human population or actually cause of our success. So this 'mercy'part comes cause we are too damn successful and not cause thesethings are build into us... originally we're only meant to becompassionate about other humans... to aid our complex socialstructures, nothing else; care for other animals is just a sideaffect.

Limits of our management skills -

It can be consideredthat at the current state of time, the human population is so damn inexcess that any average individual or even groups of averageindividuals will not be able to manage it; we need someone extraordinary. It's out off the bounds for an average team of human beingto manage such a large population. Thanks to democracy, the handfulof good and super intelligent human beings will never be electedfollowing the thinking of the average.

Even if the suffice do get selected for thepurpose, it will still be very difficulties for them to manage themajority fools of the human population. These common people don'tunderstand anything, and even if they feel the slightestinconvenience they make a mob and revolt... none of them haveunderstanding about whats going on inside, what are the challengesfaced by the leaders etc... leave alone advising solutions.

Less intelligence -

Ok, so I've been talking a lot about common peopleare fools, but are they really fools?

If the average population was actuallyintelligent, the average would have been capable enough to vote orrealize that the leadership system is crap for this large amount ofpopulation and our small planet earth wouldn't have been divided into100s of countries. If human population was intelligent enough anaverage set of individuals would have been good enough to manage thehuman population, but apparently that's not possible.

Another proof of lower human intelligence is thefact that people cant predict the future given certain facts... likeglobal warming (which's probably a myth), people have been told thetemperature thing, it's consequences and even the severity but arethey talking care of it?... yeah 1% population does. They don'trealize the fact that if they don't stop driving 4 seater cars aloneor quit IC engines and adopt it's electric variants, to save earth,but they neither care, nor realize the severity of this. What's moreimportant is the 'manufacturing cost' of the vehicle... that isfinancial things take presidency over the future of earth no one canrealize the real danger.

I say IC engines should be banned at least onroads within a period of 5 years, if that sounds too hard, new ICvehicle should be banned for sale at least. I haven't even mentionedflight which's the most inefficient model of transport around (with10% efficiency I guess? Remember Newton's third law and KE, momentumrelation?). Even with an electric motor there's nothing you can domuch to improve the efficiency of a flight.

Most human being are governed by an apprehensionthat nothing can harm the human population major – we're the mostsuccessful of all creatures, there're no rivals absolutely. What acommon human's mind cant see is that the rival is not in form acreature, but are fight for resources, various geological and cosmicinterferences that will wipe us someday – which'll be another daywhen we'll be thinking the human population is safe and nothing canharm it.

Invisible enemies will never be realized except bya few scientists who'll be suppressed by the stupid government(which's elected by the stupid people following democracy) tomaintain the 'economy' of the nation, or whatsoever reason. The humanpopulation is itself the biggest enemy of the species and we'vefailed to realize that.

Humans become fans of mostly entertainers, or themost insignificant people on earth; as a result they are rich,whereas scientists, by the most important personals neither have themoney nor the right. This has been explained below.

Financial distribution among types of people -

Let's see who get'spaid most (1 to 3) -

Businessmen
Entertainers
Working class people
1. Scientists.

There's no scope ofdoubt that the entertainers are the most insignificant people on theplanet, and yet they are one of the most paid. People recognize themas 'gods' as so they are taken as brand ambassadors and becomemillionaires soon.

On the otherhand, the scientists appear to be insignificant... for all the goodthey do to the world, and for which humanity has risen to suchheights are ignored and given a salary (although it is high, but it'scomparatively very low).

It appearsimpossible to solve this issue, since people simply can't become fansof scientists (they are so uncool), but the government can help. Theycan make a rule by which a minimum of 50% of the revenues generatedby a company using the R&D of a scientist or a team has to bepaid to them. This will although directly affect the businessmen andindirectly the entertainers, but at least the most significant peoplewill get paid what they did for. Additional the utility patent termshould be extended to 30 years.

The patent lawsstates that the term of 20 years is to ensure that the inventor keepson working rather than just invent one thing and relax for a lifetime. This is indeed true, the solution to this will be extension of5 years on all previous patents if and only if a new patent has beenfiled.

Our method of discussion is still crappy –

Discussion is one ofthe few things which make humans very different – the hugevocabulary, the brain and patience to sit and listen to each otherfor hours on end; but unfortunately I find the trivial debatingmethod nothing but a waist of time for major and controversialdecisions.

If you carefullylisten to a serious debate; effectively only 4 things happen most ofthe time -

People repeats their statements again and again cause the other party fails to understand or listen; as a result he asks or prompts the answer again and again.
A lot of solid points are completely forgotten.
They cut each others sentences, as a result the 2 never understand each other.
Some people forget a few points since you need to respond fast to people – it becomes a type of game on who responds faster.

And the 3 problems tothese are -

There's lack of depth in the discussion; as we go deeper we keep forgetting other factors in the discussion making the situation complex.
What people said is also forgotten unless things are recorded; and even if they are, it's very difficult to track the discussion cause it's usually not structured.
Oral discussion can't be structured.
You physically have to go and dedicate your complete time discussing; and if the discussion gets postponed many times (cause the people are asking for time); the discussion gets delayed by an extreme amount.

As of the currenttime, none of the above problems have been addressed and that's causewe're still using trivial techniques to commence our debates – justtalking.

Conclusion -

We're nothing but a bunch of monkeys, finally theyare our ancestors.

Solution to all this -

Be follower of logic.

And our objective should be -

Everyone on earth should be happy.
Wildlife should be conserved.
Future should be good (safety from the invisible enemies).
Humanity should expand (not on earth).

By following logic we ought to do things whichapparently people don't like and the people who don't like it will bewelcomed in the discussion and ultimately convinced that this was theright decision.

The backbone of what should be done and whatshould not should be decided in discussions... this's where thingsshould start, thus we should have a solid discussion platform to formlaws. This will be as such -

All discussion will be in textual form and inonline forums, this way we solve 3, 4, 6 and 8 with a new problem –discussion is slow, but it's better (and faster) than postponing.

Why this's faster is cause discussion can commenceday and night, when someone wants time to gather statistics or justneed a break, he can simply leave for any amount of time and comeback when he wants to and catch up with the discussion since it'scompletely archived and easy to track, thus giving him extremeflexibility and not ruining his whole day – people can even do thispart time as a result lots of important (and might be intelligent)people who'd otherwise not have participated start participating.Also, for the same reason, this'll give people time to think (4)
Asof point 3, since this's a written discussion, they can't interrupt.Everyone can write completely and till his/her complete satisfaction.

Anyone from the public can start a thread in thisforum to change or make a law.

The various things that this person wants to state(as to why the law should exist, the current problems etc...) will bebroken down into small points which will be discussed independently.These individual points will be responded to by people to spark adiscussion.

e.g. I want discussion on abolishment of softwarepatents, I'll place the following points (just for e.g.) -

Topic – Software patents should be more limited.

….
Patents have a history of supporting only large companies which try to eat up small companies or individuals making software
Using patents large companies try to abolish or put pressure on non-profit organizations or people making opensourced software, thus failing the point of patents (good of the people).
….

To discuss, someone may respond -

….
Patents have a history of supporting only large companies which try to eat up small companies or individuals making software
Using patents large companies try to abolish or put pressure on non-profit organizations or people making opensourced software, thus failing the point of patents (good of the people).
….

Just in case there's another aspect arising from apoint (numbered 2), a new point can be made off it (numbered 5). Ifthis new point is such that the previous point (from which it arisesfrom) depends on it, point 2 may be suspended unless point 5 isresolved and there's a definitive conclusion on it.

This will form the very basic concept of howdiscussions should be proceeded and will clearly remove issues 1, 2,7 and 5 of the classical discussion methods.

As I stated, everyone from the public canparticipate in this discussion, but they have to first pass a test bywhich they will state what they want to discuss about. If it has beenfound that his point has not been discussed before he'll be allowedin the discussion permanently (i.e. next time he wont be needing apermission unless he posts something already previously discussed).

If this restriction is not applied there'll be aflood of posts.

Other small time problems exists which havesolutions to e.g. no personal attacks etc...

Best of all there'll be no political party systemwhich's a complete failure since all that political parties do isfavor each other and disfavor others in a hypocrite way.

This system will be used to make decisions also;swift, time sensitive decisions will be made by a single authorityand after discussion it might be changed.

I tend to think, if we follow this system theworld will change. The commoners will see why they are wrong and noone will be unsatisfied since they can always discuss. No rallies ormobs or monopolies. People will be under control. There'll be noelections, the immediate leader (for swift decisions) will be chosenon bases of how accurately he made decisions in the past.

KDE builtin man page viewer.

2011-09-25T22:02:00.000-07:00

Just in case you don't have khelpcenter installed (cause you've installed a minimal KDE build) there's a another way to view a man page in HTML.

In dolphin/konqueror do -

man:

e.g. -

man:nano.

In Dolphin this'll make a temporary HTML file and open in the default browser, in Konqueror, it'll open that temporary HTML file in itself.

Parallel re-fetcher (using wget).

2011-07-22T07:02:00.000-07:00

This script is a parallel re-fetcher (i.e. it can restart downloads removing the old files and updating them with a new ones). the comment says it all.

#! /bin/bash
rm -Rf /tmp/fetching_links
# Takes in a file, and a number which defines how many links to be fetched in parallel. This'll also utilize the wget feature to reuse an existing TCP connection.
# e.g. ./fetch_parallel <path to list> <no. of threads (n)>
# The file taken in will be spitted into n parts and each part will be stored in /tmp/fetching_links (with text file named 0, 1, 2, 3 etc... depending on value of n).
# Each file will be fed to wget for fetching.
# third argument is optional. Third, if present will will refetch the downloads after n seconds (as specified by the third argument) and overwrite the existing files. If the argument is 'c', it'll refetch without waiting.
# Files will be stored in ./downloads
# variable to store all links
links="$(cat "$1")"
# Generate list of links (depending on no. of parallel fetches).
# variable each will contain the no. of lines to exist in each instance of wget.
declare -i each
each=$(($(echo "$links" | wc --lines)/$2))
# Helper index variable $num
declare -i num
num=1
#assign link list for each wget instance to process and split the file list in arrays of $links.
while [[ $(($num - 1)) != $2 ]]
do
    links[$num]=$(echo "$links" | head -${each})
    #trim list of files to allow second run.
    #remaining lines (not divisible with each) will be in links[0]
    links="$(echo "$links" | tail -n +$(($each+1)))"
    num=num+1
done
#num will be used later as the no. of valid indexes in links. Thus reduce it's value to the right one.
num=num-1
mkdir /tmp/fetching_links
# index variable i will be used to echo lines in array links to /tmp/fetching_links, each will be read separately by wget.
declare -i i
i=0
# if links[0] = "" or \n, it means there were no left overs after the split of the link list. I need to make a mark of this.
    if [[ ${links[0]} == "" || ${links[0]} == "
" ]]
    then
# Set variable f as "empty" if links[0] was "". For future use.
        f="empty"
    fi
# num variable contains the no. of indexes available. For future use, it's copied over to another variable max.
declare -i max
max=$num
while [[ $num != -1 ]]
do
# File names will be same as the index variable in variable links
    echo "${links[$num]}" > /tmp/fetching_links/$num
    num=num-1
    if [[ $f == "empty" ]]
    then
        if [[ $num == 0 ]]
        then
            break
        fi
    fi
    done
# function which needs to be called again and again for repetitive fetching.
unset links
# Value of max will again be used, thus storing in num again.
declare -i num
num=$max
call_wget(){
# Resetting value of max in case of a recall.
    max=$num
# calling of wget starts here. Using previous variable max and 'f'
    while [[ $max  != -1 ]]
    do
        wget -N --tries=3 --timeout=5 -U "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Gentoo Linux x86_64; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/11.0.696.71 Safari/534.16" -i /tmp/fetching_links/$max &> /dev/null &
        #debug
        max=max-1
# file[0] will be missing if f==empty
        if [[ $f == "empty" ]]
        then
            if [[ $max == 0 ]]
            then
                break
            fi
        fi
    done
}
t=$3
# If $3="", wget will just run once.
if [[ $t > 0 || $t == "c" ]]
then
    while [[ "1" != "2" ]] # An infinite loop
    do
        call_wget
        echo "Fresh call"
    # See if any wget's running in bg using jobs.
        status="running"
        while [[ "$status" == "running" ]]
        do
            jobs | grep Running &> /dev/null
            if [[ $? == 0 ]]
            then
                status="running"
                sleep 2
                echo "running"
            else
                status=""
            fi
        done
        # The sleep timer, or no wait, depending on value of $3.
        if [[ $3 != "c" ]]
        then
            echo "waiting $3 seconds"
            sleep $t
        fi
    done
else
    call_wget
    status="running"
        while [[ "$status" == "running" ]]
        do
            jobs | grep Running &> /dev/null
            if [[ $? == 0 ]]
            then
                status="running"
                sleep 2
                echo "running in background"
            else
                status=""
                echo "All done."
            fi
        done
fi
rm -Rf /tmp/fetching_links

Making openoffice/libreoffice save faster.

2011-07-13T21:13:00.000-07:00

With large documents, openoffice/libreoffice slows down miserably saving documents; most of the problem is HDD I/O.

That can be solved in most Non-Microsoft systems by saving to ram instead of the HDD.

To start off, make a folder named X... this'll be the place where you'll copy over the document you'll be editing (COPY, NOT CUT).

mount a tmpfs filesystem (portion of RAM) to this folder (as root) -

mount -t tmpfs none 'full path of X enclosed in single quotes'

Then copy over the document to folder X, notice if you turn off the PC, you'll loose the document, thus it's critical to make backups (i'll tell you an automated method).

Notice, when saving changes to the document, it'll be faster... there's a another hack to make things yet faster, but before that let's make the automated backup. Run the following (not as root) in a terminal -

while [[ $i != '78' ]]; do sleep 60; cp 'full path to document in folder X in single quotes' 'full path to original document in single quotes'; done

This'll make backups withing a single minute of the document.
As of further making things faster, first make a dir Y in /tmp -
mkdir /tmp/Y

Then mount a tmpfs file system on it (as root) -

mount -t tmpfs none /tmp/Y

Goto openoffice, in tools > options > openoffice/libreoffice > paths

In here set the temp directory to /tmp/Y.

You're done, saves should be a lot faster now (restart all instances of openoffice). However notice, under VERY large documents and limited amount of ram (usually less than 1 GB with KDE), this may fill up your RAM very quickly.

Micromax 352G on Linux.

2011-07-12T01:14:00.000-07:00

This's just another regular modem with a storage device as the default mod. First you need to install usb-modeswitch, then plug in the modem (or replug the modem), then run (as root) -

wvdialconf

If it says modem not found, it means the USB device has not switched it's state, thus, do so as follows -

usb_modeswitch -v 1c9e -p f000

Then again try wvdialconf, it's ought to work.

You'll now have a file name /etc/wvdial.conf, edit this as root, enter your username, password (usually anything will work), then the number to be dialed (usually *99#). Uncomment these lines also.

Next run wvdial command, and things should work fine. Notice the color coding on the modem also to see if it even catches the network.

Dog's intelligence.

2011-06-01T08:14:00.000-07:00

I've a Golden retriever who's 12 years old (i.e. towards the end of his life time, although he looks pretty healthy). This's my first dog, following his increasing age, I've learn that his intelligence grew with time... to a surprising level.

I mean, people (and some scientists) say dogs don't understand words but the tone at which one speaks... I find it to be wrong. No matter what the expression the dog can understand -

1) I'm gonna take um for a walk.
2) Who's gonna take um for a walk (e.g. me, my friend or my dad). Well get this -- If someone is talking over the phone discusses that person x is gonna take um for a walk, he goes to that person expecting him a walk.
3) Apart form realizing when we're gonna administer him medicines, he'll grasp us talking and realize it's time for medicines, then soon he'll be under the bed or the table.
4) What sort of food he's gonna get (from curd to milk to soup to bones to choostics -- yup you got that right).

A lot more I can't remember, I also thinks he understands grammar, not only a few words. A few things extra -

Over time he has learnt the packet in which his favorite choostics lie so he knows what I'm opening. He also recognizes it's sound... and various sounds including the vehicles.
He knows who's watching um... even with side eyes... i.e. he recognizes not only the eye, but the pupil of the eye. Actually he can even understand expressions.

All in all, I think what we understand about him (except his health), he understands the same about us.

How to get websites opening faster.

2011-03-05T06:43:00.000-08:00

Yes, browsers have DNS caching, but it might not be configurable (it might get cleared after like... 60 seconds which's way too less) or it might cache websites/ip who's DNS has changed or it might store limited no. of sites etc...

/etc/hosts is a file where you can specify to your OS network which names to resolve to which IP in the following format -



e.g -

204.187.15.12   forums.gentoo.org
208.80.152.2    en.wikipedia.org
209.85.231.104 www.google.com
209.85.231.104 www.google.co.in

This will give you good latency losses.

Reverse tunneling

2011-02-25T23:19:00.000-08:00

If the server is behind a router you can still connect to the remote server through a thing called 'reverse tunneling'. For this you have to execute a few commands from the remote system (remote system is the server). Since the router will not allow incoming packet from the local system (local system is the one which is the client) unless you made a 'tunnel' from the remote one.

Now comes the concept of port forwarding. Here, a certain port on the server is 'forwarded' to the local system, the local system can uses this port on itself (I.e localhost) as if this port is on the the remote system. Suppose port x is forwarded, then I can -

ssh -p x remote_user@localhost

I.e I'm using x port as if it's on the remote computer, but actually I'm using localhost for it.

This port x will actually be mapped to the port on which sshd listens on the remote system.

Before you choose the port x, ensure it's not used by anyone, else port forwarding will fail.

The -R option allows you to make a reverse tunnel from the remote system, thus do the following to make the tunnel -

ssh -R ::: @

on the remote system.

example -

ssh -R 1009:localhost (or the computer itself):22 de@decomp.com

And in the client -

ssh -p 1009 remote_user@localhost

In effect this's like -

ssh -p 22 remote_user@the.remote.computer

It's useful to add the -N option also, this will avoid the server from to execute a command on the host.

Another option is -T. This will disable the pseudo terminal, that is it will make no relations to the terminal of the host system, and so it will not even be able to execute commands.

If you also specify the -n option, it'll ignore all inputs from stdin.

Chrooting user in SSH (OpenSSH_5.8p1-hpn13v10)

2011-02-25T04:37:00.000-08:00

OpenSSH has this feature (on the server side) of chrooting users to a specific directory after they log in, that way you can ensure the users dont have access to your data. Useful when reverse tunneling.

First, you need to make a directory in which you can chroot using chroot... i.e you need the bear miminal, usually mount binding /bin and /lib64 (x64) or /lib (on x86) readonly will do so (I'm not sure about x86). Assuming /home/chroot is this directory -

mount --bind /bin /home/chroot/bin

Same for /lib(64)

Try chrooting into /home/chroot, it should work. Since you're using the libraries and executables in /home/chroot/* will be used for the by, even by SSH.

Next you need to create/modify a user which ssh will chroot to; notice that the files in /home/chroot needs to be used for this, not those in /. While creating/modifying the user, you need to take a note that the paths will be relative to /home/chroot NOT the usual way. i.e. if you're specifying bash as the default shell for the user, it will not be /home/chroot/bin/bash, but /bin/bash, thus when ssh chroots the user, it will use /home/chroot/bin/bash and not /bin/bash. Sounds confusing.

Now let's make a home directory for the user (optional, i.e you can specify / as the home directory)

mkdir /home/chroot/ch_root

Make or modify a user (I'll modify here) -

usermod -s /bin/bash --home /ch_root ch_root

Notice -- in the server /ch_root does not exist, but in /home/chroot, it does; this is what I meant to say -- paths are relative to /home/chroot and not /.

Now add the following directive to /etc/ssh/sshd_config -

ChrootDirectory /home/chroot

Restart ssh, ssh using ch_root, and the user will be logged in to a chrooted jail in /home/chroot.

X Error of failed request: BadLength (poly request too large or internal Xlib length error) on Nvidia.

2010-12-14T04:33:00.000-08:00

Ever got this -

X Error of failed request: BadLength (poly request too large or internal Xlib length error)

while a running a game or openGL application on NVIDIA.

Problem is solved by installing libgl1-nvidia-glx-ia32, which provides 32 bit openGL libraries for 32 bit applications like America's army.

Photoshop CS5 on wine.

2010-12-12T06:28:00.000-08:00

When a notorious Microsoft bribed companys launch application only for Windows or a few other OSs, what do you do? Download the pirated ones. Well, they didn't launch it for the right OS officially, so why should you buy officially?

e.g -- Adobe. So here I tell you how to run photoshop CS5 on Wine, and only the portable pirated version works, so we dont have to pay to a Microsoft bribed company.

You can download the portable version using the torrent which have plenty of seeds (do seed to make Adobe suffer).

WINE might ask you to install the 'gecko' package, if it prompts, do install.

Then just run the setup directly with wine... everything should work. Use the latest version of WINE (1.3.8 does work).

In case the application doesn't run install the gecko package using winetricks, a shell script -

./winetricks gecko

Download from http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetrick

PlayonLinux

2010-12-02T01:25:00.000-08:00

This is an essential WINE wrapper which apart from using the WINE which's installed in the system can also maintain a static builds of various other wine WINE versions.

To do so, navigate to Tools > Manage wine versions.

The application will download whatever version you'll say in ~/.playonlinux/WineVersions/, speaking of which ~/.playonlinux is the home directory of the application, all wine prefixes made will be stored in this directory in the sub directory wineprefix... you can remove these directories to clean the prefix.

Apart from the repository which you can see on clicking the 'install' button you can run third party *.exe in the same dialog by going to 'install a .pol package or an unsupported application', then you'll be greeted by 2 options, select the manual install one, and do whatever the wizard says.

With POL, you can use the latest WINE and manage all wine prefix without using long commands.

You can even use the wine versions in ~/.playonlinux/WineVersions directly (you can see the wine executable in the usr/bin directory), no harm in that. Create an alias for ease.

Why Microsoft contributes to Apache foundation.

2010-10-21T07:42:00.000-07:00

I think the only reason is that MS copies Apache Webserver sources to IIS and adds a few hidden API calls of Windows, gaining an advantage.

So next time you but your favorite copy of Windows server and IIS, remember it's Microsoft's Apache webserver you've been fooled to buy form MS.

List of articles

2010-10-16T09:51:00.000-07:00

List of articles in my blog -

Why Ubuntu sucks.
DVD video protected disks.
Zen kernel overview
Why use Gentoo?
Solving SCSI errors with k3b/cdrtools
Why opensource?
Unique ways to contribute to opensource.
Making a sabayon package.
Humans defenseless in the wild?
Sabayon Gentoo Symbiosis

Why Ubuntu sucks.

2010-10-13T01:25:00.000-07:00

Ok, despite the popularity that Ubuntu has got I'm posting a rant on it; that's cause it really deserves it. Earlier when I used to use Ubuntu 8.04... no issues, but things have been degrading since then and at the current state and as a system admin, I can confirm that Ubuntu or it's variants are no longer in production quality.

This happened possibly cause of the Windows migrants (or normal users) who just preferred the GUI and next next finish crap but they are actually a part of the community... they are willing to help, unfortunately their help and their opinion causes more problems and myths than solutions. As a result we had more such people adding up in the community and now the state is that almost everything about Ubuntu is complete trash.

Why I decided to write this today is cause one of my clients said “Linux sucks” thanks to Ubuntu (yeah I know it's Ubuntu's fault not upstream).

Why Ubuntu sucks -

Community – As said before, majority (70% to 80%) of people in Ubuntu community are still under the impression that Ubuntu is a Windows alternative; just judging from the GUI and doing everything from the GUI; they dont even know the difference between Linux and Ubuntu. They have less knowledge, ok, but real issues starts by the fact that these people have attitude and overestimate their knowledge and comment without understanding the main questions.
Overall, to sum up, this is what the Ubuntu community wanna say -
“It doesn't matter how many packages are preinstalled, it doesn't matter how the packages have been compiled, and it doesn't matter how you've configured the kernel or the system, all that matter is if the OS is Ubuntu or not and if it is, it is the best!”.
Now the community will ask "It works perfectly here", and the obvious answer that any non Ubuntu user will give is that all this has been tried on verity of hardware which is true... not even verity, in the same system problems increase over time and I get too many calls.
The community represents the common public, and the common public IS stupid, they don't need to talk to the devs directly!... they need to talk to them though admins or some expert users to ensure that they don't bombard the handful of Senior devs that are still left in Ubuntu. And those admins shouldn't be Ubuntu admins.
Since such people form the larger majority, we just get answers to simple stupid questions like what's the root directory, how you add a new user, how you install software... all repetitive or simple questions. If you have any real questions which points to a real bug/challenge... the community is doomed. 70% of the community does not have the capability to answer this. The remaining 30% are bombarded by repetitive questions so they don't even see the good questions. Let's take some sample old unanswered questions from the 10-11^th page of a randomly chosen forum -
“http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1581605
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1581584
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1563031
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1581574
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1563002&highlight=CUPS”
Package quality – Ok, the above is not that much of a real issue, but this is the main issue with Ubuntu. In my case, with every Ubuntu install comes new bugs.
Take the current issue for examples, DVDstyler does not make the final project... some sorta 'error' occurs, possibly causes of unsatisfied dependency.
Ok, so I tried the same with Sabayon with the free spaced hosted by an NFS server running on Ubuntu... and guess what happened? Ubuntu NFS encountered 'errors'... cannot r/w files.

NFS is always giving issues... verity of issues from mounting the served location, to file transfer which at times stops cause of some sorta error which's different every time. Ofcourse the problem gets solved after an Ubuntu 'reboot'. In the end I preferred system rescue CD to get the job done which is unfortunately based on Gentoo – the distro which most Ubuntu users hate with an excuse – 'its not worth it' where as the reality is it's not their cup of tea... how can stupid windows users start using fabulous distros like Gentoo, further more how can they see the advantage?

CUPS hangs too much, the web config page never opens.

I opened a bug to compile mplayer so as to play HD videos, hell yeah they fixed it, but now the HD audio wont come (wma).

That CD/wine bug is there for around 6 months, and no one has a way to fix it.

Now the scanner stopped working.

Overall we have verity of uncountable bugs, it appears the devs maintaining Ubuntu packages not proper devs or contributers... they are Windows devs trying to do some Linux package management; or college IT freshers. Otherwise who else will be interested in Ubuntu anyway... it's just another shining distro!
Horrible dependency of preinstalled package – apt-get remove ubuntu-desktop;apt-get autoclean; nothing more gets removed.
If you wanna remove a preinstalled package in Ubuntu, probably you have to check the dependencies manually to get the job done. I do it for around 10 packages.
Buggy dependency resolution of apt – This is not a major issue, but at times, apt-get autoclean just wont work as expected, and you gotta remove a bunch of orphan packages manually.
FS corruption – Since the Ubuntu's 'super speed' bootup/shutdown started, at times the FS does get an unclean unmount; it shows up in the next boot.
Hardware incompatibility – Various small issues with hardware does occur. For example in a few acer laptops, we have issues with the brightness, touchpad keys, alps touchpad etc...
Ubuntu seems extra slow – All other distros are faster in comparison. You can see the benchmarks.

There're many more (right now and in the making) that I probably forgot about. The current state is such that I'm forced to leave Ubuntu... and I'm glad I'm going to. If you're a system admin or a dev and using Ubuntu, I advice you quit now and start using better thing... maybe Debian itself; yeah Ubuntu community is big, but you gotta see what sorta people it's made off. To the rest of Ubuntu users – I suggest you remain with it and not pollute other distros.

DVD video protected disks.

2010-10-02T10:49:00.000-07:00

Recently I got up with a challenge to copy a protected DVD video disk... which is actually illegal, but I just did it for educational purposes.

So what is this protection? It happens that some of the data on the DVD is encrypted, the key to this encryption is supposed to be written to the lead-in area of the DVD.

What a DVD player does is read this key for purpose of decryption of the data (video) under question... so the hardware should support decryption if you want to play such a thing.

Luckily most modern DVD writers (everything else below it is obsolete) do support this, thus you can flawlessly copy such a DVD, defeating it's purpose.

Thoughtfully speaking, almost all sorts of DRM is complete crap (almost, cause few are actually effective, that I've discussed later). If any medium makes a sound and produces a video, it can be, in the modern world, captured with no losses... if it plays in a DVD player (it will) you can record the lossless data though S/PDIF DVI or HDMI... if you're applying DRM to a media which has to be played on a verity of hardware manufactured by various corporations, the technology is probably crap, i.e if you want it to be effective there should a few listed hardware devices which should be able to play it, I bet the Chinese will be the first to break such sort of DRM. This actually did happen in North Asia a few months after CSS DRM was launched... they recorded it live, making the copy protection useless.

Such sorta things cause nothing but problems to the end user... as a result they too download pirated.

So let these propritory DRM people learn a few things by NOT buying anything DRM protected. Yeah, protection of copyrighted material is good, but what's the use if it poses no effects at all?... I mean, if you're having copies of the same thing floating as torrents on the Internet what's the use of it?

So in Europe we have a ban on P2P communication, that is effective, but it's clearly in excess... I mean you're trying to deprive people off fundamental rights simply to make Britney Spears and Steven Spielberg richer?.. yeah, why not forbid people to 'record' the movie and music 'in their minds' to ensure they wont be able to reproduce it anywhere else?.. why not just forbid phone calls to ensure the copy protected lyrics are leaked out off your lips?

Hell yeah, that'll make Britney and Spielberg a lot richer...

If you want to have this thing done effectively, you need to target the sites hosting the copy protected material (not 'peers', but the trackers and the sites providing the torrents).

Zen kernel overview

2010-08-26T22:48:00.000-07:00

- no title specified

Initially looking at the zen kernel, I was thinking 'what's the utility'?... Ok, it's tweaked for the desktop, but I didn't expect much of a difference form the official and the Linux kernel, until I really started to configure it.

It's basically a collection of almost all the patches, enhancements that's around and has been provided for the Linux kernel made into a single kernel – Zen.

These are the key features that I really liked (from Linux-2.6.34) -

•.CFS CPU scheduler – Although I've not tried it much, but it boosts to increase the responsiveness of the kernel. It's coded by veteran kernel programmer Con Kolivas.
•.Tweak for the above or CFQ scheduler and DIRTY_RATIO, BACKGROUND_DIRTY_RATIO – You can set the priority of X to a high value if using CFQ or even tweak the CFS scheduler and even DIRTY_RATIO, BACKGROUND_DIRTY_RATIO which makes sense in desktop systems.
•.Compression mode – You are given 4 compression modes of the kernel including LZO which's the fastest for decompression and increases the boot times by a very small amount (install lzop package for you kernel to compile if you're using this compression method).
•.Additional RCU implementations including Preemptable tree-based hierarchical RCU to boost, again, the responsiveness.
•.Custom CFLAGS.
•.Support for -march=native for compilation.
•.Timer frequency – You can set timer frequencies till 10,000 just in case you wanna experiment.
•.Tuxonice – I think this is not in the official kernel, it claims to be a more efficient suspend method.
•.Reiser4 support – Although it's future is uncertain, it's good enough for the desktops. Enjoy the fastest FS for small files.
•.Many more – which I did not notice.

Overall, if you're a veteran Linux user, it makes all sense to replace the default kernel with this one – personally I did see the desktop becomes pretty responsive when using this kernel; and no, it's not placebo effect, I could point out which kernel am I using when either one were started randomly (The original Gentoo kernel and the newly configured Zen kernel.).

It will be very nice if Zen also includes the patches for the Linux unified kernel.

Why use Gentoo

2010-08-22T05:57:00.001-07:00

Hello everyone.

I'm posting here (and will keep updating my post) about what people say about Gentoo, and what doubts do they have about the project and what wars are going on in the communities.

First of all let's see why are you using Gentoo. Gentoo is for -
admins
devs who do not solely develop high level programs
Enthusiasts
Curious minds (about Linux)
And might be Graphs artists also.
Servers

If you're using Gentoo and not anyone or more from the above, then it's a waste of time.

Gentoo is used by admins, devs, enthusiasts cause many of them know/wanna-know Linux good enough, I.e they can handle the technical expertize that Gentoo throws at them; the efforts of editing the configuration file, the efforts of fulfilling the compile requirements, the efforts to configure the kernel, etc... i.e. they are willing to learn and have a bit of time at hand.
The main reason why they use it is either for one or more of the following -

*Complete control of the system (known compile time parameters).
*Leaning the internals of everything.
*Speed – Lowered dependencies, lowered runtime requirements of binaries, known optimization (explained in FAQ), tweaked kernel (if the user has configured his kernel), LDFLAGS, new packages.
*keep uptodated.
*the latest unstable packages.
*New features in software.
*Rolling release.
*slots
*architecture.
*Security.

For 'curious minds' or people who are learning Linux, it just provides a playground. If using Gentoo they become enthusiasts, they will most probably use it for any of the above stated reasons but only if they realize the powers of Gentoo and even if they do, they should have an interest to use those powers.
Whatever be, if you continue using Gentoo, you will continuously be learning something or the other since it reviles the inner workings of the new packages and even hardware; the various options they can be compiled with, the various features they support.

*Complete control of the system (known compile time parameters) – Related FAQs -

*I can have complete control over the system using any other binary based distribution.

When all binary distributions were providing X with HAL, Gentoo gave it's users an option to compile with without.

If you have an old processor which does not support SSE2 and SSE3 instructions, no use compiling your binaries with it. Also many packages (like ffmpeg and mplayer) support compiling without these.

Why compile blender with openal support when you don't want it?

We use recoll with QT interface, which Ubuntu can't. Although recoll is not in portage but a contributer is maintaining the ebuild (But the portage maintainers wont let him in.)

Uncountable more.

*The package maintainers can build these packages with such features removed/added

Then the no. of packages of the Ubuntu distribution will be close to a billion if they attempted to do so; so many are the number of options.

*You can apt-get –no-install-recommends, then install the recommended ones manually.

There's a difference between a plugin and a dependency, you can remove the plugins but if you remove the dependencies it will result in errors... the devs know that.

In Gentoo we remove the dependencies. Let's take an example of kde-desktop in Ubuntu; here I list the packages that Gentoo would not install (if kdebase-meta is emerged) -

ark kdepasswd khelpcenter4 ksnapshot ksystemlog language-selector-qt libkdecorations4 libkonq5 libksignalplotter4 libkwineffects1 libokularcore1 libpoppler-qt4-3 okular

Anyway, this is not a good example to state runtime dependencies; many more examples exist...including gnome and xfce.

Recently I got another example of the apt dependencies resolution. I accidentally installed fglrx on an nvidia, so I want to remove it now, and along with that, it wants to remove the following -

flashplugin-installer flashplugin-nonfree ia32-libs nspluginwrapper wine1.2

*OK, so I can customize most things using almost any distro...this is Linux, this is opensource.

It's difficult to remove things than adding them – specially in Ubuntu.

You decide to completely remove gnome and add kde instead, but on removing the ubuntu-desktop package, nothing else gets removed in auto-removing.

Furthermore there're many utilities preinstalled not as a meta package...you can't hunt for them in the default stack of the installed 1200 packages, you might remove dependencies off X...who knows.

*What's the advantage?

Satisfaction of the user (others will be discussed later).

*Leaning the internals of everything.

*Why can't I do this with any other distro?

Cause Gentoo forces you to. Otherwise it will fail to work, or work bad (after which the users say Gentoo is bad).

Gentoo expect you to work on it, for a simple reason – Customization, Gentoo's goal.

It allows you to play around heavy with kernel configs, it will teach you how to boot the system manually, it will explain the factors and options of a compile, uncountable more...

Furthermore in a usual shining distro, you do not know which things worked out of the box without your permission and configuration... you might not stop them since you do not know if it's a dependency of something else.

Anyway, most do agree with this point.

*Speed

*Ubuntu is much faster than Gentoo (yo!...Gentoo has nano second boost in performance).

Ground truth is Ubuntu is one of the slowest distributions around, it's not cause of it's inefficiency, but cause Debian has been modified for ease of use with the expense of speed.

As we all know, easiest doesn't mean the best; same can be said about Linux and windows. And actually Gentoo is one of the fastest distros around. Here are the benchmarks -

http://global.phoronix-test-suite.com/?k=profile&u=unlotto-26045-5690-24680

http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7574

http://snaprails.tumblr.com/post/325624962/linux-performance-benchmark-apache-nginx

http://snaprails.tumblr.com/post/306663818/linux-performance-benchmark-system

This is Sabayon's, but it's Gentoo based so -

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=sabayon_51_benchmarks&num=1

I personally did certain benchmarks to find Gentoo was -2% to 40% faster on startup times of programs and now I can play HD videos with my broken graphs drivers.

Later on I also did some benchmarks compared to arch to realize that decompression was faster on Gentoo and compression gains were upto 50% with lpaq9m compression algorithm. I also realized that if the compression was a short one, arch was faster, but for prolonged compression, Gentoo was getting much faster with time and reached a point where it was ~50% faster. Although there was no difference in startup times of programs, but the UI seemed sluggish (this was pretty noticeable); anyway no major advantage. The boot time of arch was around half of Gentoo's, this maybe cause I'm using baselayout 1. Base layout 2 is said to decrease the boot times by 100%, I upgraded and yes, the boot times where a bit faster than Arch's. Notice however that I was using Arch on a 4 GB partition and Gentoo was spread across a 4 GB partition (root) and a 8 GB partition and packages installed in arch were very less as compared to Gentoo (I use this Gentoo as mainstream). Also notice that I'm always using reiserfs which has fragmentation problems specially when using it with notail option and my Gentoo installation is around 6 months old and I was using 2.6.31 while Arch was using 2.6.33; these factors are also to be considered with these benchmarks.

The optimization is not cause of the CFLAGS or the compile time parameters of GCC (assume you've set it correctly) (however I'm doubting this after the arch benchmarks), but primarily cause of USE flags which result in binaries of lower dependencies, thus it will search less and load less. Other reasons are LDFLAGS and lower dependencies and packages installed (the more you tweak the USE flags, the more lower the dependencies, so the performance depends on you).
You don't have to tweak the USE flags every 2 days. Half of the job is done by the devs who provided 'profiles'...even for KDE and GNOME desktops.

If you're using Gentoo of special purpose systems like servers (without X) or as a bank accounting software which does not need any USB support, CD/DVD, media etc.. support, then Gentoo can give you more than 50% performance gains cause of the lost dependencies cause of USE flags.

*Speed is a Placebo effect.

Gentoo is fast and has been reported be numerous Gentoo desktop users and benchmarks (even I did that), and you think all suffer from this disease? To realize if I was a victim, I did startup benchmarks of various applications to realize Gentoo was actually pretty faster than Ubuntu and I'm not infected and if you find Gentoo is not fast you've either misconfigured your system, not configured it well (these 2 are different) or you're having a placebo effect instead.

*I don't think Gentoo's compile time is worth the effort and time.

If you're a complete newbie and do not belong to any of the groups above and considered giving Gentoo a try and actually gone though all those things – it was your stupidity to use Gentoo. Go back to Ubuntu, or try Sabayon, it's Gentoo based but easier.

As for the compile times -

Quote:
Gentoo is used by sensible people who have enough common sense to realize -- "A compilation process needs not to be 'watched'"

I let Gentoo do the compiling, while I'm writing this.

And guess what?....it got compiled loong ago! Did I regret it's long compile time?

Anyway, if you're the sort of guy who keeping trying new software or changes platform every 6 months, then you're at a loss using Gentoo. Gentoo is best used when you install it once and keep using it (even after migrating it to another PC) for 7 years.

*With more powerful hardware, significance of Gentoo's will be lost.

No actually, the opposite is happening. With more powerful hardware you can compile your package with many features; not to mention, the compile times will also reduced – the most problematical part of Gentoo according to the users.

Furthermore Gentoo gives you a feeling of swiftness to your desktop, if a program loads in 1 second...gentoo might do it in 0.7 or 0.5 second; although this sounds less, but it give the user a feeling of the desktop being more responsive, which lots of users like (and that's why many still use XP in the windows world). Anyway finally it depends on your personal preference.

*I'm a graphs artist, how will it help me?

There're benchmarks where Gentoo has performed extremely well when rendering, if you do that you might save quiet a lot of hours. But using Gentoo is tough. If you have a friend who's used to Gentoo, let him help you with this.

As of the people who don't know the load on the system when rendering (and start saying that I'm talking rubbish), it can take weeks to render movies, as a result people use many boxes for this and even small optimizations can result in hours saved. If you argue that it takes equal amount of time installing Gentoo, no it does not as compared to the weeks of rendering and there will be much time saved. Furthermore, rendering is something you have to wait for while compiling is something you don't have to.

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread?t=61483

Blender fails to run in Ubuntu under my setup so I cant do any benchmarks no another setup, with a processor faster than mine (it extracts and compiles much faster) and running Ubuntu, render times where ~50% slower.

*My gentoo is slower or equally fast than Ubuntu! It's also unstable...why??

Gentoo provides numerous amounts of tweaking and playing around. If you find it slower, it means you've messed up the configuration. Read the handbook and do what it says, goto the doc page of www.gentoo.org and read the relevant docs (including that of portage and make.conf).

Don't forget to tweak your kernel, which at times does 50% of the optimizations. But is the hardest to configure, for the same reason reasons, it can cause major instability.

Whatever might be the reason, it's not Gentoo's fault it's yours.

*It does not matter how many packages are installed; the speed remains the same.

If you assume this you'll be confessing that Ubuntu is slow cause of inefficiency rather than the excess of preinstalled package.

I did some benchmarks regarding this. First I installed the default Ubuntu, then installed ~800 packages bringing it to a total of ~2000 here are the results -

Light Ubuntu -

time firefox
user 0m1.280s
sys 0m0.260s

time firefox
user 0m0.960s
sys 0m0.100s

time firefox
user 0m0.780s
sys 0m0.190s

time firefox
user 0m0.840s
sys 0m0.170s

time tomboy
user 0m2.240s
sys 0m0.220s

time tomboy
user 0m1.170s
sys 0m0.130s

time tomboy
user 0m1.160s
sys 0m0.140s

time tomboy
user 0m1.240s
sys 0m0.070s

time pitivi
user 0m1.460s
sys 0m0.370s

time pitivi
user 0m1.000s
sys 0m0.160s

time pitivi
user 0m0.820s
sys 0m0.090s

time pitivi
user 0m0.740s
sys 0m0.130s

time totem
user 0m0.770s
sys 0m0.140s

time totem
user 0m0.740s
sys 0m0.040s

time totem
user 0m0.720s
sys 0m0.120s

time totem
user 0m0.680s
sys 0m0.100s

time rhythmbox
user 0m2.300s
sys 0m0.240s

time rhythmbox
user 0m1.120s
sys 0m0.100s

time rhythmbox
user 0m1.030s
sys 0m0.190s

time rhythmbox
user 0m1.060s
sys 0m0.150s

time evolution
user 0m1.240s
sys 0m0.100s

time evolution
user 0m0.910s
sys 0m0.050s

time evolution
user 0m0.930s
sys 0m0.060s

time evolution
user 0m0.940s
sys 0m0.040s

time f-spot
user 0m1.500s
sys 0m0.170s

time f-spot
user 0m1.600s
sys 0m0.110s

time f-spot
user 0m1.580s
sys 0m0.150s

time f-spot
user 0m0.240s
sys 0m0.170s

time oodraw

real 0m6.781s
user 0m0.240s
sys 0m0.170s

time oodraw

real 0m1.032s
user 0m0.160s
sys 0m0.100s

time oodraw

real 0m1.031s
user 0m0.180s
sys 0m0.080s

time oodraw

real 0m1.051s
user 0m0.180s
sys 0m0.110s

time brasero
user 0m0.630s
sys 0m0.080s

time brasero
user 0m0.470s
sys 0m0.040s

time brasero
user 0m0.380s
sys 0m0.060s

time brasero
user 0m0.450s
sys 0m0.050s

Heavy Ubuntu -

time firefox
user 0m1.410s
sys 0m0.290s

time firefox
user 0m0.950s
sys 0m0.140s

time firefox
user 0m0.850s
sys 0m0.150s

time firefox
user 0m0.900s
sys 0m0.140s

time tomboy
user 0m1.640s
sys 0m0.160s

time tomboy
user 0m1.230s
sys 0m0.160s

time tomboy
user 0m1.150s
sys 0m0.170s

time tomboy
user 0m1.180s
sys 0m0.110s

time pitivi
user 0m2.210s
sys 0m0.580s

time pitivi
user 0m1.190s
sys 0m0.110s

time pitivi
user 0m1.140s
sys 0m0.150s

time pitivi
user 0m1.170s
sys 0m0.100s

time totem
user 0m0.970s
sys 0m0.110s

time totem
user 0m0.700s
sys 0m0.140s

time totem
user 0m0.740s
sys 0m0.170s

time totem
user 0m0.830s
sys 0m0.100s

time rhythmbox
user 0m1.560s
sys 0m0.180s

time rhythmbox
user 0m1.130s
sys 0m0.140s

time rhythmbox
user 0m1.170s
sys 0m0.150s

time rhythmbox
user 0m1.100s
sys 0m0.130s

time fspot
user 0m1.800s
sys 0m0.230s

time fspot
user 0m1.560s
sys 0m0.190s

time fspot
user 0m1.440s
sys 0m0.160s

time fspot
user 0m1.580s
sys 0m0.140s

time evolution
user 1.290
sys 0.140

time evolution
user 1.000s
sys 0.072

time evolution
user 1.000
sys 0.070

time evolution
user 0.960
sys 0.070

time oodraw

real 0m17.408s
user 0m1.700s
sys 0m0.400s

time oodraw

real 0m0.888s
user 0m0.010s
sys 0m0.040s

time oodraw

real 0m0.905s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.060s

time oodraw

real 0m1.114s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.060s

time brasero
user 0m0.770s
sys 0m0.220s

time brasero
user 0m0.520s
sys 0m0.070s

time brasero
user 0m0.590s
sys 0m0.100s

time brasero
user 0m0.440s
sys 0m0.110s

I did find Ubuntu sluggish after this and boot time tripled. And that's the main reason why Puppy Linux doesn't come preinstalled with 50,000 packages.

Even if you remove many packages off Ubuntu, then also Gentoo will show it's performance gains cause of USE flags (depending on how you've set them).

You can configuration Gentoo to be the most feature rich, by which it will turn to be slower than most distros.

*Known optimization.

You don't know what the developers packing the packages compiled your software with. It might be -O1, -O2, -O3, without sse3 or any new processor feature. With Gentoo nothing like that will happen, as a result you might get performance gains cause of this factor.

Same can be said about package. Who know your mplayer was not compiled with sse3 or with the new Nvidia GPU acceleration support?

Anyway, I've also read that GCC might start automatic optimization for CUDA. Whenever that happens, Gentoo will be the first to get the advantage.
BTW I think Ubuntu devs are using -Os...the installation is so small!

*Lowered runtime dependencies
Since the program in Gentoo has been compiled without support for many things, it will load and work faster cause of lower libraries loaded and also consume lower memory. Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not sure about this.

This is what Ubuntu does when it's loading a program -

ldd /usr/bin/k3b|wc --lines
70
de@de-desktop:~$ ldd /usr/bin/amarok|wc --lines
79
ldd /usr/bin/gimp|wc --lines
58
ldd /usr/bin/ksysguard|wc --lines
62
ldd /usr/bin/kwrite|wc --lines
54
ldd /usr/bin/plasma-desktop|wc --lines
74
ldd /usr/bin/knotify4|wc --lines
45
ldd /usr/bin/konsole|wc --lines
57
ldd /usr/bin/dolphin|wc --lines
64
ldd /usr/bin/konqueror|wc --lines
57
ldd /usr/bin/systemsettings|wc --lines
55
de@de-desktop:~$ ldd /usr/bin/okular|wc --lines
52
ldd /usr/bin/ksnapshot|wc --lines
51
ldd /usr/bin/ktorrent|wc --lines
62
ldd /usr/bin/kbluetooth|wc --lines
58
ldd /usr/bin/acetoneiso|wc --lines
38
ldd /usr/bin/kmix|wc --lines
79
ldd /usr/bin/totem|wc --lines
73
de@de-desktop:~$ ldd /usr/bin/smplayer|wc --lines
33
ldd /usr/bin/kcalc|wc --lines
46
ldd /usr/bin/ark|wc --lines
54
ldd /usr/bin/recoll|wc --lines
36

And this is Gentoo's (under my configuration) -

de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/k3b|wc --lines
66
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/amarok|wc --lines
73
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/gimp|wc --lines
52
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/ksysguard|wc --lines
53
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/kwrite|wc --lines
51
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/plasma-desktop|wc --lines
65
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/knotify4|wc --lines
41
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/blender|wc --lines
36
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/konsole|wc --lines
55
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/dolphin|wc --lines
54
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/konqueror|wc --lines
53
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/systemsettings|wc --lines
51
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/okular|wc --lines
49
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/ksnapshot|wc --lines
48
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/ktorrent|wc --lines
58
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/kbluetooth|wc --lines
52
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/acetoneiso|wc --lines
35
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/kmix|wc --lines
45
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/totem|wc --lines
63
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/smplayer|wc --lines
30
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/kcalc|wc --lines
42
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/ark|wc --lines
51
de@localhost ~ $ ldd /usr/bin/recoll|wc --lines
33
de@localhost ~ $

*LDFLAGS

I don't know if these work...or how it works. But many people say it does make speed gains, although I didn't notice any.

*New package

The new package are more optimized, suitable for more multithreading, more stable etc...

Gentoo supports unstable packages, so that means the latest.

*keeping up to date
*the latest unstable packages.
*New features in software.

Everyone knows Gentoo has the latest packages and even live ebuild that is the package with the latest commit with the devs.

Gentoo is usually quick keeping up to date with the updates. Thanks to the maintainers. With this you get the latest features also which is very much seen with amarok and mplayer (that's cause I saw it).

*Rolling release.

As said before, Gentoo is really worth it if you keep one install for 7 years. Update regularly, and you don't have to care about the versions of Gentoo. You can easily migrate Gentoo to another PC (although I've not tried it) and just keep it forever....

*slots

Can you install grub and grub2 together? Can you install KDE 3 and KDE4 with all different KDE versions together?...with Gentoo you can, and only Gentoo can. If you want this feature bad, Gentoo is for you.

Note, not all software can be installed in slots.

*Security.

Gentoo can be made the most secure distribution by selecting the hardened profile and various other tweaks.

Others

*Despite it's advantage Ubuntu is more productive than Gentoo.

Yes, Ubuntu is like a standard Pizza, while Gentoo is the one with that extra cheese toping. Both will satisfy your hunger but you'll be more satisfied with the latter with the expense of higher cost, or a sore tummy or throat (Cheese can cause bad throat).

*Gentoo and Ubuntu cannot be compared.

Why not? Cause it's hard to make Gentoo almost equal to Ubuntu (UI, packages and all)?

The advantage of Gentoo lies in it's lightness, so if you compare kubuntu with Gentoo running kdebase-meta, it's perfectly fare, it's the advantage of Gentoo to install the minimal and Gentoo should get benchmarked with USE flags configured to install the minimal, since that's what Ubuntu can't do.

*dynamic linking.

Dynamic linking results in reduced memory consumption (correct me if I'm wrong) and keeping the package up to date, that is in case there's a security flaw in the shared library, and it get's fixed, the packages depending on it will also have an advantage. We get other advantages of this also, including more speeds depending on what fixes have been made.

In Gentoo you can ensure that you binaries are dynamically linked as compared to binary distribution. For example in Ubuntu, firefox and blender (to name a few) are not dynamically linked.

*You blamed every Gentoo's fault on the user (then what's Gentoo's fault?...how can it improve?).

If there're compile time failures, some runtime error, or some bugs which you encountered, then it's Gentoo's fault. It's recommended to report a bug.

*The Gentoo community is rude.

Although this is not a FAQ, Gentoo community is very polite, but the Ubuntu community is very rude. You call the dependencies resolution of apt horrible, and look at the amount of Ubuntu fanboys (mostly Windows migrants who know nothing about Linux) calling you names. Most people in Ubuntu forum can't tolerate even the least criticism of Ubuntu and start blaming your distribution instead; most of them are new to Linux and don't tend to learn more but also don't hold back to give criticism on a topic they don't know much about.

Cause of this reason (and if this continues) I may stop spreading Ubuntu, or stop Debian administration as a whole and that's why I downloaded a copy of Sabayon and might try Fedora also. BTW I liked Sabayon by quiet a lot.

*You're a ricer.

The Gentoo community itself makes jokes of ricers; ricers are the people who will tweak for even the least gains and go to extreme levels for it. This primarily includes setting of insane CFLAGS and trying new ones out. In reality this is waste of time and I don't do that.
All I do is check out the global USE flags (that too once in 6 months at most...or whenever I feel like), and before most merges, check their USE and set them as per my needs.

If that's ricing to you, go back to windows clicking next till the finish appears and ensure to have 4 expensive antiviruses, antirootkit, antimalware and antispyware with a large and shiny GUI occupying 4 out of 6 cores of your Desktop and using 70% of your 4GB ram.

*You're a Gentoo fanboy

I've explained the advantages and disadvantage of Gentoo, had I been biased, I would have explained only advantages and encouraged everyone to use Gentoo.

I will continue using Gentoo for educational purposes mostly, secondary reasons are performance gains, customization and the fact that I'm an enthusiasts.

*There's no environments that Gentoo can be employed in.

As stated before, Gentoo can be employed as a special purpose systems or the ones which stays offline.

The advantages of using Gentoo as a server distribution is an axiom assuming you know how to configure stuff.

*I still think Gentoo is the worst distribution for anyone.

Even after reading all the above, is most probably because you're some sorta fanboy of some binary based distribution and cant live with the fact that Gentoo has many advantages (as a source based distribution) cause of which many people are using it.

*I hate Gentoo.

Well, it's your personal preference. If you support opensource, there're many people saying I hate opensource.

*Gentoo devs fight! Gentoo is dead -

Although it's not even close to dead, yes the devs do fight and this does cause problems to the distro.
Hope this problem gets fixed soon.

*I still don't believe Gentoo is faster and I still hate Gentoo.

That's cause you quit Gentoo early cause it's hard and you mind could not pop up the fact that you don't need to watch the compilation process and you can multitask duing the install using your favorite shining distro. If you don't like Gentoo admit it, if you did not find it fast doesn't mean it is not fast – it's simply your opinion and the reason why we have so much mixed feelings about this speed factor is cause the configuring Gentoo is hard, and only a few people can do it.

Gentoo expects you to work hard for it to be setup if you don't like it, the distro is not for you; speaking of which others 'out of the box' and shiny distros have done a very bad job when making it 'out of the box'... it works out of the box only under 50% of the setups and there're small problems in almost every disto on almost every computer including the desktops.

Again if you claim that it works 100% for you, it doesn't mean it works for everyone.

*I've heard this all before, and yet I'm not convinced to use Gentoo.

It's simply your personal preference, I'm not forcing you to use Gentoo, you can use Debian core, arch or might be Sabayon minimal if you want to have control over your system but not on the compile.

Solving SCSI or any other errors with k3b/cdrtools

2010-08-12T01:55:00.000-07:00

Note - This solution appears not to work with cdrkit.

At times you might get SCSI errors when writing to DVDs (cmd timeout after 0.2xx seconds), sg_write issues etc... Just add -immed flag to cdrecord to fix the issue. Set k3b to use immed by default. This issue might be more frequent when using a DVD writer though a PATA to USB connector.

If you get misc. errors in general, then check if the priority of the burning program/backend has been manually set to high, this causes problems.

Why opensource?

2010-07-23T07:35:00.000-07:00

In this article, I'll explain why software is best made opensource and try to cut the common arguments of people who do not support it.

A 'free software' does not make any restriction on the source code, that means the source code is made public and one can, copy, freely modify and distribute it as if it was scientific knowledge. Cause of this nature, developers (software engineers) around the globe contribute bit by bit to the source code; the open nature allows the users and developers to communicate, as a results the software made is completely according to the user's needs and contains the user's various creative opinion.

Thus free software works on donations (though source codes, money donations, bug reports, documentation, translation to languages etc...). The power of free software is not to be underestimated. By almost the whole world, free software is proven to be the best and used by true professional and large organizations, both for it's cost effective, free nature and it's quality. The Linux kernel the one of the best kernel ever and almost all super computers use it. There are large organizations which support opensource like Mozilla, Novel, redhat, Intel, AMD, Nvidia and even Google, thus development of such software by all these organizations and developers around the globe result in rapid, quality and secure software. When it comes to opensource, the competitors come together to do something truly productive.

Compared to software which's not opensource, their main aim will be to earn money, they'll try and beat completion (even the opensource ones), gain a monopoly and hike the prices up (like Microsoft has done); they don't care about the users, nor quality software, they just care about money, they want your money, and they'll force you to pay you money. Once all competition is dead, they will most probably stop developing the software and hike the prices to insanity; they usually make monopolistic restrictive file formats which are only going to open in their proprietary applications, thus making a monopoly, you will not even be able to convert these formats to opensource formats and if the company drops support for it, there's nothing you will be able to do. Such things cannot happen with opensource, even you can copy and modify the source code to your needs and the file format will never be lost no matter how much time has passed, simply cause it's your property, a public property like sciences. One reason for the quality of opensource software is that the people developing these are hobbyists, they are geniuses with an intent to create quality software (unlike the proprietary counterparts) and provide it to you and if people do things with interest, the results are fabulous. Any security loophole is fixed within hours with opesource software since there're people working on it round the clock and around the globe.

Microsoft is the king of monopolistic practices and third grade software and successfully have forced people to use the same cause of the monopoly though their monopolistic practices over time. Each virus of Microsoft Windows is a security loophole which an opensource operating systems, lacks. Bill Gates, founder or Microsoft keeps all money to himself and does not spend any on software, and there's nothing you can do about it. You cannot complain to Microsoft about the viruses, worms, crashes and instability or about Vista's requirement being too hight and it being too slow cause it's simply not your right; they won't give a damn, they will kick you out of their offices, and there's nothing you can do. On the other hand we have open source operating system which are more feature rich than windows out of the box yet having a fraction system requirement, thus one can see the inefficient and third grade quality of software that Microsoft has made, which is many times worst than the open source alternatives. Bill Gates is a billionaire cause he took money form people in exchange of Windows and Microsoft Office and people have no option cause the Window software only worked in Window and the word documents only opened in Office (although that has changed now, this was their main intent) – typical monopolistic practice by Microsoft. Windows has been designed to to help the programmers make Window applications, but it's such that any programs written under windows will only work under windows; this is was the main aim of the design and is as of the current date. The operating system has not been keeping quality (security, stability and speed) in mind but looks only to boost their sales and to gain maximum revenues form it. They don't care about the rest.

If you would have noticed, most PCs come preinstalled in Windows, thus if you buy such a PC you will be forced to pay for Window, we call this Microsoft tax, an fabulous way maintain the monopoly and gain maximum profit, and they all bought it in with the excuse of stopping piracy. There're still many laptops available without Windows preinstalled, buy those. They will save you money and also save the software foundation from getting lower in quality.

There're uncountable number of antitrust cases on Microsoft; and cause of this monopoly people have suffered a huge loss; all these viruses, reformats, worms, crashes is cause of Microsoft's monopolistic practices which has forced people to use Windows and killed all competition. You love XP right? But XP is out of production officially by Microsoft and you will be forced do use Window 7 or Vista and will have to upgrade the hardware to 3 GB ram and a quad core processor; none of which has happened to the opensource. Opensource software is for the purpose of the people; for their good not for money and business like with Microsoft; even if there's no competition for a particular opensource software, the development of the software will never stop, it will keep going better and it will always be free of charge and will never force you to upgrade your hardware. Almost all Microsoft product is closed source, that means they never release the source code, and they might be just copying Opensourced code and selling it to you, you don't know, it's a complete lie.

Another lie is that opensource operating systems have very less viruses cause it's not that much widespread as window; this a complete nonsense reason given by Microsoft, Opensource operating systems are used widely by servers, that is computers with top notch internet connection and powerful hardware which are all the targets of viruses and crackers but very less have been able to blow a hole in it.

Microsoft does not even maintain a repository for windows, even though it's a large organization; it manifests that it does not want to spend money, but just earn it.

Microsoft window's command line interpreter is one of the worst in the world, since they know through this they won't get any returns, the users usually do not use it, so why should they develop it (and I know about Powershell as copied form bash)?

Another big lie by Microsoft to justify closed source is better than opensource is that since the source codes are open, crackers will be able to see the security venerabilities and so breaking a software open will be an easy job in open source software; however this does not happen. The source codes are reviewed by thousands of developers world wide and and any security venerability is caught instantly and fixed within hours; this has been actually seen that Opensource software are the most secure and closed source is the least secure; the most insecure software organization in the world is Microsoft (there are billions (999,999,999,999 + 1) of viruses and security loopholes), the people who made this claim; they realize that people do not understand what's security in a software so are least concerned about it, they are only concerned about the sales and revenues generated, nothing more.

If people would have donated the huge sums of money to the opensource instead of Microsoft, it would have done wonders to the current world of software, there would have been no viruses, no crashes and we would have had an amazing world of stable top quality software we cannot even imagine of at the current date, all cause of monopolistic rubbish organizations like Microsoft. If you want this dream to be true, start now by using opensource software and contributing to the community, they need you.

As of employment of software engineers, the opensource organizations employ them by gaining revenues through advertisements or donations. Thus it cannot be directly stated that opensource decreases the opportunity of employment to developers. If an opensource software is used widespread, the donations will be huge and so the employment and developers of software; thus I urge you to donate. And actually the donations will be more as compared to the sales of the propitiatory counter parts, that's cause everyone will donate, from rich to the not-so-rich, the not so rich although will not be able to buy expensive software but can donate a little, making the difference. A big example is the non profit organization Mozilla foundation which gets donations of order of millions of dollars and all are used for productive purpose including employing coders and not used to make large houses or top the billionaire chart for the owner like what's the case with Bill gates... he's actually decreasing the employment by doing to and keeping huge amounts of money to himself.

People argue, “If Microsoft is monopolistic, so it Intel”, I got the answer to that too.

Why don't we have companies which make real world things (that is equipment and all) in an 'open' way that is why do we not have any organizations manufacturing equipment, for example without any restrictions?

The answer lies in the nature of software. Software can be best developed if made opensource, a software development does not require you to devote yourself completely to it; you can spend a few hours of contribution, and there will be considerable development of the software, after your contribution another contributer can continue your work easily. It does not make sense to make software closed source since two organizations can use each other's technology without knowing it, thus the purpose of making software closed source is lost, closed source software might simply use opensource ones and sell it to you but no one will know what's actually happening. Take the docx file format case which Microsoft lost, the opposing company reverse engineered docx format to realize that it was their proprietary technology, and then they acted... this is just one example, who knows what's written behind the binaries?.. may be 90% of proprietary software works over previously applied software patents. This cannot happen with things like manufacturing plants; the manufacturing processes of other organizations can easily be seen, thus making a patent useful. Organizations which make real world (hardware) product, you need to devote yourself completely to it and the task is such that your strategy cannot be learned easily and in a fast way by anyone. To start off such an organization, you need huge amounts of initial investments and employees; on the other hand, doing the same with software is of a fractional difficulty, you can do it alongside your main work. When there's a software upgrade to a new version, apart form adding new feature, most of the changes are bug fixes... problems with the software that was there with the previous version; if the software is free, it makes all reasons to upgrade, since it's free of cost, upgrading does not hurt. However if the software is not free, think, why should you buy a new version just to iron out the issues in the previous, should it not be free? If you do buy , it'll be like buying a car with lots of flaws in it, and after a year or 2, buying another simply to remove the issues – the faults that was in the previously in the car, and actually this should have been done for free but you paid for it, you where made a fool; to top all reason in combination to this, most of the changes in the new version of proprietary software are bug fixes... so you know what you paid for, few visual enhancements (which made the software appear as if it was 'new') and 90% bug fixes – flaws in the previous software now improved after paying more money. Furthermore, the opensource has gained a very high momentum, thus it makes all sense to support such software and kill closed source money minded organizations like Microsoft.

Unique ways to contribute to opensource.

2010-07-23T07:28:00.000-07:00

- no title specified

When we talk about contributions, money plays a major role... everyone knows about monitory contributions bug reports/Developer task etc.... However, even if you're not a technical personnel, and do not even wish monitory contributions (for some reasons), there're other ways available also -

•.Hardware compatibility with Linux is a major issue, actually the manufacturer is to blame. So whenever you find such a product not working out, call the manufacturer straight and complain.
- ◦.If he says the hardware is officially incompatible or they can't fix it, tell on their face that their products sucks, and you will never buy their products again and never recommend it to anyone and just demote all their products.
- ◦.If he says Linux users fall in the majority, tell him the statistics are wrong and you see all Linux users around you.
•.Wherever you see a product which requires drivers and all and the Linux compatibility has not been commented on call the manufacturer and ask about it's Linux compatibility. Regardless of what he says, respond by telling him you need to bulk order the product and need 50 or 100 or even 1000... whatever amount of pieces.
•.Check out which companies do not provide any Laptops or Desktops with Linux preinstalled or if there're no products without Windows preinstalled and complain to them about how you're forcing everyone to buy Windows, and decreasing the value of money for their product if someone does not wish to use Windows and you and your friends (or the whole company and take large numbers again.) are preferring computers Without windows installed, but they don't manufacture them.
- ◦.If you're using windows do not buy computers with non trial versions of Microsoft Office or any other such product.
•.Publicize Linux distros by the following points -
- ◦.No need to reformat for life.
- ◦.Very stable.
- ◦.No security issues like Antivirus, firewall etc..
- ◦.For windows there're millions of viruses made daily, but for Linux, there are almost none.
- ◦.A 3-d desktop.
- ◦.No need to hunt applications on the internet to install.
- ◦.Public property, Download, modify and redistribute without fear of being prosecuted.

Although these techniques might not appeal to many, since they are considered 'bad', that is these (except the last point) are mostly lies, but you really have no other option. If GNU is actually going to have that wildebeest image, it'll always be the prey of predators and always be vulnerable.

By far, Microsoft is the biggest rival of GNU/Opensource, it's always trying to kill it by unfair means and causes harm to the people; if they are doing this, the response has to be the same from the GNU herd otherwise it will be the hunted.

Making a sabayon package.

2010-07-23T07:17:00.000-07:00

- no title specified

Like deb and rpm, there're also Sabayon packages but cause Sabayon is not known much, such packages are hard to be found. Most probably you will not pass through a scenario where you will actually not get a package you need inside the official Sabayon repository, but if you do, here I'll state what you can do to resolve the issue.

Since Sabayon is based on Gentoo, everything that works in Gentoo, also works in Sabayon including ebuilds which might be commonly considered as Gentoo packages and Ebuilds are found at a very large number, if you did not find a Sabayon package, you will get an Ebuild and you can make the Sabayon package from this. To get the ebuild search in http://www.gentoo-portage.com, or http://bugs.gentoo.org or http://gpo.zugaina.org/ download it and place it in /usr/portage/app-misc/<package name>/<place the ebuild here in the name format <package name>-<version>.ebuild>.

Example if we have an ebuild named limewire-5.0.0.ebuild then place it in /usr/portage/app-misc/limewire/

Make the directories if they are not available. The ebuild name should strictly be limewire-<version>, that is in general <package name>-<version>. The directory where this ebuild will be placed in the app-misc directory, should be named <package name>, in this case, limewire. Now drop to the the root prompt.

Next, you need to create a manifest of the ebuild by -

ebuild <ebuild with complete location> manifest

then you can safely emerge with -

emerge limewire

From here on, there're primarily 2 ways by which you can make a Sabayon package, for one of them run the following commands first -

equo rescue spmsync

Actually emerge is set to do this automatically after merging any package, but do this again just in case it does not happen.

As of the insides on how this works, entropy (the binary package manager of Sabayon) has a separate database to that of portage, but both need to have the same packages recorded as installed, to make out for the differences, we run equo rescue spmsync so Limewire gets recorded in the entropy database and now the package will be installed in Sabayon, you can see it in Sulfur as installed.

Next to build a package off it -

equo smart quickpkg <package name>

This will be placed in /var/lib/entropy/tmp by default, override by the switch --savedir.

You should have an entropy package there.

Now let's discuss another way of creating a Sabayon packages from Gentoo binaries which where made during compile time by portage (using --buildpkg or quickpkg), assuming you have such a binary, just -

equo smart inflate <gentoo binary>

And the resultant Sabayon package will be placed in /var/lib/entropy/tmp.

For this technique, you just need to have the gentoo binary, neither the ebuild nor you need to emerge it through portage.

You can install a Sabayon package with sulfur by going to file>install from binaries...

alternatively -

equo <the Sabayon binary>

You don't need to worry about the dependencies, they get sorted out by the Sabayon package automatically. Any dependency in the ebuild or the Gentoo binary will be loaded into the Sabayon package.

Request your Sabayon package, I'll try to make them.

Humans defenseless in the wild?

2010-07-23T07:11:00.000-07:00

- no title specified

People often consider themselves to be vulnerable like domesticated chicken when lost in the wild... they say that if he's faced with a wild animal, he will not survive... he does not have the natural 'defenses'... that is physically he's defenseless... however I don't think so and here are my opinions.

You would have noticed, that I'm talking a 'he' here... that's cause there's nothing a women can do in the wild, but a man can.

I say humans can mostly handle creatures roughly equal to their own size alone... that is I'm removing some big cats from the list, but not all like cheetah, a small lepord etc... and of course if you encounter a bear, buffalo, wildebeest etc... there's no way you can fight um back. Even the biggest are afraid of poisonous frogs and snakes.

First, we underestimate our physical strength, apart from being one of the largest land animals, we're also one of the strongest, if you did not fear to death or tried running away from a 80KG anaconda, instead decided to fight it aways, most probably you will win.

So let's start with the anaconda... most men are strong enough to lift it up and if we think we're vulnerable... it wont make sense. If the anaconda grabs one arm, we got the other, if it grabs the head and tries to suffocate, we can still move our arms and all for a while, but what if we get a grab of it's neck tight and to top that, what if we twist it bad?... there's absolutely nothing an anaconda can do, death will come at an instant; the creature might not be able to tell but it will realize humans are pretty powerful creatures physically.

A very powerful thing that we can do is kick, ever realized the amount of muscle around your legs... the thickness of your thies and how fat your ass is? And ever realize how high we can jump with it?... if that impulse (of the order of tons) is applied to your rival, you will know the consequence, what if you just dropkick and it hits your competitor straight?... it might fracture a few bones and after that the wild animal will never face a human... it'll be surely shot afraid. Currently we don't keep any nails on our toes, but you would have noticed it grows pretty thick and will actually work like a small dagger if you do have them.

Next comes the weight. So what if you just fall down on the animal... what will it be able to do?... that's right, nothing. So we got the weight advantage. Instead something like this happens to us, we can at least grab um by our hands by at least a small angle, our limbs have enough flexibility to reach our backs, and we can at least attempt!

Then comes the hands. Something that most land animals miss and our unique weapon. Our hands can slide to the animal's throat, then we can grab some of it's vital organs and cause some serious damage after which the animal won't forget till death (which will be soon). Our hands have fingers which are 'sort of' blunt, but what if you combine with all your force and push it into the animal's eyes or ears?, sure that might hurt you, but it'll hurt your opponent harder. Let's see other things that our hands can do – pull it's ears, pock into it's ears, grab the tongue, and best of all... pull his balls, or private organs... or punch the lower back side which's usually uncovered and very vulnerable.

So next time you see a wild animal or even something crazy like a bear or tiger attacking you (and it's too late to run away), instead of trying to run, stand helpless praying for god, or searching for a weapon which you know is not around; think about these few things that you were born with and use them to your best struggle to survival.

Of course prevention is better than cure, even the animals know that, so should you.

Sabayon Gentoo Symbiosis

2010-07-23T07:03:00.000-07:00

Although many people might not notice, but this sort of relationship is unique and one of it's kind, this is the most effective relationship an OS can have on another.
The devs of the binary based distros have to compile packages on their own. They need to take care of it's dependencies, compile time parameters, environment, any sorta group etc... this's what all Ubuntu, OpenSuse, Fedora etc... devlopers have to take care of, except Sabayon.
For Sabayon devs all this job is done by the source based distro Gentoo, this might not sound great, but actually it is. You see both Sabayon and Gentoo have users, so by this relationship the users can utilize the efforts that the devs do while making an ebuild (or Gentoo packages if you don't know); efforts like the dependencies, compile time parameters all can be user set in Gentoo... and this is what the Sabayon devs take advantage of. All they do is simply compile the Gentoo ebuilds with standard parameters so as to make a great generic desktop, thus the Sabayon team is effectively of the size Gentoo + Sabayon devs and the Gentoo users are of the size Gentoo + Sabayon; making a large community.