100th post

After 3 years of this web blog introduction, here I am with my 100th post!

Technorati tags: OpenGuru, 100th post.

How To: Fix Kannada Font problem in Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope

Even though Ubuntu Jaunty comes with Kannada fonts pre-installed, due to some technical problems these fonts never work properly.

For example,

Above screenshot shows the Kannada portal Sampada.net running in default Ubuntu Jaunty installation.

You can fix this issue easily. Just do the following..

install the package named "ttf-kannada-fonts" from synaptic.

or

issue following command in terminal.

sudo apt-get install ttf-kannada-fonts

or

click here to install the "ttf-kannada-fonts" package.

After doing this, same website is rendered perfectly in Ubuntu.

This article is available in Kannada language.

---

ಈ ಬರಹವು ಇಂಗ್ಲಿಷ್ ಬಾಷೆಯಲ್ಲಿಯೂ ಲಭ್ಯವಿದೆ.

ಉಬುಂಟು ಜೋನ್ಟಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ಕನ್ನಡ ಬಾಷೆಯ ಫಾಂಟ್ ಲಭ್ಯವಿದ್ಹರೂ, ಅದರಲ್ಲಿರುವ ಕೆಲವು ತಾಂತ್ರಿಕ ತೊಂದರೆಗಳಿಂದಾಗಿ ಸರಿಯಾಗಿ ಕಾಣಿಸುವುದಿಲ್ಲ.

ಉದಾಹರಣೆಗೆ,

ಮೇಲಿನ ಚಿತ್ರವು ಕನ್ನಡದ ಖ್ಯಾತ ಅಂತರ್ಜ್ಯಾಲ ಜಾಗವಾದ ಸಂಪದ.ನೆಟ್ ನ ನೋಟವನ್ನು ಉಬುಂಟು ಜೋನ್ಟಿಯಲ್ಲಿರುವ ತೊಂದರೆಯೊಂದಿಗೆ ತೋರಿಸುತ್ತದೆ.

ನೀವು ಇದನ್ನು ಸರಿ ಮಾಡಬಹುದು. ಇದಕ್ಕಾಗಿ ಕೆಳಗೆ ನೀಡಿರುವ ಸಲಹೆಗಳನ್ನು ಪಾಲಿಸಿರಿ.

ಸಿನಪ್ತಿಕನ್ನು ಬಳಸಿ "ttf-kannada-fonts" ಎಂಬ ಪ್ಯಾಕೇಜನ್ನು ಇನ್ಸ್ಟಾಲ್ ಮಾಡಿರಿ.

ಅಥವಾ

ಟರ್ಮಿನಲ್ ನಲ್ಲಿ ಕೆಳ ಕಂಡ ಕಮ್ಯಾಂಡ್ ನ್ನು ಟೈಪ್ ಮಾಡಿರಿ.

sudo apt-get install ttf-kannada-fonts

ಅಥವಾ

ಈ "ttf-kannada-fonts" ಪ್ಯಾಕೇಜ್ ನ್ನು ಇನ್ಸ್ಟಾಲ್ ಮಾಡಲು ಇಲ್ಲಿ ಕ್ಲಿಕ್ ಮಾಡಿರಿ.

ಅಷ್ಟೆ!

ನೋಡಿ ಇದೇ ಸಂಪದ.ನೆಟ್ ಈ "ttf-kannada-fonts" ಪ್ಯಾಕೇಜ್ ಇನ್ಸ್ಟಾಲ್ ಮಾಡಿದ ನಂತರ, ಎಷ್ಟು ಚೆನ್ನಾಗಿ ಮೂಡಿ ಬಂದಿದೆ.

ಗೂಗಲ್ ಬಳಸಿ ಕನ್ನಡದಲ್ಲಿ ಟೈಪ್ ಮಾಡಲಾಗಿದೆ.

P.S. Typed in Kannada using Google.

Technorati tags: Kannada, Ubuntu and Kannada, Solution To Ubuntu Kannada Font Rendering Problem.

How To: Hide the mounted Volume icons from GNOME Desktop

I have a lot of volumes mounted in my desktop(just about 20!). I really hate to see my desktop being cluttered with the mounted volume icons. So, What do I do with them ? I just hide them!

If you are like me, and want to stop GNOME from showing up the mounted volume icons on your GNOME-desktop, here is the trick!

• Step 1: Press Alt+F2
  
  this should open up "Run Application" dialog box, enter "gconf-editor" in this and press enter.
  
  OR
  
  open Terminal from Applications->Accessories. and type "gconf-editor" and press enter.
• Step 2:
  
  First Step should launch a separate application named "Configuration Editor". This is the front-end to the settings of different GNOME applications.
  
  This is more or like registry editor or regedit in Windows.
  
• Step 3:
  
  In Configuration Editor, traverse to /apps/nautilus/desktop/
  
  here you will see many key value pairs.
  
  
  
  
  We are interested in a key named volumes_visible, uncheck the check-box in-front of this key. That's it!
  

P.S. If you are interested you can play with rest of the nautilus settings. From same place you can show/hide Trash icon, Computer icon and Home icon from your desktop.

Also, you can change the name of the Computer icon and Home icon.

Technorati tags: GNOME, GNOME Hide mounted volume icons from desktop, gconf-editor, Changing nautilus settings.

Ubuntu 9.04 -Jaunty Jackalope - How To enable alt-ctrl-backspace

In Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope, the X11 restart keyboard shortcut alt-ctrl-backspace is by default disabled. This is done to reduce issues experienced by users who accidentally trigger the key combo.

However, I feel this shortcut is very useful and is a lifesaver in several situations.

If you want to enable this shortcut then either you have to edit the xorg.conf file or install a command named dontzap.

To install this package search in synaptic for package named dontzap or issue following command.

sudo apt-get install dontzap
Once you have installed this package, type following command in terminal to enable this X11 keyboard shortcut.

sudo dontzap --disable
For some reason, If you want to disable this shortcut again, then either modify the xorg.conf manually or issue following command,

sudo dontzap --enable
That's it folks.

Ubuntu 9.04 - Jaunty Jackalope looks solid!

I just switched from Ubuntu 7.10 - Gutsy Gibbon to Ubuntu 9.04 - Jaunty Jackalope.



wow! I am really impressed! Jaunty really looks solid. GNOME 2.26.1 is just awesome! Everything looks tightly integrated and working!

Thanks and congrats to the Ubuntu team and GNOME team for a solid release.

Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon reached end of life on 18th of this month, which forced me to do this switch. After installing Jaunty, I am very happy that I switched!

RIP Gutsy Gibbon, and welcome Jaunty Jackalope.

Oracle buys SUN, what next?

You people might have read this NEWS by now.

Oracle and SUN announced today that they have entered into a definitive mutual agreement, under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion or $5.6 billion net of Sun’s cash and debt.

Yeah.. This move make sense under SUNs current situation, but what about the future of SUN?

I am kind of excited!, as well as confused or worried about the future. Here are my worries, which only time has to answer!

1. What is going to happen to MySQL? Whether Oracle is going to kill it?
   
   I still wondering about the fate of MySQL. I still feel that, MySQL was better on its own, before it got itself acquired by SUN. Anyways, its too late now.
   
   Even though we have PostgreSQL, web development using LAMP incomplete without MySQL.
   
   I don't think Oracle will maintain two version of RDBMS, as it will only create confusion among its potential customers. Instead it may either kill MySQL or Merge MySQL with its RDBMS and create a single product.
   
   Either way, It's still OK I guess, Even If Oracle kills MySQL, as MySQL source code is available under GPL, somebody will fork it. This is what I like about GPL.
   
   
2. What about the future of Btrfs and ZFS into Linux?
   
   You people may be knowing that, Oracle is currently developing a new generation file system named Btrfs (pronounced as ButterFS) for Linux. Now that Oracle has SUN, it can stop developing Btrfs and just make ZFS available under GPLv2. or at-least combine the part of ZFS into the Btrfs.
   
   Whatever the case, the future is more bright at-least in this case!
   
   
3. What about the future of commercial Linux support?
   
   You people may be knowing that, Oracle is also into the service business, where it sells support to the Redhat Enterprise Linux under the name Orclae unbreakable Linux.
   
   What about its future? What about the existing customers? Now that the Oracle has to give support Solaris also, I guess Oracle will stop selling Linux support! or Who knows? It may stop selling Solaris, even though its highly unlikely to happen.
   

I guess, only time can answer these question. If you have any idea, please leave a comment..

Links:

• Orcale press release.
  
• SUN Media Kit.

Zoundry Raven - Awesome blog editor

Finally I have found a awesome free desktop blog editor. And good thing about this free blog editor is that, its free as in Freedom.

Zoundry LLC. has released the beta version of their blog editor named Zoundry Raven. Actually I am posting this article directly from Raven. Even though Raven is a beta software, its fully functional and can be used for day to day blogging.

The best feature I liked in Raven, it works without any fuss. As soon as I installed Raven, I was able to import my profile from previous version Zoundry blog editor and Microsoft Live writer and this import actually worked!

The blog editor setup hardly took few seconds, and within one minute I was ready to blog with Raven being up and running. This time includes the time taken to download the English dictionary, my blog posts and blog templates.

Second feature which I liked in Raven is the live preview. This is same as in Scribefire or in Microsoft writer. Raven will download your blog template and can show your post preview as it would like in your blog.

Other features I liked in Raven:

1. XHTML Everywhere!: wow! This is something, which I was missing in almost all the blog editors. I actually like to write the post in XHTML editor and Raven has a good XHTML editor which has features like auto complete, XHTML validation and auto conversion to valid XHTML.
2. Fast and Lightweight: I felt that Raven is very fast and is NOT a memory hog.
3. Dictionary support: Raven support many language dictionaries and You can install them from Raven itself. Raven will automatically download it.
4. Media Storage support: Raven support different API for uploading images. They are flickr, imageshack(wow!), custom FTP site and Picasa web.
5. Table support. Blog editors like Scribefire and all still does not have this support.
6. Great tagging support - You can add tags to websites such as Technorati, Del.icio.us, Zooomr and Flickr.

These are the features which I liked very much.

Don't remember Raven is still a beta software, it will only get better and better.

Things which I am missing from Raven:

Raven is available only for windows at this time. However, since Raven is entirely coded in python and the source code is released under GNU GPL v2, I guess soon somebody will port this to Linux and Mac.

Once some body does this, I can ditch that stupid blogspot editor.

I wish Zoundry Raven very best of luck.

Links:

1. Google Code project
2. Zoundry LLC website
3. Zoundry Raven homepage

p.s.: I heartily thank you Zoundry LLC. for making this wonderful software source available under free source license.

Technorati : Blog Editor, Desktop Blog Editors, Zoundry Raven

Del.icio.us : Blog Editor, Desktop Blog Editors, Zoundry Raven

Zooomr : Blog Editor, Desktop Blog Editors, Zoundry Raven

Flickr : Blog Editor, Desktop Blog Editors, Zoundry Raven

Blogger finally gets a new revamped post page

After a very long time, Google has made changes to the blogspot posting page.

The new posting page looks clean and neat. It also has a option to set your location. (Geo tagging everywhere!)

Now its possible to resize the post edit box. (This is the features for which I was waiting since ages!)

Also, post previews are shown in separate pop up window. Also, you set how you want the typed HTML code to be interpreted.

Here are the some other new features I have noticed.

1. In Edit HTML page, blogger warns you about wrongly placed XHTML tags.
   
2. The Image uploader also revamped. Now its a simple UI with no options to specify the image size.
   
   Once the uploaded image is shown on your blog post, blogger shows the popup link to resize your image.
   
   However there is no way to change the image alignment. (ie; like the one is used in this post. If you need this kind of image alignment, you need to specify it manually.)
   

Overall, nice set of useful features.

Next change ? Google, please introduce some cool blogspot themes! Current themes are ages old!

You can check the all new blogspot post page by visiting http://draft.blogger.com/

How To: Fix shared library load problem in GNU/Linux

I recently started learning/using Google C++ Testing framework.

I compiled and installed Google testing framework as per the instruction. But still I wasn't able to run the sample applications compiled by me.

Whenever I run them, I used to get following error.

error while loading shared libraries: libgtest.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

But I had installed Google test framework properly. The install script had properly placed the libgtest.so.0 into /usr/local/lib

So, to check which all shared library are failed to load, I issued following command

$ ldd a.out

and the output was

raghunayak@raghu-desktop:~/google_test/samples$ ldd a.out
        libgtest.so.0 => not found
        libstdc++.so.6 => /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6 (0x00002b2897d75000)
        libm.so.6 => /lib/libm.so.6 (0x00002b2898080000)
        libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x00002b2898301000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x00002b2898510000)
        /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00002b2897b57000)

Which showed that, only libraries placed in /usr/local/lib are failed to load. This gave me a hint that, /usr/local/lib is not the ld library search path.

To confirm this, I entered following command, which lists all the libraries that ld can load.

$ ldconfig -p

This confirmed that, /usr/local/lib is indeed missing from ld library search path.

So, to include /usr/local/lib into the ld library search path, I typed following into the terminal.

$ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/local/lib/

after this, I typed

$ ldd a.out

and this time the ld was able to properly find the library gtest.so.0 placed in '/usr/local/lib'

raghunayak@raghu-desktop:~/google_test/samples$ ldd a.out
        libgtest.so.0 => /usr/local/lib/libgtest.so.0 (0x00002ae54f520000)
        libstdc++.so.6 => /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6 (0x00002ae54f772000)
        libm.so.6 => /lib/libm.so.6 (0x00002ae54fa7d000)
        libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x00002ae54fcfe000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x00002ae54ff0d000)
        /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00002ae54f302000)

After this I was able to run samples without any problems.

Temporary Solution:

Temporary solution is to add '/usr/local/lib' into the environmental variable named LD_LIBRARY_PATH

so, the solution is to add /usr/local/lib into the enviornment variable named LD_LIBRARY_PATH, by typing

You can do this by typing

$ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/local/lib/

Permanent solution:

permanent solution is to modify the file /etc/ld.so.conf and add the path /usr/local/lib into it.

You can do it manually by typing

$ sudo gedit /etc/ld.so.conf

or type following into the terminal

$ sudo bash -c 'echo /usr/local/lib >> /etc/ld.so.conf ' && sudo ldconfig

P.S.: I think GNU/Linux distributions by default should include /usr/local/lib in /etc/ld.so.conf or at-least the install script of the libraries should have this intelligence.

Ubuntu - Changing default Java version

I recently installed Frostwire, but somehow I couldn't able to even start Frostwire. In command line it used show following error log:

An unexpected error has been detected by Java Runtime Environment:

However, other Java applications such as Vuze were working perfectly.

Later I found that, If have a 64 bit machine and have installed both 32 bit and 64 bit version of Java, then you can have only one among them active at a time.

ie; You can use either Vuze or Frostwire, as Vuze requires 64 bit Java, whereas Frostwire needs 32 bit verison of Java.

By default last installed version of Java will be used as the default Java. This can be changed by issuing following command:

$sudo update-alternatives --config java

When you issue this command you will see something like this:

There are 4 alternatives which provide `java'.

  Selection    Alternative
-----------------------------------------------
          1    /usr/bin/gij-4.2
*         2    /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/bin/java
          3    /usr/lib/jvm/ia32-java-6-sun/jre/bin/java
 +        4    /usr/lib/jvm/java-7-icedtea/jre/bin/java

Press enter to keep the default[*], or type selection number: 

In this list, entry number 2 corresponds to the 64 bit Java and entry number 3 corresponds to the 32 bit Java version. The star (*) present over the second entry, means that 64 bit version of Java is in use presently.

Whenever you want 32 bit Java, issue above mentioned command and press 3 to select 32 bit Java. Similarly, Whenever you want 64 bit Java, issue above mentioned command and press 2 to select 64 bit Java.

Same command can be used to select SUN Java package instead of GNU Compiler for the Java or GCJ.

Hope this helps you people..