RESEARCHUT

Synchronization is one of the common problems I face with my multiple machines. This article is about how KDE help me in keeping my data synchronized across machines without any problem.

Most GNU/Linux desktop users today are aware of the new 3D enhancements brought to the desktop. Namely Compiz and Beryl.

Compiz is already present in Debian but Beryl isn’t and will not be included until Etch is released, which probably is expected to be released in another 3 months. Beryl looks to be primarily focused on Ubuntu which IMO is not good but I can’t comment much because I haven’t contributed to it. In fact, as per the recent announcement on the Beryl blog, their release too seems to be focused on Ubuntu.

luvcview is a camera viewer for UVC driver based webcams

I’ve packaged a .deb for it which can be fetched from:

http://mentors.debian.net/cgi-bin/sponsor- pkglist?action=details;package=luvcview

Debian is a great OS Distribution. It itself is a great community. But there are times when Debian is very frustrating also. Like many of the packages go on a very slow pace.

Truly speaking, there isn’t much a person can ask the Debian community given the amount of contribution it makes.

I was looking for knetstats package but couldn’t find much help. The ITP against knetstats is more than 100 days but still not entered into Debian. And on the knetstats page, the debian package mentioned is outdated.

For many who don’t know, root-tail is a small utility which can write to your Desktop’s Screen (Often called the root window). It is mainly used to display critical system messages.

I’ve been a root-tail fan for long. It like the idea of displaying syslog messages on my desktop. It almost fixes 50% of my problems.

The problem with KDE is that it drwas its own Desktop image on top of the root window because of which you can’t see the messages drawn by root-tail. But KDE is something I’m an addict of and can’t live without. But recently I realised that KDE already had the framework in place for applications like root-tail.

If you are a person like me who likes to read books in html format, you sure would have lot of soft books. These books occupy a lot of diskspace because they are small files and just text. Apache’s transparent decompression (mod_deflate) is a good solution to read these books while keeping them compressed.

Hence this small utility which’ll gunzip/gzip all your html/text files on all Python supported platforms. Hope you find it useful.

Happy Birthday KDE

ctime, atime and mtime

It is important to distinguish between a file or directory ’s change time (ctime), access time (atime), and modify time (mtime).

ctime -- In UNIX, it is not possible to tell the actual creation time of a file. The ctime–change time–is the time when changes were made to the file or directory ’s inode (owner, permissions, etc.). It is needed by the dump command to determine if the file needs to be backed up. You can view the ctime with the ls -lc command.

World Class Company - Third Class Ethics

Well!! After almost around 3 months after my exit from my previous employer ( Dell R &D Center, Bangalore - India), I’ve now had some time to rant about the experiences I had.

Hereforth, unless explicitly mentioned, When Dell is quoted, I mean as **Dell R &D Center, Bangalore - India, **and not any other Dell facility because it is not fair for me to comment about the other centers since I ’ve not worked there.

First generate a public key

		1.rrs@geeKISSexy:~$ ssh-keygen -t dsa  
                2.Generating public/private dsa key pair.  
                3.Enter file in which to save the key (/home/rrs/.ssh/id_dsa):  
                4.Created directory '/home/rrs/.ssh'.  
                5.Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):  
                6.Enter same passphrase again:  
                7.Your identification has been saved in /home/rrs/.ssh/id_dsa.  
                8.Your public key has been saved in /home/rrs/.ssh/id_dsa.pub.  
          
Enter the command "ssh-keygen -t dsa" (line 1.).  
When prompted on file where key is saved just hit "Enter" (line 3.).  
When prompted for a passphrase just hit "Enter" (line 5.).  
When prompted to confirm passphrase hit "Enter" a second time (line 6.).   
Once you have created your public key you can copy it to the server.   
          
  
                1.rrs@geeKISSexy:~$ ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub rrs@learner  
                25  
                3.The authenticity of host 'learner (192.168.1.1)' can't be established.  
                4.RSA key fingerprint is 8a:8a:53:b3:1c:d6:72:b5:e9:e8:7d:c7:81:8c:6f:0b.  
                5.Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes  
                6.Warning: Permanently added 'learner' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.  
                7.rrs@learner's password:  
                8.Now try logging into the machine, with "ssh 'rrs@learner'", and check in:  
          
Enter the command "ssh-copy-id -i [location of key] [username@server IP] (line 1.).  
You may get some complaints due to defaults but when prompted to continue enter "yes" (line 5.).    
You will next be prompted to enter the user's password (line 7.). Remember the user password must be the same on the the client and server  
Finally you will be asked to see if you can log in via ssh on the server (line 8.).   
If everything is correct you should now be able to log in on the server in a your user account without having to enter a password.   
          
  
                rrs@geeKISSexy:~$ ssh rrs@learner  
                Last login: Sat Aug 12 11:21:54 2006