rohitj's domain

Its a great pleasure to announce that Tata guys have come up with a supercomputer which is ranked 4th fastest in the world, and fastest in Asia.

I am happy for 2 reasons

1. that India did it again. (remember param2000?)
2. that the computer uses Linux

Tata is the only company that has maintained its reputation for long time now. Even when TCS is criticized sometimes, Tata has maintained its reputation. Those who do not know, Tata’s most of the money goes to charity work. I am using the word “goes” not “will”. I love this group.

For more details check the original post.

-by guest blogger nareshov

Let’s begin then:

Let’s see, I’ve been asked to post here by rohitj on some sort of Fedora vs. Ubuntu. (He was more interested in “Fedora sucks” than “Ubuntu rocks” ).

I have my own experiences with these distros ever since the FC3 days (and then Ubuntu 5.04). I’ve had n00bs having trouble with the default SELinux settings in Fedora given the LAN environment in IITK. Hunting for everyday requirements such as Valknut (those days, we didn’t have linuxdcpp). This repo and that repo and more. The troubles people had with not having mp3 support out of the box in either of these distros.

I hate hunting 3rd party repos and installing nvidia drivers only to experience strange lockups or X crashes. Many of us have had bad experiences with nvidia and deb-distros. Freezes and Crashes were common (not sure now, with gutsy things might’ve changed).

Ubuntu has seen a lot of improvements since Breezy. Trying to adjust time+date asks you to install NTP support if you choose to use a time-server. Ubuntu asks you to install either NFS or Samba if you try to share a folder. Totem calls synaptic to install gstreamer-plugins-{ugly|bad} when needed. I’m not aware if Fedora does the same. They probably do. While Shuttleworth still insists on a brown+orange mixture in the default appearance of the desktop, Fedora has been playing around with their blues ever since the Bluecurves in RedHat9.

Here in India, the “old” linux junta is primarily a RedHat fanbase. Ever since Ubuntu started sending CDs for free, we see things changing. Many who have a lot of faith in RedHat (for good reasons) use Fedora, only to realise that it’s more of a community playground for the RedHat folks to experiment on. I’m not really sure why SuSE wasn’t very popular until Novell showed up in Bangalore.

More? When I do an aptitude install mysql-server , Debian would ask me to set the root password for the server and start the service. Now, yesterday RohitJ had trouble even starting the service and didn’t know the default root server (Probably had none). I can understand Gentoo not setting a default root passwd and not starting the service for you, but Fedora?

Another point of dissatisfaction being the GUI Server administrative tools in Fedora. Boy do they suck donkey balls. I don’t even have to describe what we went through a year ago in that hurry.

Gutsy is here btw, I can see the Indian Ubuntu servers go slow with the rush as I write. Ubuntu has a decent Compiz-fusion set up that hasn’t crashed on me so far – been two days roughly. It also has a n00b-friendly restricted drivers manager. All this cuts trouble and time-expenditure, you know? Ubuntu even understands that when I do an aptitude install flashplugin-nonfree on an amd64 machine it first gets nsplugin-wrapper and then downloads the flashplugin from Adobe’s mirrors and voila! Your 64-bit firefox can play videos on Youtube. I seriously doubt if Fedora can do this (comments please).

What else? Ah yes, good things Fedora has done recently is to stop messing around with the upstream Gnome default layout and combining /core and /extras. But Livna et al still exist >_>.

Look at Debian or Gentoo, it’s all there in one place. *Most* of it at least, compared to the rest – Fedora, openSUSE, Mandriva where you _have_ to depend on third party repositories for some software which might not be popular in the US but very popular in Russia or India (DC++ !). Come on!

Well, guess I’ll drop by when the comments are pouring in

So, I was out for the weekend. When I came back I saw my phpMyVisites and found this statistics for the week :

Isn’t it strange?

mm, I want my Gentoo back. This is a funny article which says who uses what linux distro.

http://www.askreamaor.com/linux-and-unix/what-your-linux-distro-says-about-you/

So, what does your linux distro say about you?

So, these guys they have collected some logos of some free softwares. Checkout http://raro.oreto.inf-cr.uclm.es/apps/stickers/ . It’s a cool collection. Right now, on my laptop I have got 5 stickers.

1. Some warning label.
2. Laptop Hardware Config.
3. Graphics by ATI
4. Intel Inside
5. Designed for MS Windows XP

Of course the fifth one makes my laptop look dirty. . I want to remove it, but I am afraid my laptop’s beauty will go down with the mark that this sticker will leave. But these guys have given ‘us’ a solution. We plan to get these stickers printed. And then we will be able to remove the existing stickers and place these free software stickers on  the same place. It will be so cool.

Those who want such stickers, leave a comment here. And wait for some time. ( Search for a press is going)

So, after having some problems with installation of Gentoo, I was thinking of installing something else. It was very bad that I couldn’t install Gentoo for some bugs that I couldn’t fix. I waited for long time, asked experts for this bug, no one could solve the problem. I finally installed Fedora 7. Yeah, I know I have been supporting Ubuntu, and still I installed Fedora. The reason being that one friend asked me to try it again. Don’t forget, my linux life started with Fedora Core 4, 2 year go. I kinda thought that I should try it again. The main reason of my separation from Fedora is that Fedora is backed by an enterprise and it releases its new versions so frequently. But his point was good enough. Fedora separates non-free softwares from free softwares. Thats a good thing, I think. Rather Gentoo and Ubuntu should start doing that. I was on ubuntu for just 1 week. Though I was feeded a lot that Ubuntu is better. I will give Ubuntu another shot and then will compare things. I still think that if I leave apart this non-free, free software repositories stuff, Ubuntu is better. At least it claims straight forward that it will remain free. Anyways, I used Gentoo for like 1 year. It felt good that lots of things were under my control. I am not linux developer or debugger, but still Gentoo gives me so many controls. I liked that.

Fedora after Gentoo surely makes me feel dumb. Its obvious, right? You have so less controls and so many things that you don’t want. You know that things are not good with your computer, but you don’t want to do anything because you are afraid of compile time of Gentoo. Though I think it’s better. Gentoo was big addiction. I agree Linux is addiction, but Gentoo is a step forward. I have less things to do with Fedora, its good because now I can spend time in creative works. . I remember that I used to spend a lot of time in compilations and searching for solution of bugs in Gentoo. But, of course I will shift to Gentoo sooner or later. Though I am afraid of future of Gentoo. Main developers of Gentoo are going away from Gentoo. And those who are in have lots of internal fights. I hope they will unite soon.

Another friend of mine tried Debian. He liked it. But, I am sure I am not trying that for next 1 year at least. So, main competitors for me are Ubuntu, Gentoo and Fedora. Lets wait for another 2 weeks, then I will tell you where I am. In a week or 2 CFS will come on Gentoo. Then I will try Gentoo, before that I will try Ubuntu.

This is the first time when I could read and write in hindi on my machine. This is how it works in Fedora :

1. Install fonts-hindi : yum install fonts-hindi
2. Install the greasespot plugin : Go to the site http://www.greasespot.net/ and click on the “install greasespot” link, it will install this plugin.
3. restart firefox.

And you are done
अब आराम से हिन्दी मे लिखें।

Update : If you want to write in hindi you may be interested in this link www.rohitj.net/indic

If you want to know in one line why I use/prefer linux, the answer is that it gives me “freedom”. And if you will give me second line I will say because the ‘fight’ is against ”copyright”.

Freedom : Since linux is open source, I can use it the way I want. That means that my machine will do what I want it to do. (I don’t want to give control of my machine to someone else.) And then I will be able to save myself from these “proprietary rights”.

Copyright : Todays copyright laws are killing creativity. People develop stuffs and copyright it in a way that others can not develop upon it for long time. And this long means 100 years!!!!!  So either you come up with another substitutable technology or you just use what they are developing. That means that if a technology A is made by some corporate B and if B is not able to develop A properly, people will have to make substitute technology. Not only that, if you have some idea that will enrich A, you can not implement that.  So waste of time and resources. Overall development is restricted.

“Proprietary Rights” : Let us take an example. File formats. Microsoft has proprietary rights for “.doc”. That means if tomorrow, Microsoft will say that no software other than Microsoft Office is allowed to use this file format, users will have to shift to Microsoft Office. This vendor lock-in favors producers and restricts clients. In other way its a cheap way of controlling consumer. Propietary rights  is a big concern today.

So, if you think you are a resposible person, you will use Linux. (Yeah, I agree its still not good enough for computer illiterates.)