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November 1st is celebrated in Karnataka (a state in India) as Kannada Rajyotsava or Kannada language day. Kannada is the state language of Karnataka. I’m from Karnataka and I really love the language, its culture, the people and probably everything about it. But I’m not fanatical about it. I equally love and respect other languages especially languages of neighbouring states irrespective of the regional politiks.

I’m also a FOSS fan and its my desire to bring both the spirit as well as products of FOSS to Kannada language. I’m also interested in localization project. That is because, I believe the vast treasure of knowledge available on the internet can reach and benifit the people living in the remote corners of the state only if it is available in their local language. Instead of making the whole population learn a foreign language in order to gain from the knowledge revolution the knowledge should be made available readily to them in the language they are most comfortable with. Our brothers in the neighbouring states and elsewhere in India have succeeded to a great degree in this regard. If they can achieve it we too can!

Upon clicking the ‘Details’ button I got detailed messages as:
Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/ for information. (Details – 1: IOR file ‘/tmp/gconfd-svinux/lock/ior’ not opened successfully, no gconfd located: Permission denied 2: IOR file ‘/tmp/gconfd-svinux/lock/ior’ not opened successfully, no gconfd located: Permission denied)

This msg repeated several times.

On googling I came across a page for mysql bugs with similar looking error. The person who reported bug also had posted a suggestion that the file was searching gconfd in the tmp folder so he linked the file to his home directory’ gconfd.

Taking the clue I just did ls -la in my /tmp and found that the owner for gconfd-svinux was 500. 500 is default for users in Fedora/Redhat but I had edited it to 1000. So I changed the owner to svinux and the problem got rectified. I still dont understand the details of it. Just a superficial problem-solving. Nevertheless it was a good experience.

Today I found an open-source media player that plays virtually all kinds of audio/video formats (except realmedia files?) including streaming audio/video. It has precompiled binaries for all major linux distros and for Unices(BSDs and Solaris) and for Windows and for Mac OS X! Ofcourse it provides source code too if we want to compile it ourselves. I’m talking about VLC Media player.

After my success with mp3 to ogg conversion, I wanted to convert my mpegs to theora format. So I downloaded and put the ‘ffmpeg2theora‘ converter (binary format) in /usr/local/bin. Then converted one of the files for testing. But sadly the quality was worse than worst. Don’t know what happened. Did I make any mistake? Ofcourse I did not use any ‘options’. Later I found out that it was problem with the Kaffaine media player not ffmpeg2theora script. But before I could know this I only thought that ffmpeg2theora didnot work.

I was not in a mood to study ‘ffmpeg2theora’ so I just googled to see if I can find something easier. From Xiph.org page, I was led to theora.org page and from there to the VLC player’s page. I was really impressed with the information in the homepage. I clicked on the link that had binaries (for fear of dependencies) for Fedora. It said the binary was available from livna repos and provided a link to livna . Livna is a repository of add-on packages for Fedora. We have to install the repository rpm for our version of Fedora to access the packages through yum. I installed the Fedora 7 repo-rpm(livna-release-7.rpm) with ‘rpm -ivh livna-release-7.rpm’ which automatically put the repo files in /etc/yum.repos.d/ directory. I then did ‘yum install vlc’. It installed the player taking care of all the dependencies and bingo I was ready to watch all the available formats in my box.

After this I thought why not play my theora converted file to see where the problem was? Was it with the converter or the mediaplayer? I was indeed relieved to see that my theora file played perfectly well in VLC. As I say I’m not gifted enough to differentiate in qualities between formats. For me the quality of theora file was as good as the original mpeg file. Just to reconfirm that its Kaffine’s fault, I logged into Debian which has only GNOME and played the file in Totem. It worked fine in totem too.

Once I was convinced that the theora-converted file plays well, I converted all my proprietary files into theora. I still use VLC but all my multimedia files are now free-format files. Probably its illegal to convert the file formats (Does the prop. license prohibit the format conversion?). I don’t know. Also, not all the files I’ve are purchased ones! Who cares?

I’ve a very modest pc and a 256kbps connection. For most westerners/Americans it may be nothing. I’ve read them talking about speeds in Mbps/Gbps(?!). Here in India and the place I stay, 256kbps is pretty good speed. Anyway I was impatient to use Gibbon so thought of downloading instead of ordering free cd or purchasing it. It took about 10hours I then checked the md5sum to make sure the file is not corrupt and burnt the iso (in terminal using cdrecord. Its a nice geeky feeling you know ).

Once my install cum live cd was ready I booted through it and once I was in the desktop tried to move around. Found the layouts to be similar to Fedora except the colour-scheme and icons! It could be the feature of new GNOME. Then I clicked on the installer and it started to ask the regular questions. I choose the manual partition and continued to install. The first time however the installer got stuck. The busy curson icon kept rotating for a long time. I dont know if it takes that much time or it really got stuck as I thought. Anyway I restarted the installer and this time it went smoothly. It started copying files and then came the two most irritating parts.

First, it automatically started updating the apt by ’scanning the mirror…’ . It took hell lot of time. Why the f**k should it update apt while installing. It could very well do it afterwards. What if I had a 56k modem connection. I had no Idea it would to it otherwise would have disconnected the wire. No information, no choice

Second, it automatically installed grub on MBR. Why? Why do you assume that people only run Windows and its ok to install grub provided you make it dual-boot? Again where is the choice? I have Debian as my main OS and want Debian to run its grub. Well I’m not an expert and probably it doesnot matter what os runs grub. But _still_ I prefer Debian to take care of bootloading. Its for the same reason I hated Mandriva installation.

In both the cases why are they trying to be over-smart? They can give choices and tell the novice users what is the defaults are and ask them to stick to defaults if they get confused. Do they think users are idiots? As I type this I remember Linus’ comment on GNOME. He while asking people to prefer KDE to GNOME said if one thinks that users are idiots only idiots will use their products.

Ok, it finally finished installing (took 40m) and then I rebooted the system. Dont know what went wrong the boot menu was a trash. There was 4 repeated entries of Slackware, 2 of Fedora, no mention of Debian, CentOS! I restarted the system with my Debian DVD and reinstalled the grub. Then booted into Ubuntu.

Once inside, it was pain to see all my partitions auto mounted. Why do you auto mount all the partitions? Mount windows drives if you want (except the c drive which users can f**k up by mistake now that Ubuntu supports ntfs write).

By default, in Gibbon all the partitions are mounted in /media. May be others too do the same. But I’m kind of fuzzy about this. Ideally I want only the removable media(floppy, cds, pendrives) to be mounted on /media and all the harddisk partitions to be mounted on /mnt. I edited my fstab but it doesnot seem to work. Still all the drives are auto mounted. May be there is some tweaking which I dont know.

Now regarding performance, I found nothing very special to mention. All the applications – office applications, browser, mail client, chat client, image viewer, etc… all seemed normal. As I said except for the colour-scheme and icon graphics, it seemed similar to Fedora desktop. They may be just the updated versions with security fixes and optimised for the new kernel/GNOME etc… In that sense, ya it sure ‘just works’. As for music playback, there is one thing to note, the choice to install ‘ugly’ codecs to play mp3, mpeg, divx etc… some choice at last!

Last but not the least I dislike about Ubuntu is their too much talk about humanity. Sir, its good that you have such high ideals but why tomtom it. That Mandela speeches, brown colour themes, ‘linux for human beings’ stuff… Why over do things? Too much of anything is too bad. Look at Fedora. They dont talk much. Though their products are not the best all the time they dont irritate me by their touchy-touchy ideals. Have ‘freedom’ as your ideal and then shut-up and do your work.

If my vote counts I would give only 2 out of 5 to Gibbon. This release will not be my default desktop OS. Of all the releases of this year, Fedora has no competition-atleast on my personal computer!

As the default KDE install did not have Firefox and Thunderbird, I tried to install it through pirut. Pirut did trouble me. ‘Retriving information…’ went on and on and on… I lost my patience and force quit the application. I then used yum to install them and in about 8-10m I was browsing and mailing using my favourite applications. Dont know if that was a temp problem with pirut or it seriously has some bugs. Anyway I’m comfortable using yum so guess that should not matter much.

Fedora doesnot come with mp3/mpeg plugins for license/patent reasons. Its one factor that many take into consideration while choosing a distro. But inability to play the mp3s/mpegs doesnot bother me for two reasons. Firstly, I’m not a music guy. I won’t die without it. Secondly, I’ve found a script that converts mp3 to ogg and I’ve converted all my mp3 songs to ogg format. My ears are not sharp enough to notice the reduction in quality after conversion from one lossy format to another!

Apart from pirut all the default applications ‘just work’! I just love Fedora. Its going to be my primary desktop OS for a long time if they continue to keep this standard.

Happy Fedoring…

I’ve Fedora 7 on my multiboot box. As one is aware Fedora has no out-of-box support for proprietary music formats like mp3, mpg, aac, etc. In their webpage the Redhat states that instead of giving support for proprietary formats and their by letting users to continue using them it wants to kinda force them into using free formats like ogg, theora etc. Some may say its against the spirit of freedom. But I strongly support RedHat in this issue. Yes, if we are provided support for mp3 would we ever bother to use ogg format? Would we take the trouble to download necessary plugins or to convert the mp3 files into ogg files and use them? We all are slaves of inertia. It needs some ‘force’ to change the status.

So, instead of downloading plugins to play mp3 files I googled for mp3 to ogg converters. Among all the available choices the following two attracted my attention:

1. http://linux.oldcrank.com - A shell script which can be used to convert mp3 to ogg from command line.

2. http://soundconverter.berlios.de – A GNOME utility for mp3 to ogg conversion.

I downloaded the soundconverter source file and tried to install it. As I feared I got lost in dependency maze. I then downloaded the mp3ogg script from first site. Changed the permission to 755 and put it in /usr/local/bin.

The next step was, ofcourse, to test it. I selected an mp3 song and typed

mp3ogg filename.mp3

Guess what? It works. Now I’ve found a way to satisfy my ‘ear’ly urges on Fedora too.

We can give to options to this:

-s : to suppress all error messages.

-d : to delete the original mp3 file.

The converts the file into ogg file with the same name and in the current directory. I didnot try changing directories and all. I guess it first converts the mp3 into a wav file and then converts it into ogg file. Anyway, thanks a lot to Loran for writing such a nice script file.

Experts, ofcourse, say that ogg is a lossy format and if we convert from mp3 which is already a lossy format, the quality further degrades. If at all we are converting it is better to convert to FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) which as the same says is a better free format. If we are using audio cds, its better to use tools like grip and to rip the songs directly into ogg formats. Well, they may be right. While I completely agree with second suggestion, I’m not sure if I want to convert my files to FLAC. I guess the file size is bigger for flac format compared to ogg. My disk space is not impressive. Moreover I’m not a music guy. Not expert enough to feel the difference in quality anyway. All I need is to listen to song when I feel like. I love linux (read ‘Freedom’) and any kind of music format that runs on it is ok for me.

Now friends, when we can convert music files to free formats why continue to use proprietary formats? Why go with the tide? Remember we are never going to save our lives unless we swim agaist or across it! If we do not have necessary converters we can’t help. But when we have converters we better make use of them.

In an interview to oneopensource.it Linus said the only distribution he has not tried is Debian. The reason he gave is ‘because that has traditionally been harder to install’. Quite strange!

I’m not an expert linux user. Certainly not a programmer or administrator. I’m an average user- somewhere in low to mid-level of the hierarchy. But of several distros I’ve installed, Debian has been the easiest! Distros like fedora core and ubuntu showed me hell while installing them on my low memory (256MB DDR400) box. Ubuntu live-cds took ages to boot up and to navigate from window to window. Infact, Ubuntu 6.04 and 6.10 never got installed from live-cd. I had to buy the ‘alternate cd’ to install them. With Debian Etch, I had no problems! Not just about memory usage, even the options at the time of installation were not difficult or confusing, though installer is not graphical. Well, may be I’ve to try installing it again to countercheck if the linux-great, after which linux is named, is right!

Personally, even the OS experience has been awesome! Man, all the softwares it came with just work. And we have all the softwares a general user would like to have in an OS-Office suite, Internet, Media Players. Talking about media players, I thought Debian did not support proprietary formats like mp3, mpeg, vob, etc.. But the totem and rhythom box just play everything. I actually don’t remember installing any plugins – certainly not by downloading from internet and then installing. In case if I’ve installed the ‘ugly’ plugins may be they were already available in the DVDs. In that case it does not matter if Debian does not support proprietary formats by default. Just install the plugins n have same media experience as you would have in Windozzzz. In fact, now I don’t need Windows at all, except for using some proprietary softwares used by my company.

Who said Debian (atleast Etch, which I’ve tried) is not beginner friendly? Get life-insurance and give me your address…!