Windows XP autochk problems and solution

This is the last post for 2006.
I did not want to write anything today but somehow dragged myself into writing this. It has been a blockbuster year for me personally. Lots of personal chores completed this year which had been postponed year after year lazily. Work and hobby wise it was not a very good year. Did not concentrate on 1 distro or one language. Working on linux only still remains a mirage.

Since I had been to the USA for a month, my PC had been in the hands of my kid and all others and sundry who just know the basics of operating a PC.
As such when I came back I could see many games downloaded from the internet and installed wherever the setup defaulted. No uninstallation was done if the game/program did not work or was not used.
The major problem was that whenever my PC booted chkdsk or autochk(as it is called in XP) would start and after checkimg uptoa certain % the pc rebooted. The quickest solution to this was cancelling disk check and proceeding to boot in to XP. This cancelling had to be done everytime whenever the XP booted.
I decided to find a solution to this. Obviously the first stop was google. Google gave some very good links but many were ambiguous.
I booted from a bootable XP installation cd and went into the recovery console. Starting autochk I came across the same problem and the PC rebooted.
I then booted my pc off a Win98 cd. I ran the old Scandisk program and did a thorough check of drive C. Unfortunately scandisk reported 6 bad sectors. Now when I rebooted into XP autochk started but this time it did the complete check resolving errors and booted cleanly into windows.
The error is resolved and everything is just working fine.
Maybe somebody should tell Microsoft that its older products are more stable than its newer versions.

Indian screenshot in linux

Whenever I browse through various distribution home pages and their screenshot I see screenshots uploaded by users across the world with their country specific contents. I was surprised to see a Indian screenshot with a Hindi song Jhalak Dikhlaja in the XMMS playlist and the map of India in the background. I found this screenshot on the Zenwalk distro page

Out of hibernation and kernel panics

After a long time really thought that I have been neglecting my blog and ahsould post some crap.
Things to do
Need to upgrade to all new versions of Linux distros---I am way behind
Slackware, Ubuntu, Debian
Have to open up my pc and clean off the dust.
Now that I have a office provided laptop (IBM T41) ---need to use it more effectively.
Del.icio.us cleaning continues but again need to speed it up else it looks like a mess.

I have not had a kernel panic in the last year, mainly because I use tried and tested distros and the standard hardware. It was wonderful to see people posting images of kernel panics in Linux and Freebsd and there are many of these. Surprisingly there is only 1 image found on google for kernel panic in Solaris ?????. I remember having kernel panics when I first tried linux in 2000 and did not know what to do to resolve it.

Del.icio.us cleaning spree

I am on a del.icio.us cleaning spree. The links are piling and are saved to tags which I feel are relevant at that point of time. Yes, and there is duplication also. It seems a mammoth task as it is sometimes confusing where a link is to be tagged or whether the link needs to be saved or not.
On the del.icio.us topic this post sums up how to become a del.icio.us power user.
My links can be viewed from the links column on my blog.

Finally installed Ubuntu-with some errors

Ubuntu has been topping almost every linux site and therefore I had to install anyways. I faced some problems though.

1. Halfway through while trying to install it from the alternate cd, my monitor went into sleep mode and I could not do anything. This means I did not know what was happening as there was no display. There was continuous cd and hdd activity to warrant that the installation was in process. I tried to reboot from the keyboard and tried everything but in vain. Finally I had to reset the pc. Assuming something went wrong during install I installed it again, this time deciding to be careful to press only the ENTER key and not reboot. The same problem was faced and it was a blind install in the last leg of install.
2. This caused some errors like on first boot the human.xml theme could not be loaded. The login screen also was not activated by default i.e I had to press the buttons Enter to enable the username and password screen.
3. one solution to (2) I found that the standard Gnome greeting screen worked correctly.
4. Need to investigate the screen blanking problem as nobody has faced this issue when I posted into lists
   

Installing Ubuntu Dapper drake

Downloaded the Ubuntu 6.06 iso. It has become a sleek product. But after booting to the desktop and clicking on install the problems started. My pc hung when the installation asked for time zone.
I restarted it and tried to install again and this time it was taking infinity to proceed to the next screen and there was continuous disk activity of both the hdd and the cd rom drive.
A post to the lists gave an answer that this install is buggy and with RAM<300mb it does not work
My pc has 256mb of RAM.
The solution was another cd named alternate cd which had the old debian style installer.
Now i need to download this which means another day.
Ubuntu is topping all distro sites and hence I wanted to try it. I already have installed 5.10 but not used it much.

irc logs for freenode channels,Lisp,emacs etc

I remembered once I had seen a page with irc logs for Ubuntu. I had not paid much attention then.
After the release of Dapper 6.06 of Ubuntu I wanted to view these logs and could not recollect the url. A search on google went in vain, maybe i did not enter the proper search words. Finally I found it. I searched if there were logs available for all other channels but only some channels are logged.
In turn i found this cool site which keeps logs some of the irc channels.
Also these
Ubuntu/Edubuntu/Kubuntu/Ubuntu-dev------>http://people.ubuntu.com/~fabbione/irclogs/
Selected channels------------------------------->http://www.irclogs.net


Irc logs can be useful as a searchable faq and also may provide answers to many questions.
Recently Lisp and Emacs have been the flavor of the month for me and I browse through the lisp irc logs frequently, although I do not use both.

Gnuradio

Found a link to gnuradio. Radio through software and i never knew such a thing existed. Would surely like to try it out when I have time.

Have started reading "Learning Python" in earnest. Have read very little, not even upto chapter 1. I had started earlier with python and had almost read 3 chapters but had left it due to lack of time. Now I am not worrying about time. I have decided on a target of 1 chapter per week, and even if this is not achievable consistently then "read whenever I have time".

Installed SUSE 10.1 from the LFY magazine cd. Did not have much time to work on it but the installation screens are superb.

Playing games with my kid from old CHIP CD's. All are demo versions. Played Superbike 2001,
NFS Hot pursuit, Road rash. Trying to run NFS porsche unleashed on XP.

Emacs and lisp week

The perennial dilemma of "which editor" vi/vim or emacs finally got resolved atleast for me.
Emacs came out as the winner. Both of them have their merits and demerits but I thought emacs has that geek feeling as an all in one customisable and extensible editor. One reason for some amount of bias is that I have bought the Learning Gnu Emacs -OReilly book. This inspite of reading on O'Reilly itself that they sell the vi book twice as much as emacs. Actually I have found emacs very difficult to learn with all the odd key combinations instead of the regular ones which we are used to.
The turning point for my decision was the number of new information resources I could find on the internet. It all began when I started a search for IRC in google. This was just for the heck of it, just wanted to follow the links in the search result of google. This lead me to a number of links related to IRC and to other information. For e.g the developer of MIRC a IRC client's homepage listed some physics and virtual life links. Normally I only see the first 5 pages of the google listing. This time I thought to delve deeper and went beyond page 20 and found a link to the Emacswiki with the EmacsIRC client.
To my astonishment Emacs could also be used as an irc client. I also am an avid LISP follower i.e I am fascinated by Lisp although know nothing about it except that it is a language very few use. I got a link to the Road to LISP survey and this consisted of simple questions of how lisp users came to use lisp and what have they learned so far, what do they feel about lisp in general etc. The answers were mind boggling and I came to know that Lisp can be used for hardcore programming and each one had had a great learning experience and were still learning. I knew all the way that Emacs has been programmed in Elisp a Lisp dialect. Many of the users in the survey said that they had encountered Lisp through Emacs/Elisp. For the whole week and more thereafter I was engrossed in reading the survey and anything and everything about emacs and lisp. I knew that I had to learn emacs atleast.
Also I found that the emacs mailing list was also very active and development was still on. Many users were using emacs as a PIM also.
I also came to know a lot of other terms and books about lisp from the RTL survey which I was not aware of. I had read Eric Raymonds "How to become a hacker" and he mentions that you should know all the 5 languages (C,C++,Java,Python and Lisp). He says learning Lisp will give profound enlightenment even though one may not use it practically. I am ready to be enlightened.
Having written all this I have not even started at anything. The usual reasons of lack of time due to work pressures(not currently) and meeting social obligations(family and friends).

Lets see atleast I am not letting my blog die.

I will not let my blog die

Well, It has become boring to write a blog to keep it active. But I wont let it die. I will still update it as and when I get time. The latest resolve I have made i snot to buy any new books (techie) but to read it after downloading it from the net and yes all of them are available is some format or other.
Currently my pc has been plagued with adware and pop-sites which come very often. I have tried several of the free spyware programs but to no avail.
I am trying other alternatives.
Another problem has arisen because my ISP has changed some settings and I connect in WinXp through a dial-up icon but through my network card. On observation I found out that the winxp dial up setup states connect using ISDN channel of network card.
Now how do I do this in Linux???????????
After all the dilemma of which text editor emacs or vim I have finally decided to use emacs. It is surely criticised a lot but it has fabulous things which can be done. Now I have just decide but havent had the time to use it.
I hope I do not let my blog die. Will post soon or rather daily

Nothing much

Its the end of the 1st month of the new year. Nothing new to write. I was very much busy on my job at office. Implementation was in full swing. Had good exposure on Fixed Assets and FSG reports on Oracle.
Started to write a daily journal in Oo writer on FC3
Configured my ADSL connection on slack 10.2, FC3 (already working and stable) and Ubuntu
Found that Ubuntu was a bit sluggish and was suprised how I was addicted to Slackware console with mc as the file explorer.
Wrote programs in c in emacs,vim, kate on gui and vi on console.
I found vi/vim more popular and also more easier and convenient to learn. Emacs has a steep learning curve.
I have bought "Learning Gnu Emacs" last year.
Searched google for vi vs. emacs links and got some whopping 39000+ links.
Yum is giving some problems and stops in between.
I want to download Oracle 10gexpress database on linux.
Windows XP has started giving errors. Applications like Firefox and Azureus are giving errors when I open them although they run smoothly thereafter.
Win Xp shows the filesystem as RAW and I cannot run chkdsk on RAW filesystem.
Could not get any plausible solution to this problem.
I need to format my C drive and reinstall Win XP and also Office 2000.
Do not have much time as lot of household work needs to be done as my brother is getting married in March 06.
I think I will take up this project of writing a journal/diary as I wish for 2006.
Another project is appearing for OCA and OCP examinations in 2006.

Wikipedia-Fund raising appeal

A post on slashdot describes Wikipedia founder making a personal appeal for donations.
Wikipedia is a very useful source of information and is of course free. I always search google for any specific term and many times the first link is Wikipedia. It is unending, bottomless free information.
I go not know whether wikipedia needs these funds to be online, but surely hope that it does not shutdown or go into oblivion remaining unupdated.
Maybe some big companies like google,yahoo,IBM donate a huge amount andd keep it alive. Cannot imagine internet without wikipedia.
Is there any other encyclopedia equivalent to wikipedia?
Wish I could donate in Rupees.
Off topic
Suddenly I wondered that if blogspot(this site)or del.icio.usor any other site became non free and started charging money or shutdown due to unavoidable circumstances, where would I blog, where will my blog posts till today go. Thinking of this I have started to search for a tool that will archive all my blog posts from all blogs to my HDD.

Synopsis 2005

My first post for 2006

2005-Adieu

• Concentrated more on Linux and opensource in general
• Installed additional Hdd in my pc and this is devoted for free os.
• Remained faithful with at least 1 distro FC3. I think I used this more than any other distro.
• Lost a little bit of faith in Slack but cannot give up. this was because of the elimination of Gnome from slack 10.2
  
• My hdd read somewhat like this as on 31/12/05
• hda (Win XP,Slack 10.1,10.2, FC3)
• hdb(Ubuntu and Kanotix and balance is empty)

2006-to be done

• Try as many distros as possible.
• Do geeky things like using the old pc lying idle in a very imaginative way
• LFS and gentoo are 2 projects for me in 2006 should try them
• OpenSolaris and FreeBSD install them together with linux
• Concentrate on one programmimg language, be it c,python, lisp anything and continue that for the whole year. Keep in mind that you can only learn 1 topic at a time.
• Do some open source writing just for the satisfaction it gives and maybe try to get it published in the magazines or on the net
• Try to think of something innovative taking inspiration from distrowatch
• Do some ethical hacking at home only.
• Do some preofessional course (OCA/OCP/CISA/ISA) etc
• continue blogging even though my blog is ranked above 10lacs in technorati.
• Do not lose heart and concentrate and focus.
• Try to contibute to some project/distro anything (although difficult for non programmer like me).

Cheers and Happy New Year