OLPC XO-1 demo-ed at ILUG-Goa Meet

This tiny and unusual computer was demoed at the monthly meeting of ILUG-Goa, the Free Software and Open Source user group that meets at the Goa Science Centre in Miramar, last Saturday (Jan 26, 2008).


Ms. Rut Pinto Viegas Jesus, a Copenhagen-based PhD researcher of Goan-Portuguese ancestry, managed to bring down one model of the computer, while visiting Goa on holiday and a family visit to her relations in Santa Cruz and Salcete.

The 4000-rupee computer shows up in Goa

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If Operating Systems Ran The Airlines

An old LG (#45) post, never fails to amuse me after so many years

UNIX Airways


Everyone brings one piece of the plane along when they come to the airport. They all go out on the runway and put the plane together piece by piece, arguing non-stop about what kind of plane they are supposed to be building.

Air DOS


Everybody pushes the airplane until it glides, then they jump on and let the plane coast until it hits the ground again. Then they push again, jump on again, and so on ...

Mac Airlines


All the stewards, captains, baggage handlers, and ticket agents look and act exactly the same. Every time you ask questions about details, you are gently but firmly told that you don't need to know, don't want to know, and everything will be done for you without your ever having to know, so just shut up.

Windows Air


The terminal is pretty and colorful, with friendly stewards, easy baggage check and boarding, and a smooth take-off. After about 10 minutes in the air, the plane explodes with no warning whatsoever.

Windows NT Air


Just like Windows Air, but costs more, uses much bigger planes, and takes out all the other aircraft within a 40-mile radius when it explodes.

Linux Air


Disgruntled employees of all the other OS airlines decide to start their own airline. They build the planes, ticket counters, and pave the runways themselves. They charge a small fee to cover the cost of printing the ticket, but you can also download and print the ticket yourself. When you board the plane, you are given a seat, four bolts, a wrench and a copy of the Seat-HOWTO.html. Once settled, the fully adjustable seat is very comfortable, the plane leaves and arrives on time without a single problem, the in-flight meal is wonderful. You try to tell customers of the other airlines about the great trip, but all they can say is, "You had to do what with the seat?"

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Wake up to the music

Using cron/mplayer and some shell glue you can create your own musical alarm clock to wake you up everyday. Ever since the Cron-MP3 alarm clock was published some years ago, it never ceases to dazzle me what you can do with little creativity.

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Volunteer with Free Software Foundation of India (FSF-I)

The FSF-I website is the right place to get the complete information on its latest activities and read the FSF-I charter to know more about the foundation . It is however the FSF-Friends mailing-list where the most the interaction and information exchange takes place. If you need to stay informed about FSF-I and other related activities in India then this is the list to join.

To be volunteer you can register as FSF India Volunteer and get listed in the FSF India Volunteer Directory . But its not a must, if you can spare a little of your time and do any of the tasks then just shoot a email to the admins . There is a list of various tasks that you can help out with on the foundations website.

The the FSF-Friends mailing-list isn’t the only list, there are many others see if anyone suit your interests. Perhaps you can also join a regional mailing-list thats near your city and meet other free software advocates and volunteers.

1. Delhi


2. Pune


3. Andhra Pradesh


4. Tamil Nadu


5. Bangalore



6. Kerala

Well, you can also take a look these few specific tasks which I think would need some attention of volunteers.

• Submit News regularly : Some of activities and events news don’t really make it to FSF-I portal news feed.

• Populate the mailing-lists : Various lists like Fsf-dev fsf-prog and fsf-edu are very inactive perhaps you can participate and start relevant discussions.

• Document Free Software Projects : The Indian Free Software Project Directory is an excellent resource for various projects from the subcontinent. You can contribute and keep this up-to-date. The FSUG-Bangalore had a similar initiative which died out .

• Content in Indian Languages : Perhaps its a good idea to have content in various Indian languages, the translation of GNU GPL of licenses is a good start.

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Raw Control Characters In Less pager

Less is my default terminal pager program. On GNU Debian Linux pager is just a symbolic link to your less or one of other available pager progams like more , most , lv etc..( run update-alternatives —list pager to find out alternative pager programs available on your computer). Lately some funny characters started showing up in my pager .

$ ls /tmp/Foo/ | pager

ESC[0mESC[0mFooBarESC[0m

ESC[0mMaster-fooESC[0m

ESC[m

Oops, That looks like the ANSI Escape Sequences commonly used for making a shell colourful, but our pager program less seems to have some trouble with it. Let’s try to correct this but using -R option which toggles this behaviour.

$ ls /tmp/Foo/ | pager -R

FooBar

Master-foo

Ok, that seems to fix it. Now let’s set it into our shell environment.You set the same using lesskey also.

LESS=”-R”; export LESS

Please note that using -r option may cause display problems , that’s why I use -R .

Wolfgang Friebel notes in Displaying more with less that ..

Syntax highlighting is only activated if the environment variable LESS is existing and contains the option -R or -r or less is called with one of these options. This guarantees, that instead of literal escape sequences colors are displayed. The detection of the -r/-R presence at runtime is rather dependent on the operating system and may not work in all cases. Putting the option in the LESS environment variable is guaranteed to work.By installing the perl module Proc::ProcessTable the OS dependence can be reduced as well.

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Free Website Uptime Monitoring Service

When it comes to hosting my websites I like to spread them over multiple web hosting companies. It does improve my odds of all the sites going down at the same time, but tracking their uptime becomes an issue. There are website uptime monitoring services one too many, most of them have a catch either they want you to place images with backlinks to their website or something more silly.

A tried and tested free uptime monitoring service I use is http://uptime.alal.com/uptime/ , originally written in TCL its now run by OpenACS . To track a website just add a URL to text file or HTML page on your website which contains a single word “success” in it. And choose whether you want to get email when this website down or just check periodically every few hours. Compared to other website uptime monitoring services this one does only one thing and does it well too.

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Upgrade problems for sysvinit (2.86.ds1-16 | 2.86.ds1-19)

Update: Post out-of-date …. don’t flame me

Those of you who followed the earlier the fix for sysvinit (2.86.ds1-16) upgrade problem given below should read the follow-up comments that were aired on both debian-devel and debian-user.

— Petter Reinholdtsen Sat, 9 Sep 2006 20:12:47 +0200

In version 2.86.ds1-16 of the sysv-rc package released 2006-09-06, the update-rc.d script was broken. When used to to update symlinks it would remove all symlinks for a init.d script if such symlinks existed, and add them if they were missing. This broke all packages being upgraded after the new version was installed, as their init.d scripts will no longer be executed. This problem was fixed in version 2.86.ds1-18, but the broken packages will stay broken until their postinst scripts are executed again.

Those with packages being broken from this bug can fix it by using ‘apt-get —reinstall install package’ on the affected packages. A quick way out is to reinstall all the packages with scripts in /etc/init.d/.

for p in `dpkg -S /etc/init.d/*|cut -d: -f1|sort -u`; do

apt-get —reinstall install -y $p

done

Read the Petter Reinholdtsen’s post

sysvinit (2.86.ds1-19) unstable; urgency=low

The script proposed below is dangerous, as it had a problem

with removed but not purged packages. If such packages had

files in /etc/init.d/, it could end up trying to remove quite a lot
of packages. This version check to make sure the package is installed before trying to reinstall it, as well as making sure the
admin is asked for every package.

for p in `dpkg -S /etc/init.d/*|cut -d: -f1|sort -u`; do
if dpkg —get-selections $p | grep -qw install ; then
echo reinstalling $p
apt-get —reinstall install $p
fi
done

To avoid the question, add -y as an argument for apt-get.

An alternative to reinstalling all these packages is to look in /var/log/dpkg.log for the packages that was installed and upgraded between sysv-rc version 2.86.ds1-16 and version 2.86.ds1-18, and only reinstall these. A script to do this and update the system is provided in /etc/init.d/.

/usr/share/doc/sysv-rc/update-rc.d-recover

Please use it to update your installation if you were upgrading from one of the broken versions of sysv-rc.

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