November 13, 2008 by Kulbir Saini on Google, Screenshot

Google is Fastest

While testing a piece of code for my squid plugin, I ended up changing permissions of /tmp/ directory to 0755. A few minutes later (after making changes to the code), I tried committing it to fedorapeople.org and got this error

[project@bordeaux youtube_cache]$ git push --all ssh://kulbirsaini@fedorapeople.org/~kulbirsaini/public_git/youtube_cache.git
Enter passphrase for key '/home2/Studies/project/.ssh/id_rsa':
ssh_control_listener bind(): Permission denied
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly
error: failed to push to 'ssh://kulbirsaini@fedorapeople.org/~kulbirsaini/public_git/youtube_cache.git'
[project@bordeaux youtube_cache]$

Well, I couldn’t understand the error and jumped to #fedora-admin. I pasted the error on pastebin. Almost a minute laster, while trying to conquer the error, I Googled the exact error and I was damn surprised to see the paste as first result. What an indexing speed Google has??? See the screen shot for proof 🙂

In #fedora-admin ricky confirmed that nothing was wrong on server side and it should be a local problem with my machine or proxy server at my insti border. A few minutes later, I reliazed the /tmp/ permission thing and changing permissions back to 0777 fixed everything 🙂

May 25, 2008 by Kulbir Saini on Email Client, GTalk, Internet, Linux, Open Source, Screenshot

Review: Spicebird – A Collaboration Platform

Well, I happened to attend this workshop on “How to build business around open source tools” organized by Twincling Society and IIIT Hyderabad. There I came to know about Spicebird. Spicebird is a single platform for many collaboration needs. It provides e-mail, calendaring and instant messaging with intuitive integration and unlimited extensibility. Spicebird is being developed by a Hyderabad based Indian start-up named Synovel (All four founders are alumni of IIIT Hyderabad). Below we look at some features that Spicebird provides.

1. Tabbed Interface

The tabbed interface for different utilities like mail, calendar, contacts, tasks etc. looks pretty clean. The interface is not at all cluttered in any way and navigation to different utilities is straight forward. You don’t have to brainstorm before getting something done.

2. Familiar Interface & Crisp Icon Set

Spicebird has an interface similar to loads of mozilla based application out there. The settings, preferences and the way things have been managed are familiar. So people who are switching from other open source email clients will not face any problems at all. Spicebird uses icons from Tango Project. The icons used are really good looking.

3. Nice Home Tab

The way Home tab has been organized is really appealing. You can add applets which includes rss feeds from you favourite blogs, mail folder views, calendar, upcoming events and Date & Time. Geeks love rss feeds. And what can be better than having it on your home tab all the time along with your mails. Event applet comes handy to remind you of the upcoming meetings and deadlines. And its on home tab all the time 🙂 Date & Time is specially helpful when you collaborate with people in different timezones. So you can add their timezone on home tab and you know when is the right time to ping them.

4. Email

Email experience is more or less like any other open source email client. But Spicebird provides some intitutive features like if it finds that the content of a mail is about a meeting, it’ll give an option for creating a calendar event for the same. This is a really good feature and this is just the begining. Spicebird is still beta.

5. Instant Messaging

This is a really cool feature from collaboration point of view and which makes Spicebird different from the masses. Spicebird is supporting IM via any jabber server. So if you are a startup, setup your own jabber server on Intranet and use it for collaboration. Mind blowing!! This also includes Gmail/GTalk. So you can just say bye bye to your messenger and start using it right away with GTalk. Plus this will import all your contacts to your local address book. Another real good feature which is not there in lot of other email clients.

6. Calendar & Task Management

Another good feature. Integrated calendar and task management. You can quickly add tasks and events. And you need not check your calendar for upcoming events, add upcoming event applet on home tab and you will have them all the time in front of your eyes 🙂

Conclusion

Whether you are a startup which is looking for tools to collaborate or a user who is excited about using open source tools, just go and download Spicebird from here and explore a new way of managing things at a single place 🙂

You can look at Spicebird Roadmap here and checkout the video demo of Spicebird here.

January 14, 2008 by Kulbir Saini on Bug, Fedora, Graphics, KDE, Kopete, Screenshot

Review: KDE4 – Is it worth upgrading?

KDE4 was released on Jan 11, 2008. I noticed the rpms for Fedora on rpmfind.net on Jan 13. It was a big trouble to get packages one by one keeping in mind the dependencies. I tried Yum with rpmfind repo but it didn’t work out. Then I used the server where my domain is hosted. I have 15GB bandwidth per month and the download speed on the server is awesome (average 400kbps). So, I just ftp to rpmfind.net and downloaded all the rpms on the server hosting my site. And then I downloaded the packages from my domain to my local machine ( No effort for searching now and I can do parallel downloading now). So, lets see how to install KDE4 on Fedora.

Step 1:

Get the KDE4 rpms from rpmfind.net . Here is the list of all the kde4 rpms that you need to download from rpmfind.net.

Step 2:

Enable the fedora development repository. In '/etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-development.repo' file check if enabled is equal to 1 for development repo. If its zero, then change it to 1.

Step 3:

Use yum to install the kde rpms that you have downloaded.

[root@bordeaux KDE4_RPMS]# yum install *.rpm [Enter]  (do as root)

Note: After the KDE4 rpms are up in the fedora repos, then you can skip the step 1 and directly install kde by issuing the command

[root@bordeaux saini]# yum install kde* [Enter] (do as root)

My Experience

I was expecting a lot from KDE4. But a lot of things went wrong. When I logged into KDE4 for the first time, everything was looking awesome and very sharp. But then I faced the first crash while editing the settings for a widget and I realized that its not possible to have a crash free KDE application. After upgrade ( which cost me around 1GB of downloading via yum) and spending a lot of time manually downloading the packages, all I got was a desktop environment which will crash frequently to remind that you just wasted 1GB of bandwidth.

After upgrading, Kopete stopped working due to some conflict in ssl libraries, xchat is also not working due to some other library conflicts, dolphin the new file manager for KDE doesn’t even start and flush all kind of errors and faults when launched from command line. After the first crash the panel disappeared and I couldn’t get it back. Launching kicker returns the kde3 panel.

KDE4 is awesome when you just sit back and look at it. But when you want to work with some apps, its miserable. One of my friend had this status message on gtalk ‘ KDE4 : KDE3.5.8 :: Vista : XP ‘. KDE4 is as good as Vista when it comes to looks but its equally bad as Vista as compared to XP when it comes to work with it.

Conclusion: Don’t upgrade to KDE4 and wait till May, 2008 when KDE4 will be shipped with Fedora 9. I hope that KDE4 will not crash frequently when it’ll be embedded natively.

Here are some screen shots if you wanna have a look 🙂

November 23, 2007 by Kulbir Saini on Extensions, Firefox, Fonts, FTP, Internet, Linux, Review, Screenshot

Review: Firefox 3 Beta 1

Firefox 3 Beta 1 is available now. I downloaded the package yesterday morning and started using it right away. While using, I figured out some of the good things and at the same time there are some bad things about this test release. Here is what I feel about Firefox 3 Beta 1.

BTW, you can get beta 1 for Firefox 3 here. I am not going to tell, how to install firefox 🙂

Positives:

1.Nice Default Font:

Well someone may argue that you can configure any font in any version of Firefox, so whats the good thing about this default font in Firefox 3 Beta1. Well, I’ll say that configuration is always available but nobody gives a damn to configure the font in browser. I am liking this default font in FF3 Beta1 and everything now seems interesting to read. I have Read more than 40 wiki pages since last two days.

2.New FTP Listing Style:

The FTP listings in Firefox 3 Beta 1 has got new stylesheet. Its not dirty any more. It feels good while browsing ftp now. See the screen-shot below.

3.Website Identity:

This is new feature, but I couldn’t find it useful. When you click on favicon in the location bar, a pop-up kinda thing comes up, which tells about the identity of the site you are visiting. Check out the snapshot below.

4.Drag n Drop:

You can now hold any thing in Firefox 3 Beta 1 and drag it anywhere you want. Though I could not drop the images to gimp or anywhere else, it looks good. I think its in the development stage right now.

5.Bookmarks:

Bookmarking a website or editing your bookmarks is far easier now. You can edit a bookmarked site while its loading or can bookmark the site by just clicking a button. A new star-shaped button has been added in the location bar before the go button. If a site is not bookmarked, clicking the button will just bookmark it without asking for anything. If you again click on the button, now you can edit or delete the site you just bookmarked.

6.Adding Search Engine:

In firefox 3 beta 1, you can add the site you are browsing in you search engine list just like google, imdb, wikipedia, yahoo or whatever. But this is not valid for every website. Every website in this world can’t be a search engine 😛 Checkout the snapshot or KDE.

7.Link sorting/searching in location bar:

Firefox 3 beta 1 implements a new searching/sorting mechanism for links in location bar. As you type some letters, those are now searched in the link as well as the title of the page and then the links are sorted and displayed as list. In drop down list, you can also see the sites on your bookmarks.

8.Places Folder:

A new bookmark folder named ‘Places’ has been added. It has 6 sub-folders which contains links to different site based on a particular criterion. Some of them are ‘Recently Starred Pages’, ‘Recently Visited Starred Pages’, ‘Most Visited Starred Pages’ etc. I was looking for something like this since a long time. Because every time I login into my PC and fire up my firefox, first of all, I visit 8-10 sites (students mail, slashdot, iiit blogroll, yahoo mail, gmail, forum, orkut etc.). Now, I can open all of them in just one click. I click on ‘Most Visited Starred Pages’ and done.

9.Low Memory:

Well, a review of Firefox 3 Beta 1 on zdnet, say that Firefox 3 beta 1 is consuming low memory than Firefox 2 and IE 7. That review is for Firefox in windows. But in Fedora 7, I didn’t experience any reduction in memory usage.

10.Faster:

I don’t know how to justify this, but Firefox 3 Beta 1 seems to load pages faster. What I could think was that, when you click go, it loads the page in the background for some-time and then suddenly flushes the page to the screen and it appears that the entire page has been loaded in one go. I may be wrong though.

11.Improved GUI:

The rendering of buttons, input fields, images in the pages have improved a lot and buttons and drop down menus look better now.

Negatives:

1.Extensions:

Life is a bit or I should say a byte difficult with Firefox extensions. Now, I am too much used to use these extensions that I can’t live without them. I’ll crash if I don’t have ‘Undo Closed Tab’ extension. I keep making stupid mistakes. All the extensions are not yet available for Firefox 3, so its a problem.

2.Multiple Tabs:

Firefox 3 Beta 1 immediately dies if I open more than 20 tabs. I opened my wiki saved session (39 tabs) and after sometime I was searching for Firefox. Where the hell firefox window has gone?

3.Crashes:

I don’t know what exactly is the problem, but I think Firefox 3 revolts against Yahoo Mail and GMail. Whenever I open Yahoo Mail or GMail, Firefox 3 Beta 1 crashes. Either there is some problem with the heavily loaded mail pages or it doesn’t want me to use GMail or Yahoo.

Well, there may be lot more positives and negatives. These are the things I noticed about Firefox 3 Beta 1 in last two days. As the positives list is ruling the negatives, I am using Firefox 3 Beta 1 full time these days.

PS : @Paresh I think FF3 is better than FF2 in many ways. But you may want to wait for all the extensions to be compatible with FF3.

November 10, 2007 by Kulbir Saini on Compiz, Drivers, Eclipse, Fedora, GNOME, Graphics, Hardware, NVIDIA, Remote Desktop, Review, Screenshot, Sound, Tips - Tricks, VNC Server, VNC Viewer, Wireless, Xorg

Review: Fedora 8 – Warewolf

I installed Fedora 8 32 bit from a leaky mirror on Nov 7th and I just had a very bad experience with it. Nothing seemed to be working. But I can’t accept that. As I am a hardcore fan of Fedora, I just can’t sit back and say “ah, Fedora 8 sucks, i am not gonna use that”. I fetched Fedora 8 x86_64 (64bit) from a mirror yesterday, after the release. I installed it and everything worked out of the box. I can’t believe that I wrote something wrong about Fedora. How could I do that ?

First of all, I would like to say that The artwork team at Fedora has done a very fantastic job. The graphics right from installation up to the desktop are just awesome. Especially the default background is very nice. Here is shot of the default Gnome Fedora 8 Desktop.

Right after the installation, I fetched the nVidia proprietary drivers from here and installed them. And those were installed successfully without giving any errors or problems. [ If you want a complete howto on installing nvidia drivers. Its here.] A reboot after the installation and compiz worked out of the box. Here is shot.

Ok, graphics done. What now ? I just realized that there is no mp3 support. No worries. Codeina aka Codec Buddy is there. Just issue ‘codeina’ command from command line and a window like this will appear.

Check Fluendo MP3 Audio Decoder and click get selected, accept the license conditions and you’ll see that codeina is fetching the codecs. [If codeina does not fetch codecs or give error like timeout or some other network error. Try checking your proxy setting in System -> Preferences -> Internet And Network -> Network Proxy . It may help. ]

Ok. Now, codeina has done the job. Lets play some mp3. Note that amarok still can’t play mp3 files because it uses xine engine. So, you can choose either Totem or Rhythmbox to play your mp3 files. Here is a shot of Rhythmbox. So, Codeina also works out of the box.

Another major improvement in Fedora 8 in audio section is introduction or pulseaudio. Issue command ‘pulseaudio’ from command line and you will see a window like this.

You can control the sound stream from different players or whatever. You can mute individual streams and can even set the default devices for certain streams through this fantastic gui.

Another good thing in Fedora 8 is Eclipse. Eclipse 3.3 is back in Fedora 8. They excluded it from Fedora 7. I am happy to see it back here in Fedora 8.

Another utility that I found helpful is Remote Desktop utility. Launch System -> Preferences -> Internet And Network -> Remote Desktop and you’ll see a window like this.

Set your preferences and now you can browse your desktop from anywhere using ‘vncviewer <yourIP>:0’. Though one call always configure vncserver to get that done. But for newbies it’ll be a great help.

Also, My wireless lan card, Ralink rt2500 WNC-0301 is detected successfully in Fedora 8. But I am not sure whether it works or not, because there is not wifi environment in my lab and I can’t check it without that. [ Anyway if your wifi card doesn’t work, here is a howto on installing Ralink rt2500 WNC-0301 using drivers from serailmonkey. ]

Another improvement is that cursor was never invisible. Up to Fedora 7, I suffered cursor invisible problem on first login. [ If you are facing the same problem, add line

Options "HWCursor" off

to “screens” section in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and issue ‘gdm-restart’ command. It’ll be fine afterwards. ]

The boot time has also improved significantly. My Fedora 8 boots in just 45 seconds.

These Fedora 8 Screenshots and other related to Fedora 8 can be reached here.

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