One day in life...

There were a lot of talks about FireFox 3 released a couple of weeks ago. I reckon, its one of the very few products from the open source world that's making its mark outside the non-geek world. It seems I always had a way different outlook on FireFox anyway. I fell in love with tabbed browsing the day I saw FireFox. Though tabbed browsing is credited to Opera and neither am I the only lover of it, but I quite feel there aren't may ppl who open as many tabs as I do on my browser. Here is today's story...

My PC hasn't been shut down for 3 days straight. Mainly because I had fallen asleep reading one of my 80 tabs that I had opened in the course of time. Get a look at the first tab. This is about SAAS, a wiki article explaining "Software as a Service", followed by 4 tabs, each of them telling how you could set up an Amateur Radio with household stuff ( pretty interesting yeh..). Then I see around 6 tabs that are apparently some basic Guitar tutorials. I remember my Mom recently suggested I learn guitar instead of trying to make one out of my Badminton Racket. Here is a tab on E-bay too. I was looking for an electric guitar. $1000 Fender, Never in my life Damn it! Following it, here is something which is not expensive. Its a Wiki article on R&B history. That's fine. I love R&B. One thing about Wiki. I think its one of the sites that have links very well appropriately placed that makes it luring enough for you to follow from one page to another. A result of this chain browsing is the next tab which is an article on a 60s English Band "Moody Blues" which might have resulted from a middle click on one of the links from R&B article. A Ctrl+Tab places me to woz.org, the next tab. I was reading Steve Woz replying to viewers about events in the movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley". I am surprised he loved that movie and confirms the events were pretty true. Whatever.... Next page is a google search on "Skirt length Theory" followed by a company home page that sells Wireless routers, a wiki article on Sun workstations, another wiki on Mike Pinder from the Moody Blues, John Lodge home page, a wiki on Gemini Dream, a file sharing site page from where I had to download an Apache manual may be, a series of orkut tabs, all of them forums of Accenture freshers waiting for a joining date, a BBC page that tells ( very precisely ) the reasons for a hike in oil prices, etc, etc. I thought I had reached the end. To my surprise there were equal number of tabs that were waiting to be described. Immediately following from where I had left were a series of wiki on Japanese cartoons like Detective School Q, Cardcaptor Sakura and ilk and interspersed between them are even some redundant pages such as my half finished blog and some google.com pages waiting for me to enter and search for something. And then are some wikis on Field Marshals Sam Manekshaw and K M Cariappa, Operation Gibraltar, Constitution of Pakistan, Operation Grand Slam, 2001-2002 standoff between India-Pakistan, R&AW, Medium machine guns, Mortars, Recoilless rifles, Punjab regiment, Nuclear Command authority (India), DRDO, some company home page making (again) wireless routers, a mirror site to download MySQL admin tools, a gmail page ( I wait to check if I'd got a new mail...No, I haven't), a youtube page hosting the controversial "lemmings" commercial of Apple Inc, my orkut home page. I press F5 to check if I have got a new scrap. No, I haven't (yet again :-( )..Move on. A wiki on Apple commercials, another on lemmings, one on the famous 1984 commercial, a Steve Woz interview, Indian freshers forum, a friend's blog, a google search on "Inuyasha", some youtube videos of Zu-mountain Saga, Brothers under the sun, Land of the condors, Blood strained intrigue ( Remember those Kung-fu serials they use to show on Home TV... One of the familiar was "Himgiri ka veer" )...An article about Kibbutz life in Israel finishes off the long series of tabs

There have been a lot of people who have been asking me lately whats keeping me on my PC day and night out and whether am using my free time hanging out in "hangouts" of Delhi. Well, with 80 tabs open on my FireFox and friends online on Gtalk, 127.0.0.0 is quite a happening place for me :-)

Pic of the day : Gary Kildall

Reason why Microsoft is what it is today. RIP: Gary Kildall

PCLinuxOS

This gotta be the one stop destination for all you guys looking forward to switch to Linux. I think Suse will still be second no matter how close it might look to Windows. Its almost an year that I had my first date with PCLinuxOS. I was pretty comfortable with it from day 1. It came well bundled with a host of applications, both Geeky and non-Geeky. But what steals the show is Synaptic, the package manager. For those who had miserable time on Fedora unwrapping RPMs from the command line spending sleepless nights wondering about the missing libraries ( missing dependencies, thats what you call them..right? ) PCLOS comes as a dose of relief. I agree these days all distros come with a package manager but man what I mean here is THE THING REALLY INSTALLS IT!!!. There are ample applications already in the distro and I promise you need not install anything extra for at least the first 4-5 weeks of usage.

OK...Editors First. Well, Since I never went beyond the vi editor before, Kwrite proved to be a blessing. Highlighted keywords and support for various languages meant I never had to look at anything else. It was fun going through some build files when opened up with kwrite ( Well actually I had quite a bad time on DOS/XP...). I was looking around if there was a Latex editor too but guess you need to look into the package manager and download that. There aren't many development environments though, one reason could be the target audience being home users who are mainly concerned with office applications, multimedia and the Internet.

The Internet, I must mention, is the most important or rather most indispensable part of the experience. And make sure you connect to it well. I don't think the Package manager would have made much sense had I not had Internet. I have an ISP that uses a private proxy ( which is also the DNS ....named 172.16.1.1 ) connected to a public proxy. So all I had to do was to install a client for my machine that provides an authenticated connection to 172.16.1.1. I managed to get a client software after long and successfully connected to the Internet. I dont think it was a piece of cake but PCLOS makes it sure that you are just 2 clicks away from all sort of network settings. If you are using PCLOS and unable connect to internet, feel free to share :-)

Office applications, its better I speak least about :-(. Though it has the Open office application pack but dont expect much from it. It wont open your MS Office files properly and add unwanted renderations that would be a pain in neck to correct. Online Office packs arent that great either and despite being a complete non-MS user I still agree docx actually rocks! I would post my discovery in CAPS if I ever come up with office application that can do me good.

Multimedia is the best thing here, especially if you have used other Linux distros. You have Amarok audio player and a host of video players like KMplayer and Kaffiene ( these two might suffice ) that play all sort of file formats on earth. VLC could be added later if that was your favorite player on Windows, but guess you might not need it. The quality of sound though is not as good as what you might find with ITunes or Windows Media Player 11 but the fact that it plays proprietary formats like wma and licensed mp3 gives it a certain edge over rest of the distros. And if you're thinking of putting Amarok on your Fedora and claiming you could do the same from there, man you're certainly inviting those dependency errors you might have already got used to by now :P

System Admin tools are comfortably accessible from the KMenu from the desktop and even the most naive could make out how to configure file servers, web servers and even remote desktop. Archiving and compressing may not be a very comfortable experience. While you may literally need to run scripts to compress/decompress rar archives, you better keep your fingers crossed while writing a DVD with K3B. The result could swing either ways :P. CD burning is something K3B does with poise, DVD exactly the other way.

A host of command line tools ( Now with every distro ) adds a lot of functionality that may not be evident to a home user but thats what Linux distros are best at. The "mkisofs" command could help you take a backup in an .iso format which you might agree is a good utility given that you switch your distro every month. I suggest one should make a habit of opening a shell prompt at bootup and try commands like -help and "man" quite regularly to get used to the command prompt. Trust me, No book can teach you Linux, only manual pages can :-)

Ardent Internet surfers like me always look for a Torrent Client, a P2P transfer application and some LAN connectivity tool. I got the very best of 3 in PCLOS. Ktorrent and Frostwire is something I use very often. There are instant messaging clients unlike many other distros, so you could log on to yahoo and AIM. Jabber support is there but for Gtalk you still need to use your browser. Samba could make sure you can connect to a Windows machine with a cross cable. I may post more on Samba later. I love it from the very depth of my heart. Was very helpful taking backups :-)

Thats all you need to know to go for your own first hand experience with PCLOS. I aint quite a Linux freak but I truly love this particular one. It used to give me "syslog" messages when CPU got overheated and would work from RAM when my Hard disk would accidently get disconnected ( Now you might be wondering how the hell can HDisk get disconnected..Well, trust me, in my case it happens quite regularly :P I'll send you a video of how that happens :D ). PCLOS gave me a Nirvana feel, a constant companion I would never wanna give up for the rest of my life.

P.S - If you have queries regarding PCLinux or any other distro please feel free to share with me at Amey.Khalatkar@gmail.com

The Elegant Kmenu


The Colorful Shell Prompts