Filling my Technological Void|Learning to Adapt to new Technology…… The Hard Way.

Wow it seems I overlooked SMU results. The results for the previous semester have been since the 24th. You can find them at their usual place which is http://www.smude.edu.in/Users/distancehome.aspx . So don;t forget to check them out if you haven’t already.

Recently my friend happened to be looking for an application which could work with both twitter.com and identi.ca and found that the number of clients we’re quite limited. Although the adobe air applications weren’t exactly working until he got to fool around with it quite a bit. Nonetheless at the end we found out that you could actually run Adobe air applications with no problem on ArchLinux also. Although the same was available on Fedora and Ubuntu it never seemed to work on ArchLinux till he fooled around with it. Anyway I’ve just written the process in case anyone needed it.

First of all let me link you the package you need to install which can be found here. This is the 32 bit package for Adobe Air. You need to use yaourt to install it on your system obviously. Enter the following command

yaourt -S bin32-adobe-air
Follow the prompts until asked to edit the PKGBUILD for lib32-orbit2. I’ve quoted the file below.

# Contributor: Andreas Schönfelder

pkgname=lib32-orbit2
pkgver=2.14.17
pkgrel32=1
pkgrel=1
pkgdesc=”Thin/fast CORBA ORB”
arch=(’x86_64′)
license=(’LGPL’ ‘GPL’)
groups=(’lib32′)
depends=(’lib32-libidl2′)
url=”http://www.gnome.org”
source=(”ftp://ftp.archlinux.org/extra/os/i686/${pkgname/lib32-/}-${pkgver}-${pkgrel32}-i686.pkg.tar.gz”)
md5sums=(’ed8c80a76d9e9adbdba48317f3d16e13′)

build() {
mkdir -p $pkgdir/opt/lib32/usr/lib || return 1
cp -R $srcdir/usr/lib/*.so* $pkgdir/opt/lib32/usr/lib || return 1
}

There are two things you need to edit here. First change the mdsum to include a # as shown #md5sums=(’ed8c80a76d9e9adbdba48317f3d16e13′) . Basically commenting out the line. Secondly you want to change the package name to pkgver=2.14.17 .

After doing the above you can follow through the yaourt installation process and now should have it installed. Next got o adobes site and download one of the Air applications. In my case I downloaded twhirl.air . You can get twhirl from here . Now here’s a copy of the wrapper script file you need to be able to run the applications.

#!/bin/bash
# Simple Adobe Air SDK wrapper script to use it as a simple AIR application launcher
# By Spider.007 / Sjon

if [[ -z “$1″ ]]
then
echo “Please supply an .air application as first argument”
exit 1
fi

export GTK_PATH=/opt/lib32/usr/lib/gtk-2.0
export PANGO_RC_FILE=/opt/lib32/config/pango/pangorc
export GDK_PIXBUF_MODULE_FILE=/opt/lib32/config/gdk/gdk-pixbuf.loaders
export GTK_IM_MODULE_FILE=/opt/lib32/config/gdk/gdk.immodules
export G_FILENAME_ENCODING=UTF-8

tmpdir=`mktemp -d /tmp/adobeair.XXXXXXXXXX`

echo “adobe-air: Extracting application to directory: $tmpdir”
mkdir -p $tmpdir
unzip -q $1 -d $tmpdir || exit 1

echo “adobe-air: Attempting to start application”
/opt/adobe-air-sdk/bin/adl -nodebug $tmpdir/META-INF/AIR/application.xml $tmpdir

echo “adobe-air: Cleaning up temporary directory”
rm -Rf $tmpdir && echo “adobe-air: Done”

Save this file as adobe-air.sh in your folder where the twhirl file is and then make it executable. Now open the terminal and then enter the following command.

./adobe-air.sh twhirl.air
This should bring up the following screen.

Now you can enter in your account details and then start using twitter and keep in touch with your friends . One problem you will notice is that it doesn’t save your password and have to enter it each time. Other than that I haven’t faced any issues as of yet.

After hearing all this ruckus about KDE 4.2 I just had to try it. The last time I tried KDE it was when 4.1 came out and to be frank I really wasn’t that impressed , mainly due to the fact that the bugs we’re quite numerous and working on it was a pain in itself. With this experience I was sort of hesitant to install KDE 4.2 but I love being a lab rat of course, so what the hell.

To install KDE 4.2 on your system you would run the following commands.

pacman -Sy kde
pacman -S kde-extragear

Once I entered this command I found that I had to download about 400 MB of data. If you are one of those bandwidth restricted plans you might wait for your free time to come before you start downloading.

After the downloads finished I tried logging on to KDE 4.2 with my fingers crossed. To my amazement  was greeted by the KDE spash followed by the desktop. You can see my desktop below.

Not only was the installation that easy but I have yet to find a bug or a problem. Although being a pessimist I believe that the absence of bugs may be a warning of impending disaster, I think I’ll be perfectly fine and I just want to thank the KDE team for doing a great job with it. Since one of my friends asked I’m posting the memory usage of KDE 4.2 on my box also.

At the moment of posting this I’m using 646.1 MB of RAM and no swap. Now before you start rolling your eyes. let me say that I have the following applications open also.

Firefox with 4 tabs open.
Konqueror
Terminal
XChat
Twhirl.air

Once I get much familiar with it and use it for a much longer time I’ll see if I can give an indepth review. Till then, all I have to say is KDE 4.2 Rocks .

For those who don’t know what the above means, it refers to being “Away Without Official Leave”. Or at least thats what I think it means. Like usual I would just love to blame my studies for being the reason I didn’t have time to make some updates here but this time I actually do have a valid reason.

Back in the day when I came to India and my parents we’re still working in USA I stayed with an Uncle of mine. He would pretty much help me out with anything I needed. Recently, he became sick and passed away. His sudden loss has sort of taken its toll on me and everyone who know him. That being said, all I can say is his absence is a void that can never be filled and he shall be certainly missed.

Recently I had to reinstall my Windows box so I decided to reinstall my Archlinux box as well. So I started taking backups which I must say that backing up data is starting to hurt the wallet since I have about 20-35 GB of data I need to save. So continued on and backed up everything and reinstalled Windows first since I wanted a dual boot configuration on this system. My system has a IDE and SATA hard disk which tends to cause problems when I configure it for dual booting. Usually I end up with having to use the BIOS boot options to go to either Linux or Windows. Well with the help of a friend on IRC (Thanks Qwerty) I created a /boot partition on the IDE drive which Windows was installed and then the rest of the Linux partitions on the SATA drive and then installed the GRUB to sda instead of the boot partition like I was doing previously and now I have a perfectly configured Dual boot.

Now if you are wondering what does this have to do with Symlink errors, hold your horses I’m getting there. After continuing with the install I did a pacman -Syu and made sure I upgraded all base packages but after downloading the updates it just wouldn’t get upgraded but rather gave me the following error.


checking package integrity...
checking for file conflicts...
error: could not prepare transaction
klibc: /usr/lib/klibc/include/asm/Kbuild exists in filesystem
klibc: /usr/lib/klibc/include/asm/a.out-core.h exists in filesystem
klibc: /usr/lib/klibc/include/asm/a.out.h exists in filesystem
klibc: /usr/lib/klibc/include/asm/acpi.h exists in filesystem
klibc: /usr/lib/klibc/include/asm/agp.h exists in filesystem
............  (Couple 100 of errors deleted) ................
klibc: /usr/lib/klibc/include/asm/xor_32.h exists in filesystem
klibc: /usr/lib/klibc/include/asm/xor_64.h exists in filesystem
Errors occurred, no packages were upgraded.

Checked around and found that without performing the following command would result in the above error.

rm /usr/lib/klibc/include/asm

Running this command fixed the problem and I was able to upgrade the packages with no problem. The reason for this is shown below as quoted per www.archlinux.com

Due to a limitation in pacman’s conflict checking and symbolic link resolution, the upgrade to klibc-1.5.14-1 requires manual removal of a symbolic link before updating. Please run the command “rm /usr/lib/klibc/include/asm” as root to remove the symbolic link that will otherwise cause a few hundred false file conflicts.

Source

Over time I’ve always enjoyed idling time off in IRC channels but now over time I think the good times have passed. Not only does it consume way too much time but it sometimes leads to unnecessary aggravation also. Sure I mean I have a sense of humor but that doesn’t always work especially when you just got from work after a tiring day. An example.

<Person X> Hey guys,
<Person Y> Hi!
<Person X> Hey is it possible to <insert random question here> .
<Person A> Learn to fcking spell it.
<Person B> STFU
<Person C> GTFO
<Person A> <Insert Momma joke here>
……………………………………………

Well obviously thats more than enough to piss off most sane people I know. Sure once its funny but every other day it starts taking a toll. Hell you don’t even get a response like that from channels like Ubuntu or Archlinux. Obviously the answer is simple , I’ve been idling my time in the wrong channel or the people I once knew are now possessed by demons. Either way I’ve found that spending more time in my channel or #archlinux and #Ubuntu and its offtopic channel is more fun.

Over these years of using computers I’ve learned a couple of things. One of them is to not classify users based on the product they use or make general assumptions based on whatever they used. Go to any forum and you’ll find a bunch of nitwits that try to portray that anyone using Windows is a “n00b” and anyone who uses Linux is extra smart unlike the poor little dumbass on his Win box.  I’ve personally had so enough of this crap that I quit visiting the forums that I use to go to and enjoy. Go to and thread that starts with the word Windows and suddenly a Linux jerk comes in going “Oh wait , Linux already does this or HAHAHA you n00b Windows Sucks.” I mean seriously where do you draw a line.

Sure be free to advocate Linux but FFS do it without alienating the other users who would just want to be with their Windows box at home.

Its been a long time since I made my last post and I’m going to plead the Fifth so that I don’t look guilty of slacking. Anyway the past 1-2 months have been quite hectic. First of all results have come out and they are quite below what I expected. Although the subjects for this semester aren’t alot they contain quite a bit of content to keep a student busy.

The subjects I have for this Semester are given below:

1. Advanced Operating System
2. Advanced System Architecture
3. .Net Applications
4. Project

The subject .Net Applications is an elective which I chose over Embedded Systems. Mainly I chose that over Embedded cause I greatly doubt SMU’s ability to be able to provide quality study material on the subject. As the fourth subject you can see I’ve listed out a Project. It seems that the whole project is graded as a separate subject and even has an examination which is based on four subjects that we learned in previous semesters like OOPS , DBMS etc.Now to mention I have the usual slew of assignments which needs to be done within a month. This month and the next should be quite interesting.

Finally, I decided to go and download Cent OS so I could try it out for my Network Installation Project. You can access the download section here at this page . At first when I saw the size I was kind of pessimistic if this was going to happen anytime this year. I couldn’t have been any more wrong, I managed to get speeds above 150 kbps for their downloads which is the fastest speeds I have had yet (329 kbps).  Anyway I managed to get the 32 bit of the distro very fast.

Next task was installing Virtualbox. So I went ahead and entered the following command.

pacman -S virtualbox

After confirming the download and installing it I followed the instructions which I found here on the ArchWiki. Once Virtualbox was installed I configured it for the installation of Cent OS (Red Hat).  Next I burned the ISO I downloaded onto a DVD for backup purposes and then inserted the Disk and checked if I was able to start the Installation. As soon as I started the installation I was greeted by the Cent OS GUI Installer. Continued with the Installation and choose the Option for Server and with the Gnome GUI. Further selected server services like Apache, Samba etc as this was going to help me with my Network Install project.

Heres a picture of my Arch Linux desktop with Cent OS 5.2 Running in VirtualBox.

I noticed one thing though, the mouse seemed not to be captured till I went to Devices > Install Guest Additions. Although I’m not sure why that actually fixed it or it wasn’t working in the first place. Now its time for me to get my hands dirty and goof around on the server and prepare for setting up this on our Windows Network :).