Nithin Kamath’s Weblog

For the past few months I have been using my Sony Cybershot W80 extensively and taking photos left and right. One of the features that I use is that of creating folders on the memory card. On one such occasion I created a new folder which was for experimenting with the camera options next day.

Once I finished with the experimenting I wanted to delete them, since there were lots of photos deleting them individually did not make any sense so I used the ‘delete all photos in the folder’. The pictures got deleted fine….but as luck may have it the initial few photos were the one which I wanted. So was it all gone for ever??

Well….Google is here…..did a quick round of search and ended up with a quick open source solution to recover media files from a memory card. here is what needs to be done.

• Install ‘testdisk’ package for your distribution
  The first step which I did was to install a software package named “testdisk”, depending on the distribution you use you should easily be able to find the package.
• Make an image of the memory card
  The next step is to make an image of your memory card, this is achieved using the ‘dd’ command which comes by default with most distributions, the command you will have to issue is:

  $ dd if=/dev/sda1 of=memory_card.img bs=1024

  In the above command, ‘if’ is the input drive which should be your memory card, ‘of’ is the file name for the image which we are creating, and ‘bs’ is the byte size.

• Recover files by scanning the image using photorec
  The final step is to use a command provided by testdisk package. The ‘photorec’ command will recover all the JPG and GIF files which were recently deleted from your memory card. The command is very simple:

  $ photorec memory_card.img

  The software will take you through a menu driven interface where you will have to select a few options to get your work done. It is simple and anyone should be able to use it with ease.

So by following the above three simple steps I was able to recover the pictures which I had thought were lost for ever and that to using only free software and on a Linux system. There is one or the other software in a Linux system which will always be there for your requirement but may have been unknown to you, but once you know your requirement you would be amazed at the options that are available, atleast I was blown away. Three cheers to free software and lots of thanks to the developers of ‘testdisk’ and ‘photorec’. Now only if someone would write a proper GUI for this….well I don’t want to be too greedy…

So I am off to take more photos without having to worry about losing some photos unintentionally when deleting photos from the Cybershot memory card…

Finally, I found a simple and really fast image viewer for my gnome desktop - GPicView. The first impression I got of this software was that this looked very much similar to the Microsoft Image and Fax Viewer, and the layout of the buttons is quite similar to it.

Before coming across GPicView I was using ‘Eye of Gnome’ for viewing images and photos. But some how or the other I felt it was a bit slow to start up and use. But GPicView, though not as polished as the other software is a no nonsense approach to image viewing. It just has a few options to offer, but it does what it is designed to do - that is view images and pictures. A must have program, given its small footprint and the small install files size. The best things about GPicView is its really fast load time on low end machines with very less RAM.

The features of the program are as below (taken from the sites homepage, link provided at the bottom of the post):

• Extremely lightweight and fast with low memory usage
• Very suitable for default image viewer of desktop system
• Simple and intuitive interface
• Minimal lib dependency: Only pure GTK+ is used
• Desktop independent: Doesn’t require any specific desktop environment
• Open source, licensed under GNU GPL

I download the rpm for my Suse 10.2 from the http://rpm.pbone.net/ site.

You can find more information about this project at its home page - http://lxde.sourceforge.net/gpicview/.

You are on the Gnome desktop and would like to get to a particular location on the disk, how would you do it. I am not sure of you, but for me it was first clicking on the home icon and then typing the path in the address bar of nautilus. Sometimes I also used the ‘Alt+F2′ option to get there.

But did you know that if you are on desktop you can use the quick access key ‘/’ to go to any location. Quite cool huh!! I was surprised at this useful feature. Do you know of any such hidden ways, let me know. Hope you found this interesting enough.

Photos….Photos…and more Photos…..ever since I bought the digital camera I have been clicking photos of anything imaginable. I have been on a few trips as well, hence I thought of putting some of the good ones on the web and share it with a few friends, and the best solution for these for me turned out to be Picasa.

So off I went about putting together the photos I wanted to upload to Picasa Web, that is when I realised that I am in a bit of trouble. With each photo being 1.8MB, it was very obvious that I needed to resize the photo’s to a more web appropriate resolution of 1024×768 and at a lower image quality.

I did not directly recollect any software available in Linux which has batch resize options, hence I quickly did a google search and the results surprised me. The solution was a really simple one, that of making use of the package which is by default available in most Linux distro’s - “ImageMagick”, which provides the ‘convert’ command.

Here’s the simple script:
for k in $(ls *.JPG); do convert $k -resize 1024×768 -quality 100 re_$k; done

The working of the above script is simple, here is what it does:
1. Loops through all the JPG files in the current directory.
2. Then for each JPG file in the directory it calls the ‘convert’ command telling it to resize the images to the size 1024×768 and without an quality loss (i.e. 100, means no compression) and saves the resultant file with the prefix ‘re_’.
3. The done statement tells the script to end once all the JPG files are processed.

How is that for a simple and effective solution. Three cheers for command line….who needs bulky and resource hungry GUI programs…? And if you are waiting for the photos…sorry…that is available only to a few select friends and relatives…..but I have posted some of them at the following link http://flickr.com/photos/knithink.

Want that document urgently, but don’t remember which folder you put it in…and thousands of files are littered all over…..Search! Search!….but how…..???

Well over the last year or so the desktop search, an area which has been a sore point in Linux desktops is finally seeing light. Initially we were offered Beagle, which I liked but had to do away with because of it hunger for cpu and the ram. And more recently Google announced its offering. And this time not a wine implementation of the Windoze version like Picasa, but a complete port of Google Desktop Search.

So I thought I will give it a try. Installation was simple as every, just downloaded the file and the installation went on without any issues. After installing, the next time I restarted the machine the search agent appeared in the system tray panel and it began indexing.

The good thing was that it installed the required extensions for firefox and thunderbird itself, so I did not have to do anything. And the indexing was getting done during the idle time, and not when you were using the machine, though I would feel the system crawl How?? Well, I have just 256 megs of RAM ;-( and too much thrashing and swapping was going on, also thunderbird began to slow down, since the indexing was getting done real time rather than offine.

But Google being Google delivered a good product, though with fewer features than the Windoze version. The search result are accurate and it even has a cached copy of the search result.

Over all a good product with good search capabilities, I keep it on most of the time, but sometimes when the things get slow, I do turn the ‘pause indexing’ option on. So no more struggling to find that document, google is here.

You can find more about it here @ features page.

You can download it from the download page.

After successfully getting my CDMA modem to work in SuSe 10.2, I am really happy and enjoying browsing the net on SuSe. But all of the sudden for the past two to three days I experienced a strange problem when trying to connect. I got this message, after the connection was made:

–> Script /etc/ppp/ip-up run successful
–> Default route Ok.
–> warning, can’t find address for `www.suse.de`
–> warning, address lookup does not work
–> Nameserver (DNS) failure, the connection may not work.
–> Connected… Press Ctrl-C to disconnect

Now I was in a fix, how every I tried I could not get the it working, I rebooted and tried in Windoze :-), there it worked fine. So I was hell bent on finding out the cause of this problem.

To find the solution, I turned to the internet, but the results were disappointing. All of them suggested to check the /etc/resolve.conf (for nameserver line) and the /etc/wvdial.conf (for Auto DNS line). I was sure this was not the problem as it was connecting before.

Finally, after much struggle I found the culprit, it was ‘dhcpcd‘ - DHCP client daemon, I was really feeling stupid for not identifying it at the first point when DNS failure message came up.

So just started this and immediately I stopped getting the failure message. Enjoy currently, do you have an other alternate solution, do write back in the comments.

GAIM, the multi protocol instant messenger client for Windows, Linux, BSD, and other Unixes. Using Gaim one can talk to one’s friends using AIM, ICQ, Jabber/XMPP, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, IRC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, QQ, Lotus Sametime, SILC, SIMPLE, and Zephyr.

GAIM has now been renamed to Pidgin. The change in the name was due to a trademark issue with AOL, which has an instant messenger which goes by the name AIM. But change in the name has been quite good and it is extremely nice to finally see the new version which was held up due to the issue with AOL.

Pidgin has a new logo, looks great and functionality is top class. One of the first things I noticed was the new Tango icon set they shifted to. The icon set gives a huge boost to the look and feel of the software. I am just in love with this icon theme. Also the way the contacts are displayed has changed a bit, they are displayed as dots along with the name and photos. The dots/images make it easier to know the status of the user much easier.

Overall a too good of a product, and I recommend it to ever one who uses any instant messenger client. In fact, yesterday when I finally managed to get back to connecting to net via Linux, the first thing I did was download Pidgin and get it working. Also when compared to the other two Internet products which also are in version 2, viz., Firefox and Thunderbird, I would say Pidgin has had more of a significant change from 1.x series to 2.x version.

I recently got a internet connection from Tata Indicom (CDMA Wireless). I purchased the Huawei EC325 modem which uses a USB cable to connect to the PC. My inital reaction was since it was a USB connection and was using a custom software to connect to the net, it would not be possible to connect to the net in Linux using this modem.

After full two months, I finally gave up my laziness and did a quick search. I tried out the first solution offered and it worked out in the first try itself, how often does that happen. It took me a total of 10 mins including searching, restarting and configuring to get connected to the net in Linux.

Here is the procedure to get Huawei EC325 Data Modem in Linux:-

1. Open a terminal window.
2. Log in as root, i.e. type “su -” sans the quotes and enter the root password.
3. Then use vi to edit/create the following file “/etc/wvdial.conf”.
4. Enter the following text into it.
   [Modem0]
   Modem=/dev/ttyUSB0
   Baud=115200
   SetVolume=0
   Dial Command = ATDT
   init1=ATZ
   init2=AT+CRM=1
   FlowControl= Hardware (CRTSCTS)
   [Dialer tata]
   Username= internet
   Password= internet
   Phone=#777
   Stupid Mode= 1
   Inherits = Modem0
5. In the above change the Modem=/dev/ttyUSB0 to what ever your device name is, you should be able to see it while the OS is booting, else give the “dmesg” command and search in that.
6. Final step is give the command “wvdial tata”, and if everything is proper you should now be connected to the net.
7. Press “Ctrl+c” when you want to disconnect.

I have tried this on SuSE 10.1 and it should work on any latest release of any Linux system. Also I had this system configured for net access for BSNL dataone service before, so am not absolutely sure if you have to do any DNS settings or not. But it should work regardless of it.

Great to be back into the Linux world again.

For the past 2-3 weeks I have been using Tomboy, which its developers mention as “a simple and easy to use desktop note-taking application”. It is a mono based application and can be added to the gnome panel. Also, it has the potential to help one organize the ideas and information dealt in every day.

Some months back I had read reviews of the application, and at that time I was just thinking why would any one use such a application after all, since there are many easily accessible text applications readily available. It is only after I began to use it that I have come to appreciate the utility of this application.

I currently use it to jot down anything nice that comes to my head, the good thing is that I can easily access it and there is no need to save the writing by giving file names. This is the major advantage since files unless they are in a folder you regularly open and check will be forgotten. It uses a WikiWiki-like linking system which makes it easy to link similar notes.

Now I use Tomboy to prepare my blog posts and anything else which I find interesting that has to be referred later. In fact Tomboy has become one of my favorite applications along with Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, Kontact, XdTV, Picasa, GIMP, etc. The version I am using is 0.3.5, even though it has not reached the major release, yet it is fully stable and I have not encountered any crashes.

The each passing day for me is bringing new floss applications forward, which increase my efficiency and save time. Hats off for floss developers.

Off-Topic: Picasa - Google’s Photo Organiser has an hidden Easter Egg (a hidden message which is generally coded for fun) - A sweet little teddy bear which can be displayed by pressing Ctrl + Shift + Y simultaneously.

While posting about beagle i came remember about another software I have been using viz., GKrellM - which is GNU Krell Monitors about which i did not make a post yet. GKrellM has a set of builtin monitors which can monitor and show the state of various devices. The cool thing is that it display them in a nice readable format on the desktop, replacing the other alternatives such as the gdesklets.

I am currently using it to monitor the cpu usage and also to display time, since I think this time display is lot cooler than the one in the panel. Also another feature of GKrellM is the huge set of themes made for usage with it. I am currently using the Aqua theme as can be seen in the screenshot. You can also see the uptime of my pc, it show the machine is on for about 3hrs and 40mins. If you are wondering why there is a sudden spike in the cpu usage every few seconds, well it is due to the beagle dog which is trying very hard to index all the files in my home directory.

To try it out further i have set the clock chime in the clock option on. So at the start of every hour i am having a small midi file playback using timidity to keep track of time, just in case i get too lost in the work. And also on a trial basic i have a very small midi file to playback on quater hour basis. ( For those really interested in what midi files are being played, for hour - coca cola theme music, and for quater hour - airtel theme music). If any one of you have any cool midi files which are less than 30 secs, please let me know of them (please use the comments option below)