Nithin Kamath's Weblog » GNU/Linux

FOSS.in 2009 – WOW!

Nithin — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 07:40:35 +0000

Atul Chitnis introducing Philip Tellis at FOSS.in 2009

The 2009 edition of FOSS.in came to an end yesterday and this was my first experience attending such a big conference. So how was my experince? All I can say is that I was totally blown away by the spirit, dedication and enthusiasm of the people who were a part of FOSS.in. I salute all the people who made FOSS.in such a memorable experience.

For a first timer like me being at such a event can be a bit overwhelming, but thanks to Laxminarayana Kamath I got to meet up with lot of people right from Baiju, Santosh, Debayan, Sham, Tony, Ankur, Deepak, Anil, Hardik, Vignesh and lots more…sorry folks I am not able to mention all your names but I sure remember you.

FOSS.in has lots of talks and workouts, I attended a few of them and to sum them all up I would quote what Philip Tellis had quoted in his ‘Shut up and hack’ keynote “Have Itch, Scratch”, that is what the conference is all about and the tag line of the event ‘Show me the code’ is justified. If you were at the workouts and seen the number of them this year you could have understood what the Itch can do.

One more thing that made this years FOSS.in special and convinient was that it was held at NIMHANS Convention Center with three auditoriums for talks, one whole floor for the workouts – WOW! Thats how it should be.

So I will wrapup this quick writeup on FOSS.in 2009 with a BIG Thank You to the Team FOSS.in for organising such a big event in such a smooth manner.

Quick Tip : Truncate a file in Linux

Nithin — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:00:57 +0000

Lately I have been looking at improving my command line skills in Linux, and here is a quick tip to truncate a file to zero byte file, helpful to empty huge log files quickly.

:>filename

or you can also use the common method which make more sense:

cat /dev/null > filename

So enjoy and let me know any command line tricks if you know.

vnStat – Network Traffic Monitor for Linux

Nithin — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 09:00:32 +0000

vnStat is a simple console based network traffic monitoring software. It is light weight and provides detailed statistics of the network traffic. The statistics can be hourly, daily, monthly, yearly etc.

One important feature of vnStat is that it runs as a daemon and monitors the interface, so it does not matter if the interface is not up when you start vnStat, it will start collecting statistics once the interface is up. So how is this data useful? It will help me know my usage over a period of time, so in future if I need to change my internet provider, I can use the details below to decide on my plan.

You can find out more about vnStat at the site : http://humdi.net/vnstat/

The monthly and the top10 days statistics for me are detailed below:

$ vnstat -m
ppp0  /  monthly

  month         rx      |      tx      |   total
------------------------+--------------+--------------------------------------
 Jul '09     533.29 MiB |    92.18 MiB |   625.47 MiB  %%%%%%%%%::
 Aug '09     602.88 MiB |   123.16 MiB |   726.04 MiB  %%%%%%%%%%%::
 Sep '09     319.09 MiB |    87.87 MiB |   406.96 MiB  %%%%%::
 Oct '09     991.48 MiB |   170.32 MiB |     1.13 GiB  %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%:::
 Nov '09     248.32 MiB |    65.81 MiB |   314.13 MiB  %%%%:
------------------------+--------------+--------------------------------------
estimated       986 MiB |      258 MiB |     1.21 GiB

$ vnstat -t

 ppp0  /  top 10

   #       day          rx     |      tx     |  total
-------------------------------+-------------+---------------------------------
   1    23.10.09    226.22 MiB |    8.02 MiB |  234.25 MiB  %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%:
   2    25.10.09    127.68 MiB |   10.30 MiB |  137.98 MiB  %%%%%%%%%:
   3    18.07.09    114.88 MiB |    8.00 MiB |  122.89 MiB  %%%%%%%%:
   4    19.07.09    111.19 MiB |    9.93 MiB |  121.12 MiB  %%%%%%%%:
   5    05.11.09     82.37 MiB |   16.67 MiB |   99.04 MiB  %%%%%%:
   6    07.11.09     72.35 MiB |   24.32 MiB |   96.68 MiB  %%%%%::
   7    24.10.09     70.41 MiB |    9.49 MiB |   79.91 MiB  %%%%%:
   8    08.08.09     68.50 MiB |   10.88 MiB |   79.38 MiB  %%%%%:
   9    21.07.09     70.15 MiB |    7.74 MiB |   77.89 MiB  %%%%%
  10    31.10.09     56.81 MiB |   11.86 MiB |   68.67 MiB  %%%%:
-------------------------------+-------------+---------------------------------

Gnome – Change the ‘Show Desktop’ Keyboard Shortcut

Nithin — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 10:41:41 +0000

In Gnome the show desktop is by default mapped to ‘Ctrl + Alt + d’, if you would like to change it to something else the easiest way out is using the ‘System –> Preferences –> Keyboard shortcuts’. Though this is the easiest way those of you who are like me, would like to use the ‘Windows Key + d’.

This is not possible using the ‘Keyboard Shortcuts’ window as it shows ‘Windows Key’ as ‘Super L’ and does not allow to enter any additional key, so to acheive the ‘Windows Key + d’ for ‘Show Desktop’ you would have to run the following command in the terminal to get that done:

gconftool-2 -t str --set /apps/metacity/global_keybindings/show_desktop "d"

Thats it, hope you found this useful, let me know by writing down a comment below.

Install Picasa3.5 under Linux

Nithin — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 11:00:27 +0000

Which software comes to you mind when I mention ‘Photo Management’, yes Picasa!. Google has some time back launched Picasa 3.5 for Windows and MacOSx, but apparently due to the low adoption among Linux user they have not launched the ported version for Linux. So does this meant Linux users wont be able to use Picasa3.5? Don’t worry about it, since Google has not ported Picasa to native version we can just get the Windows version and run it under Wine.

But there are other methods as well, like the one I followed where you use the Wine supplied by the earlier install of Picasa. So if you are using the earlier Picasa 3x for Linux version then it is very simple if you have Windows installed in your system. Just follow the steps mentioned below:
[1] Download the latest version of Picasa 3.5 for Windows from the Picasa site.
[2] Install it under Windows,
[3] Issue “gksu nautilus” under terminal or if you are fine with using command prompt then skip this step.
[4] Rename the ‘Picasa3′ folder under ‘/opt/google/picasa/3.0/wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Google/’ to ‘Picasa3_old’.
[5] Copy the contents of the folder ‘Picasa3′ from your windows partition to the path mentioned in point 4. (The location where Picasa3 is installed in windows would probably be installed in ‘C:\Program Files\Google\’, so find where the partition is mounted in Linux, for me it is ‘/media/win_c’)
[6] You are done, enjoy using Picasa3.5 under Linux.

If you do not have Windows, then for step 2, you would have to install ‘Wine’ from your package repository and install Picasa3.5 executable using it. Then for step 4, the location would be ‘/home/YOUR_USER_NAME/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Google/’

Do let me know if you have any doubts using the comments section below.