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.