RESEARCHUT

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!

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.

An old time favorite.

Ignoring files in subversion during checkout.

You can’t directly ignore folders on a checkout, but you can use sparse checkouts in svn 1.5. For example:

$ svn co http://subversion/project/trunk my_checkout –depth immediates

This will check files and directories from your project trunk into ‘my_checkout’, but not recurse into those directories. Eg:

$ cd my_checkout && ls
bar/ baz foo xyzzy/

Then to get the contents of ‘bar’ down:
$ cd bar && svn update –set-depth infinity

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For all NFS Old Timers…

Many must be aware of the older Need For Speed games that EA produced. One among them was High Stakes. IMHO, the uniqueness of High Stakes was its Damage Mode feature which could be very well felt in the game. The more the car’s engine/steering/suspension got damaged, the more difficult it was to handle the car then. I could never find the same game play in the later versions of EA’s NFS.

Pantyhose for Men….. Sounds interesting???
Visit http://www.e-mancipate.net/
Let’s see when we could see this in stores in India :D

I’ve always been very skeptical about Doctors. Given the kind of news we’ve heard about Doctor’s (one who used to take kidneys out of healthy people in the name of treatment), it was tough believing in this profession.

But I think I’ve been very wrong. One example cannot represent a community. My father has been going through serious medical treatments and I admitted him to the Manipal Hospital at Bangalore, India. Different people have had varying opinions about Manipal Hospital. I though it is important for me to opine what I went through with his treatment.

I’ve been working on a bug recently related to udev which under certain circumstances triggers an OOM on the Linux kernel. On another bug, I also wanted to look for the max open processes for a single file. The results I found and pretty good. The Linux Kernel’s OOM feature has imporved a lot.

This is the one liner used to trigger the OOM.

while true; do tail -f /tmp/test.txt & x=expr $x + 1; echo $x; done

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Yay!! First of all, Thank you.

I think now is the time most of the KDE users are going to migrate to KDE 4.1. KDE 4.1 looks so tempting that I really can’t wait. So while I compose this blog post, apt is doing all the needful to download the KDE4.1 packages from Debian Experimental. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t following KDE 4.x. While, becuasae of resource constraints, Debian made a wise choice of sticking to just a single KDE version (i.e. KDE3 in testing and KDE4 in unstable/experimental), there still are many ways to be able to test KDE 4.x. And by ways , I don’t mean a VM or a Live CD. You can definitely do a much better and realistic testing of KDE4 on your production box without fearing of screwing your current KDE 3.x installation. At Debian Wiki, there’s a cool howto describing how to do it. If you follow the wiki howto properly, you should even be able to test bling features like KWin’s Composite and Plasma.

When writing packages for Debian, one of the biggest problems is determining the packages to be put in Build-Depends

Sometimes, a single dependency in Build-Depends ends up building the package successfully on your machine while it fails on other machines. This is where pbuilder is really handy. It allows you to have bare minimal Debian OS releases, to which you can pass the package to build. It downloads the Build- Depends and then does a build in the clean Debian build environment. Now if you’ve provided incomplete Build-Depends, your build will fail.