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. :-)

(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).

Last Saturday we had the second episode of the FOSS workshop at Rajabazar Science College, Kolkata. Due to Indranil Das Gupta's unavailability, I took the GNU/Linux pre-tutorial instead of the GCC/Make/GDB workshop, which was again handled by Santanu Sinha.

Before the start of the workshop we ran into some X server related problems on the machines on which the pre-tutorial was to be held. The Rajabazar Science College authorities had some brand new Pentium D machines on standby, which were used to replace most of these problematic systems.

We started with a brief history of the Free Software movement, and then went on to see how to navigate the a basic GNOME desktop. Next we explored some of the Free Software equivalents of common proprietary programs like OpenOffice.org (for MS Office), GIMP (for Adobe Photoshop), Evince (for Adobe Acrobat), GAIM (for GTalk, Yahoo! Messenger), etc..

Next was lunch, which comprised of chicken sand-witches, fish fry, ice-cream, etc..

We started the second half with basic network configuration before going on to explore package management tools and the concept of a 'distribution'. Since all the systems were running Fedora, we limited ourselves to YUM and Pirut as the package management tools. We rounded up the session with a look at the GNU Coreutils and Vi.

Apart from the wonderful teaching experience there were a couple of pluses:
* I managed to learn a bit more about Vi through Vimtutor.
* # yum update pdgin* gnome-* openoffice* ... while showing off package management tools.

I managed to configure Jabberd2 on my laptop in a jiffy this evening. The best part is that my Fedora Core 5 (Bordeaux) based system succeeded where I have seen Debian stalwarts stumble.

This was mainly due to this amazing documentation.

Varkon is a free CAD system and high level development tool for Engineering, Computer Aided Design and Product Modeling applications originally developed by Microform AB in Sweden.
It is now maintained and further developed by the CAD group at the Department of Technology at Örebro university in Sweden.

The GNU/Linux version is under the GNU GPL and available at no charge, while the current price for a Windows95/NT license is 875 USD. Support is available for all platforms.

Someone is using it on a Cray T3E supercomputer with 256 300Mhz 64 bit Alpha processors.

Check the Varkon home page at http://www.tech.oru.se/cad/varkon/ to know more.

Though I have not yet tried it, the fact that SAAB uses Varkon to design its aeroplanes is enough to earn it a four star rating.

Right now Arjun, Manu, Vivek and me are in the process of migrating our (National Institute of Technology, Hamirpur) computer centre to GNU/Linux. We have chosen Ubuntu as the distribution, since the uninitiated find it easier than the rest. In case you are already hopping about the 'non-freeness' of it, let me tell you that we have removed the multiverse repository from /etc/apt/sources.list.

Till now things have been going on well, except some teething problems with NIS (we will solve it once the installation is over) and some interference from Mr. Rajiv Kumar regarding the need of having GNU/Linux in the centre.

Lets hope this is not a one-off venture.

Here is my modified version of the AC_PYTHON_MODULE GNU Autoconf M4 macro published at http://autoconf-archive.cryp.to/ac_python_module.html.

The original version of the macro was unable to take care of multiple versions of Python installed on a system. For example I have Python 2.3.5 and Python 2.4.3 on my system, and if I need to check whether a certain module 'foo' is installed for Python 2.4.3 the macro would not work correctly. This was because of the fact that the macro was ignoring the environment variable PYTHON and directly invoking 'python'. Hence clear demarcation between the two versions was not possible.

Exaile (http://www.exaile.org/) is GNOME's reply to AmaroK. It is based on GTK+ and written in Python. It uses the GStreamer engine as its backend. Exaile boasts of many of the features that has endeared AmaroK to so many people. The artist and album information extraction feature is working nicely and it also downloads guitar tablatures from http://fretplay.com/ and http://lyrc.com.ar/ provides the lyrics.

I tried out version 0.2.7 from the tarball supplied on the Exaile website, and the first thing that struck me was the absense of a polished build system. One has to do:
$ make
# make install
to install the thing, but the absense of the configure script was a real pain. In no time I ran into a dependency quagmire, but my new found knowledge of Python came in handy. After some downloads and yumming from the Fedora repositories and rpmfind.net, I had Exaile running on my Fedora Core 5 GNOME desktop.

Being a relatively new project, it is not yet as polished as it should be. However it is worth giving a try, and if it were not for the incomplete build system it would have surely got a four star rating.

Thanks to Adam Olsen for developing such a nice program, I do not have to gape at AmaroK on a KDE box.

Htop is an interactive, text mode process viewer using the ncurses interface.

A brief comparison of htop and top:
* In 'htop' you can scroll the list vertically and horizontally to see all processes and complete command lines.
* In 'top' you are subject to a delay for each unassigned key you press (especially annoying when multi-key escape sequences are triggered by accident).
* 'htop' starts faster ('top' seems to collect data for a while before displaying anything).
* In 'htop' you don't need to type the process number to kill a process, in 'top' you do.
* In 'htop' you don't need to type the process number or the priority value to renice a process, in 'top' you do.
* 'htop' supports mouse operation, 'top' doesn't
* 'top' is older, hence, more used and tested.

Courtesy: http://htop.sourceforge.net/ and Debian Times.

Here is a nice way to mark a particular C function as deprecated. It might come in handy if you are in the process of developing an API or library and intend to phase out a particular component of it. The Linux kernel developers also use this method.

Here is what you get on compiling and running it:
[rishi@Sunflower devel]$ gcc -ansi -pedantic foo.c -o foo
foo.c: In function ‘main’:
foo.c:8: warning: ‘foo’ is deprecated (declared at foo.c:5)
[rishi@Sunflower devel]$ ./foo
I am foo.
[rishi@Sunflower devel]$

The latest release of the Fedora Core line of GNU/Linux distrbutions was released on the 24th of October 2006. I still do not have a copy of the DVD though.

Here is a list of mirrors and the BitTorrent tracker for downloading Zod:
http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/install-guide/fc6/

The enthusiasm over the release such levels that 10,000 downloads were reported within the first 5 hours of the release, resulting in overwhelming traffic on the Red Hat servers. Some interesting regarding this:
http://www.theregister.com/2006/10/25/fedora_stops_the_download_madness/
http://news.com.com/2061-10795_3-6129149.html?part=rss&tag=6129149&subj=news

A FUSE based driver to provide read/write support for NTFS on 32-bit Linux systems.

I finally succeeded in configuring the Apache web server on Razorblade to serve content from the users' home directories. The problem pertaining to permissions that was dogging us till now was solved by this command:
# chcon -R -t httpd_user_content_t /home/*/public_html/

Thanks to Stanton Finley's Fedora Core 5 Linux Installation Notes at: http://stanton-finley.net/fedora_core_5_installation_notes.html

One amazing place to get a Fedora Core 5 system up and running from scratch. Includes information on setting up your media players to configuring the various services.

To turn on tab-completion in Python, one needs to put the following in the PYTHONSTARTUP file. The Readline module needs to be installed for this feature to work.

try:
import readline
except ImportError:
print "Module readline not available."
else:
import rlcompleter
readline.parse_and_bind("tab: complete")

Set the value of $CVSEDITOR or $EDITOR to denote which text-editor to use to write the log while committing.

[rishi@Sunflower ~]$ export CVSEDITOR="emacs -nw"

Adding the above line (the part after the $) to ~/.bash_profile or /etc/profile would also be enough, depending whether you want to make system-wide changes or user-wise changes.

Finding the size of a directory was one of the things I could not figure out how to do from the terminal. I recall someone saying that one would require sed and gawk to do it. That terrified me...

So here is the simple way to do it.

[rishi@Sunflower ~]$ du -sh /data
4.8G /data
[alien@Sunflower ~]$ du -sh .
20M .

However it becomes quite slow if one wants to check the size of something as big as /. This is because the cumulative sum of all the files and folders are actually found during run-time to find the size. The following command took me almost 5 minutes.

[rishi@Sunflower ~]$ sudo du -sh /
18G /

Doesn't the ext3 filesystem store the sizes of directories somewhere permanently? If not, then how come df is so fast? The following does not take even a second to execute.

[rishi@Sunflower ~]$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda2 18G 11G 6.0G 64% /
/dev/hda1 92M 19M 68M 22% /boot
/dev/hda3 6.0G 4.8G 845M 86% /data
tmpfs 109M 0 109M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/hda7 221M 49M 161M 24% /devel
/dev/hda5 2.0G 1.7G 222M 89% /home
/dev/hda6 996M 34M 911M 4% /tmp

These are the questions I need to find answer to now...

I finally got YUM to work on my Fedora Core 5 system from behind Squid. After almost 2 years of struggle originating from my Tettnang days, it all turned out to be a minor fault in the configuration files.

For all those who have had trouble setting up YUM, I am posting the various configuration files below:

/etc/profile:

export http_proxy="http://mmh3:mmh3@172.16.16.2:3128/"
export https_proxy="http://mmh3:mmh3@172.16.16.2:3128/"
export ftp_proxy="http://mmh3:mmh3@172.16.16.2:3128/"
export socks_proxy="http://mmh3:mmh3@172.16.16.2:3128/"
export HTTP_PROXY="http://mmh3:mmh3@172.16.16.2:3128/"
export HTTPS_PROXY="http://mmh3:mmh3@172.16.16.2:3128/"
export FTP_PROXY="http://mmh3:mmh3@172.16.16.2:3128/"
export SOCKS_PROXY="http://mmh3:mmh3@172.16.16.2:3128/"


N.B.: The "/" at the end of the proxy values is very essential. It was one of the major stumbling blocks for me. Although wget works without it, YUM does not. In my case it was unable to resolve the names of the repositories.

/etc/yum.conf:

[main]
proxy=http://172.16.16.2:3128/
proxy_username=mmh3
proxy_password=mmh3
cachedir=/var/cache/yum
keepcache=0
debuglevel=2
logfile=/var/log/yum.log
pkgpolicy=newest
distroverpkg=redhat-release
tolerant=1
exactarch=1
obsoletes=1
gpgcheck=0
plugins=1
metadata_expire=1800
timeout=90

N.B.: Such a high timeout value might not be required or desired by many, but I had kept it since I was experiencing some timeouts.

/etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-core.repo:

[core]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch
baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/$releasever/$bas earch/os/
mirrorlist=http://fedora.redhat.com/download/mirrors/fedora-core-$releasever
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora

[core-debuginfo]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - Debug
baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/$releasever/$bas earch/debug/
enabled=0
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora

[core-source]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - Source
baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/$releasever/sour ce/SRPMS/
enabled=0
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora

/etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-updates.repo:

[updates]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - Updates
baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/updates/$releasever/$basearch/
mirrorlist=http://fedora.redhat.com/download/mirrors/updates-released-fc$releasever
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora

[updates-debuginfo]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - Updates - Debug
baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/updates/$releasever/$basearch/debug/
enabled=0
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora

[updates-source]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - Updates Source
baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/updates/$releasever/SRPMS/
enabled=0
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora

/etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-extras.repo:

[extras]
name=Fedora Extras $releasever - $basearch
baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/$releasever/$basearch/
mirrorlist=http://fedora.redhat.com/download/mirrors/fedora-extras-$releasever
enabled=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-extras
gpgcheck=1

[extras-debuginfo]
name=Fedora Extras $releasever - $basearch - Debug
baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/$releasever/$basearch/debug/
enabled=0
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-extras
gpgcheck=1

[extras-source]
name=Fedora Extras $releasever - Source
baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/$releasever/SRPMS/
enabled=0
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-extras
gpgcheck=1

The GPG keys of the repositories should be present in /etc/pki/rpm-gpg.

eg., /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora:

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (GNU/Linux)
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=mJAx
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----