Christy Speaks

The news of the Yue Yue, the chinese toddler in hit and run case has shocked the World & has raised concern over the state of Humanity in our so called "Modern World". When I first saw the video I couldn't believe how people can be so apathetic about it. How could you turn a Blind eye to a two year old child bleeding on the road? How could you be Deaf, to not hear the child's agony? How could you be Mute, to not call for help? Was it because she wasn't a family member or friend? It started with the first driver knocking her down, pausing the van & then driving it away running her over with its back wheel. Yangcheng Evening News quoted the man who first struck Yue Yue as saying, "If it was you who hit someone, you'd run too. You can see the little girl, looking around when she walked. If she walked properly, how could I hit her?" What I would like to ask him is "How could you be such an a**hole and run over the girl again? If...

Its been 1 1/2 months since Ubuntu 9.10 aka Karmic Koala 's release. Since then I have been using it at my work place. The default theme is now a bit darker. Some other notable changes is Add/Remove Application being replaced by Ubuntu Software Center . The Software Center is aimed at newbie users who are migrating from Windows. It has the s/ w's divided into categories, which can be installed on click. The major difference is here is the installation happening in background. The image below shows the Software Center interface. The system boot time in Karmic is fast similar to its predecessor. ext4 is now the default filesystem . Ubuntu One is another new feature which gives users 2 GB of free online storage. Overall Karmic shows progress but the focus was more towards new users.

Jaunty Jackalope the latest version of Ubuntu 9.04 is out. The looks are almost as of 8.10, with an additional package called Computer Janitor which is similar to autoclean in apt-get. This time around there are 3 ubuntu editions instead of the regular 2 editions namely Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop Edition Ubuntu 9.04 Server Edition Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix ( New Edition ) The system boot time hasn't changed much. ext4 has been added to the list of supported filesytems for the first time. In the next release it is planned to make ext4 as the default filesytem. As for game enthusiasts it would be better to avoid it for the time being as I found the nvidia-glx-180 package buggy. The driver caused my system to crash atleast 4 times before I realised the problem and disabled it. Overall the system is OK to be used by general users.

Its been long since I started using VMware, almost 2 years. VMware became one of the essential softwares of CRAVE lab due to the frequent Linux Workshop taken by the me & Joseph. All seemed well until Ubuntu 8.04 aka Hardy Heron , when vmware-server was removed from the partner repository of Ubuntu. Now if I had to use it again on Ubuntu, then manual installation was the only option. Come to think of it we at CRAVE never depended on a proprietary software so much as VMware. I personally felt it was time that we left VMware and move ahead. I needed a software which was user friendly unlike Qemu. Finally I found the answer in VirtualBox , a Sun Product. I tried it out and man I loved it. It was the answer to all my problems. Now VirtualBox has replaced VMware in our essential softwares list at CRAVE. I will put up another post on the Installation of VirtualBox on Ubuntu when I get some free time. I have put the installation guide for VirtualBox at http://crave.dbit.in/wiki/index.ph...

DUCS & CRAVE are organizing a week long event called Open Source Software Week at DBIT . The OSS week will be conducted in 3 rd week of October i.e from 13 th - 18 th of October. The aim of the program is to introduce the students & staff to Open Source technology. This will also serve as a platform for introducing the freshers to Open Source thereby getting new CRAVE members (hardly any left). The OSS schedule is for the week is as follows - Linux Workshop (Architecture, Installation, ..) Animation (Blender) Graphic Designing (Inkscape, GIMP) Programming & Web Development (Editors, Apache, MySQL, ..) LaTeX Workshop Open Office Suite Gaming (Openarena, Torcs, UrbanTerror, ..) The Workshops will be conducted by Royston, Maddy & me. As of now the poster for the event has been completed mostly. The registration for the event will begin from 3 rd October. That's all for now, got to do some preparation for the event.

Many of us are familiar to the term Live CD , a common term during Linux installations. Being a System Administrator for past 2 years at CRAVE , a problem which I regularly came across was the need for a CD-ROM during installation process. Now this is absolutely fine when we install distro on a PC or so, but when you are talking about 20-30 PCs this becomes a pain especially if the PCs aforementioned are without CD-ROMs. As I was thinking of possible solutions like 'network boot', it struck me that ' USB boot' is also a possible solution. Though ' USB boot' is not very popular among Linux users, at least now. Currently ' USB boot' is in its early stages. At CRAVE we tried ' USB boot' about 7-8 months ago, the result was we could not get pass the initial loading screen. Making ' USB boot' work involves a lot of tweaking. I believe it is high time that Linux distros start working towards this, the floppy disks have already vani...