Debian Lenny - Reviews and Comparison

Now that Lenny is released, we see a lot of reviews around the world. I think most of the reviewers do an unfair comparison for Debian.

I followed Heise Online’s review and see that they are comparing Lenny to Ubuntu/Fedora/openSUSE.

IMO, the philosophy behind Debian Stable is very different than that of Fedora/openSUSE/Ubuntu. Fedora/openSUSE are more focused to bring you the latest and greatest. The same applies to Ubuntu (Excluding the LTS release). These are releases where they are targetting users as Beta Testers. And that’s good. It brings a good final Stable Release product. But comparing Debian to them is not really correct.

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Categories: Debian-Pages 

Debian Lenny Released

Amazing Moments
Debian Lenny has been released.

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Go, grab now.

Categories: Debian-Pages 

Motorola S9 Bluetooth Headset

So my friend game me a cute little birthday present, a Motorola S9 Bluetooth Headset.

Making it work under Linux was not very difficult but still has to catch-up in terms of utils.

To make the headset work, I just had to run a scan on the Linux host, and get the hw address and specify it in .asoundrc.

pcm.bluetooth {
type bluetooth {
address = xx.xx.xx.xx.xx
description “Motorola S9 Bluetooth Headset”
}
}

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Categories: Debian-Pages Technology  Tags: bluetooth 

Operation Modes in a [Linux] Distribution

IMO, Linux Distributors should seriously think about Role Based Operations for their distributions.

Every linux user is going to be using his copy of the distribution in a different way. But from the distributor’s point of view, it should boil down to:

Desktop Users

Laptop Users

Server Users

Currently, some of the distributions apply this thought only to packages. For example, Ubuntu rolls out a desktop flavor and a server (generic) flavor of its kernel package. I think the distributions need to think broad and realize that NOT One Size Fits All.

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Categories: Debian-Pages Computing 

The Taxi Wallah's Dream

It was about 2 AM , some day in June 2008 , when I caught the taxi from Chinatown, Boston, MA to head to my hotel room in Waltham, MA.

It was the same day Celtics went victorious over Lakers in the Basketball match. I was lucky to see the people cheering and celebrating the victory. Everyone was shaking hands with others. I didn’t feel that I was a visitor there.

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Categories: Psyche 

pypt-offline goodness

I created pypt-offline with the hope that it’d be useful for people who don’t have an internet connection but would still like to enjoy Debian. Enjoying Debian is about enjoying its Package Manager, APT. I don’t have any data to show if pypt-offline is in use by anybody. I too, use it rarely, when at my hometown. But I hope people who use it, find it useful.

At my hometown, I use internet service from my friend’s ISP. I have a 10kb/s connection at home. That’s slow.

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Categories: Tools Programming  Tags: apt-offline 

Laptop - Microsoft Windows - Installer - License

Most people who’ve bought laptops, would see a pre-installed version of Windows, for which they’d have already paid. Recently things have changed but still for the majority of the laptop models available, Windows is the most commonly used option.

I own a Dell XPS M1210 which too came pre-installed with Microsoft Windows XP. Since the machine was low on hard-drive space, I had to eventually knock-off all Non-Linux partitions to make more space. Recently I was able to swap my Seagate SATA Laptop Drive (160 GB) with the one that was shipped with the Laptop. This made me rich in disk space. So, being a small PC gamer, I decided that I do want to have a copy of Windows XP installed on my machine. And why not, I already have paid for it and own a license.

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Categories: Tools Technology 

SELinux in Debian

Thanks to Pierre Chifflier , Debian now has setroubleshoot packaged. The good thing about setroubleshoot is that it gives you a very user friendly message about the SELinux violations that occur on your box while you were doing something.

Now that something is very difficult to define (at least for Debian). My day job requires me to work on the RHELdistribution which has very good SELinux policy defined (Same is the case with Fedora). Here’s a list of things which Debian’s SELinux policy lacks and that RHEL/Fedora’s doesn’t

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Designed for Linux

A couple of years back (or maybe still), it was difficult to find Device Support in Linux from the Hardware Vendor.

Recently I was at home on a small vacation. There something surprised me. I bought a device which had a logo saying, “Designend for Linux”. Cheers!

Categories: Fun Technology 

Temple of Lord Mahadev, Bangalore

Having been in Bangalore for more than 4+ years, it was a regret when I visited the temple of Lord Mahadev, that why didn’t I visit it earlier.

This past weekend I had the opportunity to be there with my parents and I must say, it is awesome. You need to be there.

Lord Mahadev Temple,
Bangalore

Categories: General