Rob Levin, better known as `lilo’ on Freenode was hit by a car when he was riding his motorcycle on September 12. He suffered head injury and was in coma. He passed away today early morning when his family decided to take out the life support. Though many people considered him obnoxious and irritating, Freenode proved to be critical to many Free Software projects. Adieu, my friend, and thanks for all the fish.
General
26
Aug 06
The Bliss of Free Wireless
I am at the Barista in Koramangla, Bangalore at this moment. Though they don’t have WiFi at their premises, I am getting 5 cells from a nearby Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology. w00t! I will write about the 4th International Conference on GPLv3 and my experience with rms later, when I reach my den …
16
Aug 06
Do you know this guy?
I was watching The Codebreakers and I saw a person (in a split second frame) who looked very familiar to me. So is the person below Mahendra M? If he is indeed Mahendra, then I’d like to know how he got into the movie, and if he isn’t then it’d be all the more interesting 
20
Jul 06
The Dell XPS m1210 — a mini review
After a lot of research, I recently got a Dell XPS m1210 for my girl friend. It’s a cool 12.1″ WXGA laptop with pretty much cutting edge features. It has an Intel T2300 Core Duo processor and came with 1 GiB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM and a 80 GB SATA HDD. It also has the usual embellishments like DVD RW, Intel Pro Wireless, 9 cell battery etc. All this weighs just around 2 Kg and costs around 1500 USD. So it’ll neither break your back nor will it burn a hole in your kitty 
It came with something called Dell Media Direct which is some kind of embedded DVD player and would run without an Operating System. I clean formatted the hard drive and tried to install Ubuntu 6.06 LTS “Dapper Drake” on it. But I was struck by a known bug in the Ubuntu installer which frustrated me a lot. I installed Ubuntu on it finally by avoiding the bug somehow and everything went just fine afterwards. I thought that I’d need to compile and install the Wireless drivers myself but I was pleased to see that Ubuntu included the binary firmware in its restricted modules package. So everything worked just “out of the box” It was pretty amazing to see great support for relatively new hardware in GNU/Linux. The only thing that I had to fix by hand was the display resolution. X.org could detect only 1024×768 resolution which not only looked bad, but due to the different aspect ratio things looked a bit stretched horizontally. I fixed the problem by using 915resolution to over-write the display BIOS. I added an entry for 1280×800 in an unused slot and that fixed the problem just fine.
As far as the performance of the laptop is concerned, it’s just amazing. It’s very fast considering its size and I am sure it will beat any laptop in its class. It takes only around 25 secs for Ubuntu to boot, and < 30 mins to rip a DVD. What else can I say, I can’t really complain. At last, a really portable as well as usable laptop. I am really feeling like keeping it for myself and handing over my 3 year old Toshiba to her.
Though almost everything works fine by default I guess it’d be good to have a comaptibility matrix. So here it is –
| 1. | Processor (Intel T2300 Core Duo) | Works | Needs SMP kernel |
| 2. | DVD RW Drive (Sony) | Works | - |
| 3 | SATA Hard Disk (Hitachi) | Works | - |
| 4. | Ethernet (Broadcom BCM4401-B0) | Works | Needs b44 module |
| 5. | Wireless (Intel 3945abg) | Works | Needs ipw3945 module, firmware, etc. |
| 6. | Display (Intel 950) | Works | Needs 915resolution to get high resolution |
| 7. | Sound (Intel 82801G) | Works | Needs snd-hda-intel module |
| 8. | Firewire (Ricoh) | Works | Needs ieee1394 module |
| 9. | Modem (Intel) | Haven’t tested, but should work | Most probably will work with the snd-intel8×0m module |
| 10. | Card Reader (Ricoh) | Somewhat works | Works with SD, doesn’t work with MMC |
| 11. | ACPI | Somewhat works | Suspend to RAM doesn’t work yet |
The things that don’t work at the moment will start working soon as and when newer kernels are released. The hardware is very new, so small issues can be expected. Over all, it’s a very nice laptop to buy. I haven’t faced any quirks with it and seems to be very stable. Final verdict — great buy, very good hardware and very good value for money.
Toufeeq has also written a nice review of his XPS m1210, though his configuration differs slightly with mine it’s very useful.
3
Jul 06
The coffee now smells better
I went to our local Cafe Coffee Day after quite a few weeks last Saturday. Then I went inside the front-desk to change a few songs and the friendly waiter Amit told me something which had the word “Linux” in it. I ignored him completely and went on to the computer desk and noticed that there were two computers now instead of one. They are doing the billing on a new HP machine and the songs are being played from the old machine. I asked the manager the secret behind the new machine and he told me “They have now upgraded the software everywhere and it now runs on Linux”. I was extremely surprised. I couldn’t believe it, so I went on to check it out myself. And indeed, Ctrl+Alt+F1 told me that they are running some flavour of GNU/Linux. The actual Java application ran on the 2nd virtual terminal. It seems they have somehow locked down the system and it boots up to start the Java app by itself. Pretty nice actually. They also have some nifty things like a 802.11 based order taking device and also a bill printer.
I am sure this is a pretty big step towards total GNU/Linux domination. This bold step by Cafe Coffee Day will help in proving that GNU/Linux is indeed ready for the enterprise.
So guys, go ahead and enjoy your coffee in Cafe Coffee Day, and be assured that your bill is being processed by a system based on Free Software
6
Jun 06
Elephants Dream — A very nice watch
I downloaded and watched Elephants Dream yesterday. The animation, sound and visual effects are simply awesome. It's amazing to see what can be achieved with Blender, The GIMP and other Free Software tools. The movie is of professional quality and the actors are good too. The downside is of course the story-line. The story though innovative, seemed to have ended quite abruptly.
But let's look at the positive sides. The movie was created with a sole purpose of showing to the world the capabilities of Free Software tools in general and Blender in particular. And they have achieved their goal surely. Also, all the production files of the whole film plus the soundtrack have been released under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license which is simply incredible. Everybody in this world is allowed to use any part of the movie to create a derived work. So it's only a matter of time when somebody will create a newer and probably a better version of the movie and will release it to the world. I am also hoping that more movies like this one are released in the future.
24
Nov 05
First post!
Yay! I have a new blog! The earlier blog I was writing got busted owing to a crappy host, and since I don't yet have the money to buy my own hosting, I had been looking for a free blog hosting service for quite sometime. I know I could have used Blogger or LiveJournal, but I never really liked their blogging softwares. Wordpress was & still is my most favourite blogging software, and I am really happy that wordpress.com is offering this amazing service for free. What's more, it seems they are using some really cool version of WP here with AJAX and all, so it rocks big time!
Wait for more!
