Friday, November 25, 2005
Mounting .ISO files as a loop device in Linux.
With the ever increasing choice of Linux distributions, I hate to burn ‘n waste those CDs, just to try out a distro. Though I use an RW disc most of the time, there are times when I hate burning even those, especially when the .ISO file in question is part of a package/optional CD set (containing extra software that can be added on top of the base system) and hence need not be booted from.
Case in point: The Gentoo packages CD that one can use, to install pre-built binaries /group packages. This is especially useful when installing huge binaries such as Kde,Gnome, Openoffice, etc. as an alternative to compiling them from source.
Here is what I do to install the software directly from the .ISO instead of burning it on the .CD. What’s more, doing it this way is much faster too without the significant overhead of reading it from media.
#su
#mkdir /packages
#mount –t iso9660 /root/gentoo-packages-amd64-2005.1.iso /packages –o loop
And here is how I install the software from the .ISO file:
#export PKGDIR=/packages
#emerge --usepkg gnome
No more wasted CD’s and no more long waits.
¶ 18:23 1 comments
Case in point: The Gentoo packages CD that one can use, to install pre-built binaries /group packages. This is especially useful when installing huge binaries such as Kde,Gnome, Openoffice, etc. as an alternative to compiling them from source.
Here is what I do to install the software directly from the .ISO instead of burning it on the .CD. What’s more, doing it this way is much faster too without the significant overhead of reading it from media.
#su
#mkdir /packages
#mount –t iso9660 /root/gentoo-packages-amd64-2005.1.iso /packages –o loop
And here is how I install the software from the .ISO file:
#export PKGDIR=/packages
#emerge --usepkg gnome
No more wasted CD’s and no more long waits.
¶ 18:23 1 comments
Thursday, November 17, 2005
Blogger for Word - An awesome little proggy!
Frankly, I never would’ve started blogging if not for “Blogger for Word”. The idea of writing those lengthy posts within the confines of a textbox is not something that would ever appeal to me. That’s the reason I stayed away from Web mail as well.
Now thanks to “Blogger for Word”, I’ve this new found freedom to start posting. All of my posts till now have been from Word. I feel so liberated. Seriously this is such a perfect little proggie which fully integrates with Microsoft Word that I wonder why no-one ever thought of this brilliant idea before, but then that’s Google!! They innovate and think so far ahead.
The interface is so simple to use, it automatically fetches my previous posts, lets me publish or update new posts and the best part of it all is that it preserves my formatting as is! What’s even more incredible is that the HTML that it generates appears so consistently in all web browsers.
Frankly, I don’t mind becoming the spokesperson for “Blogger for Word”. In case you haven’t started using it, I strongly urge you to do so now. Hey you can now compose those lengthy posts at your work place pretending to be hard at work. Who knows you might even get a raise with all that PR you are building up silently. Do you need any other reason ;-) ¶ 20:37 0 comments
Now thanks to “Blogger for Word”, I’ve this new found freedom to start posting. All of my posts till now have been from Word. I feel so liberated. Seriously this is such a perfect little proggie which fully integrates with Microsoft Word that I wonder why no-one ever thought of this brilliant idea before, but then that’s Google!! They innovate and think so far ahead.
The interface is so simple to use, it automatically fetches my previous posts, lets me publish or update new posts and the best part of it all is that it preserves my formatting as is! What’s even more incredible is that the HTML that it generates appears so consistently in all web browsers.
Frankly, I don’t mind becoming the spokesperson for “Blogger for Word”. In case you haven’t started using it, I strongly urge you to do so now. Hey you can now compose those lengthy posts at your work place pretending to be hard at work. Who knows you might even get a raise with all that PR you are building up silently. Do you need any other reason ;-) ¶ 20:37 0 comments
Essential Firefox & Thunderbird Hacks
Back when Internet Explorer was being ravaged and you still had to pay for Opera, Firefox emerged and went on to become the darling of Browsers, quickly capturing our imagination. The timing was perfect as many such users were looking for simple alternatives to Internet Explorer without all the hassles that came along with it.
However, I switched to Firefox & Thunderbird for totally a different reason. Being the Linux lover that I’m, I was looking for a browser and email client that could be used seamlessly across Windows and Linux using a shared installation. I was so thrilled when I discovered this, especially seeing that my message store in Thunderbird could be displayed and updated in either Linux or Windows. I was even more thrilled to see all those glorious extensions and themes to Firefox that made it a complete browsing experience.
Think about it, not only can you potentially share your address book and email store, but you could completely avoid setting it up for every Linux distro or Windows reinstall that you did. What freedom! Firefox and all its extensions made it possible, to have every conceivable tweak that you could imagine all within the confines of your integrated browser. I thought this would be a good opportunity to share some of these tricks with the rest of the world. So here goes:
RSS Reader:
Though not known to most people, Firefox has been the RSS reader of my choice ever since it hit the browser scene. However, weird terminology and an unintuitive interface has confused users making them stay away from it. For starters, Firefox calls RSS feeds as Live Bookmarks. Though Firefox can detect RSS feeds in most websites (by displaying an orange icon at the lower right corner of your browser status bar), occasionally it fails! When this happens, you gotta copy the link for your feed, goto Bookmarks->Manage Bookmarks->File->New Live Bookmark and then paste your feed. Yuck, how irritating and annoying.
However thanks to “Phil Ringnalda” for his “LiveBookmark This” firefox extension. Now you can right click on any feed link and select “Add Live Bookmark” to choose a bookmark location for your RSS feed. Combine this with “Manage Bookmarks” feature of Firefox to create folders within “Bookmarks Toolbar Folders”! These folders serve as category folders to hold your RSS feeds. For example, I have the following folders: News, Entertainment, Blogs, Technology, Security, Linux etc. Make sure your “Bookmarks Toolbar” is visible to neatly access all your feeds as menu items from any of your feed categories (folders). Nice!
Copying Firefox profile folders:
Usually I install lot of extensions and themes that I deem useful. However I hate the prospect of reinstalling all of them while creating a different Firefox profile or when creating a new profile from Linux. Thanks to this tip that I read on the internet, you can now simply copy your entire Firefox profile folder onto a new location, search and replace all hard coded paths in chrome.rdf (located in your profile folder) to that of your new location, modify your profile.ini to point to your newly copied profile folder and Voila! You have the exact same profile that you copied, complete with Bookmarks, Feeds, History and even your cache. Nice! It’s explained in detail here.
Sharing Thunderbird profiles:
Functionally almost identical to Outlook Express sans its hassles, Thunderbird has gone on to become my most favorite email client. One of the features I love about Thunderbird is that you can create a common message base (profile) and go-on to share that message base with other installations of Thunderbird.
Lets take an example, though am very happy with my gmail/yahoo for all of my personal email, I still need a common shared message base for all my family emails, newsletters etc. Not only does Thunderbird provide this exact feature, but it’s so flexible in that it lets me access the shared message base from different user accounts and even other OS installations including Linux.
Here is what I do:
In case you are wondering why I mentioned storing the Message Store in a FAT32 partition, the answer is Linux. That’s right; you can access FAT32 partitions in read/write mode from Linux. Hence you could mount your FAT32 partition (usually mounted at startup) and then create a new profiles.ini file to point to your shared message store folder created in step-1. That’ it, now you can access your message store without setting it up again in Linux. What’s more, you Get/Send mail from any profile, and it automatically reflects on all of the other profiles. Now, no more reboots to Windows to check ‘n update my emails. Nice! It’s explained in detail here.
While we are on the subject, take a look “MozBackup” which lets you backup ‘n restore Thunderbird/Firefox/Mozilla profiles using a simple Wizard based interface.
I hope you find the above tips useful and unleash the full power of your Firefox and Thunderbird installation. Go Mozilla!
¶ 20:08 0 comments
However, I switched to Firefox & Thunderbird for totally a different reason. Being the Linux lover that I’m, I was looking for a browser and email client that could be used seamlessly across Windows and Linux using a shared installation. I was so thrilled when I discovered this, especially seeing that my message store in Thunderbird could be displayed and updated in either Linux or Windows. I was even more thrilled to see all those glorious extensions and themes to Firefox that made it a complete browsing experience.
Think about it, not only can you potentially share your address book and email store, but you could completely avoid setting it up for every Linux distro or Windows reinstall that you did. What freedom! Firefox and all its extensions made it possible, to have every conceivable tweak that you could imagine all within the confines of your integrated browser. I thought this would be a good opportunity to share some of these tricks with the rest of the world. So here goes:
RSS Reader:
Though not known to most people, Firefox has been the RSS reader of my choice ever since it hit the browser scene. However, weird terminology and an unintuitive interface has confused users making them stay away from it. For starters, Firefox calls RSS feeds as Live Bookmarks. Though Firefox can detect RSS feeds in most websites (by displaying an orange icon at the lower right corner of your browser status bar), occasionally it fails! When this happens, you gotta copy the link for your feed, goto Bookmarks->Manage Bookmarks->File->New Live Bookmark and then paste your feed. Yuck, how irritating and annoying.
However thanks to “Phil Ringnalda” for his “LiveBookmark This” firefox extension. Now you can right click on any feed link and select “Add Live Bookmark” to choose a bookmark location for your RSS feed. Combine this with “Manage Bookmarks” feature of Firefox to create folders within “Bookmarks Toolbar Folders”! These folders serve as category folders to hold your RSS feeds. For example, I have the following folders: News, Entertainment, Blogs, Technology, Security, Linux etc. Make sure your “Bookmarks Toolbar” is visible to neatly access all your feeds as menu items from any of your feed categories (folders). Nice!
Copying Firefox profile folders:
Usually I install lot of extensions and themes that I deem useful. However I hate the prospect of reinstalling all of them while creating a different Firefox profile or when creating a new profile from Linux. Thanks to this tip that I read on the internet, you can now simply copy your entire Firefox profile folder onto a new location, search and replace all hard coded paths in chrome.rdf (located in your profile folder) to that of your new location, modify your profile.ini to point to your newly copied profile folder and Voila! You have the exact same profile that you copied, complete with Bookmarks, Feeds, History and even your cache. Nice! It’s explained in detail here.
Sharing Thunderbird profiles:
Functionally almost identical to Outlook Express sans its hassles, Thunderbird has gone on to become my most favorite email client. One of the features I love about Thunderbird is that you can create a common message base (profile) and go-on to share that message base with other installations of Thunderbird.
Lets take an example, though am very happy with my gmail/yahoo for all of my personal email, I still need a common shared message base for all my family emails, newsletters etc. Not only does Thunderbird provide this exact feature, but it’s so flexible in that it lets me access the shared message base from different user accounts and even other OS installations including Linux.
Here is what I do:
- I create a profile using Thunderbird profile manager in a common shared drive (FAT32 partition), proceed to setup my accounts/pop/smtp server information etc.
- Close Thunderbird.
- Copy the profiles.ini to respective user account (alternatively let thunderbird create it by firing it up and closing it without creating anything).
- Modify the profiles.ini and change the relative path to an absolute path and make it the same as the folder location created in step-1.
- Change the line IsRelative=1 to IsRelative=0.
- Restart Thunderbird.
In case you are wondering why I mentioned storing the Message Store in a FAT32 partition, the answer is Linux. That’s right; you can access FAT32 partitions in read/write mode from Linux. Hence you could mount your FAT32 partition (usually mounted at startup) and then create a new profiles.ini file to point to your shared message store folder created in step-1. That’ it, now you can access your message store without setting it up again in Linux. What’s more, you Get/Send mail from any profile, and it automatically reflects on all of the other profiles. Now, no more reboots to Windows to check ‘n update my emails. Nice! It’s explained in detail here.
While we are on the subject, take a look “MozBackup” which lets you backup ‘n restore Thunderbird/Firefox/Mozilla profiles using a simple Wizard based interface.
I hope you find the above tips useful and unleash the full power of your Firefox and Thunderbird installation. Go Mozilla!
¶ 20:08 0 comments
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Kanotix 64-2005-03 – An excellent Debain based Linux distribution.
Though I like my Gentoo installation the most; especially for the control that it offers, I tend to keep it bare and start up in console mode all of the time. However there are times when I dislike the “compile from source” way of installing stuff. These are times, when I long for distributions that work out of the box with easy installation of binaries. Kanotix is one such distribution based on Debian-Sid with up-to-date packages, fantastic hardware recognition, simplest ‘n fastest hard-drive installation and of course a great Live-CD. It also has a 64 bit version called Kanotix64 which is a delight to work with.
First impressions:
Though at first glance, Kanotix resembles Knoppix and is even based on it, what sets it apart is its ability to painlessly install onto hard-drives and more importantly update it. When I booted it first, I was surprised to see a GRUB loader instead of the standard LILO that we are so used to. I started the Live-CD version with an up-to-date 2.6 kernel and was pleasantly surprised. It detected almost all my hardware flawlessly except my Broadcom (BCM4318) Wireless adapter, and brought up KDE 3.4 GUI that we’ve grown to love. I was so impressed with the Live-CD that I decided to install onto my hard-drive immediately. That’s right Kanotix comes with a very impressive list of packages including K3B for burning DVDs, OpenOffice suite, PPPOE client, DHCP client, Instant messaging, browsers and more. The complete list of packages for Kanotix 64-2005-03 can be found here.
Hard-Drive Install:
This has to be one the most pleasing things about this distribution. The hard-drive installation is so painless and one of the fastest I’ve ever seen. I generally opt for Grub-Install on my root partition, loading it from my NT loader. Since I was in the terminal for installing, I could do this easily by mounting my C:>, creating the boot loader file, and modifying boot.ini. After a quick reboot, Voila! I had the exact installation of the Live-CD on my hard-drive.
Wireless:
As I mentioned earlier, Kanotix couldn’t detect my wireless adapter which is a Broadcom (BCM4318) Airforce One 54.g 802.11g wireless adapter. I wasn’t surprised as I already knew native drivers for this device didn’t exist. So I fired up ndiswrapper, loaded my xp64 wireless driver. Much to my annoyance the driver failed to load. A quick inspection showed me the version of ndiswrapper to be 1.5. Since this driver works only with ndiswrapper 1.2, I uninstalled ndiswrapper 1.5 and installed ndiswrapper 1.2, making it from source. As expected, I got my wireless adapter working and connected to my access point. Configuration of my wireless connection using kWifiManager proved to be painless. After adding ndiswrapper to my kernel modules and a reboot later, I had wireless connectivity at startup. Nice.
Conclusion:
I think this is one of the most underrated distributions. The quality of this distribution is very impressive and will appeal to end-users and power-users alike. Hardware detection and package selection is one of the best available. Being Debian based, installing/updating packages using apt-get/kPackageManager/Synaptic makes package management a breeze. Kudos to developer Kano for making such an awesome distribution.
Related Links:
¶ 21:31 0 comments
First impressions:
Though at first glance, Kanotix resembles Knoppix and is even based on it, what sets it apart is its ability to painlessly install onto hard-drives and more importantly update it. When I booted it first, I was surprised to see a GRUB loader instead of the standard LILO that we are so used to. I started the Live-CD version with an up-to-date 2.6 kernel and was pleasantly surprised. It detected almost all my hardware flawlessly except my Broadcom (BCM4318) Wireless adapter, and brought up KDE 3.4 GUI that we’ve grown to love. I was so impressed with the Live-CD that I decided to install onto my hard-drive immediately. That’s right Kanotix comes with a very impressive list of packages including K3B for burning DVDs, OpenOffice suite, PPPOE client, DHCP client, Instant messaging, browsers and more. The complete list of packages for Kanotix 64-2005-03 can be found here.
Hard-Drive Install:
This has to be one the most pleasing things about this distribution. The hard-drive installation is so painless and one of the fastest I’ve ever seen. I generally opt for Grub-Install on my root partition, loading it from my NT loader. Since I was in the terminal for installing, I could do this easily by mounting my C:>, creating the boot loader file, and modifying boot.ini. After a quick reboot, Voila! I had the exact installation of the Live-CD on my hard-drive.
Wireless:
As I mentioned earlier, Kanotix couldn’t detect my wireless adapter which is a Broadcom (BCM4318) Airforce One 54.g 802.11g wireless adapter. I wasn’t surprised as I already knew native drivers for this device didn’t exist. So I fired up ndiswrapper, loaded my xp64 wireless driver. Much to my annoyance the driver failed to load. A quick inspection showed me the version of ndiswrapper to be 1.5. Since this driver works only with ndiswrapper 1.2, I uninstalled ndiswrapper 1.5 and installed ndiswrapper 1.2, making it from source. As expected, I got my wireless adapter working and connected to my access point. Configuration of my wireless connection using kWifiManager proved to be painless. After adding ndiswrapper to my kernel modules and a reboot later, I had wireless connectivity at startup. Nice.
Conclusion:
I think this is one of the most underrated distributions. The quality of this distribution is very impressive and will appeal to end-users and power-users alike. Hardware detection and package selection is one of the best available. Being Debian based, installing/updating packages using apt-get/kPackageManager/Synaptic makes package management a breeze. Kudos to developer Kano for making such an awesome distribution.
Related Links:
- Kanotix Wiki - English
- Great review of Kanotix in Distrowatch.com by Robert Storey
- Another great review of Kanotix in Linux.com by Preston St. Pierre
¶ 21:31 0 comments
D-Link DI-524 Airforce One 54.g Wireless Router
When I decided to buy a laptop, I knew I’d have to buy a wireless router. Well with the prices of wireless routers crashing, I bought the DLINK DI-524 wireless router on an impulse when buying my Acer Aspire 5002WLMI Laptop.
When I did get a chance to read reviews on this router (prior to opening it), I was disappointed. There was lot of bad press surrounding this router although the D-LINK site had excellent words on its product. Yeah right!!
Anyway it was too late to return it and I decided to use it anyway. What the heck. To my pleasant surprise, the router worked right out of the box. The Ethernet switch worked like a charm churning out IP addresses without hitches. All excited, I configured my access point and tried to connect wirelessly. Well guess what – it failed!! That’s right, no matter what I did, I couldn’t get it to connect wirelessly. I configured all the correct settings but nothing worked.
After toying with it for 10 minutes, when I started to get that feeling deep in my pit, suddenly it occurred to me that I check with the D-LINK website for a firmware update. Well surprise surprise, sure enough; there was a recent firmware update for this exact router!
Immediately I downloaded, flashed my router and waited with bated breath as it restarted. Voila – my wireless link was up. My laptop picked up the SSID and connected to it automatically. What a delightful feeling!!
Fully pleased, I proceeded to setup basic WIFI security like disabling SSID broadcast, turning on 128 bit WEP encryption with shared key, stealthing port 113 (IDENT) using port forwarding (virtual server menu), enabling MAC filters and restricting DHCP ranges. There is also an option to disable radio, thereby turning off wireless altogether. Very useful,if you need to create a network with no wireless clients.
It’s been working out of the box ever since and is one of the easiest of routers to configure. I must add that am extremely pleased with router though the range of this router can be limited. One of the features that I love is that setting in the router to automatically reconnect your PPPOE connection (DSL) when it disconnects, nicely simulating an always on internet connection.
The only issue that I might have is with the router time always defaulting to Apr 2002. This can be a pain while reviewing logs. Overall – a wonderful product from DLINK for as little as 35$ approx (after mail-in rebates). ¶ 00:37 0 comments
When I did get a chance to read reviews on this router (prior to opening it), I was disappointed. There was lot of bad press surrounding this router although the D-LINK site had excellent words on its product. Yeah right!!
Anyway it was too late to return it and I decided to use it anyway. What the heck. To my pleasant surprise, the router worked right out of the box. The Ethernet switch worked like a charm churning out IP addresses without hitches. All excited, I configured my access point and tried to connect wirelessly. Well guess what – it failed!! That’s right, no matter what I did, I couldn’t get it to connect wirelessly. I configured all the correct settings but nothing worked.
After toying with it for 10 minutes, when I started to get that feeling deep in my pit, suddenly it occurred to me that I check with the D-LINK website for a firmware update. Well surprise surprise, sure enough; there was a recent firmware update for this exact router!
Immediately I downloaded, flashed my router and waited with bated breath as it restarted. Voila – my wireless link was up. My laptop picked up the SSID and connected to it automatically. What a delightful feeling!!
Fully pleased, I proceeded to setup basic WIFI security like disabling SSID broadcast, turning on 128 bit WEP encryption with shared key, stealthing port 113 (IDENT) using port forwarding (virtual server menu), enabling MAC filters and restricting DHCP ranges. There is also an option to disable radio, thereby turning off wireless altogether. Very useful,if you need to create a network with no wireless clients.
It’s been working out of the box ever since and is one of the easiest of routers to configure. I must add that am extremely pleased with router though the range of this router can be limited. One of the features that I love is that setting in the router to automatically reconnect your PPPOE connection (DSL) when it disconnects, nicely simulating an always on internet connection.
The only issue that I might have is with the router time always defaulting to Apr 2002. This can be a pain while reviewing logs. Overall – a wonderful product from DLINK for as little as 35$ approx (after mail-in rebates). ¶ 00:37 0 comments
Monday, November 14, 2005
Pay it forward..
So, am a clueless drifter wandering around. Then why this web log, you might think? Well, I’ve been getting so much of help from the Internet, from people who’d post their experiences only to help other people. Its time then, I thought that I’d share many such unique experiences of mine and pay it forward. If you’ve watched the movie “Pay it forward” starring Harry Joel Osment (from Sixth Sense) and Helen Hunt (Twister, As good as it gets), you’d know what I mean.
So what am I gonna write about? Well mostly about computers that I toy around with all the time. Oh I forgot to mention, I love playing with Linux – so lot of it would be based on my experiences with different distros of Linux as well, and no, before you think, am no Windows/MS hater. I happen to love my Windows installations just as well. So from time to time, I plan to write about some of my Windows experiences as well. Most of it is gonna be from an end-user perspective, though I might write about code - mostly Perl, Networking and other Sysadmin experiences as well.
Though the theme around this weblog is centered around computers, operating systems and networking, from time to time, I plan to write about my take on movies and books as well.
I’ll try to make sure the information I post is as accurate and researched as possible. If you like what I write and find it useful, great – leave a comment but more importantly “Pay it forward”. If not, leave me alone and drift to another place that you might like. Remember, am not responsible for things breaking just coz you followed my posts. Of course, using your common sense helps too :-)
Allrighty then, watch this space for more and let me know what you think. Ciao! ¶ 18:56 1 comments
So what am I gonna write about? Well mostly about computers that I toy around with all the time. Oh I forgot to mention, I love playing with Linux – so lot of it would be based on my experiences with different distros of Linux as well, and no, before you think, am no Windows/MS hater. I happen to love my Windows installations just as well. So from time to time, I plan to write about some of my Windows experiences as well. Most of it is gonna be from an end-user perspective, though I might write about code - mostly Perl, Networking and other Sysadmin experiences as well.
Though the theme around this weblog is centered around computers, operating systems and networking, from time to time, I plan to write about my take on movies and books as well.
I’ll try to make sure the information I post is as accurate and researched as possible. If you like what I write and find it useful, great – leave a comment but more importantly “Pay it forward”. If not, leave me alone and drift to another place that you might like. Remember, am not responsible for things breaking just coz you followed my posts. Of course, using your common sense helps too :-)
Allrighty then, watch this space for more and let me know what you think. Ciao! ¶ 18:56 1 comments