Thou shall not die

I am referring to this blog which seemed as good as dead. For the past 5 months I have been predominantly a windows user with 1 month spent in the USA for official work where only Windows is used.
My pc self assembled (by my brother) crashed on me in Feb 07. I tried my level best with whatever knowledge I had to somehow start it but to no avail. I was not able to get any display on my monitor and the green light on the CPU stayed on continuously. My first suspicion was it was due to one of the harddisk which had developed bad sectors. Finally I gave up and took help from the local computer dealer. By current standards (considering the cutting edge technology) my box should be called outdated but on a conservative comparison it was a healthy system.

Alas the motherboard had conked. The monitor was working fine. Now i had 2 options, dig out the warranty which is for 2 years or buy a brand new PC. The local shop whom I had approached coaxed me into building new PC. Now I was spoilt for choice as there options galore. Should I go in for a AMD or an Intel a AMD X2 or a Intel C2D(Core 2 Duo), the options and the permutation and combinations were unlimited from the high end to the minimalistic home computer.
I researched extensively on the internet and posted in various forums especially the Digit magazine forum. I also consulted friends who had bought a computer within the last 6 months. 6 months is a long time for electronic and computer hardware, prices had dropped considerably and a pc with a basic Core2Duo processor looked tempting and affordable. Finally my research ended in more of a confused state of mind and I gave in to buy the C2d.
I learnt a lesson though in this process, that with the extensive info found from the internet I could have myself bought these hardware parts and got it assembled from a local guy.
So now I have a spanking new Pc a Intel C2D E6300@1.86ghz 1gig of RAM, 2 SATA HDD of 80gigs each, DVD writer, and a Intel DG965ry mobo.
Alas after using it for 2 days I was enlightened that Linux kernel did not support the DG965ry chipset. Yes , you could make it work with many workarounds or wait for 2 months for the new kernel with this chipset supported. Luckily I was out of station for a month and was not using my computer. In the meantime I waited for new versions of the Linux kernel to be bundled with some distro.
With much trepidation after almost 3 months without Linux I decided to try Ubuntu (the most popular distro according to Distrowatch). I downloaded the desktop cd through torrent and booted with it.
Everything went fine and Ubuntu booted to the desktop. So I had regained confidence and was sure that Ubuntu supported the DG965ry chipset. But this was a live run and now I needed to install it. Here came the question of bootloader. The most widely used bootloader for Linux GRUB was surely there, but I wanted to boot Ubuntu in a alternate way i.e not installing it to the Master Boot Record(MBR) as is the most preferred way.
Now here is where the beauty of open source and free software is, you have options for everything and you are spoilt for choice. After lot of exploring and spending the weekend and trying out many tools, I found GRUB4DOS.
Lo and behold I could boot into Ubuntu without touching the MBR
Right now I am just booting and exploring Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn (although I have used linux off and on since 2000) and I will write another post on bootloaders in detail.
This post will hopefully keep my blog alive however trivial it may be in the blogosphere.
I am also using a brand new laptop provided by my office a Dell D820 customized with 4 gb RAM and a 80g HDD. My earlier laptop IBM T41 lies as a standby.

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.