Linux

Lost searching for something in Unicode, I stumbled across this one, today. The Software is called Dasher and not surprisingly, it is available on the ubuntu/debian repository to download and install with apt. (packages available for M$ OSes and MacOSX as well, on its project page). Around a 10 MB + install.

It is an interesting software. The project page states that:

Dasher is an information-efficient text-entry interface, driven by natural continuous pointing gestures. Dasher is a competitive text-entry system wherever a full-size keyboard cannot be used - for example,

* on a palmtop computer;
* on a wearable computer;
* when operating a computer one-handed, by joystick, touchscreen, trackball, or mouse;
* when operating a computer with zero hands (i.e., by head-mouse or by eyetracker).

though and obviously so, its not much of a pleasure trying to use it on PC (it can be a very useful tool on handheld, protable devices to type Unicode).
The best thing of all, is that it supports Unicode Kannada, Unicode Hindi and much more languages in Unicode!

Dasher - Kannada

I turned it on, and tried typing my name in Kannada. I could click on 'ಹ', then came the probable letters floating adjacent to it. I clicked on 'ರ', then came the glyphs that can be added to those. It was pretty much like looking into a maze and picking the letters you want to be typed. I would love to see this one controlled by fingers, and a touch screen rather than mouse or joystick, like those we see on sci-fi movies - which is quite possible in near future, though I fear the whole process won't get less boring even with that ;)

It *is* boring if you're asked to pluck the letters one by one that you need to form your statement. Its a complexified way of putting in letters (unless there's no other way). Moreover, its painful for eyes (but maybe not once you get used to it). The project page claims that one can type 39 words per minute if he/she gets well versed with this tool. Whatever is, I was happy and thrilled to see a tool that can let you key in Unicode even when you don't have a keymap or input method!

This one could be a nice tool for kids to play with... or for folks using handhelds 'on field work' - just take out your handhelds and start plucking letters and 'dash' through the maze! :)

Out of tremendous curiosity, I had upgraded to breezy earlier this week. All looked good until xine bagan segfaulting (crashing). I removed xine, and out with it went crazily some packages that depended on something or the other. Overall, it turns out that apt isn't quite sane on the dev repository of breezy and if you don't bother to check whats getting removed or installed as probably most of us do on hoary, you might stand a chance to loose lots of applications, never to be installed again :) (apt won't let you install them).

I soon realised there was no way I could downgrade the system and there are loads of dependencies that one should probably sit weeks together to resolve if done manually. So, the inevitable: reinstall Hoary :D. Of late, I have not been very much accustomed to re-installing the whole operating system (like we used to do in windows days). Re-installing windows every one or two months to make it "faster" is still a custom with lots of windows users I've known ;) But with ubuntu, I'll have to, this time, though for an ironically different reason, a doing of my own. :D Now, I've learnt to stay away from the dev repository and keep away from adventuring into unstable stuff unless its really necessary. (Mentioned all this here, so that it can be of help to others).

After 2 horrible weeks of no Internet, I'm back on. After many frantic calls to BSNL Bangalore's who's who, the dataone connection was finally restored for the shifted telephone line. I missed a lot of blogging and of course, work.

Among other things I would've been blogging these days and missed, is about my friend's new office. He's started a small development firm in the heart of Jayanagar, and has given it a real stylish start. I wish him all the best with that.

***

We'll be releasing tomorrow, beta version of an all-Kannada live CD which is also installable on hard disk. It is based on mepis OS, and has XFCE with Kannada interface. It is part of the Maitre project that we started out few weeks back. If you're interested in volunteering to test the CD or help in any sort, check out this page.

While it was conspicuous that Red Hat had its say on everything in fedora and was steering it in its own way, the results apparently haven't been real good. The community interest has severely declined. Ostensibly, Red Hat seems to have accepted it and opened its eyes. Now, Red Hat is ready to slightly loosen up by "turning over copyrights and development work to an outside entity called the Fedora Foundation" to "assure broader community involvement in Fedora-sponsored projects".

This sounds obvious in the wake of new distributions (ubuntu, especially) that have become hugely popular, have come up with 6 month release schedule and have greater community involvement.
For anything, I doubt how much intense participation this move of RH will receive to its fedora initiative, given that everything on fedora seems to be going the Red Hat way. It's still the iron that is being hammered out on the anvil to serve for the RHE Linux and there's no real community feeling when that happens. Nevertheless, this one's a good move by Red Hat. ;)

The UPS model I've got (and is pretty common APC product in India) is BackUPS ES 500. The device comes with an USB connector. The Back-up they (the APC fellows) claim is 20 minutes... though it just gives around 12 minutes for me even after a complete recharge. (But the UPS has saved my PC on many occasions - so, worth the compromise).

The UPS comes with a CD, which has the Powerchute software for Windows. But they don't provide software or support for Linux. (Once when I had called up the customer support to inquire about software for Linux, a person there had asked "Whats Linux, Sir?" :D) which more or less explains how serious they're about Linux. Nevertheless, we have open source alternatives :) (which is why OSS rocks).
The best among the alternatives happens to be apcupsd (APC UPS daemon).

When using fedora, I don't remember having any issues getting the apcupsd daemon running. The only big deal was to take the rpm, install it and start the daemon. But that was probably the only thing that was so straightforward... every other package needed compiling from source (unless there was an rpm for it on freshrpms.net)

Installing apcupsd on ubuntu is straightforward. One has to just apt-get it from the repository. But, ironically, on ubuntu, getting apcupsd running needs some tweaking. From the day I switched over to ubuntu, I've seldom tweaked anything to get packages working... which makes this tweak worth to be mentioned on the blog. At first shot, here's what you get:

hpn@kapila:~$ sudo /etc/init.d/apcupsd start
Please check your configuration ISCONFIGURED

I googled around, and found this nice document. The document is for debian, but is the same on ubuntu... so works. Here's what I did for my BackUPS ES 500, with reference to that document:

open /etc/apcupsd/apcupsd.conf
and set:

UPSNAME myups
UPSCABLE usb
UPSTYPE usb
NETSERVER on


DEVICE - commented out.

open /etc/default/apcupsd

and change ISCONFIGURED=no to ISCONFIGURED=yes

done!

and do a apcaccess, you should get something similiar to this:

sh-3.00# apcaccess
APC : 001,033,0816
DATE : Sun May 22 18:22:13 IST 2005
HOSTNAME : kapila
RELEASE : 3.10.17
VERSION : 3.10.17 (18 March 2005) debian
UPSNAME : myups
CABLE : USB Cable
MODEL : Back-UPS ES 500
UPSMODE : Stand Alone
STARTTIME: Sun May 22 18:22:13 IST 2005
STATUS : TRIM ONLINE
LINEV : 000.0 Volts
LOADPCT : 49.0 Percent Load Capacity
BCHARGE : 100.0 Percent
TIMELEFT : 29.2 Minutes
MBATTCHG : 20 Percent
MINTIMEL : 10 Minutes
MAXTIME : 0 Seconds
LOTRANS : 195.0 Volts
HITRANS : 255.0 Volts
ALARMDEL : Always
BATTV : 13.3 Volts
NUMXFERS : 0
TONBATT : 0 seconds
CUMONBATT: 0 seconds
XOFFBATT : N/A
SELFTEST : NO
STATFLAG : 0x0200000A Status Flag
SERIALNO : NB18008004272
BATTDATE : 2004-11-17
NOMBATTV : 12.0
FIRMWARE : 50.m3.I USB FW:m3
APCMODEL : Back-UPS ES 500
END APC : Sun May 22 18:22:18 IST 2005

and now, whenever there's a power failure, something similiar to the following prop up on the terminal with a beep:

Broadcast Message from root@kapila
(somewhere) at 18:26 ...

Warning power loss detected on UPS myups

Broadcast Message from root@kapila
(somewhere) at 18:26 ...

Power failure on UPS myups. Running on batteries.

and it cleanly shuts down the comp once the batteries are used up! woot! ;)

It was a tough decision, but in many ways a good one...
I switched from fedora core 3 to ubuntu recently. As it happened, the other day GNOME suddenly got messed up on fedora when I tried to kill gam_server (gamin - which was eating up 100% CPU, I couldn't figure out why) and I couldn't use xcfe comfortably (though its quite faster than GNOME). I don't like KDE, either. So, instead of installing fedora afresh, I opted to go for ubuntu. I have been hearing a lot about it these days, it was time to check it out myself :)