It was a long time since I installed debian on my laptop. Unsupported hardware issues dogged it the last time I tried it on this (which seems years back). But this time, it was really worth giving a shot.

I found Debian sleek, more nostalgic than any other present distribution. It is probably the best distribution to work with.

But the old kernel that is shipped with etch had some ACPI related issues. And sound wasn't there. I had to download and compile the latest Kernel after which everything is good. Pidgin has to be compiled if you don't fancy gaim. iwp2200 wasn't working fine, but did after installing the firmware. And that is about my log of installing Debian etch on my old laptop. :-)

BSNL launched EV-DO card last year here in India. It connects to the Internet providing close to broadband speeds. Their infrastructure has been improving gradually here and the news is that it would support speeds upto 2mbps by the end of this month.

Upgraded Ubuntu on my laptop to the latest - 7.04, Feisty Fawn. The upgrade was smooth and easy.

For me, upgrading to a newer version is to just have the latest of applications, especially GNOME and Evolution. Looks like there is a bunch of [:http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/704tour|very nice features] on 7.04.

If your Firefox rendering of Indic characters (especially Kannada characters) go bonkers yet again, add your default locale back again on /usr/bin/firefox.

Found this on a forum. Very useful in converting Tiffs to PDF.


tiff2ps -h 8.5 -w 11 *.tif > tiffs.ps
ps2pdfwr -g7920x6120 tiffs.ps


(Quite handy - and you can even go ahead to shrink the two commands to one).

for A in *.jpg; do convert $A $A.png; done
rename -v 's/\.jpg.png$/.png/' *.jpg.png

This, on GNU/Linux, with [:http://www.imagemagick.org/|imagemagick].

rename -v 's/\.php5$/.php/' *.php5

(the above command renames .php5 to .php in the present folder)

GDM for the rightists?
Not quite, but you could find it useful if you, like me, are not-so-orthodox Hindu who prays to [:http://www.hindunet.org/god/Gods/ganesh/|Ganesha] everyday before starting work.

Thanks to [:http://trixinc.deviantart.com/|Trixinc] for [:http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/10555864/?qo=33&q=by%3Atrixinc&qh=sort%3Atime+-in%3Ascraps|the wonderful wallpaper of Ganapa] that is the heart and soul of this pretty GNOME GDM.

Here's a screenshot of it:

[:http://sampada.net/GDM-GaNapa.tar.gz|Click here to download the package].

What's GDM?: Visit [:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Display_Manager]