# /sbin/service network stop
on a remote Data Center server with no immediate onsite help available to start the network from local login.
No prizes for guessing who did this !!!
It was me 
One of our boxes was being flood attacked by someone (unsuccessful attempt). I was investigating the box and habit of using tab completion screwed things up.
If that attacker was trying to get our box down… I probably helped him !!!
After probably 2 years, I woke up at 4 am. I found the LFY magazine lying in front of me and picked up the Sabayon DVD to test on VirtualBox.
The last time I tried sabayon, I felt it was slow compared to other distros on my PC configuration. Things haven’t changed much yet.
Here are some screenshots…
Sabayon 4 - Bootable DVD options
KDE 3.5.10 on Sabayon 4
It features special options for eeePC!
There are many famous games (Battle for Wesnoth, Sauerbraten, Nexuiz, SecondLife) shipped, that may take long time to download.
It is not only a gamers delight but also a multimedia rich distro. Check out the multimedia apps if you get hold of Sabayon.
As for me, I am still happy with openSUSE 11.0 on my PC and Mandriva 2008.1 on my lappie. 
Trying to configure your HP products like printer and/or scanner on opensuse (or for that matter any linux distro)?
Make sure that you have hplib package installed.
My HP Deskjet 3745 used to work on Mandriva lappie but not on openSUSE PC. After beating around the bush with CUPS, I figured out that there should be some driver in repos. A quick search and tada .. hplib.
Just installed it, reconfigured the printer and wolah its printing.
With an announcement on the official Mandriva blog, I made a quick move to get ilughyd and mukt.in registered as one among those to celebrate the launch.
We did have an awesome party, with ~20 attendees. Thanks to Mandriva for their goodies and Primora for their office space for the party.
We enjoyed our own little Mandriva 2009 chocolate cake and drinks. Attendees had brought desktop PCs’ and laptops to get them installed with Mandriva.
Some of them made Mandriva as their only operating system (removing an existing proprietary OS), while some were content with dual-boot and installations on VirtualBox.
Notebooks with Mandriva 2009!
People just loved the Mandriva interface and went eye-popping over KDE widgets in combination with CompizFusion.
We concluded the party with small sessions on Mandriva Control Center, rpmdrake and Compiz Settings Manager.
Most pics are available here; couldn’t add all of them( argh! that 200 pics limit on Flickr).
A special thanks to the support staff at Primora for cleaning up the mess attendees made with the cake.
My freaking old harddisk of PC gave trouble again this morning. I had to run manual file system check on /var yet again.
The very next time it didn’t allow me to login!
Skimming through /var, I found the answer in /var/log/kdm.log -
Fatal Error: Accessed global static ‘KGlobalPrivate *globalData()’ after destruction. Defined at /usr/src/packages/BUILD/kdelibs-4.0.4/kdecore/kernel/kglobal.cpp:98
KDE developers wouldn’t care much about 4.0.4, they are already on the path of 4.2
I tried autologin, manual start of X and kde, starting xdm through runlevel 3. Nothing seems to work.
Many of my socket permissions from ~/.kde4/socket-blackbeauty/ were messed up. (blackbeauty is hostname).
The only work-around that did the job was creating a new user and starting my X from run level 3. The kdmgreeter would still not allow any user to login.
I tried to install another greeter theme using KNS ( K New Stuff ), and it seems to tell me that themes are installed but I couldn’t see them on Login Manager’s themes tab. That’s another weirdo now! I can’t even tell if it was the fault of the SUSE default kdmtheme.
Suggestion welcome
Continued from here.
My screen was replaced and tested for just 4 hours at an acer authorised service center.
Makes me wonder why it took 9 days and 5 reminder calls to get my laptop back; seems quite long considering that it is a carry-in warranty and not a home delivery too. Nine days! sigh.
I hopped back home in joy; hoping that troubles are over and getting eager to work. I was baffled the very moment unpacked my lappie from the box. Reason – two uneven surfaces near the battery compartment. It looked as if they’ve used some tools like screwdriver to lift the compartment. I called up the service center and they denied opening the compartment. According to them they had replaced only the LCD and that doesn’t require opening any of the compartments.
I never knew acer laptop compartment seals could self break!
Fair enough, lets boot up now. The beautiful Mandriva 2008.1 booted up and brought me to the login screen. My eye caught something – the time. Its wrong!
desk @ home
I checked the BIOS setup and found that time, date, boot sequence and few other options were changed. Why would these require change if they were servicing it for display issue?
Anyway, I had to complete my pending tasks. I worked on the laptop for about 30 minutes and here it is – A new problem. The left side of the keyboard was warmer than it used to be. I checked the ventilation slots and it was blowing hot air at high speed. Never before was the laptop so hot. I could smell hot lead at the ventilation slots.
I installed lm_sensors, and it showed 60 C for CPU temperature. That’s real crazy considering the fact that it rained and room temperature was cool, it was night time and moreover I had the room fan on at the highest speed. On top of all these I had a laptop cooling pad. Boy, this is not good.
I logged a new support request with the help of acer tech support and took the laptop back to the same authorised dealer/service center. I showed them the broken compartment seals; only then they admitted opening it for checking internal components. They have taken in the laptop and promised 4 days for problem resolution (the same way they did the last time, may be 4==9).
Before leaving, I asked them if their engineers worked on linux too (my lappie has mandriva linux). They nodded and claimed that they know it all.
Next day I was waiting for their call. They told me they would notify if the hardware needs to be replaced. It was almost evening and impatiently I gave them a call to inquire status. Surprisingly, they didn’t check it because my laptop didn’t have WindowsXP!! Hello, this is a linux laptop. Acer shipped it with linpus linux and your tech support doesn’t work on linux! It was just yesterday you claimed that they know it all.
I then explained the steps to go to my 3rd workspace in KDE, where I had gkrellm monitoring the CPU load and temperature. If they would have admitted not knowing gnu/linux when I gave in the laptop, I’d have showed them and given a small tutorial also (FOR FREE).
So, again I am on a waiting mode for their call.
Hardware vendors who claim to support GNU/Linux should try to walk the talk.
About Six and half hours of leeching from torrent and 117.4 MB of seeding contribution for self-satisfaction, adds another distro to my wallet – the all new openSUSE 11.0 KDE4 Live CD.
Watching DragonBall on lappie and simultaneously installing openSUSE on my PC made the installation feel fast. After post installation configuration, it automatically logged me in with my username.
I was expecting to see the shiny black KDE4 panel and it turned out that openSUSE build had something else in mind.
A grey panel…err..not so attractive!
KDE4’s panel settings doesn’t have customisation for color and transparency like it did in 3.5.x series. Anyway, I thought I could figure it out somewhere in configuration files or may be live with it.
Some things I found missing during installation include setting hostname, choosing Network Type, Package selections.
After installation I also noticed that an extra user `linux` was created apart from my username.
Who asked for that? Is it a feature or did I do something during installation. ( One eyeball was watching lappie and the other was on PC – trait of suse mascot )
I decided to redo installation with careful check. This time I found that I had not unchecked the option of using same password for my username and root. Using this feature simulates ubuntu’s sudo kinda environment where you use your own password to do administrative tasks.
Even after the second installation, I find the ‘linux’ user existing on my system. So, well may be it’s not something I did and probably it’s a feature which I need to find an use for.
Moving on to KDE4 desktop now. openSUSE 11.0 ships in with KDE 4.0.4 which seems quite stable than my trunk build 4.0.7. Yes, quite stable but has issues.
The plasmoids on desktop lose their rotation when you relogin. They get realigned at their default vertical orientation.
Another issue is when I change colors in my look and feel settings and apply them, I get logged out losing all my open tasks.
openSUSE 11.0 also ships Firefox3 beta5 which hangs when your machine comes back from power save mode. Yet to test out Firefox3 Final on this.
Nevertheless, I am loving KDE4. Soon this ’shipped’ KDE will be removed and my PC should be living on KDE trunk.
Current distro profiles of my machines – openSUSE 11.0 on PC and Mandriva 2008.1 on lappie.
No. It’s not the countdown for launch of my start-up, neither is countdown for start of a new TV game show.
4 days remain for the start of my semester exams and I still don’t know where my books are. (Do I have them?). “Ah, I’ll just read them from internet”, is how I try to console myself.
All these days I’ve been busy at maintaining mukt.in and tasted the pressure of lead responsibilities. Today, after lots of effort into writing our own forms, the attendee registration is up finally. (Yes, we chose not to use CMS even this time).
I would like to thank sivaji, kidfoo, deepsa, AJuOnLiNE and sanjayb for their efforts at it, while I was merely debugging stuff. (Ok, I know some names sound weird, but those are IRC handles)
I thought, “Atleast today I should sit and read something today”. I use my blackbeauty(PC) for reading for exams/e-books, coding for KDragons and on lappie its django, PHP, MySQL.
It almost skipped my mind that I had messed up my Desktop yesterday. KDE4’s plasma was crashing and I didn’t fix that yet. The problem was that widgets support isn’t really great on my build.
Here’s how my desktop looked yesterday – orkut album link
While most of the google search look-up’s and chat at #kde(freenode) suggested deleting plasma* from $KDEHOME/share/config, I figured out that moving plasma-appletsrc to something like plasma-appletsrc.old should do for me. Really no reason to delete plasmarc for my problem.
And this was not the end of issues. My downloads stopped due to insufficient disk space. What in the world could fill up my 45GB of /home?
A quick du -h showed me 31GB being consumed by .strigi folder in my home directory.
There were no options to disable strigi from my systems settings and I was not finding a clue whether this belongs to KDED services.
After lot of head scratching I found strigi-daemon running in my process table and it was eating away my resource like a glutton. (77% of CPU time!) No wonder why I felt KDE4 was being slow.
A small work around for this problem is ’sudo apt-get remove strigi-daemon’ and then delete all items from ~/.strigi/clucene
This seems to work fine, just that I don’t know the after-effects of reboot. Let’s wait and watch.
Oh by the way, would someone want to help me lose the habit of going to sleep at 5:00 am?
I’ve got exams from 18th, and all of them are at 10:00am. Time is ticking like always…
Yes, it is spring now. No, I don’t mean the season but the new distribution on my lappie.
From the time I quit CSC, I’ve been using k/ubuntu for stable production work with little time for distro trials.
I picked up March and May issues of `Linux For You`and to my delight I found slackware12 and mandriva 2008.1 lying cute and cuddly in their shiny seal covers.
Then came hopping, the bully of our house a.k.a my girlfriend and snatched the slackware DVD to fulfill her new found madness – “Distro trials on Virtualbox”. 
So, I spent my night yesterday installing and configuring mandriva spring. It took almost 5 hours to finish backups, installation, Look & Feel hacking, installing my requirements (apache, MySQL, Django, python, php) and a bunch other packages.
As a part of Look & Feel hacking, kiba-dock is the new app that makes it to my list; it took time to configure it not to look bloated, decide & place my launchers, refine the shadows & effects and last but not least was to suppress the black background render by using xcompmgr package.
I thought I did everything right, but no – I did screw up. I forgot to backup the database being used by my django models. No worries, it was just test database being used for my django learning.
Using debian derivatives has made me depend on deb packages. I also installed alien in case I need some packages from my backed up archives when I am away from internet.
That finished my configuration to be used for stable work. It feels good getting back to mandriva – the distro I was faithful to (mandrake 10.1 – mandriva 2006.)
My new lappie rested in its bag for some days. I had no time to use it and may be I was even waiting for my opensolaris shipment to arrive. It was my third attempt to get free opensolaris shipment from SUN. Hoping atleast the third one would come.
I tried downloading from the website, but the download breaks. One of ilughyd members, theju tried from torrent, I guess he got a bad checksum. So, all in all last, trust was on SUN to grant me an opensolaris DVD.
The wait was getting longer each day and one fine day ubuntu released 8.04 LTS version. This tempted me to try out the distro and still keep waiting for opensolaris. ubuntu studio seemed a good deal to try out. The download was another long wait.
After install affects:
1. Atheros wi-fi device was not detected.
2. Low quality sound.
Sound could be taken care of later, but lappie is really not mobile until I can go wireless. Limited by time, I left it in that state for few more days. The day I got back to it, I tried using the restricted drivers and madwifi.
Then I tried ndiswrapper deb package and used winXP drivers; no avail.
I was suggested to try compiling ndiswrapper from source rather than using packaed deb, at ‘The GNU/Linux Group‘
That attempt ended in CFLAGS error. Checked around in the internet to find lots of reports on CFLAG errors from various people trying to compile apps from source. Most of them are related to kernel 2.6.24
I was lost in thoughts on what can be done and lo – my opensolaris shipment arrived(release 1/08). Eager to get it run, I tried installing and ended up with bad/non-existing X server on the disk. I couldn’t get into GUI installation and I didnt want to spend time doing command installation and then patch my X.
It is not my natural self to upgrade / install new releases – Long lost habit. I wait for a month or two after the release and upgrade/install, only if necessary. Running low on time, I decided to pull debian4.0/kubuntu7.10 from my CD pack and get done with distro installation.
Atheros didnt work by default in it as well, but then ndiswrapper 1.51 did the job to an almost ok level. I say so because my wi-fi switch doesn’t blink, though I am able to connect to internet and it also works as toggle to switch on/off.
I’ll save the lights thingy for some other time. Got loads of other things to address on priority.
