There are just so many things wrong with this.

It is downright cowardice to imply that if we somehow lack the resources or motivation to fight crime, we should instead accept it. Especially a crime as degrading, as humiliating as sexual harassment – humiliating not only to the criminals but to the society at large – not long ago, Mumbai used to pride itself on being a “safe” city, one in which a lady could walk alone at night unafraid. And now, even if a couple of girls are walking in the company of men they know, they still aren’t safe. As a democratic society, we have laws against such behavior, and if the police aren’t competent enough to fight it, they just need to be better.

Actually, this wasn’t blown out of proportion enough. The reason this became visible was that media men happened to be at the scene and recorded the proceedings. I wonder how many other cases of harassment or molestation, or worse, happened that night that went by unnoticed because the victims were too scared, too uninfluential, or just too ignorant to report what happened. It’s not like we do not know that this is a problem – we just like to cover it up.

It’s hypocritical to say that this happens everywhere, so lets just put up with it. The Mumbai police are so proud of their offensive against drug abuse that these days they put up neon signs on intersections congratulating themselves for jailing X number of drug users. How come they could find the resources to fight drugs but somehow can’t find resources or even the will to start a fight against harassment? Behind drugs are the most powerful resources that organized crime has at its disposal, because drugs earn them money. Comparatively, street harassment ought to be much easier to combat.

Finally, is it that hard to take a stand and say “No, we do not accept this”? If so, that means we’ve just given up, or worse, sided with the perpetrators. That does nothing but encourage these people to behave in this way. That such a despicable act occurred in Mumbai is partly due to the “look-the-other-way” silence of a society that somehow condones such crimes. Is it surprising that the villians feel increasingly free to encroach upon their victims until their ethics and morals start to define of our society? We don’t want to let this continue, and part of that process is awareness, part of that process is to face that this indeed is a social disease that we’ve failed to cure.

We either work towards awareness and a cure, or the crimes get worse; and history holds our entire society responsible.

$ 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 managers. Works fine after doing “yum update libpurple”.

(via)

I don’t think that statement really reflects the ground truth. In one sense, the Linux desktop was “ready” to compete with Windows etc. quite a while ago (I’ve been using Linux on my main system for at least four years now). It’s much easier to get up to speed on Linux now than a decade ago, and the average person (with zero Linux experience) can manage to install and even use it for most tasks if they break their heads on it for a while. On the other hand, Linux still isn’t yet ready to be distributed to the masses, or “grandma-ready” as people like to call it. Extremetech reviewed Feisty Fawn and found that a lot of things like DVD playback etc. were still lacking. I’m willing to bet that in the next couple of years grandparents and housewives are far from likely to be the main customers of Dell’s Linux offerings.

What has actually happened, is that Linux geeks have become a market force to reckon with. There are far more casual hackers, computer science graduates, OS adventure-seekers and serious Linux workers in the world today than a few years ago. Dell has realized (and others soon will) that it’s a very competitive market these days and selling hardware to Linux geeks can actually make a difference to the bottom line – profit. And that’s why they’re taking the Linux plunge. Because one of the most popular questions on laptop and Linux forums is “which hardware does Linux run best on?” Not because Linux has crossed some threshold at this point of time that makes it suitable for the masses.

This is good news, of course. Once someone as big as Dell realizes this, it will (hopefully) hit hardware manufacturers and software developers sooner and make one of the biggest headaches of Linux disappear – lack of hardware (driver) and software support from companies.

Will Linux ever truly be ready for the masses – and become something of an OS X? Eventually, yes. Someone will realize that it’s actually quite simple to have Linux running all the users want to run (as long as you ignore the everything-must-be-free-as-in-speech mantra), and then actually do it, and then actually market it to the masses as such. Maybe it’ll be Canonical with Ubuntu, maybe it’ll be Linspire, maybe Xandros or maybe Novell. I think it will still take a few years before Linux becomes mainstream though.

Anyway compiling svn on this machine was a bit of a chore, so I’m just writing it down for reference. The normal way to compile is to get the subversion-1.x.x and subversion-deps-1.x.x files, untar/gunzip them (they extract into the same subversion-1.x.x directory), run autogen.sh, run ./configure, make and make install. I got caught while running make due to one of the dependencies and the error was:

.../neon/src/.libs/libneon.a(ne_request.o): relocation R_X86_64_32 against `a local symbol’ can not be used when making a shared object; recompile with -fPIC

I found the solution in the comments of this blog post. The subversion-deps archive extracts a subdir called “neon” into the subversion source folder. The workaround is to go into the neon subdir, run ./configure –enable-shared && make && make install (i also used –prefix=$HOME/usr for both this and the top-level ./configure). Once this is done, go back to the top-level source directory, run autogen.sh, ./configure, make and make install as usual and it should work.

I think you ignore the benefits of having the thousand and one linux distros around.

Fourth, and probably the most important – don’t you see that these distros mean there is so much of effort in the community to develop Linux? It’s infinitely easier to just join a project than start your own, yet people do it – which means Linux development is in good shape for the years to come. If only a few major distros – those supported by companies – are left at some point, I’ll seriously start to doubt the community’s interest and/or capability of maintaining Linux anymore.

Duplicating that in Linux is quite simple. First, you need scrot, a command-line program mentioned in the article linked above. Fedora users can get it through yum (yum install scrot). Otherwise you’ll need to download and compile it.

Next, we need to setup the keyboard shortcuts. I’ll describe this for KDE, but I’m sure there’s an equivalent way to do this in GNOME. In KDE (3.5) go to Control Center -> Regional & Accessibility -> Input actions. Create a new action of type “Keyboard Shortcut -> Command/URL (simple)”. I setup Ctrl+Shift+3 to the command scrot ~/Desktop/scr`date +%d%b%y_%H%M%S`.png and Ctrl+Shift+4 to the command scrot -s ~/Desktop/scr`date +%d%b%y_%H%M%S`.png. See the screenshot below (click for larger image).

Now, pressing Ctrl+Shift+3 puts a full screenshot on your desktop, and pressing Ctrl+Shift+4 allows you to either select a window (single click in a window) or select a region of the screen (click and drag rectangle) and the appropriate capture will be placed on the desktop. The files are dated and timed, so they should be easy to find.

Anyway, it has a number of dependencies and since it’s not made into the fedora repos yet (I hope it will, soon!) here’s the easy way to install it.

1. yum install perl-Crypt-Blowfish perl-FreezeThaw perl-Crypt-SSLeay perl-XML-Simple perl-Gtk2 perl-Gtk2-TrayIcon (these are obtainable from the preinstalled Fedora repos – core, updates and extras)
2. yum update perl glib* perl-Glib (Older versions of glib give problems)
3. If you have the dries repository added to yum, just do yum install perl-Crypt-Simple. If not, get the rpm from here. Install it using rpm -ivh perl-Crypt-Simple*
4. Get the checkgmail fedora rpm and install: rpm -ivh checkgmail*

[ Update for Fedora Core 6 ] Step 2 is not needed. In step 3, download the perl-Crypt-Simple fc6 rpm. The rest is the same.

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 back to the Mac takes brain cycles. Even though nearly everything works the same, there are minor, but painful differences. How you copy and paste text to and from Terminal / iTerm, gVim behavior, virtual desktop switching – minor things but very irritating and distracting at times. There are three main computers I use – my desktops at home and lab and my Powerbook and finally, all three run Fedora.

I’ve got the linux-ppc urge for quite some while now, I guess the last straw was the Apple battery recall fiasco, my Powerbook, after nearly a month of turning in the battery is still battery-less and therefore nearly use-less. So I didn’t have much to lose by experimenting. And I came across this post after which I decided to take the plunge.

PPC is not x86

Just in case you’re planning to try this out on your G4/G5 based Mac – these computers have a different architecture called powerpc or ppc, and aren’t as well-supported for Linux as the x86 architectures of AMD or Intel processors.

Ubuntu vs. Fedora

There are a number of resources online for installing Ubuntu on ppc architectures, but relatively few for Fedora. I was initially tempted to go for Ubuntu because of this but I really prefer Fedora. No harm in trying (we Linux folks are supposed to do that aren’t we?) and I could always reinstall Ubuntu if Fedora didn’t work out. Like I said, my Powerbook without a battery was just a toy to play with.

Partitions

My original configuration was a single partition containing my entire Mac OS X partition. I wanted to make a dual-boot system (didn’t know how well Linux would work out and OS X is useful for PowerPoint). There are a number of paid utilities and some free/shareware ones to resize an existing hard drive but I didn’t find anything that I could trust. I figured after more than 18 months my Powerbook could use a OS X reinstall anyway, and so I backed up my data and reinstalled Mac OS X, leaving about 15 GB in free space on my disk for Linux.

Installation

I burned myself a FC5 ppc DVD and set to work. To boot from CD, you need to restart your mac and hold the ‘C’ key while starting up. First hitch: touchpad didn’t work in the graphical installer for some reason (it started working just fine after installation – on it’s own). I plugged in a USB mouse which worked fine. For partitioning, I chose to manually partition. The first thing you need to create for a Powerbook is an Apple bootstrap partition, of size exactly 1 MB (any larger and the installer will complain). Following this, you can create the usual partitions – I created swap, root and home partitions. The rest of the partition went smoothly. I foolishly unchecked the eth0 wired-LAN connection that FC5 detected (don’t do this). On my Powerbook, the system clock is set to UTC and timezone is offset, so I checked that.

Wired Networking

Wired LAN is detected in Fedora by default. I had mistakenly unchecked the device during install, I got it back running the neat command. Then, I plugged in an ethernet cable and did an ifup eth0 to breathe the fresh air of the Net.

Wireless

The good news is – Airport Extreme does work – relatively painlessly. What you need to do:

1. Update your kernel to 2.6.17 or later: yum update kernel
2. Do yum install bcm43xx-fwcutter (firmware cutter – does some stuff to the wireless card firmware)
3. Download firmware: wget http://drinus.net/airport/wl_apsta.o
4. Run: bcm43xx-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware wl_apsta.o
5. Run: modprobe bcm43xx
6. Run: cp /usr/share/doc/bcm43xx-fw-cutter-004/modprobe.bcm43xx /etc/modprobe.d/
7. Run: system-config-network, click on add device, and choose the Broadcom Wireless LAN device and your desired settings, and activate.

And wireless works!

Sound

Fedora detected the sound card. To get it working though I had to load the snd-powermac module by running: modprobe snd-powermac every startup. And somehow, putting this in modprobe.conf etc. did not work. Finally what worked was adding /sbin/modprobe snd_powermac to the file /etc/sysconfig/modules/udev-stw.modules. Note the underscore in the latter addition as opposed to the hyphen that I was using earlier. I don’t really understand this, and for another guy I spoke to at #fedora-ppc the hyphen was what worked. Anyway, this got the sound module auto-loaded at startup.

One more thing – sound is muted by default. I needed to run alsamixer at the prompt and “mute” a volume bar called “auto-mute” (don’t ask me) before sound would work. Also, the volume control is strange, it needs to be set to at least 75% for me to hear anything.

Touchpad

The touchpad, while not detected during the installer, works fine once you reboot after installation. However, the standard touchpad leaves a lot to be desired, especially since the Powerbook has only one click button. Fortunately, the synaptics driver can be used to give good touchpad functionality quite easily. The synaptics driver was included with my FC5 install, if not you can get it by yum install synaptics. Now edit the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Insert the following in the “ServerLayout” section:

Section "ServerLayout"
...
InputDevice "TouchPad"
...
EndSection

And then add the following lines somewhere in the file:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "TouchPad"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
Option "LeftEdge" "0"
Option "RightEdge" "850"
Option "TopEdge" "0"
Option "BottomEdge" "645"
Option "MinSpeed" "0.4"
Option "MaxSpeed" "1.5"
Option "AccelFactor" "0.05"
Option "FingerLow" "55"
Option "FingerHigh" "60"
Option "HorizScrollDelta" "0"
Option "VertScrollDelta" "30"
Option "UseShm" "true"
Option "SHMConfig" "on"
EndSection

This gives you the ability to scroll vertically using the right side of the touchpad, middle click by tapping two fingers on the touchpad, and right click by tapping three fingers on the touchpad. The values for MinSpeed, MaxSpeed and AccelFactor are what I am comfortable with, and you may want to experiment. I made a couple of modifications to this – the Apple touchpad single-click is too sensitive for me and I end up inadvertently clicking a lot of times, so I disabled the single click tap (single click is only by pressing the button below the touchpad). Also, I find it more convenient to right click using two fingers. These modifications can be made by inserting the following lines into the code above:

Option "TapButton2" "3"
Option "TapButton3" "2"
Option "MaxTapMove" "0"

Java

Sun doesn’t have a release of Java for PPC. gij (gcc-java) is hopeless for GUIs. Fortunately, IBM has released a Java 5 SDK for PPC here. You want the 32-bit iSeries/pSeries file. Once you have it, simply unpack it and put it somewhere appropriate, like /usr/java. To install the Java plugin for Firefox, simply go to /usr/lib/firefox-1.5.x.x (depending on your firefox version) and make a symbolic link: ln -s /usr/java/jre/bin/libjavaplugin_oji.so

So far this version of Java has been quite stable, running fine on my internet banking site and running applications such as JabRef.

Suspend

After doing yum install apmud closing the lid suspends to RAM. However, this doesn’t work in KDE for me (yet).

Mounting the OS X partition

Just make sure you have hfsutils installed and it’s as simple as mount -t hfsplus /dev/hda3 /mnt/macosx

Flash doth not work

The ways around this are obscure and IMHO not worth exploring. You can run the normal flash player in some emulation environment called qemu, though apparently only Gentoo users have been able to do this. You can try OSS implementations of flash like gnash. Let me know how you fare :)

Yet to try

External monitor support, remapping F1-F5 keys, hibernate. I’ll update this post if I try out any of these. If you’ve had experience with these, do leave a comment.

The bottom line is that I’m quite impressed. I expected to face a lot more problems getting a workable system on linux-ppc. I have a system now that I can fully work on (except for MATLAB, which doesn’t support linux-ppc platform).

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 what I needed to hear.

So I ended up getting this little beauty which has all that I need, and more. I did consider the iPod nano and the Zen V Plus from Creative. The latter was out of stock at Creative, and I had no inkling of Linux support. The Nano has just too few features (or rather you purchase most of the features – like the Apple Remote w/ radio separately).

This thing does radio, voice recording, text reading, photo display and actually plays OGG files, a huge plus for me. The interface and looks are quite decent, and the thing is actually pretty small in size (see here). Sounds phenomenal, as good or better than the Shuffle.

The Linux story goes like this. The thing mounts as a USB Mass Storage device, and it has directories for Music, Pictures, Text etc. You put music files in the music directory. The interface has a “browser” mode in which you can simply go to any folder and load the file that you want. However, to get support for the standard Artist/Album/Genre interface on the Music menu, you need to generate a database in the System folder. Some nice folks have written a nice program that does this. Pretty cool.