Solution for the annoying ticking sound problem in Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala)

Recently I upgraded from ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) to ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala). From the moment it booted it gave this annoying ticking sound through the speakers and also through the headphone every 10 -15 seconds. Grrr...

Extensive googling lead me to the solution. here it goes,

* Open /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf
* Goto the last line and comment out
options snd-hda-intel power_save=10 power_save_controller=N

* Now restart or reload the module and this annoying sound problem would stop for good.

Courtesy: I thank the ubuntu forum members for posting the solution. The reason behind this bug and detailed discussion could be found in the following links

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-discuss/2009-May/008239.html
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1311206&highlight=power_save

Configuring Perl IDE using Eclipse + EPIC + Perlcritic

Though not an ardent fan of any IDE (integrated development environment), i just thought of setting up one for PERL. i decided to stick on to the one available Free & Open option ie, Eclipse.This tutorial is a sneek peek into the getting this IDE for Perl up and running in Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon.

Softwares needed:
JDK or JRE
Eclipse 3.2
EPIC
Perlcritic

First Install the Eclipse platform preferrably 3.2 or above.Ensure that the JRE or JDK is already present because eclipse is dependant on that.As of now Eclipse would support java only, to set it up for Perl, download the EPIC package from http://e-p-i-c.sourceforge.net/ To install the plugin EPIC in Eclipse, in the eclipse window, navigate to Help -> Software Updates -> Find & Install -> Select for new features to install -> New Local site. Now select the downloaded package and the installation would go on fine.

It is assumed that creation of workbench, projects and files in eclipse are known.Now we have come to the interesting part of setting up perlcritic. perlcritic is a static analyzer which analyses the file on compilation and spits out warnings in case it does not fall in line with Perl Best Practices by Damien Conway. This comes in handy to write efficient and discernable code.Perlcritic is dependant on a number of perl modules most of which are not part of gutsy but part of hardy. Before installing perlcritic from http://packages.ubuntu.com/hardy/perl/libperl-critic-perl look into the dependencies and install those by dpkg -i file.deb once the perlcritic is installed configure the EPIC properties in Eclipse which is a easy one to do.

Now for perlcritic to throw up the warnings, install the perl module criticism from http://search.cpan.org/~thaljef/criticism-1.01/ then in the code that you write include the line use criticism 'gentle'; remember to remove the this line before shipping your product :) Now you have a perfect IDE for Perl up and running.

I am still on the search for a perl source code browser something like cscope or opengrok which works for C. If someone knows of any, dont forget to share it with me in a comment!!!

go Wi-Fi easily!!!

Recently i Wi-Fi'ed my house by running Linksys WRT54G Broadband Router. We got Airtel broadband 384 kbps connection along with a Beetel BX220 Modem. Though the net is filled up with a lot of tutorials on configuring the router, a complete start to end procedure couldn't be found. hence i thought of taking a ride along this path.

The Beetel BX220 is a modem cum router.Now you can access this modem at 192.168.1.1 When you attach the Linksys router it would also take up the same IP. So there are two work-around.one is by bridging the modem or to change the IP in the Linksys router.To bridge the modem connect to it and disable the DHCP server in it and change from PPPoE to Bridging.By this the modem would act just like an relay nothing more.

Now connect the cables in the following way.from phone to modem and from modem to router.now connect the computer to the router.The router could be reached at 192.168.1.1 The configurations out there are quite simple (refer to the userguide of the router for more info) Since the modem is now no more than a dump relay the router has to dial-up and other stuffs .Hence select the PPPoE by providing the username and password provided by your ISP.Enable DHCP server in the router.


4 points are to be addressed here to ensure security.

1. Change the password of the Router.

2. setup a Security pass key .Though WEP is widely used, going for WPA is recommend as it is tough nut to crack than WEP.

3. Disable SSID broadcast.By doing so your Router connection name wont be seen at all.Only the people who know the SSID can connect to the Wi-Fi.The crackers now have another field to crack apart from the Key.

4. Enable MAC Filter.By doing so you can allow only the systems with the MAC address you have enlisted to connect the Wi-Fi.

By now you would be up and running Wi-Fi

The Silicon Beast comes into existence

It was the month of december and it was dark in the evening, with the bitingly cold breeze wrapped around the smokey mist.It was the perfect timing for the rise of the black blended in silver.The laser Verve is infact the hood of the monster inside. It engulfes the victim with the desire to possess it. It bares one of all the sophistication that he has possessed before. It sounds the death kneel to other makes and defeats them with its stylish looks and sheer performance.It is the master of the Black which prevails over the others. Not many clones or equals it has,

Ladies and Gentleman,

Behold!!! for it is the HP's BlackBird, Emperor of all Desktops, exclusively designed for gaming.It is the dawn of the new era in gaming. No specs here. Get it for yourself from
http://h20435.www2.hp.com/

For heaven's sake dont miss the Flash intro

Finally, Aragorn is here

On december 7th, i bought HP's dv2601 TX Special Edition Laptop. I christened him as Aragorn, the elessar who never fails. Truely The mark of the Anduriel Sword of the west is set as the laser verve design on my Laptop(just kidding, but the fluid design is cool). I had Windows Vista in that, and then i installed Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. The sound worked just out of the box.Kewl thing indeed. I am waiting for the free 20 DVD movies to arrive at my doorstep :)

http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/in/en/ho/WF05a/1090709-1116637-1116665-1116665-1116665-80627766.html for the specs

Gutsy's compiz-fusion in Intel Graphics card

Gutsy Gibbon wont be much different from fiesty fawn if you dont enable compiz-fusion in it.By default compiz-fusion would be installed.but you have to install compizconfig-settings-manager additionally. after installing this visit System->preferences->Advanced desktop effect settings. Then select which ever effect you want to have and then close it. go to change desktop background and select the visual effects tab and select custom. Most drivers would start compiz effects now like magic.but mine being a intel built-in graphics card, certain changes had to be made in the /etc/xdg/compiz/compiz-manager just add SKIP_CHECKS="yes" in that and you would have compiz-fusion running :)

for starting the cube-effect you have to increase the number of workspaces to 4 which would be 2 by default.

All the Fuss about Gmail 2.0

i was upgraded to GMail 2.0 quite before some my friends could feel the new GMail. How Google Inc chose me early i have no clue about.Overall i find some new features peeping out here and there. Some to list are

* Now group chat could be done through Gmail itself by selecting Options in any one the friends chat window and then selecting group chat.EMoticons are also added in the corner :)

* The all new sign-out of chat feature enables you to check mails without being disturbed by pinging.

* The back button in the browser is atlast made to use with ordered naming convention to take people thro previous pages.

* The new Contact list with enhanced navigation, and ability to to take in the form of vCards.

* Faster prefetching of messages to enable quicker viewing of mails.

* The new filter messages like these option in actions menu.

* Integrated Photo picker with Picasa web Album.

* Apart from this the availability of IMAP support is an added advantage.

* Ability to bookmark important e-mails which could be later reached though one has to be logged on into Gmail.

* Ability to share email seraches with friends.Thereby you could direct your friend to reach the mail you are talking about.

Brewing hot soon to be served are:

* Social Gmail, which comes out with a group out of one's contacts depending upon the amount of data you type, and how fast you respond etc, it would be more like a live profile. Also one could share documents, web-links,photos, what not through here itself..

* Gmail Offline, when microsoft office suite is feeling the heat of google docs, now its outlook's turn to feel the heat. Google is trying to come out with Gmail Offline with the google gears in the back-end, it is possible to check mails, etc when the internet connection is down(by aggregating the mails in local hard disk), and later when it is up it could be synced with the gmail servers.Soon it would become a full fledged offline Mail client.

* Viewing Account Activity: It would be possible soon to check your gmail account activities to figure out when it was last logged on, System IP address and all other log related information.

For the People who changed the segregation of mails into searching of mails it would not take much time to come up with yet another revolution.

Feisty Fawn to Gutsy Gibbon

Though a patroniser of Debian GNU/linux for a long time, i didn't have Debian Etch with me to install .Therefore i tossed Ubuntu CD in the Drive and proceeded with it.Initially i installed Fiesty Fawn [7.04] and then the desire to use compiz made me to upgrade to Gutsy Gibbon[7.10].

The way to upgrade is to visit System->Administration->Update-Manager. First update all the softwares available for Feisty. since the update manager is configured to work by connecting directly to internet, it gave some problem initially.To correct this you have to do two things

1) Open Software Sources from System->Administration then make it to use main source from the list box.
2) Open Synaptic Package Manager from System->Administration then go to Settings->preferences and in the Network tab give your proxy details.

After this try to update all the softwares.Once it is ready you can move on to the next step.

Feisty Fawn sometimes comes up with a empty meta-release file in /var/lib/update-manager/. This file should basically contain the information on the next release etc, to enable upgradation. To overcome the empty file problem, download the following file and put it as meta-release file in the above specified folder

http://changelogs.ubuntu.com/meta-release-development

Now launch the update-manager, and proceed on with the upgrade button that is available there.Enjoy upgrading and be sure to read my next blog entry on how to enable compiz in Gutsy Gibbon in a system with Intel Graphics card.

Gmail joins the Mailbox size increase Competition

It seems that the gush of high capacity hard disks which have hit the market predominantly finds its way to the Data Centres around the world which powers the E-mail Industry.Recently Microsoft Hotmail Live increasing the mail box size to 5GB and Yahoo Mail celebrated its 10th anniversary by providing a mailbox size of Infinity from May 2007.Gmail which has remained the leader of the pack joins in for the fray too. Gmail which came into being in 2004 with a whooping mailbox size of 1 GB gave out 2GB in 2005 and released a "Infinity + 1" plan by which the mailbox size counter was always kept on the move.A graph outlining their plan attracted many Gmailians in 2005 and it is shown at the side

Gmailians would have noticed that their mailbox size have crossed 4 GB by now and speculative MailBox sizes are predicted all over the Internet.But the answer lies in your Gmail homepage itself.The counter is incremented by a javascript in the homepage where they set the limit to be achieved at a specific point in time.As per that, the following stats are arrived

Apr 1 2007 13:30 2835 MB
Oct 12 2007 13:30 2912 MB
Oct 23 2007 12:30 4321 MB
Jan 4 2008 13:30 6283 MB
Jan 17 2038 13:30 43008 MB
Jan 2 3456 12:30 number.MAX_VALUE = 1.79E+308

People @ Google Inc seems to have immense foresight however one question still lingers in my mind.The number.MAX_VALUE is the largest number could be represented and a value above this is called as infinity. So if Gmail has to stick to their plan of "Infinity + 1" then they have to score two more :)

Solaris to be shipped in IBM blades

A strategic alliance is what Sun tells about this deal with IBM. IBM has accepted to ship Solaris OEM with their blades. So what is going to be the impact in the market? If you have a look at the market share of lower-end x86(blades, Proliants) servers its the HP which leads there followed by DELL and IBM. In an attempt to raise through the ranking IBM has accepted this strategy which might help Sun in promoting Solaris. I do not want to speculate much on this but going through the some analysis reveals that there wont be much change in the rankings.Perhaps the deal might affect the GNU/Linux market especially Red Hat's Enterprise editions as Sun is slowly trying to penetrate the GNU/Linux deployments in the internet arena where x86 & GNU/Linux combination rules.

For IBM its an optional offering with their hardware. For Sun its a new arena where their solaris has not penetrated much.Keeping my fingers crossed i am watching what is going to be the impact of it in both the hardware and OS Market share world!!

Power of Itanium 2 (Montecito)

Itanium has been the most talked about processor even before it hit the market in 2001. it competes with the enterprise server processors like IBM's Power and Sun's UltraSparc. But when it hit the stands its sales didn't soar up as it was expected.This is mainly because of the ignorance of many people about its architecture and how to get the best out of it. some time back when in college some people had sarcastically pointed out for our college going for a itanium processor based Symmetric Multi Processor system(SMP). Now i would like to clear out those dirt out of the Byte-crunching Itanium processor.


Itanium is designed using the Explicitly Parallel Intruction Code (EPIC) architecture which is a completely new design neither near to RISC nor to CISC. EPIC means the that Itanium processor does not have the hardware in its chip for identifying instruction dependencies for parallel execution. By doing so some amount of chip space is vacuumed which could be used for accommodating additional registers.All the parallelism has to be decided by the compiler itself during compiling. The resulting binary could be made to run on the Itanium processor at mind boggling speeds. Imagine having 128 (64 bit)General purpose registers, 128 (82 bit) Floating point register, 64 branch and predicate register, 64 application register etc working on your data. really stupendous!!! Therefore if your compiler doesn't parallelize the code just like for other processors you would find itanium lagging, leading to people doubting its capacity.Itanium is best suited for places where the applications are fine tuned for it and then would one realize its sheer speed in computation.

Itanium could theoritically execute 6 instructions per cycle and practically known to execute 3 instructions per cycle while x86 architecture could do only one instruction at a time.Itanium's latest release Montecito has 2 cores each with 2 threads(coarse multithreading - doesn't run concurrently, one thread chips in when other does memory lookup ) emulating to 4 processor. Thunder and NASA's Columbia supercomputer's secret lies with Itanium !!! Apart from this Itanium has built-in capability to handle virtualization which means it can run multiple operating system concurrently. its huge 24 MB L3 on-die (internal) cache adds to its efficiency in fetching data as quickly as possible.The speculative execution in Itanium is very robust adds to its performance. Itanium 2 has improved a lot in power consumption and in price/performance arena. Itanium's sales is picking up and latest survey has indicated that its revenue is over 63% of SPARC system revenue and over 54% of Power system revenue.

As Tukwila (Itanium's next generation)is round the corner packed with quad core, Simultaneous MultiThreading(SMT- Intel's next Lethal weapon) and Common system interface and other features up its sleeve, i could smell out a competition brewing in the processor arena with IBM's Power7, Sun's Ultrasparc Rock(16 cores with yet to be decided on number of threads) and from AMD's Fusion

Emacs vs Vi

Oh god!!!! not another flame war. Today as a part of training session seminar i took emacs and as usual it ended in a flame war. very particular in not degrading any other editors during my session and giving out the salient features of Emacs itself lead to this.

Once started would i leave it so easily??? no way man. its a crusade from the chruch of emacs headed by me. I started of protesting vehemently. The moderators atlast put an end to it and asked us to come up with a list of differences between them some time later.

many links speaks in volume about the differences. but the below one is really funny.

http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=01/12/04/0326236

Changing resolution to 1024x768 in solaris

As i have started fiddling with solaris these days, i am trying to make certain things perfect in my system.After installing the solaris i borrowed the perl script from Pradhap devarajan'blog and used it to set certain initial settings like having my home mapped to root directory etc...( yeah i am yet to create a normal user, again because of procastination :( ) after that i still had some problems withe the GUI.it had options only for a 800x600 resolution so again i mailed in the mailing list and got help from pradhap. i first ran kdmconfig to select Xorg to be used instead of Xsun.then i ran the xorgconfig to create a xorg.conf in /etc/X11 which would not be created by default.then it started asking the details od mouse,keyboard,video card,moniter etc.then it eventually wrote the xorg.conf.then i looked for something like /etc/init.d/gdm restart but could not. so CTRL+ALT+Backspace did the trick.i rebooted and then changed the screen resoultion to 1024x768 which was not available before.and hey presto i got the thing what i wanted.but only one problem i did not specify the keyboard properly cos of this it echoed some other alphabets while typing. hence i reconfigured from start and specified the correct keyboard and there i got the perfect looking and working system.

I still have some questions why is that no console appears when CTRL+ALT+F1....F6 is pressed.should i have to setup something to enable it.also my audio driver needs some GStreamer plugin it seems.should configure that thing soon.i am yet to figure out how to start and stop services here in solaris.cos in init.d i could not find many of the services starting and stoping scripts.The mailing list ug-madosug is the place where i would be discovering these answers :)

Solaris in my Grub atlast

Eventhough i had installed solaris on more than 5 systems in the lab the attempt that i did on my system proved to be very tough.my hard disk was not properly partitioned right from the day i got it. (2 hard disk with 20GB + 40 GB hard disk) I left that work for later day but this procastination is the villian.lazily i just cleared one partition for solaris and tried installing but i had problems with the boot_archive.so i tried once again by around 3 am and i slept leaving the installation to happen.i dont know what was wrong with my system but when i got up a mere 800 MB was installed out of 4120MB. i switched it off and started to college. that night again i sat and started installing, everything went on well till the last 10 MB was about to be installed power went off and my screen went blank. i got wild with rage cos of the fate and went to bed. Next day evening i fully formatted my 20GB disk and used 10 GB for debian GNU/Linux(which i installed again) and 10 GB for Solaris.now my 40 GB has got 5 partitions for Windows XP. Atlast i succeeded in installing solaris in my system.i copied the splash image from belenix and is using that in my GRUB :) My friends on seeing my system booting with that Splash image and also the three OS available in my system could not prevent from letting out the words "oh my my"

Solaris - An Odyssey to take

on August 17th and 18th Mr.Ananth Shrinivas and Mr.Prathap Devarajan from Sun microsytems were in our college to educate the students about Opensolaris.Though i knew that x86 version of Solaris existed before itself i saw two such for the first time in reality on their laptops."solaris is always synonymous with the SPARC[a ruthless bytecrunching monster]" has been my view in the past.Only a few times had i ever heard of people speaking about solaris and i was waiting for an opportunity to have hands on experience in Solaris.

i first installed Solaris on one hard disk with both of them nearby and the installation was similar to the debian installation in terms of the range of the information it asked but different in terms of the environment and keys used.The partition naming terminologies were different and i crossed that level with ease as i used one of the 2 hard disks fully.then the installation were over and it binded to the NIS server of our lab properly and booted correctly.The Gnome had been customised by the people at sun and after seeing that did i believe that gnome could be used effectively to produce a really stuning look..DTrace is an amazing tool which involves a "simple idea but complex implementation" .Though i could not understand the syntax of the D language i could make out from the results it dumped what could have been the question possed at it.But never even once could i tell at what places it could be used and how the script should be framed before, ananth ran the eg scripts.

Then on the 18th of August due to some delay we started the session by 10:30 and the history of unix and solaris was handled by ananth.Then followed the session on Zones by Pratap.He gave the some insight on Branded zones too.After which ZFS was handled and then we shifted to the CS Conference hall.here we had some normal discussion on the whole thing and the people possed their questions.After the session we got the DVD and CDs from them and then i accompanied Pratap to the temple and from there to the Bus Stand.

The Session made us to understand the cool technologies available only in Solaris and not in any other Operating Systems.The Third year students too felt the same.But for the Second years(who had not yet studied OS concepts) and also for the people who had no clue about Unix based systems, there were in NO MAN's LAND.But the number of People who were really profitted by this would count to some 35-40 people.Had i come across this session quite some time back i would have based my project in this.now it is too late :( Atleast the junior people got some insight and exposure on these technologies.The coolest thing was the customized Gnome GUI.

Some of the areas where i flinched was when Linux kernel was rebuked badly.True, solaris is a OS which is generation ahead but the purpose with which it started and also concentrated on are on servers and not on ordinary PC's.while Linux is aimed at to be used as a desktop system and later it evolved and it started dominating the servers market.Both are different and could not be compared.Linux is young and was started only in the 90's while Solaris is old and its history dates back to the early 80's.While solaris has got some cooool features for administering, Linux has got many drivers for all kinds of systems.True some of the features in solaris cant be implemented in Linux cos it is meant to be that way.

kudos for the two people from Sun Microsystems for their initiative in taking this seminar.We have decided to create a mailing list called MOSUG -Madurai OpenSolaris UserGroup and also we are going to install OpenSolaris in all the client systems in Unix lab so that people can start using it.The point is solaris is a great OS with great innovations and it should be learnt by the CS people.To conclude Solaris has bagged a spot in my GRUB after GNU/Linux :)