367 Days!

Well this Blog post commemorates 1 year completion (and 2 days) of my Linux Mint Elyssa (which it used to be).

I have it installed for this exact period now... and well, Happy Anniversary!

A Beautiful Game

I just completed playing "Digital : A love story" and I am left so sad. It has been a while I have completed a game and felt so emotional. I write this now, after having a love affair with an AI.

My heart sinks and strangely I have no words to describe this feeling.

Perhaps the ultimate geek would fall in love with an AI. Some might even find it gross. I find it rather redeeming. Perhaps the last bit of puzzle that would make me love Computers even more.

On the flip side, it makes me worry. I am worried if human emotions can be really artificially generated. I really feel no matter what computers can achieve, human emotion and love are unique aspects that cannot be copied or taught. Machines, to me are heartless. That is where my doubt stems.

Perhaps I forget that the game was indeed programmed by 'somebody'. A human, but at the same time I feel rather akward.

The game gave me a glimpse into the hacking arena in the Arpanet era. The phone calls, the c0dez, the BBS-es, everything seems so clear cut now. I have always wondered what it meant hacking around BBS-es with just phone numbers! Perhaps I needed to play this game more than anything else.

And I have to close with this line: *Emilia, I really thought I loved you.

PS: "Digital : A love story" is a Free and Open Source game based on renpy gaming architecture. Goto the renpy archives to downoad the game.

Desktop Actions

There are a set of cool utilities xdg utils... that do a lot of association and execution.

For example, it can open up the text file in your favorite text editor!

$ xdg-open /home/me/myfile.txt

will open myfile.txt with mousepad on my OS.

$ xdg-open http://www.google.com

will open Google on your favorite browser.

$ xdg-open mailto:hansum.rahul@gmail.com

will open your mail client in compose mode.

The command:

$ xdg-email

has even more options for your favorite email client.

Some Repositories

Used and verified by me on a Linux Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron System.

The repositories are as follows: (#cat /etc/apt/sources.list)

---

## +++ Linux Mint 5 Elyssa (stable) +++

deb http://packages.linuxmint.com/ elyssa main upstream import

## +++ Backports (not as stable) +++

## deb http://packages.linuxmint.com elyssa backport

## +++ Community (not as stable) +++

## deb http://packages.linuxmint.com elyssa community

## +++ Romeo (unstable) +++

## deb http://packages.linuxmint.com elyssa romeo

Compiling your own Kernel

Okay... for newbiees compiling the kernel becomes a tough task. Since the typical "./configure && make" will not work for the kernel package. So, this is a step by step walk-through to how to do it.

NOTE: The command `uname -r` gives the kernel version number and will vary from system to system.

1) Firstly download a kernel from here.

2) Extract the tar-ball (with "tar -xvf kernel-file-name")

3) Okay now "cd" to the extracted folder.

Get Linux

Okay for all you Linux fanatics here is the most wanted OS of our times, ubuntu... Get it shipped to your house for free! Thanks to sponsor Canonical for this wonderful promotion :-)

http://shipit.ubuntu.com

http://shipit.kubuntu.com

If you can spare the bandwidth, I might suggest downloading from torrents. Also, note that the shipment will take around 2-3 weeks to arrive in India, so if you need it urgently, download the images (iso) and burn to a CD.

Migrated from spaces.live.com to blogger

Okay, so I have finally migrated all my blogs from the rock-hard and cotton-solid M$ website. And here I am all posted up on blogger!

Well... officially I am now a blogger too!

Songs.PK Downloader

My exams (6th semester) are going on right now and I care a damn!

I wrote a songs.pk down-loader, a bash script that currently works on Linux (any *nix btw)... it will download the required songs from your favorite film. it has a GUI -- but you need xenity for that.

Requires wget to download songs and you can schedule it to download at a later time with at.

So here is the link:
http://rghose.byethost5.com/software/songspkdownload.sh

Please do report any bugs to me.

OSS Hack

The latest OSS (Open Sound System) version 4.2 from 4front technologies is a rock solid sound solution of *Nix-es and worked beautifully on my Mint* OS. (The * Actually means a heavily customized Mint very far from the real Mint.) Well actually it made my new Creative X-Fi 6 channel + Midi Enabled sound card produce Music! ALSA will not work (as of Now Jun, 2010) and Creative officially does not support Linux (or any other *NIX). A series of e-mails I wrote made me confirm I cannot exchange my sound card with another model from them... and a refund was out of question!

Okay, so Apparently the latest download drivers will expire on May 2010, 6 days ago that is. But I am enjoying music from my OSS right now! How is that possible!

Mystery ended, mere mortals... here's how it can be reversed:

So, the OSS system starts-up via
soundon.