In a few hours I will be leaving for Kharagpur, after spending a vacation of about two and a half months back here in beautiful Dehradoon valley. Before you continue please understand that this is more like a note to myself than anything else. Nevertheless, you are welcome to read ahead. As I was leaving [...]

I generally stay away from the my-desktop-is-flashy-so-what-if-it-eats-CPU crowd but I seem to have met my match. Day before yesterday I installed The Avant Window Manager. Currently I am running AWN on top of XFCE. I’ve removed the XFCE panel and now all I have is the AWN running at the bottom of my screen.
I absolutely [...]

I recently upgraded my boot-loader to GNU GRUB 2. It has several new interesting features which sets it apart it from the older version, now termed GRUB Legacy
Another reason for my upgrade to GNU GRUB 2 was that GRUB legacy it no longer being under active development – no new features will be added to [...]

Guess what I just realized? Passive resistance is to ahimsa what open-source is to free software. The analogy just fits.

Here’s an interesting error I got while compiling C++ code during a TopCoder SRM.
LongStraightRoad.cc:43: error: no match for ‘operator==’ in ‘dist. std::map::find [with _Key = std::basic_string, _Tp = double, _Compare = std::less, _Alloc = std::allocator](((const std::basic_string&)((const std::basic_string*)(& dest)))) == std::map::end [with _Key = std::basic_string, _Tp = double, _Compare = std::less, _Alloc = std::allocator]
PS: As far [...]

I have been using XFCE for around a month. Yesterday I tried installing gnome-do. The installation was successful but on running gnome-do I kept getting an ‘Unable to open the session message bus.’ error on my terminal. Today, after installing Banshee I faced the same problem.
Googling did not help – possibly because XFCE users do [...]

I finally did it! Now my root partition is, instead of a boring old ext3 a shiny new JFS parition.
The very first thing I did was build a new kernel with JFS support compiled into it. While configuring the kernel I also selected the deadline IO scheduler as the default scheduler since it tends to [...]

The i915 driver for the Intel GM965 is broken in kernel 2.6.30 – instead of getting 1280×800 framebuffer console you end up getting up getting 1024×768. Please note that the (overall) resolution is perfectly fine – only the text will appear to remain constrained in an imaginary 1024×768 box. This happens at least in Acer [...]

I just discovered a new companion (no, not an iPod), but the MPD – Music Player Daemon. This is the probably the first time I am feeling truly satisfied about my music player.
The MPD runs as a service. It binds to a port on your computer (6600 by default). Once you have the MPD up [...]

Recently I came across this very interesting utility – CurlFtpFS (curlftpfs.sourceforge.net/). It allows users to mount FTP sites as local folders. I had an inkling that something like this could be done but I never imagined that it would be this easy!
To mount ftp.subdomain.domain.org to /home/me/random_folder all you need to do is execute curlftpfs [...]