Punch the keys

I went with my family to shop in Big Bazaar today. We tend to avoid Big Bazaar because of the crowd and ambiance. Whats wrong with the ambiance? Well ! When you think of it, nothing unexpected. You see they make it very clear in the name itself that you should be expecting a bazaar. It is really noisy and crowded. Not just the typical Indian style bazaar. Here they use microphones to rant out a steady flow of announcements/offers. And that too not just one announcement at a time. There are multiple people who would be making the announcements. So you can imagine the amount of noise. Couple that with the chitchat and discussions of the shoppers, the background music and the cyclic advertisements on the television sets hung up from the ceilings.... The first time I had the "Big Bazaar" experience was at Hyderabad. There were people shouting out the offers using megaphones. My wife, my sister-in-law, my kid all of us were shaky after the crowded and noisy experience. We found th...

When I moved to Mangalore, I looked for an apartment which was decent and had a reserved parking space. Yes, I specifically looked for reserved parking. I did not want to go around looking for parking space after a hard days work. And I got just such an apartment. However, recently I have been having quite a bit of trouble with the car parking at my apartment. Even though the parking is reserved for me, I have been finding some other car parked at my space. Why? It seems that some owners did not pay up for separate car parking and hence do not have reserved parking. So they just park it at any place they want. They can see that it is marked for use by another flat number, however this does not bother them. They, and their guests, just feels free to park where ever the heck they want! Why do people just think "me! me! me!"? Can they not be considerate enough to think about others? Will we not change? I find very few incidents where I find someone acting considerately to their ...

While I was away... (I was out of touch for a long time from the linux world) there was another release of Ubuntu. It is named Intrepid Ibex . This version was released in October '08. Hope to be catching up with this soon. Or should I be sticking to Heron? Heron will be supported for longer. Hmm, if I don't find something seriously interesting in Ibex, I think I will just go with Heron. So whats Intrepid? –adjective resolutely fearless; dauntless: an intrepid explorer . and what's an Ibex? n.   pl. ibex or i·bex·es  Any of several wild goats of the genus Capra, especially C. ibex,native to mountainous regions of Eurasia and northern Africa and having long, ridged, backward-curving horns. -- definitions from dictionary.com You can find more about the Ubuntu releases at the Wikipedia link . 

My last post was ... quite long ago. I actually do not remember when it was last that I posted something. This attempt at writing blogs will be an attempt to get regular. I hope I can put up something here each week. Today I merged some posts from my linux related blog to this one. As is the case with this blog, I have not been regular with the other blog too. I am giving up on trying to maintain a seperate blog for linux.  There are two reasons for this. Firstly, I do not think I am going to be regular at two blogs. Second and more importantly, I am not a core linux guy. I love to try out new operating systems and new technologies what ever they be. So I am going to try and put all my blogs in one place. The last I blogged, I just checked the timelines, seems to be in end of 2007. There has been a lot of things happening in my life since then. I hope I can cover some of these too in the blogs to come. Until the next one....  May God bless you.

On October 18th, the new release of ubuntu was made available. The new version is 7.10 and codenamed gutsy gibbon. I had been using the beta release from the begining of October and let me tell you it is an awesome experience. From the start itself I felt a visible change in speed. The applications and usage somehow felt very very fast. It detected my nVidia card and compiz is available with the package. What this means is that, excellent graphics are now availble right with the OS.

As I thought, I am back on Kubuntu :-( I really liked what I saw with SUSE 10.2 but, somehow I couldn't get my display drivers configured correctly. Incidentally, the work at office was also piling up so couldn't go into the issue. BUT, I promise myself to look into it as soon as I have time. In the meantime, I have loaded Kubuntu. Configured most of my applications as I wanted it. With Kubuntu, Firefox, evolution, gimp are not default as with ubuntu. But, installing these have been extremely simple. When I get time, I will be back to try out more with SUSE. I seem to line Kubuntu better than Ubuntu. Base difference of course, being KDE rather than the Gnome. I have also got Nvidia drivers and beryl running, which adds glitter to the interface. Updating the system for the first time from the repositories. This is taking a while.

In the recent times, I have been quite fascinated with Linux flavours. In college I had tried out installing RHEL (Red Hat Linux), Debian, FreeBSD etc to try them out. But eventually threw them out and settled with Windows. But off late, the ease of use of Ubuntu caught my attention and I installed it as a secondary Operating System(OS) in my home. My experience with Ubuntu so far has been very good. If not great. I must confess that I am not a power Linux user. So the Linux version, or any OS in fact, that I use should have a considerable amount of user interface for administration. And as little administration as possible. I can manage most configurations even if they warrant file editing. But need the help to be sufficiently detailed. A great part of Ubuntu is the installation. You get to try the OS even before the installation is done. The LiveCD concept really rocks! I was able to view documents, check mail, watch clips, well do just about anything without even installing the OS. ...