Irfan’s Corner on the Web On Mac, Linux, Grid, Virtualization and Software Technology

Whats wrong with a Touch Screen interface?

Maybe its just me, but I feel a LOT more productive with a touch screen interface. I just came across this post, which highlighted numerous problems with touchscreen interfaces (a la iPhone) namely:

"Some of his problems with touchscreens include: sun glare (MacBook users are already intimate with this one), grease, lack of one-handed operation and the potential for trapped dirt."

I agree with most of the highlighted problems, they indeed do cause a nuisance, however one claim which I just can't agree is that touchscreen interfaces are 'slower' at writing text than regular keyboard interfaces. I dont believe that's true at all. Touchscreen interfaces are just so much more productive. I use a Motorola e680i, which features a touchscreen interface and has no keyboard. I can write on it a lot quicker than on a regular cellphone, additionally its word prediction technology is a great time saver, theoretically in a touch screen interface you can type as fast as you can move your finger. I think there will be many problems with the iPhone's touchscreen interface, but typing is not going to be it!

Slashdot learns from Digg!

It seems that Slashdot.org, has introduced a Digg/reddit type moderation system where the users vote up or down some story, which may eventually aid the moderators in approving them to the system.

Officially dubbed as "Firehose", it says:

"The Slashdot Firehose is a collaborative system designed to allow users to assist our editors in the story selection process. Try tagging and voting on the entries below, and by using the 'feedback' menu by each entry. The hose can contain submissions, RSS Feeds, bookmarks, journal entries and Slashdot stories. "

Slashdot, once the feared for its 'slashdot effect', has been tamed since the introduction of Digg, compare the alexa rankings of the three sites, digg, slashdot and reddit. Firehose may be an attempt to take its once coveted position back by opening up its moderation system.

• slashdot.org (blue)
  
• digg.com (red)
  

How to make use of the extra Multimedia keys in Laptops and Keyboards in Linux

I bought my notebook some months ago, OpenSUSE 10.2 turned out to have excellent hardware support for it and supported nearly all hardware, except those multimedia keys which come embedded on the notebook. This tutorial will show how you can easily add support for these keys to your Linux computer. This tutorial can not just be used for adding support for the extra multimedia keys on notebooks, but also for multimedia keyboards for Desktops.

In this tutorial we will add support for the "MediaDirect" key and the multimedia keys in the front of the Dell Inspiron.

Some keys such as Mute, Volume UP/Down are supported by default. We will add support for the additional keys and integrate the functionality with Amarok, my favorite media player.

First of all you will need the necessary program, xbindkeys. Download it and install it.

xbindkeys offers the following CLI interface:

xbindkeys 1.8.2 by Philippe Brochard
usage: xbindkeys [options]
where options are:
-V, --version Print version and exit
-d, --defaults Print a default rc file
-dg, --defaults-guile Print a default guile configuration file
-f, --file Use an alternative rc file
-fg, --file-guile Use an alternative guile configuration file
-h, --help This help!
-X, --display Set X display to use
-v, --verbose More information on xbindkeys when it run
-s, --show Show the actual keybinding
-k, --key Identify one key pressed
-mk, --multikey Identify multi key pressed
-g, --geometry size and position of window open with -k|-mk option
-n, --nodaemon don't start as daemon


Intially you need to create a stub configuration file

xbindkeys --defaults-guile > ~/.xbindkeysrc.scm

Now you need to identify the keycodes for the multimedia buttons, this is done by first invoking xbindkeys with the following switch

xbindkeys -mk

Some window pop ups, and now start pressing the buttons, one after another, when you press a button some information is printed on the console as depicted in the screenshot

The "m:0x10 + c:160" part of the output identifies the specific button to the computer. You can now open up the configuration file and associate a command with this. KDE is such an advanced environment that it allows users to interact with programs from the console through the Desktop Communications Protocol (DCOP). I had pressed the mute button, so I will associate the mute action in KDE with it, by invoking:

dcop kmix Mixer0 toggleMute 0

so in the configuration file this would look like:

"dcop kmix Mixer0 toggleMute 0 "
m:0x10 + c:160

So here are some parts of my configuration file, which associate different keys to different actions, like if I press the MediaDirect key amarok should open, If I press forward, it should go to the next playlist item, If I press previous it should go to the previous playlist item etc..

"amarok"

m:0x10 + c:237
"dcop amarok player play"
m:0x10 + c:162

"dcop amarok player prev"
m:0x10 + c:144

"dcop amarok player next"
m:0x10 + c:153

"dcop amarok player stop"
m:0x10 + c:164

So this is how basically you can add support for special multimedia keys to your Linux environment. Now the key mappings will not have an effect until you do not run xbindkeys in the background, you can do that by simply saying

xbindkeys &

You could also add it to your startup files so the key mappings work automatically.

Finally Got my Webcam to work in Linux!

I bought this extremely cheap webcam from the market, named "Pasaris". It came packaged with a Windows driver, it worked fine on Windows. However because I wanted to use it on my notebook I needed to make it work on Linux. I installed all relevant modules from the kernel, believing that udev will pick the right one. However it did not work this way. Next I looked up this massive list, hoping that it is supported by the spca5xx driver. But in the entire list there doesn't seem to be any vendor called "Pasaris".

I shelved the webcam away, hoping to get a new one which would have Linux support. Today while reading Greg KH's book "Linux kernel in a nutshell", I decided to have another look at that webcam. I used lsusb to find the Vendor and Product ID, which turned out to be:

0x0c45:0613b, the kernel doesn't support any such device, so I had another look at the spca5xx support webcam list.
And viola! I found that device filed under "Sonix" brand. I was over joyed! I immediately downloaded the driver, and downloaded an application to test the setup, gqcam, and it worked pretty well!

So the moral of the story: Never be deceived by the branding on a device made in China! All of them are mostly from a single source

Getting Started with Ghost4Linux

 

Ghost is a popular software in the Windows world for creating full backups of your PCs contents and helps in restoring individual files or the entire hard drive. One of the popular ways of archiving or creating images of Linux filesystems is to use liveCD distributions and tarring the entire contents. I personally find this very time consuming and unreliable, multiple time I have heard from other people how tar archives have gone corrupt, and restoring archived files was a painful experience. Ghost4Linux (G4L) is the perfect solution for such situations. G4L is a LiveCD Linux distribution which integrates all the components to emulate the functionality the original Ghost provides while providing a user friendly well rounded interface. This article will introduce G4L, and is mainly targeted to those users who want a simple, straight forward method of creating backup of and restoring their drives.

G4L is available from http://freshmeat.net/redir/G4L/. It is distributed as an ISO Image which can be directly written to a CD. To demonstrate the capability of G4L, we will see how major functionality of the software is used.

After downloading the ISO, and booting from it you will be greeted with the following window as shown in figure 1.

 

            Figure 1

G4L startup screen allows for the selection of many kernels however many of them in my opinion are superfluous, as the differences between the kernels are very small. Let's just select the latest kernel available to boot our G4L LiveCD.

Once G4L loads it displays a disclaimer notice and some usage guidelines. After the console appears enter this:

g4l

And the following window will appear

This is where the core operations of G4L come in, as explained in the accompanying help, G4L supports primarily two methods of backing up hard drives the RAW Mode, which copies a hard disk bit by bit, the advantage of this mode is that every filesystem is supported, as G4L does not explicitly read the file system just makes a copy of it. However if you create a copy of the 80GB partition, you should restore the image to similar sized partition, otherwise it could lead to corruption of the file allocation table. However if you want to move to another hard disk than the second option is more recommended. The File Mode option creates a copy of all the files in the partitions and makes an image of them. This however has the drawback that if you are using an exotic file system not supported by the mainstream kernel, it probably will not work for you.

G4L ships with some handy utilities aswell, like hdparm tool to set hard disk parameters, for example enabling or disabling DMA. Zero-Tool to zero-out free space, for 'secure' deletion of your data, dd_rescue a tool helpful in cloning drives, and Parted, a famous partition manager.

We will now go through both modes, RAW Mode and File Mode.

RAW Mode

In RAW Mode, there are primarily three other options, "Network Use", which I believe is the most useful one as most people relocate their images to some remote location. "Local use", backing up and restoring to a local partition, and "Click n' clone", which allows you to select a drive which you want to clone, and another one on which the clone is to be installed, both drives will be identical in every manner, however caution should be taken that both drives should be identical.

Since I believe that network use is one of the most widespread use of storing images, we will examine it in a little more detail.

In Raw Mode's Network Use, we see the window shown above. Most of the options are self explanatory. In Pick Device you get to pick your network interface, available interfaces are automatically listed by G4L. G4L allows you the option of setting up DHCP or manually configuring your own IP. In manual configuration you simply enter a valid IP in your local subnet. The address of the FTP server where the image is supposed to be stored is specified in the "Config FTP" option. Once the image is being created a folder named 'img' contains the image, which can be configured by the "Path to Image Directory" option. Make sure that your FTP server allows write access to the user you specify in "Config useridpass". G4L accepts username/password specification in two modes, either you can specify –u username –p password, or more simply username:password.

The "Config filename" option is obvious. G4L allows for multiple compression techniques: Gzip, Bzip2 and Lzop. I believe that Bzip2 has the best compression so in my opinion it should be the default technique. Compression however is not suitable for RAW Mode, since data is read and written in binary mode. When making an image of all your files. Compression would be a lot more relevant in that scenario.

Finally having specified all options we can finally go to "Backup", which allows us to select entire drives or individual partitions, and starts the backup process.

Restoring a backup is as simple. All the options remain, except in "Config filename", where you specify the name of the file to be restored, and select the partition where to restore.

File Mode Backup

 

In a "File Mode" backup as already mentioned you are allowed to backup/restore files in the partitions. The working of this portion of G4L is not similar its based on a client/server architecture. And unlike the RAW Mode it does not rely on any FTP server. In "File mode", the computer where you want your files to be backed up to, you run the G4L's File-mode in server mode, and at the other end, at the computer of which you want to back up, you run the File-mode's client mode. We will now briefly go through how to setup up G4L in both modes.

In the initial G4L screen select File Mode instead, and you will be greeted with the following window:

The functions first two options, as displayed in the figure above, are identical to that of the raw mode's network option. The only difference as already mentioned, is that a FTP server is not required in this case rather, G4L uses partimage for file backups. Partimage has some limitations, however it supports all major unix based file systems like ext2/3, reiserfs, xfs, as well as Fat16/32, and has experimental support for NTFS.

After having selected the network interface and configured the IP, we can straight go to launching the server, the server starts listening for incoming connections. While a partimage server is running one can take out the CD, and put it in the other computer where the files are supposed to be copied from. At the client end again we have to configure the network device and run the client. The partimage client allows the user to select a file system and store it to a partimage server, the client also allows a user to restore a file system image from server by specifying the name of the image file.

Conclusion

G4L is a mature tool for making backups of hard drives and their contents. It is user friendly and its usage is straight forward. With such mature disk backup solutions at hand one may never need to turn towards proprietary solutions.

Beryl Rocks!

Recently I've been experimenting with Beryl on my laptop, and I have to say that I'm very impressed by the project. Sure its a relatively new project, and there quite a few bugs in it, however once you get the hang of it you really enjoy the beryl-desktop experience.

There are numerous things which make you instantly productive, however there are some other things which hinder productivity however look cool. For example the idea of "the Cube", where different desktops are running on different sides of the cube, I know is not new with beryl, however it is very productive. I keep most of my web browsing stuff on one end of the cube, another side is running VMware, another one is running some development IDE. The Cube allows you to multi-task more efficiently. I have used both Windows Vista and MacOSX 10.4.8, and I have to say that none of these operating systems even come close to Beryl. Where as MacOSX comes second and Vista is way off.

There are many effects in Beryl, which actually distract a user, for example check this one out, I can not think of any scenario where someone would like to have this:

Initially I was planning of getting a Mac Book Pro for myself, as I considered MacOSX the most productive OS, however after running OpenSUSE with Beryl, I have changed my mind. The only one thing, which Linux lacks for me is a _decent_ word processing application. I keep a Windows VM image, which I run everytime I need to write some paper or do some word processing. OpenOffice is completely inadequate for my use as it misses many features which I make use of heavily, additionally I would love to see Acrobat Professional for Linux, not the reader, but the actual program which is available for both Windows and MacOSX, this again is a software which I make use of on a daily basis.

Beryl's "Snow" effect

Apology to RentACoder.com

I'm writing this in response to a previous post I had written which talked about the state of online outsourcing services, like RentAcoder, Elance etc..

Now, the general facts remain: undervalued projects, maybe (According to Slashdot) unqualified arbitrators etc.

However, in the post I had exagerated an experience with a RentACoder arbitrator, for which I publicaly apologize. I have removed the post so that it doesnt come up at searches anymore. The post was not linked externally however it had occasionally recieved some search traffic.

I also want to point out the fact that, this blog is not moderated! No posts are approved or rejected! However there is a spam blocker, kismet, which may determine some posts to be spam and block them. I have recieved some over 1,000 spam comments.