Canonical, the guys behind Ubuntu Linux, seem to be creating a “next-generation distributed version control system” called Bazaar-NG. It’s written in Python and is primarily tested on Ubuntu. I haven’t played with it but it seems it is already self-hosting, that demonstrates a bit of its capabilities. They have excellent documentation already. Although, I am wondering how they are going to handle the ‘distributed’ part.

(via creosote)

Update : The lead guy on Bazaar-NG is also the person who wrote DistCC. So, I guess he knows what he’s doing

Most music sites will work only on Windows and that too specifically IE – so I was glad to see that MusicIndiaOnline now works on Linux using the RealOne Player. Their FAQ answers about how to get it to work on Linux.

Btw, I really like this album by Om – The Fusion Band, especially the ‘Maula’ and ‘Mohana’ songs.

Its great that I get to hear these songs for free. Now that I have heard these songs and really like them, I can buy the cassette/CD from the music shop knowing that the money is well-spent. I usually have a good nose errr…. pair of ears for music but off late, I’ve bought a few cassettes which I’m sure I’m never gonna hear again.

Tip: Mepis Linux comes with RealOne installed. So I didn’t have to do anything to get this working. It just worked out of the box. I like this so much that I want to say it again – ‘It just works.’

Should Yahoo! open up its messenger protocol? Does Google really follow its ‘Do no evil’ philosophy? Should government and public data be allowed to be handled by proprietary software? Is open source the solution always? Is using non-freedom software detrimental? The big debate is here.

Praveen says that GNOME is better but I don’t think I will switch from KDE anytime soon. I know this is the start of a holy war, in spite of that, here is why I prefer KDE over GNOME :

• Lots of good applications – Kate, Konsole, Quanta Plus, K3B, KSysGuard, Cervisia, KSnapshot, and many many more. Show me some reasonably good equivalents in the GNOME world. I’ve come across none.

• Konqueror rocks – A web browser, file explorer, FTP client, manpage viewer, etc, etc all rolled into one.

• Integration – Because of the KPart system, I can view zip files or read text within Konqueror and without the need to open another application. Also, all settings can be changed from a single Control Center.

• OK and Cancel buttons are in the right order – yes, this is a serious usability issue for me.

• IMHO, KDE is faster and more stable than GNOME. Also, Qt applications tend to be more lightweight and more stable than Gtk applications. For example, compare Kontact and Evolution, KDevelop and Anjuta, and the best comparison of all, Konsole and gnome-terminal.

• KDE works well on FreeBSD whereas GNOME comes lacking in this respect. I know this doesn’t particularly apply to me but in a company like Y! where almost all of the developers are on FreeBSD, this matters.

• Upcoming KDE 4 will make you switch back to KDE. Period.

So, all ye Linux and BSD users, which is your choice?

Conclusion: The Free and Open Source Software community is all about choice. Its a good thing (TM) that we have choices – KDE, GNOME, XFCE, Enlightenment, etc. You can choose what you like and use it. Freedom to choose matters.

I switched to Mepis GNU/Linux on my office system today. Just one word – Beauuuu—ti—ful!

I had earlier tried Mepis at home but had to switch back to Fedora Linux because of a stupid program provided by Sify Broadband, without which I cannot use the internet.

Ironically, I just had to switch from Fedora because of its numerous problems. For example, yum is a real PITA. Also, using the CDROM drive has become problematic – I have to actually change permissions of /dev/cdrom before I can play Audio CDs! Another issue is that Fedora startup is real slow.

So, I had to switch and I chose Mepis. MEPIS is an acronym for Managerial, Educational and Personal Information Systems.

First, I backed up the existing stuff on my Fedora box – my mail, my code and all other important stuff on to a CD as well as a remote system. I then downloaded the single-CD SimplyMepis 2004.06 and burnt it to a CD.

I rebooted the system, popped in the CD, the LiveCD system started running. Imagine using a complete operating system and all the software without even installing it on your hard disk! I was shocked to see that I was able to access internet already (it had used DHCP to set up the network). Really slick. Everything’s running so good and pretty fast, I could easily just boot off the CD for daily work! But it would be boring to do that everytime. Also, all my settings can be saved on a hard disk installation.

I clicked on Menu -> System -> MEPIS Utilities -> MEPIS Installation Center. Click on ‘Install MEPIS on Hard Drive’, asked MEPIS to use the hard disk any way it wants, clicked on Next and installation was done in 4-5 minutes! Yikes. The tips displayed during the installation are extremely useful, even for a long-time Linux user like me.

Once the installation was done, I configured the network to have my proper static IP address, etc. Then, I see that only the Mozilla suite comes with Mepis, not Firefox and Thunderbird. Okay, time to read up on apt-get, the package management system that comes with Mepis. It allows you to download and install software with a single command. No fuss, no muss. The manual was really simple and remarkably up-to-date as well, but then I then noticed the ‘Package Management’ tab in the MEPIS System Center – so I chose to use the Japan mirrors for packages and then tried KPackage to install Firefox. Didn’t work. It gave me some error 300 or something like that.

So, had to go back to apt-get on the command line. First, I used apt-cache search thunderbird, it seems ‘mozilla-firefox’ is what I need. Next comes apt-get install mozilla-firefox and apt-get install mozilla-thunderbird. Bam! 10 minutes later, I copied over my old mails and I had my mail and browser ready to go. After some more customization, my system was totally ready and that too within an hour!

What amazed me most of all is how easy MEPIS really is. If anybody says that Linux is tough, point them to Mepis and give a big grin. Yep, that’s how easy it is. Even Windows asks more questions during installation! MEPIS comes with all the multimedia stuff ready as well – RealPlayer, Xine, MPlayer are all there. The browser plugins are properly configured as well. Even Java is installed. It has one of the fastest startup times that I’ve come across. This is truly Linux for the desktop.

I have mentioned all the pluses, so here come the minuses. First off, the default theme sucks. Yes, I plan to change it later on. Second, how do I enable services (specifically ssh daemon) ? Fedora had a GUI for that. Oh well, a symlink in the current run level directory did the trick. Another question is why are Firefox and Thunderbird not part of the standard install ?! It definitely should be. Another gripe is Synaptic should be part of the standard install as well.

Also, the Mepis website is simply confusing. It doesn’t have a ‘Start Here’ section like it should. Also, what’s the difference between SimplyMEPIS and ProMEPIS? I still haven’t found out the answer to that one.

Synaptic and apt-get as a system totally rocks. I needed to install my beloved VIM on my system. So click on Start -> System -> Synaptic Package Manager. Enter the root password. Click on ‘Search’, enter ‘VIM’ and press Enter. It shows up a list of packages that are related to VIM. Double-click on vim and click ‘Apply’ . DONE. Its that easy.

I am really wondering why the Fedora community still hasn’t brought yum to the same level of polish as apt-get.

To finish off, I am really surprised why I haven’t tried Debian before. I guess, old (Red Hat) habits die hard. Mepis, which is based on Debian, is so user-friendly that I had to switch. I accept, I am a convert.

Sidenote : Yes, I know about Ubuntu Linux but I am a KDE user. So, MEPIS is the one for me.

Update : Advice to Mepis users in India : Use the ‘au’ i.e. Australian mirror, I find it to be the fastest for me.

Nat Friedman announced that Tor Lillqvist, of GTK+ on Windows fame, has joined Novell and will soon be working on a port of Evolution to Windows!!

I am not particularly excited at the thought of using Evolution (I prefer Thunderbird) but I am excited because the effort that will be put into the porting will certainly help the GTK port itself, a lot. It means I can seriously consider writing a cross-platform software now.

I’ve been contemplating learning wxWidgets (and wxPython in particular) but I find it to be a moving target most of the time, it’s not stable and I heard the cross-platform feature of wxPython is not really that great. I have detailed this in my post on the byte-of-python mailing list. I really like Qt but, through experience, being able to write cross-platform apps sometimes really does matter.

What experience, you ask? I once wrote a software called Diamond which was a medical laboratory management software. I toiled on it for several months and wrote about 13,000 lines of code for it. It was also my first big GUI project. All the features were great, there were few rough edges but it was reasonably acceptable, it’s only failure was that it didn’t run on Windows. Why? Because I had written it in Qt and I couldn’t afford the Qt licensing fee just for this project. I wasn’t able to convince the doctors to switch to Linux just to use this software. Plus, they used special hardware to scan images (of the patient) and needless to say, they require special device drivers which I am pretty sure wouldn’t be available on Linux.

Also, when I write a GUI chapter in my book, I want to steer clear of licensing issues as much as possible – its simply too confusing for newbies.

This brings me to another irony: Qt is under GPL and GTK is under LGPL, even though GTK is part of the GNU hierarchy who created and promote the GPL. Yet, the LGPL is the only advantage I see that Gtk has over Qt. I see every other advantage in Qt – powerful, simple, lots of useful widgets (the database widgets are really terrific), excellent documentation, C++, no need to worry about freeing memory (Qt takes care of it), upcoming Qt 4 has lots of goodies in it, …. and yet I’m back to square one.

I’ve even looked at wx.NET but I was just not comfortable with it – it looked more like ‘wxWidgets – the latest edition without pointers’ to me.

One good thing abou GTK is the look and feel – it feels nice and polished, sometimes I see the Firefox -> About menu just to click on the dandy ‘Ok’ button.

One bad thing is the new GtkFileChooser, it gets in my way every time – especially if I click on an attachment in my mail and want to change the ‘Open With’ program to something else, I browse to ‘/usr/bin’ and then it hangs since it is trying to list the 2674 files in that directory in the window…. I tried to use the autocompletion in the editing mode that pops up whenever you try to enter text in that dialog but it is completely unnatural for me to use it since the damn thing autocompletes it even before I press a tab! Sigh…. I usually directly enter ‘/usr/bin/kwrite’ in a KDE Open Window.

So for now, I will use KDE and probably will write Gtk apps (i.e. whenever I need to write GUI programs).

Note : I wanted to point to the screenshots of Diamond but my g2swaroop.net domain is down at the moment. I’ll update this post when it comes back online (hopefully in a few days)

P.S. I am trying hard not to make this post a flame bait.

Do you consider yourself a geek who loves to use GNU/Linux? Do you think you are one of the true geeks around who knows how to hack at it ?

Think again.

There’s an article in ‘The Hindu’ about Sharath Lakshman who has developed his own customized distro called ‘SLYNUX’. The amazing part is that he is a 15-year old student in 10th standard at Jawaharlal Nehru Government Higher Secondary School, Mahe, Kerala.

Excerpt:

"Another major feature about my OS is that it supports internal modems; something that other Linux versions normally don’t. It can also access most of the file types used in the Windows OS. In addition to this, SLYNUX also supports Malayalam fonts. I have even included an on-screen Malayalam keyboard," Sarath said.

By providing a flash player plug-in, a CD-burner software and a `paint’ programme, Sarath has also made sure that his OS is pretty strong on the multi-media front.

His official website is slynux.co.nr.

Knoppix is one of the coolest Linux distros around, especially because of its amazing hardware recognition capabilities.

To have a full operating system running just from a CD without the need for even a hard disk was simply unimaginable to me before I learnt about Knoppix. I was simply blown away when I first used it.

Some cool stuff can be done with this kind of technology as well such as the Movix project which allows you to create eMoviX CDs which boots on your computer and automagically starts playing movies! You can use K3B to create eMoviX CDs using Linux.

Also, check out how Jeremy Zawodny has set up Knoppix on the home computer so that his parents can use it with ease.

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