Localized Gujarati Geek

* Fortune is nice. Combination of Fortune and Debian can be much nicer!  If you have encounter ‘tips and tricks’ while working with Debian system, you might want to contribute some useful tips to Debian users. Have a look at wiki page of FortunesDebianHints Hints can be from pointing useful package to short command that can be useful in daily activity for system admins. Look at previous hints for example.

You can also comment here or drop me mail to me.

* In my constant carvings about sane email client, I found that claws in lightweight and very well email client. Icedove to claws migration was not so easy, but script did it! And, it was fun to read Planet Claws-mail too!

I hope that someday, enigmail will work (again) with icedove!

Kumar, a dedicated Debian dude has written following and I’m sponsoring the first ever Sponsored Post to my blog:

Thanks to Kartik Mistry for `sponsoring’ this blog post. I wanted him to do this because I don’t blog, and his blog has wide reception on Planet India FLOSS and Planet Debian. So, here goes!

Jigdo is a wonderful way of constructing CD/DVD ISOs by dowloading smaller units (like deb packages) to construct an image on your machine, rather than download a 4.3 GB monster over internet only to realize that the connection stops half way or some such thing.

I would also take this opportunity to publicize IIT Madras’ mirror, which mirrors quite a bit of free software. It has a (somewhat) offical Debian (x86, amd64) mirror at

http://ftp.iitm.ac.in/debian
ftp://ftp.iitm.ac.in/debian

And am x86 mirror for Ubuntu as well:
http://ftp.iitm.ac.in/ubuntu
ftp://ftp.iitm.ac.in/ubuntu

It is also (most of the time) ftp.in.kernel.org and www.in.kernel.org, since it is an official Linux kernel mirror (the only one I know of in India).

Anyway, let’s jigdo now! We are to prepare the DVD for Etch 4.0r1 (i386) using jigdo. Here are the steps:

0. Get Jigdo. You can get the “lite” version for any GNU/Linux distribution or Windows here:
http://atterer.net/jigdo/

But Debian/Ubuntu users just need to apt-get install jigdo-lite.

1. Visit http://cdimage.debian.org and go to the “Download CD/DVD images with Jigdo” section.

2. I need the official i386 “stable” DVD image for i386, so I click that. That takes me to a page with a directory listing with many “.jigdo” files and “.template” files. While the jigdo file is a gzipped and formatted list of files in the CD/DVD, the template file is one with a description of the image itself. See TechDetails.txt in the jugdo distribution (or /usr/share/doc/jigdo-file) for details.

3. I download debian-40r1-i386-DVD-1.jigdo and debian-40r1-i386-DVD-1.template to a directory on my computer, and run this:

jigdo-lite debian-40r1-i386-DVD-1.jigdo

4. First, I am asked for files to scan. Since I don’t have any files on my disk already (or don’t want to use them), I just press Return.

5. I am then asked for a mirror. I specify the fastest mirror available:
ftp://ftp.iitm.ac.in/debian

And that’s it. It is supposed to write a blank image and start populating it with Debian packages! Simple, huh?

Depending on the speed of your connection, it should take a few hours (or days) to get a DVD image done. A CD would be much quicker. For people inside IIT Madras, we get 5-7 MBps to the mirror, so it takes around half an hour for the DVD image. So, now you know whom to ask for those Debian DVDs and CDs, if you’re near Chennai, right?

Troubleshooting suggestions are available on the Debian CD-Image
website here: http://www.debian.org/CD/jigdo-cd/

So, hope this was useful.

Kumar Appaiah

* I got new 4GB USB pen drive yesterday. While waiting for my piece at Lemington Road Shoppe, I remembered the day when 256 MB pen drive cost me 1250 INR. This 4GB (~3.8 GB actually!) cost me 1650 INR

* Baby is named ‘Kavin’ (gu: કવિન, hi: कविन), which means handsome (also in Tamil!).

* I am in Font Workshop and currently learning basics of Font Technology and writing this post Well, event is going good and I am (We are) enjoying it! We were somewhat late so, I missed Mayank’s talk and then attended Priti’s talk on ‘Festival Speech Demo’. I didn’t know that priti is such good speaker! After that I went to attend Arun’s talk, he did really good job! His and Vijay’s talk was parallal, so, I missed Vijay’s OpenLazlo magic!!

Lunch was good
* I need to keep some money in bank! Thanks to Koki for managing trouble and I have no word for her quick action of adding money to my poor bank account Click here to donate me!

* Finally, After many hurdles, I got my copy of Debian System It is nice book: both in printing and binding. It costs me 650 INR but it is worth for who loves Debian by heart. Thanks to SPD people who take my request and replied me at positively. Thanks to Martin for writing this excellent book. I will post technical review soon.

* kartik.mistry@utkarshls:~$ history|awk ‘{print $2}’|awk ‘BEGIN {FS=”|”} {print $1}’|sort|uniq -c|sort -r|head -10
9 msgfmt
94 cd
7 lintian
6 cat
5 ping
5 du
50 ssh
4 rm
4 nmap
4 gedit

*  This is from Planet-Debian and originally from IBM’s nice article on UNIX productivity

* I was struggling to get audio/sound on Ubuntu Dapper 6.06 with Intel’s sound card snd-hda-intel and all efforts went to /dev/null. Since, we were using pam_mysql as authentication system, there wasn’t any ‘real’ user in any server (except root!). Idea came to my very very dirty mind and nirav added all people to audio group (generally with uid=29) and its done! Problem is solved! Now, I need to get microphone working (by) tomorrow.

* I am happy that people have already started using Asterisk in talking with clients and all, they actually recording conferences and chatting to show trainees and new people - how to talk with clients!

* We may now go with mysql_pam instead of ldap as authentication. But, yet we need to compare both in various tests like speed, ease of management and most important - security. Thanks to Mitul for pointing out this idea!

* I did first call to home from Asterisk! Sound was clear!!