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Category Archives: linux

Don’t lower your standards

It was disheartening to read of two girls being molested in Bombay on new year’s day. Far more shocking was to hear that the Police Commissioner of Mumbai was dismissive in his reaction and asked the media “not to blow this out of proportion”, because such things “can happen anywhere.” There are just so many […]

Pidgin 2.1 on Fedora 7

Yum just updated pidgin to version 2.1, but I got the following error. $ pidgin libnm_glib_nm_state_cb: dbus returned an error. (org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown) The name org.freedesktop.NetworkManager was not provided by any .service files pidgin: symbol lookup error: pidgin: undefined symbol: purple_core_ensure_single_instance Turns out pidgin 2.1 has a dependency on libpurple 2.1 which somehow got past the package […]

Dell and the time of the Linux desktop

So, Dell is finally going to be offering computers with Ubuntu Linux preinstalled, and there are rumours that HP, Lenovo, Toshiba et. al. will follow suit. And of course, the Linux world is in celebration and is saying, “The Linux Desktop is for real. Linux has proven that it can compete in the same league […]

Compiling subversion on x86_64

I think if there’s a technology equivalent of the poverty line, it should be having to live without subversion. Yet when I logged into a compute node assigned to us since we started clamouring for clock cycles, the first thing I see is: “bash: svn: command not found”. Ouch. What did I do to deserve […]

A million distros? Bring ’em on

Reproducing here my rather longish comment on this rant on LinuxDevCenter about there being so many Linux distributions. I think you ignore the benefits of having the thousand and one linux distros around. First, all of these distros are in the end attempts to do something _different_. Puppy Linux was one of the first ones […]

Easy screenshots with the keyboard in Linux

There was an article today at Linux.com that reviews various screenshot programs available for Linux. What it doesn’t tell you, is how to take screenshots painlessly in Linux. Let me try and do that. Since I use a Mac, I’m quite used to the Mac OS X way – Command+Shift+3 takes a full screenshots and […]

Fedora Core 6 is out!

Torrents here.

Installing checkgmail in Fedora Core 5/6

I’ve really come to love checkgmail, a perl-based tray application that allows you to monitor and manipulate your gmail account. The killer feature is that the notification window gives you options to delete a message, mark it as read or report it as spam. Very, very useful and fast for messages that you don’t want […]

Fedora Core 5 on Apple Powerbook G4

So, I decided to install Linux on my Powerbook G4 12″. Why? (Feel free to skip to the real install notes while I rant!) Recently, I’ve become slightly bored, slightly bugged with OS X. Nothing much wrong with OS X, just that I tend to do most of my work on Linux, and switching context […]

New Toy – iRiver H10 Jr

Couldn’t come back empty-handed from COMEX now, could I? I’ve recently started listening to podcasts and audiobooks along with music – which means a player with no screen and playlist options (like my old Shuffle) was becoming a pain. I had to either exclusively put one type of content, or blindly search around to find […]