Live from Hyderabad!

This place is *cold* ! There, I said it.
I am back at the old cyber cafe that I am used to. I introduced Firefox here a couple of years back. And guess what: All systems here now use the latest version, *exclusively* !
I haven't used a windows system in a while, so it suddenly feels very funny on this win98 box.
The newest Y! messenger I've been told so much about, is here. It doesn't seem very different. Just a lot slower and bulkier. And I just made my avatar too!

FOSS-EDU

The FOSS-EDU group in Bangalore met yesterday, at Coffee Day, Cunningham road. The idea that the events have to be interactive, in some form or another, dominated the whole meet. Arky was there and shared with us some of his experience.
You can read more about the FOSS-EDU project here.

And thanks a ton to Praveen for putting in great efforts to make the whole thing happen!

I'll be leaving for hyderabad today, so the planet is going to stay stagnant till the morning of the first. At least.

FOSS month meet

A few of us working towards the FOSS month idea are meeting on Friday evening at 6 PM at Coffee Day at Cunningham road. If you're interested, contact me, or praveen or just be there!

vrlinug portal 0.0.01 released!

Yes thats right! The vrlinug portal is finally out! Its still in its nascent stages, so any feedback is very welcome!
Also, its running from my home system, with a small pipe, so be gentle...

New host needed!

I just realised, my webhost doesn't provide me with shell access!!! WTF !?
I urgently need a new host. I need

20M+ of Linux hosting
Python
Perl
PHP
MySQL
One email account.
Decent bandwidth limit (ie *not* 100MB!)
Shell access --> *very important*
FTP access

Know one? Let me know!

vrlinug planet

Vrlinug needs a planet, among other things..
If you are a member of the mailing list and have a tech blog of sorts, then let me know, I'll add you to the planet, as soon as its up and running.

BOF anyone?

vrlinug has been dormant for over a couple of months now. Maybe we should all get together informally at a coffee house or something of the sort?

I've finally laid my hands on the Solaris Express CDs and Belenix 0.3
Thanks a ton to Moinak Ghosh.

STSH is now feature complete as planned earlier. That done, i'll be starting a rewrite in a while to make a *real* shell!

Project Syl:
The idea is to make a UNIX clone, starting with the linux kernel (version not decided yet. Maybe 1.2 or 2.0).
Things to do:
cross compiler
libc (!!!)
shell (stsh)
a text editor (vi?)
Port binutils, textutils and coreutils.
self hosting compiler
...

Eventually we intend to replace the kernel as well.
The "we" for now, is Nikhil V, Anuj B and myself.. If you're interested, then shoot me an email or leave a comment here.

BeleniX

The BeleniX project made their third release (0.3) yesterday. The new release has a Perl-Curses based hd-installer which is apparently much better than what it was earlier.
This i've got to try out!

C350 with linux?

I need a phone managing software. There's Motorola Manager for windows, a free (as in beer) software that does most of what I want. I still haven't found a decent enough phone manager on Linux.
It needs to:

1. Download the messages from my Inbox and Outbox, Keep my address book updated from the one on the phone. Synchro the datebook on the phone and on my system.
2. Keep all that info in a MySQL database so that I can query it as I like.
3. Have both a command line AND a gui interface.

I've started out with Python for the backend. I've still not figured out how exactly I should communicate with the serial port (USB actually).
Just writing and reading to/from /dev/ttyACM0 isn't working very well, as I can't extract the stuff that the phone throws back to me easily and efficiently enough.

Guess I first need a library to communicate with a serial port more cleanly..

Keep watching this space for more!

So laris?

Solaris has been giving me hell over the past week..
Formatted my entire drive (82.3G!) thrice, rewritten the entire partition table an equal number of times and I finally have a decent partition table to triple boot.

First create your paritition table with the Linux fdisk (use knoppix or slax).
Make sure you have a partition with FAT32/NTFS to install windows, a partition with EXT3 for linux, and a Solaris partition (type 0xbf) as primary partitions. Then make your /home and other windows partitions within logical partitions. This is important, as Solaris only installs to primary partitions.

Then go ahead and install windows on the FAT32/NTFS partition. Then install Linux on the EXT3 partition. Check to see if windows still boots. (You shouldn't get the ntldr missing error!).
Then install solaris.
Solaris allows you to partition things nicely, so if you already have a solaris partition ready (which you should), then it'll install directly to that. If you're not sure about the slices concept, then let the installer handle it for you.
Technically, the installation should complete, and the solaris boot manager gets installed on the MBR. It works fine here, except that the JDS now doesn't have Nautilus. Nor does anything else work!

And the Solaris driver support is PATHETIC! It refuses to detect my network card and my sound cards!

At last...

my connection is back!
A week without a proper pipe left me in a big mess.
My shell is coming along beautifully.

For those interested, the following lines will do a good part of the shell's backend.

Wildcard, shell variables, the works! wordexp will do all that for you!


wordexp(input, &result, 0);
strcpy(p.cmd, result.we_wordv[0]); i=0;
while(result.we_wordv[i]){
strcpy(args[i], result.we_wordv[i]); i++;
}


Easy as pie!

External hard disk case

Bought myself an external hard disk case some days back. Its currently working with my ancient antique 1.2 GB segate hard disk, thats about 9 years old now! And guess what, it still works!

The USB 2.0 connectivity is pretty nice, as I get some decent transfer speeds.

The hard disk currently has RHL7.1 installed on it. Too bad my motherboard can't boot from USB, or else I would have given it a try..

More on it as I play with it.


SrP

Back on Breezy

I'am finally back on ubuntu, but not before some hand-to-hand combat with the solaris fdisk and the solaris installer. The Belenix install system needs some work!
So, no Solaris yet, but even as i type, I'am downloading the Solaris 10 ISOs. If you don't already have them, you can download them from here.

On a more sombre note, my internals start tomorrow, so i'am back to Machine-Dependent Assembler Features for the SIC/XE architecture...

SrP

Whats been happening

I'am back after a long haitus.

Just got over with FOSS.IN/2005, an absolutely amazing linux and open source conference.
I've got my hands on Belenix, a live Open Solaris distro. It isn't the greatest of live cds (it takes about 20 minutes to boot up!).
All attempts to install it have been in vain so far. Solaris, like other UNIXes (unices?) requires to be in a primary partition, which my partition table isn't going to allow. So, as of now, i have to restructure my entire partition table!
That means, i'll have to backup my data (all 80GB of it!), and clean up the partition table and then proceed to install Solaris, and then Ubuntu Breezy.

Its already past midnight and i'am still searching for data to backup.

Yawn!!

this is my first post on my webdiary, come back for more action !


DISCLAIMER : I am not responsible for things i say here, for all you know, i may be drugged or drunk !