You never know

Quite often than not people are multi-tasking. Doing that you tend to have a feeling of segregating windows specific to separate tasks. Linux world have the concept of virtual desktop since time immemorial but Mr. Gates still doesn’t look upon it as a decent enough feature.

BTW, just because windows doesn’t have this by default doens’t mean they don’t have API that can’t support this. There are many applications that do just the same. I had tried quite a few of them but this one really is very useful

Virtuawin is a very light weight app that sits on the system tray. You can attach shortcuts to switch to different ‘virtual desktops’. You can have sticky windows (windows that are available on every virtual desktop). Obviously, you can select windows that are shown on a particular desktop. Ohhh! did I forget to mention that its pretty light-weight as well (really managing and showing/hiding windows shouldn’t take much time)

Apart from the obvious’es mentioned above, comes the best part that I like about this app. You don’t need to install it. Simply copy the files at some place. Hit the executable and there you are with virtuawin running.

Btw, if you found this interesting, there are a few more list here.

It’s a cool new application that let’s you mark certain files on your phone as public, and then people around you can search for and download those files over Bluetooth, without you having to send them each time. Add to that the social networking aspect, of creating and sharing profiles, chatting over Bluetooth etc. and you’ve got BluXone.

(Damn! I don’t have a Nokia )

read more | digg story

A noob architect decides that he’s obviously the best guy to revolutionize office buildings and, next thing you know, he’s designed a wind-powered rotating skyscraper. While the technical details of the wind-power system are sketchy at best, the architect, David Fisher, claims that the tower could power itself and ten other similar sized buildings.

read more | digg story

Linus: Architecture updates, drivers, filesystems, networking, security, build scripts, reorganizations, cleanups.You want a new firewire stack? We’ve got it. New wireless networking infrastructure? Check. New infiniband drivers? Digital video drivers? A totally new CPU architecture (blackfin)? Check, check, check.

read more | digg story

Windows resume copy file(s) blues:
Wonder how many time you would have tried copying a LARGE folder and almost when everything is copied Windows shouts a dialog box on your face saying that it cannot copy the file for such-n-such reason.

Copy Handler is a tool which comes at the rescue during these moments. This software hooks itself to the OS and traps when you try to copy something. It then would allow you resume/cancel/retry and even change the paths. The software runs as a systray app and can be downloaded as a zip file. Although, someone has placed an installer version here.

Painful Start->Programs->Tool->Program workflow:
If you are stressed of moving the mouse too much to run some app and think that not all useful apps can be pinned to the start menu then Launchy is the tool for you.
This software runs as a daemon on your system and can be brought to front with some easy(configurable) shortcuts. It indexes your start menu (and any other directory that you can add) for the executable files. It also indexes your bookmarks.
Now simply press the chosen shortcut, type in a few letters (need not be the first few letters) of the app you are trying to run. Launchy would bring in the best one on top (click enter and shoot). Other option are also shown in a dropdown.

Cannot delete file..its locked by some process:
All of us have tried to delete some file/folder which is not deletable as some process has locked it. Install Unlocker and it would popup whenever windows makes such complaint. It would tell you which all process(es) have locked the file/folder you are trying to delete. It would also give you an option to delete it.

Managing 2 comps with single keyboard/mouse:
This seems like a rare workflow, but in case if you fall prey to this then Synergy is your best bet. Synergy is a simple client/server software. Run it as a server on a system which is connected to the keyboard/mouse you are planning to use (say Screen1). Then configure this server instance to specify the names of the other system you are going to handle (synergy refers to them as screens). Next configure the screen placements like Screen1 is on the Screen2′s left (You also need to specify that Screen2 is on the Screen1′s right).
That being done simply run synergy as client on Screen2 (assuming Screen1 has the server instance), specify the name of the server (Screen1).
Thats it, now move your mouse to the left of the left edge of the Screen1. Your mouse would move into the right edge of Screen2 and your keyboard/mouse will start working as if they are connected directly to Screen2.

I have always been a windows user only for the conpulsions. To play UT (yeah I know we can play it under wine, but its just the way I did it!), to do some work under Visual Studio, to access Outlook (agn, I know KMail etc can give me similar functionalities with OWA [Outlook Web Access], but then this is how I do it).

My OS of choice had always been Linux. No, not because I am very fond of updating the kernel now and then or that I tweak some code to get things running on the machine. But because the way the whole Open source thing works, you always get to know what a certain app/installation is trying to do and you can yourself go ahead and help the app run if it feeling a lil out of place. Also the galore of softwares that you have at your service is amazing. You can simply go ahead pick something off the shelf and get it running. You don’t even have to worry about the attacks as even if the software you pick up turns out to be malicious, the damage is very local; rarely would it become as severe as it affects your whole user account, and almost negligible to have a attack having system wide effect (obviously, you are not supposed to run anything and everything as root. Don’t argue that a similar less privileged user would have less effect on windows system as I have seldom seem a nice app installation which doesn’t need Administrator access).

All my years in the college I had been a fan of SuSE (now openSUSE), and always heard everyone saying that RedHat is what gives you all what linux is about: the support, user community, robustness etc. So, after college I tried on FC6 on my Lenovo T60. An important resource for exactly the same installation can be found here. The things that didn’t run out of the box: wireless network card, graphics card(vesa did work), fingerprint reader, suspend to ram/hdd (I am a KDE lover and seemingly it works well on gnome). To have this installation work out well I had to first get my wireless card up. I simply downloaded the setup files, ucode, and controlling daemon using the wired connectivity. Then I sat down to configure things. Without internet I was all working with myself to get things right. It took one night but finally I could get my card up and running. Then I sat down to get the VPN access software installed so that I can start working from home. This one went pretty smoothly. With these things done, I was pretty sure that I can get the other ones done quite easily. I picked up the graphics driver next, but no matter what I do I couldn’t get the ati driver working for me. I could get the driver module compiled but configuring it into the Xorg.conf would crash the X server. So I gave up on the graphics driver and started for the fingerprint reader. This one was also very simple and I could verify that it was working. I again came back to the graphics driver problem, but the problem was a rock to crack. I gave up on it again and worked with FC6 for 1 month with sluggish graphics, a graphic driver so slow that I couldn’t even see a video full screen.

Then I was blessed with OpenSUSE 10.2 in one of the LFY editions. I was already very frustrated over the graphics driver, so I gave SuSE another shot. I started installation at 11 in the night. The only extra thing that I had on running out of the box time was my wireless card with a preinstalled, more useful network manager. This was the biggest relief I could have got as I was now connected to the net without any hassles. I then went for the VPN (piece of cake) followed by fingerprint which was again pretty easy. The most dreaded part (or as I had thought) was graphics driver. But this is what I was amazed at. I downloaded the binaries from ati, installed it, restarted the X and I had my new driver running. All this done only by 4 am. I then installed quake and it was running more smoothly than even on the windows system. The only thing that I am still not able to get up on this system is my corporate wireless access in the office which relies on the certificate. This certificate gets installed on a windows system using a VBE script. I think I would ask the IS(Information services) to get a way out over there. After that I am pretty sure I would be able to log into my corporated wireless network as well.

To wrap up, I would say that RedHat might be very strong in enterprise domain, but it still has a long way to go when desktop OS is concerned. They should understand the current prevalent hardware models available. They should give better applets to the user. AFAIU, any distro can be configured to work exactly as the other, so Redhat guys should take some tips from what SUSE packs.

For SUSE, its all beautiful as always, thanks to KDE and the new styled SUSE menu. A large pat on the back for them. Keep up the good work.

We have an Airtel broadband connection for some months now. But sharing the connection between the roomies was getting difficult. So we got a Netgear wireless router hoping that now I can kill the bandwidth when my mate is playing AOC

Happily, I setup the wireless router with the internet now getting to us as <Airtel Router>–><Netgear router>–><The home network using the ethernet ports and wireless access>. I did the same setup at my office and it worked happily. But the same thing wasn’t working out in the house no matter what I did. The comps at home cudn’t even ping to the Airtel router. We were thinking that the router has come with some kind of firewall…giving all kind of theories….thot that it the router software might have got crashed. Even started up ethereal to see what is happening at the network level.

While propounding the theories, we figured out that the new router has come up with its own dhcp and dns server and it allocates the addresses starting from 192.168.1.2/24 (it reserves 1.1 for its own interface….and of course this is configurable once we can get the router up and running). Similar configuration of the dhcp and dns servers existed in Airtel router as well, so Airtel router also gave 192.168.1.1/24 to itself and allocates ip’s after that. So, we configured the airtel router to give itself 1.4 and allocate from 1.5 onwards. This gave us a network with all hosts having unique IPs, yet the computers were not able to talk to the airtel router.

Next day, it struck that we are trying to configure a router over here (not a switch or hub), so it must have different networks/subnets on each of its side. That was it….configuring the new router’s dhcp to allocate up in 172.16 network resolved the issue.

What is more frustating about this story is that during the process of figuring out the problem we looked for the troubleshooting…which stressed that the routers should be powered on and connected in a specified order. Moreover, that clearing the browser cache can resolve the problems. We were sure that it was not possible, yet we were following the instructions as any layman would….there goes what I have learnt in those 4 years….haven’t yet moulded my brains to apply the concepts immediately.