Nothing specific...

I just thought i should put down two things that i might possibly forget...

The first thing is about being notified when a certain process running in the console window gets completed...like say we are compiling some big program like openoffice which takes hell lot of time. and we would obviously not like to keep looking at the terminal window once every few seconds/minutes to see if its over. Its easy to set it up so that a sound is played once the thing is done..By adding a && player-name filename.wav...for example, to install some software in one go when you are sure that everything will go according to plan (meaning all dependencies have been satisfied), we can use this command after cd-ing to the program directory..

./configure && make && make install && aplay /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Noise.wav

(I use aplay as i have alsa player installed on my system and it can play independently of the main music player like xmms/amarok.) Guess that was easy..It took me sometime to realise that i could use the chaining together of commands in such a way. hope it helps someone :)

Now, onto the second thing i wanted to mention...The methodology of working of gtalk..Its a pretty interesting piece of software when you think about it. When most other voice chat applications dont work well even on fast connections, google talk has been able to get landline level voice clarity between the two parties..Its pretty clear that the technology, rather methodology, used by google talk is very different from other talk clients like skype or yahoo messenger. One is led to guess that it sets up a direct connection between the 2 clients instead of routing the data through the server..and my hunch is that this is indeed what happens though I havent read any article that states this as such. My belief is strengthened by what happened the other day..This guy had called me up and we were in the middle of a voice conversation. and as usual, mr.your-freedom had to disconnect (for those not in the know, we are behind a restrictive proxy server and so, the need to use a tunneling client like your-freedom to be able to connect to the yahoo and google servers) as it does once in 2 hours as mine is a free account. But though it reconnects almost instantaneously, psi does disconnect and completely reconnects only after 30 seconds or so..but in the meanwhile, we kept talking. I noticed that psi had disconnected and was tring to reconnect only a little after it had actually gotten disconnected. but surprisingly, nothing happened to our voice chat..that i feel is proof enough of the fact that data never goes through the google server..something for us to cheer about..google cant tape our conversations even if it wanted to. As they already know lots about you and me from our usage of their services like search, gmail and (yup)blogger and loads of other things like orkut... if this isnt the case and data is indeed routed through the server, it would be interesting to see how the thing works...maybe thats why google is refusing the part with the source code.

in fact, i have never tried talking with anyone who is physically distant from me..only within the college lan have i (and most of us) used it..would be interesting to see how the voice clarity is when i talk to someone from another country..

Life and times behind a proxy server..

Being a college student and blessed with full time access to the internet (read 21 hours) is great considering the speeds that you get and the relatively nothing that you pay for it. But as in most cases, the connection to the internet is not direct but through a proxy server. A highly restrictive proxy server at that. From our experiences so far, i can say with certainity that only port 80 will be open at any given point of time. (I think i maybe wrong but as far as i know, this is the case). And so, the admins think/feel that we students should use the internet for only useful purposes and have thus blocked everything else you can think of that can make one's online life complete in today's world(especially if you are into watching movies or generally downloading stuff off the net) like downloading from torrents, connecting to p2p networks like kazaa or edonkey and why, even messengers!! Yahoo messenger doesnt connect on its default port but its been designed to seek out open ports that it can use. Alas, thats not the case with gaim. It can connect only thorugh a given port which you need to specify and cant search for open ports. Amd this forces those of us who use gaim to resort to other means to get it working. Tunneling...

Most of us use this software called Your Freedom which manages to route data supposed to be sent on any port through port 80 and thus, practically, opens up the whole internet for you irrespective of what the proxy server is capable of. But as it is a free service, the speeds are good enough only for connecting to the instant messenger servers and gives too low speeds with torrents and p2p networks (around 3 kbps which is almost nothing). So, the guys at the helm have pretty much achieved their objective. I guess there is some way to find out what port a given program is using on windows. If only we were somehow able to figure out what port yahoo messenger uses to connect to the yahoo servers, life will be a lot more painless for us guys who prefer gaim :)

And because of the same proxy servers, the adventerous few of us who want to be able to test the latest versions of open source softwares using cvs (or darcs in case of psi) cant do so very easily. again, the need to find a way to get around these (stupid) proxy servers. Help is at hand in the form of Proxy chains :)..from what i have understood, it links up your computer to the external server through a series of proxy servers and again, our proxy servers are so configured that proxychains cant use them. We need to resort to your-freedom for bailing us out again. So far, so good..They have worked well in tandem :)

And as usual, some bad sites have been blocked...and also ones like Cricinfo which are used by many to keep track of cricket scores but hog bandwidth many a time. Though one will easily realise that the methodology of blocking is not very effective and breaks down completely many a time. even if not, we have the services of anonymous proxy sites (a huge list of which can be found here) to get us through. These sites basically work on converting letters into numbers and hexadecimal code which cant be blocked as easily as blocking the alphabetical versions.

All in all, its quite a learning experience being behind a proxy server..Extensions like Switch Proxy let one lead a lot more easier life when faced with a situation of multiple proxy servers, any of which might work at a given time while the rest dont or one gives very good speeds compared to the others. Open source is simply too good a philosophy :D

Interestingly, i know of atleast one college in India which is pretty new and has net connectivity to all its hostel residents but doesnt have a proxy server at all!! Direct connection to the internet is what i gather from talking to two of my friends over there. I find it strange how they are letting it be still even after almost 2 years of inception. But then they stop it from working from 9AM-5PM to make sure students attend classes. So, i guess its a good bargain after all!!

Something apart from pure linux..

I dont have many posts on linux as such as yet but i thought let me put in a few other things about 2 other great open source softwares that i use...

Firefox:
Undoubtedly it is THE best browser on show...Though i have seen many saying that opera is faster and beats firefox in some ways, i am sure for those of you who have made the switch to firefox, going back to anything else is going to be very very painful. I would suggest you stay put here :D

The beauty of firefox lies in the ability of extensions to add innumerable features to FF and make it as good as you want it to be...I am going to list out all the extensions I use on my firefox and write a line or two about each...

1)Switchproxy:
A very useful extension for those in college/workplace LANs where there is more than one proxy server running.. This extension lets you switch from one to the another with just the click of a mouse.

2)Stumbleupon
One of the best extensions, if not the best, i have ever used. Its orkut+blogger+lots more rolled into one.

3)Ajax Yahoo Mail
Another great extension that adds a + mark next to each of the messages in your yahoo inbox and so you can view the message without having to load a complete page again. Instant reply functionality too is included. Am waiting for instant forwarding capacity and the ability to mark a message as spam...

4)Adblock
A great extension that saves you loads of bandwidth and time by removing stupid advertisements from getting loaded. You can have a look at my adblock filters file here

5)Gmail manager
Checks your gmail accounts (how many ever you want!!) and notifies you when You've got mail!!

6)Yahoo mail notifier
A similar mail checking extension for yahoo. Can check only one account though :(

7)Tab mix plus
Adds loads of options to manage your tabs in firefox.

8)Customize Google
Lets you add many good options to google searching and also helps you stay private from google's preying bots.

9)Sage
A good RSS reader exntension for firefox..only thing missing are autochecking and notify features.

10)Download Statusbar
Converts download progress bars into cute little bars and puts them in your status bar. One window lesser to work with!!

11)Informenter
Can be used to store frequently typed form values that can quickly be selected later.

12)Grease Monkey
Have heard a lot about its potential but got myself to install it only a few days back..

13)Bloglines notifier
Something I discovered only today. Thanks to Hari for telling me about bloglines. This website lets you check your feeds from anywhere in the world. And if you use only a single computer, the extension sits in your status bar and checks for updates to your feeds once in a customizable time interval and notifies you if and when there are changes. Quite neat :)

And the second software is gaim..Undoubtedly again the best multi-protocol instant messenger on show. I have heard about kopete and others but i cant see anything wrong with gaim, rather anything that is critically missing in it, albeit the voice feature needed to talk to people on google talk which too i guess shall soon be incorporated. As in all other open source softwares, gaim has the tabbing feature when you chat with more than one person simultaneously instead of opening separate windows for each..And it works well with all protocols, be it yahoo or msn or irc or jabber. It isnt ugly looking by any standards either and its even got a doodle feature in its latest version now by which two people can write on a common whiteboard to get their thoughts across in a better way than just plain chat. The only qualm i have about this doodle feature is that it doesnt seem to have been integrated with yahoo messenger's own similar feature meaning you cant doodle with someone on yahoo messenger, you can doodle only with someone else using the latest beta(or atleast 2beta1) of gaim. again, plugins add a variety of extra features to gaim like message notification and system tray integration though i personally feel that the latter should be a default option in gaim itself. when one doesnt care for fancy things as audibles and talking cartoon characters, gaim is the way to go..

to end up on a lighter note, i just discovered that i had not been making use of buddy pounces at all in gaim..and so, it so turned out that i needed to know when a person came online when away from my computer (as guifications has not yet released a version compatible with the latest beta). So i set up a buddy pounce and decided to play a sound..searching around in /usr/share/sounds, i came across the die.wav file that comes with the gnbots game (for those who are on windoze or dont have the game installed but want to hear the sound, go here...)..its gonna be real funny when the person next comes online...lets see :)

Linux related blogs i follow...

First, I keep track of blogs using the sage rss reader extension for firefox..the only qualm i have about sage is that there is no option to make it check all the feeds once in a given time interval and notify me when a certain blog is updated by, say, flashing up an icon the status bar...I dont want to install a separate rss reader for this purpose..so if someone knows any better extension that does the above thing apart from what it is expected to, do let me know..

Now, the blogs that are there in my list are..

• Ubuntu blog on wordpress


• Another good ubuntu oriented blog


• A very good and popular blog


• A nice blog that appeals to a newbie

These are the ones i look upto for news and tips. And apart from these, there are many sites that i stumble upon (in both the literal and other sense). I started off my linux life with the linux newbie administration guide..I still consider it as a very good place to refer to in case of any doubts, trivial or otherwise..You can get a free copy here. I also have a few ebooks about different topics in linux too that i have found on the hostel LAN here. I would be more than willing to share them if you do need them.

Here are a few other sites that i visit often..

1. LQ-The best Linux forum i have seen


2. TuxMe-a new site that i found very good


3. Good blog but poor patronage

This list is in no way exhaustive. I would most probably have missed out one or two links that i do follow. Will add them if and when i remember. If you know of any other good sites, please do let me know :)

Getting Gtalk working on linux...

In today's google world, those using linux as theur primary OS would have many reasons to hate google (some of them listed here) but with Google releasing Google Talk, I guess the anger if i can call it so has become more pronounced. This is because of the fact that this piece of software called Google Talk is just too good and beats all other voice IM services black and blue. The quality of the voice, the clarity and speed and afaik, the ability to work even on a normal dial up connection make it simply too good. But yet again, google has failed to address the concerns of the linux community and didnt release the source code or atleast a linux port..and so the situation was that you could sign onto the google server using other clients like gaim, psi and the rest but you couldnt talk..but whats the fun in using google talk without being able to talk?!? it took more than 2 months (gtalk first released in september last and google released libjingle sometime in december) for google to release the libraries that code for the audio component of the software, namely libjingle..And the open source community being as it is, this was lapped up quicker than expected and soon, we had Psi releasing a branch of its psi client which included incorporated libjingle into itself...i think within days of google releasing libjingle, this saw the light of the day...shows the real power of open source, something i really doubt would have happened so fast in the other case. Gaim too has kept saying they too will soon add it into their main branch though there are no signs of that happening in the very near future (a month or so). meanwhile, we alsa have other jabber clients popping up which have included libjingle like jabbin though from the looks of it, its nothing but psi remodelled a bit. you can be pretty sure that in the coming days, many more jabber clients like Gizmo too will include the voice support.

Now, coming to the topic, i will put down a few points here which i used to get the talk feature of gtalk working on linux using psi's jingle branch..the wiki page has very good info. first up, you need to get the latest sources through darcs (something similar to cvs) from their repos..being behind a stupid proxy server, cvs/darcs was not going to work on its own...so, from a good friend of mine, i got to know of a thing called Proxychains which from what i comprehend kind of links up your comp to the external server by connecting many (proxy?) servers in between in a chain..with some more work(again our insti proxy server didnt support some thing (dono what :D), i had to use Your Freedom), i got proxychains working..and downloaded the latest sources from the darcs repos (i tried downloading from the web interface using wget/webhtcopier but thats just too arbitrary...gets you many unnecessary files and wastes a lot of time). The wiki and more so, the forums helped in a lot in getting it to work...forums are indeed a boon to the linux community apart from irc channels of course. both are extremely good ways to get help with your problems. i havent used mailing lists as much so am not sure of their usefullness, though i suspect its more prone to spam once in a while. installing psi-jingle was the standard 3 step procedure (or 4 if u prefer to call it so). (all this was done back in the 3rd week of january when i was still on ubuntu..)...and lo and behold, i get a nice cute voice call button next to each person's name on my list..but unfortunately (or fortunately?) i was just not able to get my mic to work...no amount of tweaking settings worked...from alsamixer to different mics to asking on irc channels, i tried everything i could think of but all i got whenever i tried to record was a long blank sound..:(..it was then that i decided to give gentoo a try...one of my principal criteria when choosing a distro is that it should have a amd64 version...else there is no point in me having bought a 64 bit processor if my OS doesnt make use of it (like M$ Windoze)..as a result, though i wanted to try debian instead of ubuntu, dint use it as the amd64 version afaik is still under lotsa development..and i had heard before that when it comes to customization and getting the max out of your box, gentoo is second to none..so here we go..2 reasons to install gentoo..one of which was a hope that my mic would work there..(silly reason to install a whole new OS :D )..and thankfully, my mic worked in gentoo (again though loads of work had to be done though this time i knew what to do and what was going wrong where)...that day will remain special in my life forever..the day when i got both gentoo and gtalk working flawlessly!!

one thing that is striking when comparing linux to windows is the fact that linux still does not have a very good way of being able to handle many programs trying to access the same device (especially the sound card) simultaneously..so you need to completely stop all your other music and movie player (and even kill them sometimes if necessary) and then only can you talk in relative peace. and for this, i got to know of this command called fuser that tells one the processes that are accessing a specific file/device...so i used to find PIDs of these proggies and kill them..yesterday, i struck upon the idea of writing a shell script to do this and assign a shortcut key (using xbindkeys though gnome has an inbuilt shortcut assigning feature..why i prefer the former, i wil try to take it up separately later). this was the small script i managed to come up with...


#!/bin/bash
fuser -k /dev/snd/*


not too bad eh? ;) tested it when no one was calling me on psi and it worked fine..my xmms stopped playing and same happened with mplayer too..little did i realise my folly then..someone did call and give me the chance to test it out real time but i promptly rejected the call instead of acceping it and then ran this script and then called him...everything went on fine..the talk worked like magic..i thought "yes, i have managed to achieve something useful"...to my horror of horrors, a similar situation arose today morning when another good friend of mine called me..this time around, i forgot to cancel the call and let it stay while i executed the script...and unfortunately, as i realise now, psi too is actually trying to access the sound card when i execute the command..and so, it too got screwed :(...so if u know a good way of stopping all programs other than psi, please do let me know..

on the whole, it was a good experience trying to get gtalk working..one hope gaim too adds libjingle sooner than later so that i dont need to run a separate program just for gtalk. i keep checking the cvs but still if i miss out and it comes out, do let me know here by way of a comment. thanks!! :)

phew!! that was a real loong post by any standards..easily beats any other post of mine ever in terms of length (and hopefully usefullness of content too)..Thanks for reading it all the way to down this bit :)

The next level...

I have shifted from ubuntu to gentoo in case anyone is interested...Living the easy life with ubuntu ceased to be fun anymore..And without doubt, gentoo presented the next big challenge...and i managed to get it working without too much of a fuss :) now, its time to experiment with gentoo till that gets boring...Now dont ask me where i will go after that...hopefully the linux world will throw up something new :D

Distros i have tried out..(part 2)

College started in the first week of August and with me getting a single room, a computer was soon going to make its way too...soon it did...after lots and lots of discussions, debates and shop visits, this is the config that i have....AMD 2800+ 64bit, Asus K8N mobo, 512 MB RAM, 80 GB HDD, DVD RW, 17" flat CRT monitor..a pretty good bargain at 32k. WinXP came installed by default. i had kept 15GB free for linux from the beginning... but it took me some time to (again) decide on the distro i was going to install..i wanted to try something new...and found that suse 9.3 was there on the insti server..so, downloaded it and installed it..the installation was a lot more graphical than any other i had ever seen..that sort of threw me off..and kde was the default...rubbing salt into my wounds..my experience with suse turned out to be a short lived one. i decided to shift away from suse asap..and noticed that ubuntu was giving away free CDs..there i went and ordered some 10 CDs without caring to see what i was ordering..it turned out later i had ordered 6 CDs of 32 bit Ubuntu Hoary x86 and 4 more for powerPC edition..a bit of searching on the website got me to the fact that ubuntu has a 64 bit edition too...and that too, just a single CD!! so i decided to give it a try straight away..downloaded it one night..and installed it the next afternoon. and soon discovered the existence of this wonderful website called Ubuntu Guide which made life with ubuntu as simple as drinking water out of a glass!! everything was detailed out to the last possible bit and in the simplest way possible..i found out the forums to be a very helpful resource too soon. and thus began my attachment with ubuntu which has not decreased the least bit after more than 2 months..i am loving ubuntu more by the day. to the extent that i decided to reinstall it once just to start back from scratch and prove that i could get back to working condition in less than 3 hours time :)

though breezy badger was released in october, i decided not to go for it for 2 reasons...
1)i have a stable system running that gives me what i want..so why unnecessarily upgrade? that too when the gains are trivial..as far as i read, the only notable additions were some windows like add/remove programs thing and a few more things which i could do without on any day..
2)there were already many people complaining that it was buggy (so i decided to call it buggy badger..lol!!)...

and so with hoary i stick to even now..customized to the extent i can think of..though i am pretty sure a lot lot more can be done to enhance the experience...but still, i like it the way it is right now..in the coming posts, i shall be posting about what i did and how i did what i did..nothing much great but still, i felt that i should put it down in writing..atleast for my sake :D