Here is a phone conversation that makes me wonder when Linux distributions are gonna be desktop-ready.

[Background - I have installed both Linux and Windows on the computer in my Dad's medical laboratory (he's a doctor) in order to help him try out a software I had written for him.] Dad: Windows is not starting. Patients are waiting for reports! Hospitals are asking for reports. Me: What does the computer show? Dad: It just says GRUB minimal editing Me: Does it show grub> ? Dad: Yes (I quickly scurry to yahoo search to look for the GRUB manual and I recollect that GRUB boots Windows using chain-loading) Me: Dad, please run these commands:

rootnoverify (hd0,0) now press enter makeactive now press enter chainloader +1 now press enter boot now press enter

Dad: Windows started! Me: Thank god.

I shudder to think what would have happened if I wasn’t able to find a solution immediately. Getting medical reports for patients is critical. I’m not worried that GRUB failed (since I was able to solve the problem this time), all software fail at one point or another but I hope that this hasn’t put off my Dad in still using Linux.

Though, I wonder why GRUB screwed up like that.

My 12-year old sister wanted to learn more about musical instruments for some homework that she wanted to write and asked me if I knew something to write about. I told her she could use the internet to read all about that.

So, she logged into Fedora. I showed her how to open Firefox and then told her to type ‘wikipedia.org’ and press enter. Go to ‘Search’ and type ‘musical instruments’ and press enter. Voila! All the information is there. She got fascinated by the amount of info as well as the nice images on the pages about the guitar, violin, veena, sarod and many more.

It was remarkable how easily she took to Firefox. She was opening the site, searching for something, right clicking and opening in new tabs, all after just 5 min of showing her how to do it.

She even uses the computer to draw. She used to use KPaint but has now graduated to GIMP.

And they say Linux is not easy.

I was using MEPIS Linux for the past 4 days after a high recommendation by Pradeep and I was remarkably surprised by the ease of install.

First of all, it acts as a LiveCD so you can test out everything before you do any install and then you then click on the Install section in the menu and it’ll install on the hard disk. Uber-cool!

However, I hit a roadblock on two things - sound wasn’t working and the Sify dialer wasn’t working. Regarding sound, I tried everything but couldn’t get it working at all…

Disappointed, I just had to switch back to Fedora since I needed a working system fast… so I installed FC3 again and now I’m back in business.. The Fedora Installation Guide was of immense help - especially the part about removing unused services at startup and using the KDE Display Manager instead of gdm. Everything looks so much better now!

Also, I have started to rewrite chapters of my book, so that I can get back in the writing groove and also improve the wordings of many parts of the book. I’m taking into consideration the huge list of corrections sent by readers that I haven’t been able to incorporate till now. You can look forward to some good improvements in the book

I’m doing a late-nighter at work today… so I thought of listening to some music while doing the hackathon, but I’ve got bored of the ones on my hard disk. So, how about internet radio? Well, I switched to FC2 on my office box, so I can’t use Yahoo Messenger 6 Launchcast radio, but wait, there is an alternative, Shoutcast! So, I go there, click on one of the stations that suits me and listen to great songs in XMMS! Now, ain’t that nice? (And yes, you can use Winamp too )

And… thanks to the IPv6 disabling tip, browsing is now several times faster on Fedora!

Fedora Core 2 has been released! I can’t wait to get my hands on it - Kernel 2.6, KDE 3.2.2, GNOME 2.6, GIMP 2.0, k3b, ALSA, GCC 3.4 and much much more.

Some cool screenshots and it is already a superhit!

If you have already got your hands on a copy, please do tell me.