Live CD Updates

Well, it works. The hack that I mentioned yesterday works, and now I can move on and handle the dial up config part.

The procedure is quite simple – instead of running network-admin directly, the user would execute a shell script named eth-conf. That should work with 99% percent of the users of the CD who have ethernet cards. eth-conf is listed below:

#!/bin/bash
/usr/X11/bin/xhost +;
/opt/gnome/bin/network-admin;
/sbin/ifdown eth0;
/sbin/ifup eth0;
/sbin/route add default eth0;

Now I need some sleep….

Live CD Updates

I think I have found a way to have a hassle-free network config process for the Live CD users. I will test it out tomorrow, and will post the details if it works.
Downloaded and recompiled Totem and Xine-lib – works fine.

Kalipujo/Diwali

Today, it was Kalipujo, and I as usual, stayed at home . Of course, I had Alu ka paraTha, and kept on counting the number of times I could hear the fire engines go past my house.

Goodbye, Concorde

Today was Concorde’s last flight. Sad.. isn’t it. Shows you that even great technology doesn’t always succeed. I also got this picture from Reuters, which I cannot resist sharing with you. Please let me know if this is illegal – and I will remove it.

Concorde – bidding farewell

Live CD Updates

OK, network config (at least the ethernet config part)  is working
perfectly now, and I can connect through the Internet without any kind
of problems with my DIAS connection. I will be posting screenshots of
the config tool very soon. Now I need to test the Dial Up and WLAN
config part. (I need to get an
external modem from somewhere before anything else).
Just executing xhost + 
did the trick. Many thanks to Arijit Majumder for the
tip.
Now, let me outline the changes that I have made in the past week.
First of all, Slackware was a bad choice. I do not mean to say that
Slackware is not good (I personally value its simplicity greatly), but
for a localized LiveCD (in Bengali), it is not a very good choice. The
main issue lies in the fact that all the main config tools in Slack is
terminal based, which sadly has no support for Bangla. A GUI frontend
for system config was needed in Slackware (and that had to be based on
GTK2), and I could not find any. So, I switched to Mandrake. The
drakconnect tool was my initial choice, but it crashed on startup in a
Live CD environment and so, much against my wishes, I had to move to
the GNOME System Tools.  The tools are marked as unstable, though
they work fine in my own system. I need to do more testing on other
machines though. I cannot afford to have unstable apps in the LiveCD.
The transition from Slackware to Mandrake has been smoother than I had
originally anticipated, though some programmes like Xine will require
recompilation. I have added Yudit and wvdial to the LiveCD, and expect
to have a feature freeze with beta3. Here is the planned release
schedule ( no dates yet)

• beta3 – Feature Freeze
• RC1 – UI Freeze (no changes to
  desktop/docs except for bug fixing)
  
• Final release (which should be around the second week on November)

I also have some plans wrt handling disk mounting, and I had sent a
mail to Jamil on this.  The mail is copy pasted below:

Here is my
idea on handling disks.

1. Removable media (CDROM and Floppy): I'll be
using supermount (that
means the device will always be mounted - the
driver will automatically
detect when the medium is changing)

2. Hard Disks - FAT32 and NTFS partitions will
be mounted automatically,
and icons will be displayed on the right side
of the screen.
Ext2/Ext3/Reiserfs/XFS/JFS partitions will not
be mounted automatically
- people using those filesystems should be
sufficiently familiar with
mount

Now, this is quite ambitious (I still do not trust supermount very
much, and so beta3 will be requiring extensive testing. )
I am using the gnome-panel from Ximian so that there can be a menu
stripe, and a fancy alarm system has been integrated with the clock.
I now need to find out why the thing is so slow in booting up in my own
machine.
..and if someone needs a CD Cover for the LiveCD, see below (a larger
version available on request).

Live CD Updates

I have run into troubles with the networking thingy of the Live CD. Check out this post for more info. I have also decided to dump the older GTK file selector for the Ximian file selector.

The new file seletor

The older file selector had serious performance issues while handling directories with large number of files, and wasn’t too integrated with the look’n feel I am aiming for.
And the download count for the ISO is slowly creeping upto 100. Not bad… .

The Art of Unix Programming

Eric Raymond has once again come up with a brilliant and profound book. Check out the online version here. Hopefully there will an Indian edition of that book. It is difficult to read books like these from the computer monitor.

Live CD Updates

I have been making significant changes to the LiveCD for the past two days. Hopefully, the changes will be completed by tomorrow, and I will be posting a detailed list of the changes tomorrow.

GNOME Foundation

I just got accepted into the GNOME Foundation. Nice….

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too

…winter is coming, and I am reminded of Ode to Autumn by Keats.

..it is one of my favorite poems in the English – in no other work have I seen such brilliant use of words to convey the feeling of the richness (in the beginning), and in the end, the sense of waning away. Magnificent!!

Of course, nothing comes close to Ulysses (Can you imagine a more masterful beginning?), but anyway….

New Keyboard

My old keyboard was causing troubles for the last few weeks – and the failure of the pipe (|) key was the last straw. I bought myself a Microsoft keyboard :-p. It has quite a few fancy keys marked Mail, WWW, etc. All of them are working – thanks to ACME. GNOME 2.4 rocks.

Live CD updates

Managed to compile Mozilla 1.5 (the file I downloaded day before yesterday was apparently broken), and Epiphany 1.0.3. Hopefully, GNOME 2.4.1 will be released within a few days.

Live CD updates

Downloaded Mozilla 1.5 today. Could not compile it – will try again tomorrow.

Sayan and Shamashis

Sayan and Shamashis came over this evening. Had a nice Adda, and some really loud music and movies . Then the three of us went out and had some Chinese food. Fun…

..and oh!! Sayan did not use his car today!! Heh!

Ramblings regarding GNU/Linux installers

A common complaints among users is that there are simply too many tools to do a single task in the FLOSS world. To some extent it is true. However, I think, each and every app has its own merits. Let us consider three FLOSS mail clients.

1. Ximian Evolution
2. Balsa (for GNOME 2)
3. Sylpheed

Now, item 1 will clearly be preferred by someone who has

• A modern and fast machine
• Needs to manage a huge lot of appointments, contact addresses, task lists, etc in addition to emails
• Needs some eye candy on his/her desktop
• Needs to connect to M$ Exchange Servers

Items 2 and 3 will be preferred by people whose needs are comparatively less.

Item 2 will be preferred by someone with

• Comparatively less powerful hardware (compared to the present standards)
• Has to handle comparatively large volumes of non-English emails (Balse scores over Evolution here as complex text layout is not very good in gtkhtml – the rendering system in Evolution)
• Prefers a more integrated look and feel in his/her desktop

Item 3, on the other hand will be preferred by someone

• Comparatively less powerful hardware (compared to the present standards)
• With comparatively more experience in handling computers (power users – as some say)
• Preferring lesser eye candy (yep – such people exist)

So, what an installer can do is – instead of asking a user whether it will install application foo or bar or whatnot, step the user through a series of question answer sessions. It will ask various questions to the user (taking care that the questions do not become too intrusive, or that too many questions are not asked).

A sample questionnaire follows:

1. How would rate your computer (compared to other computers in the market today?)
   1. Comparatively powerful
   2. More or less same as the other computers available today
   3. Not very powerful
2. How would you rate your experience with computers?
   1. Significant experience
   2. Familiar with basic operations
   3. Completely unfamiliar with computers
3. How would you prefer your desktop to be like?
   1. Visually pleasing (at the cost of performance)
   2. As fast as possible (even if it looks ugly)
4. Would you like the applications (programs) you run to be visually more integrated with the Desktop?
   1. Yes
   2. No
5. What is your primary language (that you intend to use in your computer)?
   1. English/other Roman script based language
   2. Other

Let us consider a user whose responses are 2,2,1,1,2. The obvious choice of Mail client for him/her would be Balsa for a mail client, Galeon for a web browser, Abiword for a word processor, Gnumeric for a spreadsheet, and Totem for a media player.

The choices for an user with 2,1,2,2,2 would be Sylpheed, Mozilla, OpenOffice.org and Mplayer.

So, an user would not have to deal with crazy names of applications, and if I am not wrong, 10-15 questions would be enough to determine all the applications users will prefer.

..and if my theory is wrong (it can definitely be wrong – as I am stupid ) it would definitely be an interesting experiment. Any one willing to try it out?

Live CD Updates

A host of new releases have been made for the apps included in the LiveCD (more work for me ). Mozilla 1.5 has been released (the new site rocks). Hopefully, the Indic patch works with 1.5. I have started work on beta 3 (which would, hopefully, be the last beta) and here is a list of apps which can be expected in there.

• Mozilla 1.5
• Xine lib 1.0 rc1
• GNOME 2.4.1
• Yudit 2.7.6
• And a bunch of other console based apps (nmap, mutt, etc)
• Maybe wvdial….

Beta 2 is being downloaded at a steady rate (download count was 70 – the last time I checked). Not bad for a large ISO image of this type .

And, here is a list of packages which badly need translation updates.

• GNOME Games
• GNOME Utils
• GCalcTool
• Gaim

Hopefully, someone will take these up.

GNU/Linux FUD

Silly FUDs – check them out.

Openoffice.org in Bangla

The newly released OpenOffice.org 1.1 has support for rendering Devanagari and a few other Indic scripts. So, quite a few people have asked me – “What’s the status of Bangla?”. For a quick ‘n dirty answer, take a look here. For a long answer – read on….

Bangla support in OOo for GNU/Linux is buggy. To write Bangla properly in Writer you need to use a workaround, and Bangla is still not there in the other components. In this entry, I’ll try to explain how to write legible Bangla in OOo Writer. Please note that this is for *ix users only – if you use Windows 2k/XP, use this.

To begin with, verify that you have OpenOffice.org version 1.1 and download some Bangla fonts from the usual location. Un tar the fonts packages, and use the OOo admin program (spadmin) to install the fonts (select the *.ttf files) . Now fire up a terminal application, and issue the command

setxkbmap -symbols “us(pc105)+ben+group(ctrl_shift_toggle)”

Now, fire up OpenOffice.org Writer and from the fonts list, select any one of the Bangla fonts that you installed previously. From the side panel in Writer, click on the “Online Layout” button (usually it is the very last button from top). Now, press the right Ctrl+Shift key on your keyboard (together) and start writing Bangla in OpenOffice.org Writer. The keyboard layout is not phonetic (but once you get used to it – it is really fast!). You may want to take a look at this and this (shift mode) for getting familiar with the layout. And if you absolutely insist on a phonetic layout – see the keyboard section of the Bangla in GNU/Linux Howto. Here is a screenshot of what to expect.

..and if you want proper Bangla support in OpenOffice.org in the future, please vote for this bug in the OOo bugzilla.

Unicode? Whatz that??

Someone pointed out a very nice article on Unicode and related stuff. An ideal introduction to the subject for newbies.

Read a very thought provoking article entitled Abstracting the Linux Desktop from the File-system which argues why an user’s $HOME should be used as the Desktop in GNOME. Quite an interesting read. Maybe I should try it out someday.

I am also toying with the idea of porting GPPP to GNOME2. Let’s see what I can do. I would need to read this thing first. :-S

In other news – I updated some components of the Live CD. Still waiting for the next release of GNOME System Tools. (which should take place within a few days – if rumours are correct ).

Well, handling blosxom was getting tough (I really hated that FTP part), and so I have now switched to B2, which has support for the Blogger API, which means I will be able to use BloGTK to post my Blogs. That seems to be much more efficient and hopefully, the entries will be more regular from now on.

However I am yet to figure out how to import all my old entries to the new system – I need to keep hacking on that. The HTML code has not undergone significant changes, though it may in the near future .

The Live CD work is going on fine – with beta3 (with Morphix 0.4.1 at the core) expected to be released sometime during next week. Beta2 has been released for public download, will be plastering the announcement at GNOME Desktop and Linux.com tomorrow. Maybe a press release should also be sent to Linux For You…. dunno.

Need to get some sleep now…. Zzzzz….