Failed Attempt with Mepis

Simply Mepis 7.0 got released on December 23rd. The release announcement proclaims it to be a holiday present and surely it looks like one.
A quick look at the packages reveal a detailed list containing 2.6.22.14 kernel, Xorg 7.1.0, KDE 3.5.8, OpenOffice 2.3.0, Firefox
2.0.0.11, Thunderbird 2.0.0.6, Digikam 0.9.2, Sun Java 6.00, Amarok
1.4.7, mplayer 1.0.rc1, fuse driver 2.7.0, ntfs-3g 1.710, madwifi-ng
Atheros driver 0.9.3.2, wpa-supplicant 0.6.0, ALSA sound drivers
1.0.15, libglib2.0 2.14.0, libgtk2.0 2.10.13, and QT 4.3.1-1.

Some of the additional packages in the MEPIS 7.0 pool include:
acroread 7.0.9-0, icaclient 10.6-1, evolution 2.10.3, NVIDIA driver
100.14.19-1, NVIDIA legacy drivers 1.0.9639 and 1.0.7185, AMD fglrx
driver 8.43.2-1, libgnome2 2.18.0, compiz 0.6.3, and compiz-fusion
0.6.0.

After reading all this I got excited and decided to try it myself. Little did I knew that it will be a disaster. It was easy to download and burn the iso. Problem started immediately after that. The boot screen has many thoughtful options like

1. Default Boot
2. Run CD with r/w more
   
3. Boot with 60 Hz ( for digital Monitor)
4. Boot with 75 Hz
   
5. Boot with Vesa drivers
6. Failsafe, and
7. Memtest

I tried the default Boot but got some problem with my monitor VSYNC/HSYNC and got a black screen. Then I tried all the remaining ones and every time the HSYNC was not proper and I was never able to get a GUI. Whenever KDM tries to start, it would result in a Monitor HSYNC out of range error. I have NVIDIA 6200 256MB card, which no distribution supports out of box, however, in (K)Ubuntu the vesa options worked perfectly. Looks like Mepis shifting from Ubuntu was not welcomed by my desktop.
Interesting thing is that on the command line I can see Mepis complaining about not finding 915 chipset and saying that the current chipset is "wrong". Comeon is this Mepis release only for 915 chipset.

Anyhow this was not a big deal, I added HSYNC=30-60 in the kernel boot line and booted with VESA drivers. I was greeted with a good looking KDM login menu.




The KDM gives an option to login as either demo or root. Mepis does not believe in tell the passwords of the users, though the passwords are an easy guess. The password for user demo is "demo" and user root is "root"
I logged in as root.
The default wallpaper of root user has a warning icon to indicate that the user is root and can perhaps cause damage to the system.


I wanted to install Nvidia drivers so that I can evaluate Mepis with all the cool effects. Opening Synaptic resulted in a pop up errot.


I thought that maybe I should refresh the Synaptic repositories and get fresh package lists. However, this resulted in further errors.
and .

You can see that my network was properly configured and this was simply an error with Mepis repos.


The last thing I tried was to install Mepis on my hard disk. Check out the cool looking installer.


The Mepis installer resembled the Windows installer a lot but was easy to navigate. Sadly, whenever I tried to install, the installer froozed the entire system and I could never get Mepis installed on my system. Maybe this error is because I do not have intel 915 chipset.

My wife has a Dell 6200 Laptop which has intel chipset. I decided to try Mepis on that and Met with even more errors. The Live CD would not reach KDM no matter what boot options I choose. It gave some error about hard disk spinning too fast ???

In a nutshell my experience is like

1. Problem while booting
2. Had to guess user password
   
3. Synaptic not working
4. Hard drive installer not working
5. System hangs while running.
   
6. Would not boot on Dell 6200 Laptop.

This is end of Mepis trial for me. Maybe I'll try another of their release if it gets good reviews from users.


NOTE: Thanks to The Coding Studio for a few screnshots.

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Ubuntu Community Page on iPhone

Ubuntu has perhaps the strongest community and the community is its greatest strength. The community members go out of their way and try to make things simpler for other users. Check out this webpage regarding using iPhone/iPod Touch with Ubuntu.
I specially liked the small directions which makes life simpler like, Auto mounting tips and integration with Amarok.

Waiting for iPhone to become legally available in India so that I can also use the "Most hyped gadget of 2007".

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KDE 4.0 install on OpenSUSE

I have previously installed KDE 4.0 RC2 on Kubuntu. It involved adding deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-members-kde4/ubuntu gutsy main to your /etc/apt/sources.list and then installing a few KDE4 based packages. To be true, I was not able to do that using Adept, the Kubuntu package manager. I had to go to command line and then the install went fine.
OpenSUSE, however, changes the entire perspective of installing applications. Their revolutionary 1-Click install performs the job very well here too. All we need to do is to goto KDE4 page on OpenSUSE website and click this button . There are a few alternative install too; like the basic install and the KDE4 build dependency for developers who want to install KDE4 from source.
After clicking the KDE4 Desktop install button, YAST2 takes care of the install and does its job very well. Please check out the screenshots from the install.

1. KDE4 Page
   
2. Welcome screen with the option to choose Advanced features.
   
3. Repository chooser.
   
4. Aditional Package chooser.
   
5. Final Install .
   
6. Lastly the default KDE4 desktop and its beautiful.
   
   Check out the plasmoids. I really love them. My next article is going to be on Pasmoids.

As compared to Kubuntu, the install is a breeze and very easy. I love mouse clicks.
I hope you enjoyed the article as much as I had enjoyed installing KDE4. Watch out for more articles on KDE 4 on OpenSUSE.

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Holiday gift for OpenSUSE entusiasts

I just love OpenSUSE, I think it is one of the best distributions for a Linux user ( Novice or expert).
For people like me an ideal holiday gift would be an OpenSUSE branded T-Shirt or a bag so that I can flaunt my association with the Green Linux Distro.
The OpenSUSE Shop, presents an excellent place to get all OpenSUSE stuff.
Check otu some of cool T-Shirts and Mugs.




I specially liked their offering for babies -- teach them open source from toddler age.


Happy holiday shopping.

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Reveal Firefox Passwords

I was browsing the Firefox settings for optimizing performance and came across the "Security tab in Firefox Preferences". I was amazed to see a button called Show_Passwords.

.
I decided to probe further and clicked on it, viola it showed the list of websites with my user name on it. What more it even had a button which said "Show Passwords".



Clicking on it brought a dialog box which confirmed if I really wanted my passwords to be displayed.


Clicking yes revealed all my usernames along with respective passwords.


Now this can be handy for a home computer where if I forget my password, I can easily get it back. At the same time this poses a huge risk in Office environment, where many a times we go to get a steaming cup of coffee without locking our desktop. I know leaving the desktop unlocked is a foolish thing to do, but its a fact that many a times we do forget. In those circumstances, a colleague might easily get our personal passwords. Imagine someone getting your mail password, without your knowledge and silently read through your mails/chats.

Having discovered this, I immediately looked for similar "feature" in Konqueror- I found none. I know of a few hacks in Windows which help reveal the IE stored passwords, but the password-self-revealing feature of Firefox takes the cake when it comes to security loophole.

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No Subject reminder in Outlook Mail

Forgot to mention subject, while writing an official mail and feel bad later???????
Yes…. It's a concern for all…. A mail without a subject brings a bad impression on us.
To avoid this, Just follow the simple steps mentioned below and see the result .

1. Open your outlook
2. Press Alt+F11. This opens the Visual Basic editor and then Press Ctrl+R which in turn open Project-Project 1 (left side)
3. On the Left Pane, one can see "Microsoft Outlook Objects" or "Project1", expand this. Now one can see the "ThisOutLookSession".
4. Double click on "ThisOutLookSession". It will open up a code pane.
5. Copy and Paste the following code in the right pane. (Code Pane) and save it
   

Private Sub Application_ItemSend(ByVal Item As Object, Cancel As Boolean)

Dim strSubject As String
strSubject = Item.Subject
If Len(Trim(strSubject)) = 0 Then
Prompt$ = "Subject is Empty. Are you sure you want to send the Mail?"
If MsgBox(Prompt$, vbYesNo + vbQuestion + vbMsgBoxSetForeground, "Check for Subject") = vbNo Then
Cancel = True
End If
End If
End Sub


6. Now whenever u try to send a mail without subject, which will raise a pop-up to remind you

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Sharp Fonts on Linux

Linux today has very good looking fonts, however, some of the people who migrated from Windows still feel the lack of Windows Type fonts.

Luckily we have two very good options

1. Install the core fonts. Usually most current distributions contain a package to install the core fonts through the package named msttcorefonts.
   
2. Use Sharp Fonts.
   

Now which one to install is just a matter of personal taste.

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Okular. The universal document viewer. KDE 4.0 series

With KDE 4.0 release in sight, I plan to test some of the prominent features of KDE 4.0 and explore their functionalities.
I am starting off with Okular - The universal Document Reader.


With KDE 4, we will get Okular, the one stop shop for all our Documents.


Okular supports the following document types:

1. Portable Document Format (PDF) with the Poppler backend
2. PostScript with the libgs backend
3. Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) with the libTIFF backend
4. Microsoft Compiled HTML Help (CHM) with the libCHM backend
5. DjVu with the DjVuLibre backend
6. images
7. Device independent file format (DVI)
8. XML Paper Specification (XPS)
9. OpenDocument format (ODF)
10. FictionBook
11. ComicBook Currently we might use QComicBook for reading ComicBook Archives.
    
12. Plucker.
    

Okular began as a replacement of KPDF and was part of Google Summer of code, the project description is at KDE Developer's Corner. It is such a hugely successful project that it will form part of kdegraphics module and will replace the following KDE 3.x applications

1. KDVI
2. KFax
3. KGhostview and
   
4. KPDF

Watch out for more KDE 4.0 applications on this blog.

Few Okular Screenshots ( Taken from Official Okular web site):

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Installing Skype 2 Beta on Kubuntu

Skype seems to be following a tradition. They had first introduced Video chat with 2.0 Beta version for Windows. They followed the same version pattern and introduced Video chat in Linux with version 2.0 Beta for Linux, though this happen a long two years after the windows release.
Whatever said, Skype 2.0 Beta has fulfilled a huge gap in the Linux world. With internet speeds reaching 100 Mbps and more, video chat is soon becoming very common and skype is the most dominant player.
Skype has provided installable packages for most of the prominent distributions on their Linux beta download page.
I had opened the site in Konqueror and choose Ubuntu FeistyFawn, I was expecting that Adept Package installer ( or a variant ) would open up and offer to install, however, Konqueror gave me merely the option to download.

I knew that things cannot be this dumb, so I fired up Firefox ( NOTE:: Firefox is not part of standard Kubuntu install and has to be installed separately).
Firefox appeared a little more intelligent and offered to open the deb file with debian-view

The download was easy, but after the download I did not see any installer being fired. The download simply ended. I knew that the downloaded file will be in /tmp and there it was.
I opened the /tmp directory in Konqueror and clicked on the deb, Luckily this time gdebi fired and gave me the option to install.
I thought that all's done, how wrong I was. The gdebi installer gave an error that another installer ( adept, apt-get etc..) was running. I killed the adept-updater icon I had in the Kicker tray, still the problem remained. Then I fired Adept Manager, which also gave me the same error but also gave me an option to release the lock. I selected to release the lock and Adept Manager crashed. Wow!!
I again Fired Adept Manager and this time it came up without any error, I presumed that the lock is removed and closed it. Again clicked on the downloaded Skype 2.0 deb package to bring up gdebi. This time there was no lock problem and the installer went ahead fine and I became happy( I know I can just delete the lock file, but wanted to do it through proper channel, without any command line tweak).
My happiness was short lived as gdebi was unable to install due to missing dependency of libc6. My only option was to fire up Adept Manager and install libc6, OOPS!! libc6 is already installed only an upgrade was required.

On my third attempt with gdebi installer, I was finally able to install Skype 2.0
What a relief !!.
As expected Skype 2.0 video is all that I expected and I was able to do a video chat with my friend instantly.

Regarding my experience, all I can say is that in Ubuntu has one of the best package management whereas its KDE cousin Kubuntu presented an extremely frustrating experience. Not sure if Canonical does it deliberately, but in no way is the quality of Kubuntu same as that of Ubuntu.

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careers morgan stanley india

Looks like Microsoft thinks that people looking for careers in Morgan Stanley India, should be made aware about the potential Fraud Morgan Stanley is involved in.
I just typed "careers morgan stanley india" and the first result I got was pertaining to the potential December 2002 fraud which Morgan Stanley might be involved in.




Check it out its funny.



Google on the other hand gives an expected result for the same query.

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Microsoft Magic

Microsoft makes excellent products which many people like and many disdain. Some like the cool features of MS products, some rubbish it blatantly.
Most People say that a working copy of windows itself is a miracle, while other find the "features" amusing.


Lets check some of the Magic in MS products.

MAGIC #1

An Indian discovered that nobody can
create a FOLDER anywhere on the computer which can be named as "CON".
This is something pretty cool...and unbelievable... At Microsoft the whole
Team, couldn't answer why this happened!

TRY IT NOW ,IT WILL NOT CREATE " CON " FOLDER

MAGIC #2
For those of you using Windows, do the following:

1. Open an empty notepad file
2. Type "Bush hid the facts" (without the quotes)
3. Save it as whatever you want.
4. Close it, and re-open it.
   

is it just a really weird bug? :-??


MAGIC #3
This is something pretty cool and neat...and unbelievable... At Microsoft the whole Team, including Bill Gates, couldn't answer why this happened!
It was discovered by a Brazilian. Try it out yourself...

Open Microsoft Word and type

=rand (200, 99)

And then press ENTER. Then see the magic...............................



Solutions..
Magic – 1

Con is reserved word in MS hence you can not create folder “CON”. Few other key words are
AUX -Auxiliary port aka Serial Port COM1
CON- Short for console, which Microsoft describes as the display monitor.
COM1 -COM port.
COM2 -COM port.
COM3- COM port.
COM4 -COM port.
LPT1 -LPT port.
LPT2- LPT port.
LPT3 -LPT port.
NUL -NULL

Solution to create CON folder

1. Goto command prompt
2. Type in prompt e:\> "mkdir \\.\e:\con"
3. Verify by typing "dir \\.\e:\con"
4. Delete the file or folder "rmdir \\.\e:\con"
   

Magic -2
It’s a problem with notepad.
It appears that a lot of other character strings in the pattern 4 letters, 3 letters, 3 letters and 5 letters will give the same result. For example, the phrase "Bill fed the goats" also displays the garbled text. In fact, even a line of text such as "hhhh hhh hhh hhhhh" will elicit the same results.

Magic -3
It's a test feature. It's been in Word for a long time.
You can vary the numbers to get a different number of results. The first number is the amount of lines, and the second the amount of times the sentence is printed per line. The sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" is a sentence that contains all 26 letters of the roman alphabet. As such, it's a convenient test phrase when testing things like fonts and markup.

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About US

We are bunch of lazy guys, who love technology.
Regarding us ::
We are software engineer working with major Technology firms.
Ankur works with Microsoft and is an ardent supporter of MS, Abhay on the other hand works for one of the biggest rival of MS, IBM, and loves Linux.
Often we have a conflict with each advocating respective technologies.
We will each present our cases with proper evidences, though sometimes statements can be based on our personal likings.
NOTE::
We are so lazy that we are not sure that we will be writing blog posts every day.

UPDATE ::
I am happy to announce that Ankur is the lazier of the two. Till now he has not written any post.
I am sure that he is working on his masterpiece, his mind works best when sleeping :)

Contacts:
Ankur :: ankur@lazytechguy.com
Abhay :: abhay@lazytechguy.com

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