I like this: https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-desktop-list/2008-March/msg00047.html.

I spent much of the extended weekend (Friday was Doljatra & Good Friday) trying to get the camera on my Intel Macbook to work on Fedora. You can find almost all the non-Fedora specific information is available at http://bersace03.free.fr/ift/.

So I went ahead and created a RPM (review request: #438561), spent some time fiddling with udev because I was not getting a /dev/video0 to represent the camera, and then discovered that the USB device ID (obtained from lsusb) had to be explicitly specified to ift-load to get the firmware to actually load on to the device.

As mentioned on http://bersace03.free.fr/ift/ Ekiga was a breeze to set up, but  Cheese was not. Cheese 0.2.4 which ships with Fedora 8 kept crashing with a SIGSEGV somewhere deep inside the GStreamer library. It was a classical case of strcpy(des, NULL). So one has to grab Cheese 2.22.x from Rawhide and update GStreamer accordingly. If you happen to have the gstreamer-plugins-bad packages from Livna then you might be in for a 350MB download. You have been warned. :-)

None of these photographs are taken by me and I believe they are in the public domain. If you hold the copyright to these and do not want them on this site, please let me know.

GNOME Kashmiri seems to be in good hands.

With India winning the tri-series best-of-three finals 2-0 finally we have an Indian series victory in the record book after India's Test series victory was obliterated by cheats.

In the recent past the entire Australian cricket team, with the exception of Adam Gilchrist (who retired today), have been horrible ambassadors of their country. Hopefully they will have the good sense to redeem themselves.

(Arjun had SMSed me about these.)

/home/user> uname -a
Linux eeepc-xxxxxxxxx 2.6.21.4-eeepc #2 Mon Oct 15 12:49:37 EDT 2007 i686 GNU/Linux

/home/user> cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor       : 0
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 6
model           : 13
model name      : Intel(R) Celeron(R) M processor          900MHz
stepping        : 8
cpu MHz         : 900.000
cache size      : 512 KB
fdiv_bug        : no
hlt_bug         : no
f00f_bug        : no
coma_bug        : no
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 2
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmovpat clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss tm pbe nx
bogomips        : 1261.26
clflush size    : 64

/home/user> cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:       508328 kB
MemFree:        168732 kB
Buffers:         12204 kB
Cached:         151424 kB
SwapCached:          0 kB
Active:         186812 kB
Inactive:        89584 kB
SwapTotal:           0 kB
SwapFree:            0 kB
Dirty:              92 kB
Writeback:           0 kB
AnonPages:      112788 kB
Mapped:          52516 kB
Slab:            14916 kB
SReclaimable:     9076 kB
SUnreclaim:       5840 kB
PageTables:       1460 kB
NFS_Unstable:        0 kB
Bounce:              0 kB
CommitLimit:    254164 kB
Committed_AS:   249404 kB
VmallocTotal:   524252 kB
VmallocUsed:      4496 kB
VmallocChunk:   519384 kB

Here is a copy of the /boot/config-2.6.21.4-eeepc: http://rishi.fedorapeople.org/config-2.6.21.4-eeepc.

Spent the entire day fiddling with the ASUS Eee PC at my workplace. It needed a sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get upgrade to get the restricted Adobe Flash plugin to work with Firefox.

For the curious:
/home/user> cat /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://update.eeepc.asus.com/p701 p701 main
deb http://update.eeepc.asus.com/p701/en p701 main

However, this particular passage sounds puzzling to me: (thanks to SM for the link)
The Xandros install uses unionfs for its file system, which is very common for Live CD installations. However, one of its features is that the space used by an application cannot be freed once that application is uninstalled.

What would happen if I do a find ~ -name "*.png" -delete to remove all the PNGs from my home directory? Will I get back some free space on the file-system?

And, yes I had not realized that it had a webcam too. :-)

I just got hold of this cute little thing, which is as big as the mouse-pad I use with my desktop. And yes, it runs GNU/Linux (kernel 2.6.21) and KDE (version 3.4.x, not 4.x)!

The one on the right is the ASUS Eee PC.

KNotes, KmPlot and KDE Task Manager

Mozilla Firefox and Kontact

Unfortunately, it could not import the photographs from my Olympus digital camera. It mounted the device correctly and gave the standard options to open it in the file manager or the picture manager, but there was no progress beyond that.

Apart from that it has been quite impressive in the 40 minutes that I have used it:
+ power on to desktop in 30s
+ multimedia keys detected
+ nice set of applications -- Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, SMPlayer, Pidgin, etc.
+ unconventional, but intuitive user interface
+ they also seem to manage to ship codecs for restricted multimedia formats (which is more of a geographical/political/legal thing and not so much as a technical one)

The immediate objective is to set it up with a Vodafone GPRS connection for its owner (not me).

HTTrack is now going to be available as a Fedora package.

FDUPES is now back as a Fedora package.

FDUPES is in the EPEL wish-list and since I am not contributing to EPEL for the time being, it would be nice if someone else took care of it there.

Thanks to some help from Lennert Buytenhek, I have been trying out Fedora-ARM using QEMU over the last few days.

It seems that among all the pre-built kernel images provided at http://ftp.linux.org.uk/pub/linux/arm/fedora/qemu/, zImage-versatile-2.6.24-rc7.armv5tel has a bug which causes the kernel to panic the first time I run the virtual machine after preparing the root file system (ext2 or ext3). However on killing QEMU and restarting it again, it works fine and the problem does not occur again. The other images worked nicely though.

Other than that, I could not get X to work. xorg-x11-server-Xorg has a missing dependency in xorg-x11-drv-evdev. It turns out that xorg-x11-drv-evdev can not be rebuilt and is thus not present in the Fedora-ARM repository.

Here are some screenshots:

Booting Fedora-ARM.

Booting Fedora-ARM.

The login screen. Enter "root" as user name to log in.

# yum install emacs

# yum install gnome-desktop

Fedora stickers being printed the evening before the project day thanks to some last-ditch effort by Kushal and Arjun.

Rahul Sundaram -- Freedom is a Feature.

Mo Duffy in the speakers' lounge.

Kishore Bhargava.

That is Arjun and /me at the GNOME project day.

Piyush Verma -- the KDevelop guy.

Photos taken by Kushal Das.

Here is a short history of the GNU Privacy Guard, on the occasion its 10th birthday. Accompanying that is the release of GnuPG 2.0.8.

Rakesh is at it again.

FOSS.in is over and I am richer by a dozen stickers (GNOME, Fedora, Red Hat), a GNOME T-shirt, a Mozilla badge, and plenty of other goodies.

Here are some pictures taken over the last one week.