Changing the GRUB start time.

Well, a couple of days ago I was playing around with the configuration files while trying to get a Canon camera work as a web cam on Fedora 8 ( will be posting soon as soon as I get it working ). I don’t know what went wrong where but I guess I again messed up something somewhere. I booted my machine but the GRUB screen did not show up at all. I thought I screwed up my bootloader once again but rebooting the machine the second time I observed that the bootloader appeared, but only for a fraction of a second. From there onwards, it wasn’t rocket science to figure out what was going wrong.

The start up time in the bootloader config file had changed somehow ( how I dont know ). I just opened : /boot/grub/grub.conf

# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE: You have a /boot partition. This means that
# all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
# root (hd0,5)
# kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
# initrd /initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/sda
default=0
timeout=.1265375487234752873524368426354987123594872135041235182053-481253784
splashimage=(hd0,5)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Fedora (2.6.23.1-42.fc8 )
root (hd0,5)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.23.1-42.fc8 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet
initrd /initrd-2.6.23.1-42.fc8.img
title Other
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
~
~


If you notice the timeout in the above file it is some decimal number.
I have absolutely no idea how it changed
I just cleared the decimal and entered the time which I wanted the GRUB screen to display at bootup.

P.S. About the canon camera. I mailed the tech support for Canon and they replied back that using your canon digital camera as a webcam is not advisable as it heats up pretty quickly within 5 to 6 minutes of continuous use. Anyways you get web cams a hell lot cheaper, so why compromise on something that cost you a fortune as compared to web cams.
By the way I am trying out the above just to see if it is possible. Will post as soon as I get it working.

What’s the grey box on the top-left corner of the Gmail Window?

Ok. I have been noticing this speck on the top left corner of the Gmail window from quite sometime now but I am at a loss of words to describe what exactly the “graphic” is supposed to be. It started appearing or rather I’d say I started noticing this graphic some 15 days back but never bothered to find out what exactly it was. It looks something like: ( image courtesy TechCrunchIT)

That was reason enough for me to google it out and I found out I was not the only one who had noticed this.

www.techcrunchit.com/2008/07/05/the-mysterious-grey-box-on-gmail

This link here has an explanation and readers have also have some real “wacky” opinions on what the graphic is. Strange as it seems it appears only in Firefox and Safari browsers not in IE.
And as mysteriously the “box” started showing up it disappeared just as mysteriously.

X Crash!

You might as well have guessed by now the reason for the long hiatus from my previous post. I really messed up my X trying to install compiz on my machine. Compiz has got some real cool desktop effects like 3D cube which I decided to try out. But after I installed it and was all ready to check it out, the unthinkable happened. My X crashed! There I was staring at the blank screen and cursing myself. I should have remembered to

cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.bak

Since then I had been breaking my head trying to get my X working. Then I read somewhere ( courtesy kagesenshi ) that if you delete the /etc/X11/xorg.conf and restart, Xorg gets configured automatically. Duh! It was as simple as that!

The “Three” Commandments!

1) Do NOT log in as ‘root’ if you don’t know what you are doing.
2) Do NOT log in as ‘root’ even if you know what you are doing.
3) Never ever log in as ‘root’!

“With great power comes great responsibility”. Sad! I’ve learnt it the hard way.

Qt? Heck!! I’m loving it!

Qt is a cross-platform toolkit from Trolltech used for developing GUI applications for Windows, UNIX/X11, Mac and Linux Embedded. There are many others like GTK, Motif, TCL/TK. But, a little research on the net will show you why it’s the most preferred. Well I’m not some authority to comment on its more technical nitty gritties but the experience of the few months I’ve had with Qt is encouraging to say the least. It’s got a wonderful IDE, with widgets( control elements in Windows like Buttons, Forms ) with the drag and drop features( like Visual Studio in Windows ). Some of the well known applications created using Qt are Opera, Google Earth and Skype.

The event and event handlers concept which we are so familiar with in Visual Studio is known as signals and slots here. eg If a user clicks on the close button, we want the close() function to be called. A signal is emitted when a particular event occurs( button click here ) and a slot( event handler ) is a function that is called in response to a particular signal. If you have some experience in C++, learning Qt is absolute fun. It also comes loaded with numerous examples and a wonderful documentation that makes sure you never will have to refer any book while learning Qt. It is available under a dual license : a free evaluation version( under GPL ) and a commercial edition if you intend to use it for developing proprietary software

Well as of now, I’m using it on Linux for my final year project but it can also be used in Windows where it is integrated with Visual Studio. That’s the beauty of it. You can use it on a Windows platform for creating an application targeted for Linux or you can use it on Linux for an application targeted for a Mac. Still haven’t discovered even half of its features and I can’t wait to get going.

P.S: Thanks Reddy!

Getting media files to play on Fedora 8

One of the serious put-offs of linux is you can’t get anything running the first time. My touchpad wasn’t working the first time around. And don’t expect media to play as well! I have Fedora 8 installed and it has totem installed as the default media player. As expected, it wasn’t playing anything. I could have individually installed the codecs, but I didn’t want to take the trouble of scouting for codecs. By the way, some codecs are proprietary so there again you hit a roadblock. So, the only option left was to look for a third party repository. nubs on #fedora.freenode.net virtually ran me through the installation. Here’s how I did it:

1) Installed and activated the livna repository( Had to do it, because fedora repos do not have free codecs for some formats).

rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-8.rpm

2) Removed the existing player to make way for the version with additional support.

yum remove totem totem-plparser

3) Cleaned the yum cache.

yum clean all

4) Installed the player and all the other codecs required in one go!

yum install totem-xine xine-lib-extras xine-lib-extras-nonfree

I was done with it in four simple steps. There I was from “will totem ever play anything” to “is there anything totem won’t play?” Well, there are still some formats it doesn’t play like realmedia and a couple of others, but generally speaking it now plays almost everything under the sun!!

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Finally got TATA indicom USB Modem running on Fedora!

I have been trying to get my USB modem running on my Fedora machine since the last couple of days, but unsuccessfully. Finally after a little bit of probing on the internet, I finally got it running(Hurray!). Here’s how I went about doing it:

1)Connect the USB modem. Open the terminal and type wvdialconf wvdial.conf . Wvdial is text based ppp dialer that helps you connect to the internet.

2)The dialer utility scans all ports and automatically detects the modem. Mine was found on /dev/ttyACM0. The configuration is stored in /etc/wvdial.conf . You need to open the config file. It looks something like:

3)You need to change the username password to internet and the phone number to #777. Save and exit.

4)Now dial wvdial. I have created a seperate configuration for my modem and named it tata. You don’t need to do that except in the case you are using some other connection and you don’t want to bother with changing the .config file repeatedly. You see something like:

5)Voila!! You are now connected! . Open your browser and start surfing!

My first post finally!!

Hurray! My first post. Watch this space out for my musings on Linux.