Linuxers June 2007

linuxers@mm.ilug-bom.org.in

69 participants
105 discussions

Ubuntu 7.04 very good for Gigabyte 945 Motherboard
by Rony 25 Jun '07

25 Jun '07

Hello All, Some days ago I had installed Kubuntu 7.04 on a Gigabyte 945 mobo machine and it had the problem of hanging on shutdown/reboot. So at the same place I loaded the Ubuntu 7.04 DVD that came with this month's Digit mag. and the results were very good. Shutdown as well as reboot was smooth. Video resolution was also excellent. Sound was impressive with the African jungle snare music. After installation I was missing the 'adept' package manager, so it was installed using 'sudo apt-get install adept'. A lot of dependent files were downloaded as it is a kde application. On starting it from the menu, it gave a warning that root previlages are required to make actually changes into the system. I could not locate the edit option for the menu item so a shortcut to main panel was created and that shortcut's properties were edited to add sudo before the adept-manager command. After that Adept ran smoothly. Multimedia setup was very easy. Whenever a media was loaded, the player automatically detected missing codecs and offered to download it. They got automatically downloaded and installed. Only VCD support was not available. Maybe VCDs are out of fashion in the West. DVDs and mp3s played fine. Even one out of two Mpg4 files in the same DVD could be played. The other one ( Charlie Chaplin ) simply forced the player to close every time. Gaim was setup for Yahoo and Google Talk. Google talk's setup was found from the web through a random google search. So those who are planning to buy new systems can go for this board with Ubuntu 7.04. Those who have not yet bought the Digit June issue can do so if they are interested in this bootable DVD distro. As a Kde fan and user, I am green with envy. :-D -- Regards, Rony. Knock Knock Who's There? Linux Who Linux? GNU/Linux

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The Perfect Replacement For MP3 (Stanley Thomas' blog)
by Frederick Noronha [फर ॆडरीक नोर ोनया] 25 Jun '07

25 Jun '07

http://perfector.wordpress.com/ The Perfect Replacement For MP3 Digital music is probably the only kind of music everybody is listening to these days. The reason being that its smaller in size and thus makes it easy to share and store. Imagine downloading a 4 minute track thats approximately 40 Mb in size in a place where access to the internet is terrible and costs a bomb (thats usually the case in most places in the world). Thankfully, compression algorithms exists that can compress the same audio track to one-tenth its size, thus we do not have to imagine the above. Few weeks back I downloaded 2 albums, "My Dying Bride - A Line Of Deathless Kings" and "Slayer - Christ Illusion". The Slayer album was ripped at a very low bitrate and was not sounding too good. The album contained 14 tracks and obviously it was ripped at a lower bitrate to reduce its size. Many thanks to all the people who shared the album with me, but it was just not to my liking. There was no quality and I was furious because it took me a long time to download the album as not many people were sharing it. Boy, what a waste of time and a killer of expectation. Well thats what made me write this. Mp3 is an audio compression format that has taken the world by a storm. Mp3 is almost a synonym for music nowadays as Google is for search. Now, here comes the problem.. MP3 was good at one point in time, but not anymore. What's better? OGG VORBIS. AAC, Lame, MP3Pro neither of 'em match up to Ogg Vorbis' standards. Don't take my word for it, you can do simple tests to prove it. Take your favorite audio cd, select a track that you have heard a million times and don't mind listening to a hundred more and rip it to ogg vorbis as well as to mp3. Compare the mp3 and the ogg file to the track on the cd by listening, well now you know what I'm talking about. The ogg file is a much faithful reproduction of the cd than the mp3. An ogg file of 80kbps (bitrate) is equivalent to an mp3 encoded at 128kbps. Hey, there is still one more issue called "size". Ofcourse here again the ogg file beats the mp3 hollow. For the same size one can achieve a higher bitrate with ogg vorbis than with mp3. The best part ogg vorbis by default encodes in variable bitrate (which deliveres better quality than constant bitrate). Isn't this a great piece of information for any music lover? There are a more advantages in using ogg. Ogg is patent-free. Ok, we are just not bothered about patents here in India, but in this case we have to be because a lot of music that we listen to everyday is coming from outside India. Musicians who sell their songs in mp3 have to pay royalties. They could just save a bit more of cash by selling all over the world their songs in ogg vorbis. Not just does it benefit them but it also benefits listeners and fans. But do you think that they are seriously bothered? Music is become a business rather than an art form. Nobody cares about the quality of music their fans are listening to as long as they are minting big bucks and are being voted for the Grammy's. Portable players like ipod's also have to pay royalties but still are unwilling to support patent-free formats like ogg. Why? Because they too are doing well in selling their products. Neither the musician nor the manufacturers of players are bothered about the listener. As a guy on one of the mailing lists puts it "if only all the music in china was ripped into ogg vorbis", surely then a lot of players would be supporting it. There are a few portable players available that support ogg vorbis. Many of the game developers are using ogg vorbis and are very happy with the quality of sound and even happier because they are getting away without paying licenses. e.g. Doom 3. Ogg is only the container just like avi. It can contain several data streams at once, like video and the corresponding audio. Vorbis is the name of an open source audio compression format. There exists Theora for video compression and Speex for speech. I haven't really tried these though. If you notice I haven't mentioned anything about Windows Media Audio (wma) and Real Audio (ra), thats because I find these to be very cheap proprietary formats. I would never recommend these to any music lover. The best part about using ogg is that its open source. A lot of intense development will continue to take place to ensure that ogg vorbis remains the best. Its going to be literally impossible for any other proprietary format to beat ogg in the future. Almost all linux distributions play ogg out of the box. Things are looking bright for ogg, especially with all the Dell machines being sold with Ubuntu, we can expect a lot of vorbis encoded music from the US. Happy listening! June 25th, 2007 Categories: General . Author: stan . Comments: No Comments -- FN: Frederick Noronha Phone 0091-832-2409490 http://wikiwikiweb.de/MyContacts

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PPPoE
by Omkar Raut 25 Jun '07

25 Jun '07

Hi, I want to configure ppp to dial my isp(pacenet). For some reason I do not wish to use the rp-pppoe package. I think its possible to configure PPPoE using defualt pppd. I couldn't find a working /etc/ppp/ppp.conf. The error I am getting is "Attempting to reconnect".Even I have set mtu to 1492(as suggested on a freebsd). But I don't know what does mtu mean. Can someone point me the correct ppp configuration for use with cable net? Regards, Omkar.

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tally 5.4 on linux? / alternative to tally 5.4 on linux?
by pp raj 24 Jun '07

24 Jun '07

> i have recently switched on to linux. > previously i was using tally 5.4 version on win xp. > now i want to know how to use it on linux? (pl do not suggest > higher versions of tally as i am incapable of buying them and > since now tally 5.4 is free, i want to use it .....thats it) > (because i hav my data entered in tally & dont want to rekey the > huge data again in linux) > or is there any alternative free package which is exactly same > as tally > > plz help me as i m in trouble....... --------------------------------------------- Free POP3 Email from www.Gawab.com Sign up NOW and get your account @gawab.com!! [readmsg.fcg?msg=118209759416041]

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kind attn Fedora 7
by IPS Khurana 24 Jun '07

24 Jun '07

hi i would like to switch over to Red Hat Ent 9 orFedora 7 project.. but i would like to enquire whether it supports all in one HP printer,scanner, n DVD writer..etc can some one give me DVD of Fedora Project.. pls confirm -- IPS Khurana ***************************** Cell No: +91 9869019416

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Easy Console Firewall.
by Rony 23 Jun '07

23 Jun '07

Hello All, Arno's IPTABLES firewall is a usefull console based firewall for those who understand firewall concepts but find it difficult to remember the exact syntax of the iptables script. It is available with Debian/K-Ubuntu as an apt repo, but go to the site and download its latest deb package for the latest stable version. Installation is easy and the conf file is easy to edit. http://rocky.eld.leidenuniv.nl/ -- Regards, Rony. Knock Knock Who's There? Linux Who Linux? GNU/Linux

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TurboCash
by Rony 23 Jun '07

23 Jun '07

Hello All, TurboCash is a GPLed accounting software. At present it is available only on the $dose platform. Could accounting experts on the list have a look at the website to provide more inputs on its usefulness for Indian businesses, small and big? Since it is an 84 MB download, it looks big. The website also has links for consultants so it must be already being used by companies. http://www.turbocashuk.com/accounting-software-opensource.html http://www.turbocashuk.com/accounting-software-download.html Since it is Libre Software, I am not putting an OT tag. -- Regards, Rony. Knock Knock Who's There? Linux Who Linux? GNU/Linux

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[FOSS] Video Archives
by Roshan 23 Jun '07

23 Jun '07

List, RMS[1] was in Mumbai last year in August. (27th August 2006, to be precise). A session was organized by FSF-India and GNU/Linux User Group of Mumbai, on Free Software, Free Knowledge and Free Society. This year, President of FSF-I Georg Greve[2] was in Mumbai and delivered a talk on Free Software and Science (on Thursday, 7 June 2007). 1. Does anyone from the list, has the video archives of the above two sessions? 2. Can they be shared and re-distributed? 3. If it can be, is it available on YouTube or online media? (not others, the above ones specifically) (better if it is available on a DVD or CD) 4. Apart from this, if anyone has audio archives of sessions by RMS, please let me know. (point 2 applicable) I'm asking this because, a few who might be interested in Free Software, might find it exciting to watch a video by the pioneer of Free Software. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stallman [2] http://mm.ilug-bom.org.in/pipermail/linuxers/Week-of-Mon-20070604/059829.ht… -- FSF of India Associate Fellow - http://www.gnu.org.in S K Somaiya College of ASC- http://www.somaiya.edu/sksasc ubunturos @ freenode The DELETE button on Yahoo! Mail is unhappy. Go here to know why http://in.mail.yahoo.com

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Rumors of new Gnash functionality exaggerated
by Praveen A 22 Jun '07

22 Jun '07

A free Flash viewer is one of the last major gaps in GNU/Linux desktop functionality, so last week's news that Gnash, the free Flash player, had reached the stage where it could play YouTube and Lulu.tv videos seemed too good to be true. Unfortunately, it was. .... Read Full Story http://www.linux.com/feature/114561 Cheers Praveen -- പ്രവീണ് അരിമ്പ്രത്തൊടിയില് Join The DRM Elimination Crew Now! http://fci.wikia.com/wiki/Anti-DRM-Campaign

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Re: [ILUG-BOM] [OT] Toshiba laptop consultation
by Koustubha Kale 22 Jun '07

22 Jun '07

>> >>Mohan Nayaka wrote: > >Hi all, >> I am planning to buy a laptop. Model: Toshiba Satellite(r) A135-S2386 >> Is this machine penguin-friendly or atleast, not unfriendly? >> Particularly, is it Beryl-friendly? Any allergies to FC6/7 ? I am keen to >> try out FCx more seriously now. >> >Battery life seems short. >http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=3639&review=Toshiba+Satell… > I am using a Toshiba L-30 C330 with Fedora 6 for past 6 months. The bios is buggy so sleep, hibernate don't work. Also the sound card does not work without a 1 line hack in the patch_realtek.c file Beryl worked after a fashion but kept crashing. I also had lot of trouble with window decorations vanishing so I left it alone. Will try it again when I upgrade to F7 soon. I used an IBM T series before this for a few years & that was MUCH better with linux. Also Toshiba is not very linux friendly company in terms of drivers & updates etc if you take a look at their updates site. I should have stuck to IBM. regards Koustubha Kale ____________________________________________________________________________________ Looking for a deal? Find great prices on flights and hotels with Yahoo! FareChase. http://farechase.yahoo.com/

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Linuxers June 2007