Loading... Born a day after the American Independence in Jalandhar, Punjab, India, I've spent most part of my life there. Studied till 5th standard in St. Joseph's Convent School, Jalandhar, and later had to join Apeejay School, Jalandhar as, perhaps, the former school decided boys could be troublesome in a girls' school after 5th. After completing schooling in APJ (till 12th), joined National Institute of Technology [NITJ] (again, in Jalandhar) as a Computer Science & Engineering student in 2005. During the worst period of downtime (recession), got an on-campus placement in Accenture in 2008. Graduating from college took another year after that, and finally joined Accenture in mid-2009. This is my story so far... Btw, you can find me at: facebook twitter last.fm digg librarything granular
Nov 15

A new init system in Linux

linux, open-source No Comments »

It was bound to happen some day. The existing init system in use by most of the present Linux distros is really not leveraging the performance capabilities of modern hardware to the fullest. Spawning processes one-by-one to get the system up and running costs a lot of precious time, when it is possible to do more in less time using the power of multi-core processors.

It was a welcome surprise to read about this new thingy systemd in the Q&A section of last week’s DistroWatch Weekly. I’m really looking forward to a faster future. :)

Tagged with: • •
Nov 07

TweetDeck — Installing in Ubuntu 64-bit

linux, tutorial No Comments »
TweetDeck

TweetDeck

With Adobe AIR‘s (the runtime required by TweetDeck) official support for Linux ended, and no Linux 64-bit edition already in place, installing TweetDeck it in Ubuntu 64-bit is one hell of a task. You can get it installed in your 64-bit Linux system by following one of these tutorials, but chances are you’ll end up with a partially working installation, as happened with me.

Here I list out 4 simple steps to get the thing properly installed & working in Ubuntu:

  1. Download the 64-bit Adobe AIR deb package.
  2. Install the deb using the command: sudo dpkg -i adobeair_64.deb
  3. (Important) Install ia32-libs: sudo apt-get install ia32-libs. This is required for 32-bit environment emulation. Remember, the above packaged “64-bit” AIR is still 32-bit Linux version only. If you do not install ia32-libs, you may get errors like – Error loading the runtime (libxml2.so.2: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64)
  4. Download the latest TweetDeck AIR package. Install the package by double-clicking on it. Alternately, fire the command “Adobe AIR Application Installer” (with quotes) to invoke the GUI app installer, from where you can browse to the location of the downloaded TweetDeck AIR package to install it.

Tested on Kubuntu 11.10 (64-bit)

Tagged with: • • •
Nov 05

TestDisk — A life saver

Blogging, Rants No Comments »

TestDisk

TestDisk


Turning on your computer one not-so-fine day just to discover an entire partition (drive on harddisk) gone is nothing short of a nightmare potent enough to give you a mild heart attack. Unfortunately, exactly that happened to me yesterday.

An ardent distro hopper that I am, I recently installed (K)Ubuntu 11.10 on my laptop. Things were all fine for 4 days until I fixed a startup issue with my Windows installation using its DVD. The issue was temporarily fixed and I was able to log into Windows. But the next time I booted into Linux, my Windows partition was no longer being shown in the file manager. I fired up “fdisk -l” just to find out that the Windows partition had been overwritten by another hidden 2GB FAT partition, which was now being shown as a twin duplicate of the original. It didn’t take me much time to realize that the Windows DVD had screwed up my partition table, making the whole 80GB Windows partition disappear!

After some research, I found this excellent opensource partition recovery tool by the name TestDisk. Thanks to its Linux version, I was able to find the lost Windows partition, recover it and write the updated partition table to the harddisk. Although it’s a command-line application, believe me, it’s damn straight-forward, and as simple as any other GUI thing.

(God forbid) In case, some day, you find yourself with a partition or two gone from your harddisk, give TestDisk a try. Highly recommended.

Tagged with: • • •
May 06

Google network’s performance on BSNL EVDO in Linux

Rants 1 Comment »

has been annoyingly sluggish ever since. Pinging Google sites via command-line shows heavy packet losses. I use the same browsers in Linux (Chrome & Firefox), and the same browsers in Windows. Still, performance of all Google (and related) sites is very poor in Linux (but OK in case of Windows) due to an arcane reason that is still now clear to me. Even (innocuously) normal sites with Google ads take 4-5 refreshes to load properly. And don’t forget almost no site (ok, except some only-HTML stone-age sites still lurking around) in the world today are devoid of those nasty Google ads.

So until I solve the mystery, Google will keep me frustrated in Linux.

Tagged with: • • •
Apr 08

Here comes GNOME 3

Blogging No Comments »
GNOME 3

GNOME 3 is finally here, and it looks so darn beautiful in the screenshots. I admit, being a KDE fanboy, I was not as excited about this release as I was about KDE 4, but going by the looks, GNOME 3 looks elegant, modern, and [most importantly] stable. Cannot wait to put my hands on it.

Tagged with: • •
Previous Entries
preload preload preload