Synopsis: The culprit is the username and password. Just use “internet” as both the username and password for connecting

A few days ago, I was looking around for a wireless internet connection. I searched for various options and ended up choosing Tata Indicom as my service provider. I already had my hands on Reliance and BSNL. So I chose Tata.

When I went to the Tata Indicom Centre near my place, they had a modem kept for demo. So, to test if this works with Ubuntu, I plugged in the demo modem and the connection was smooth. No glitches whatsoever. I just had to click on the network icon on the top and click on Tata Indicon (Photon+) new connection.

So, I went ahead and purchased the modem. But when the person came out, he said that the newer modems are not compatible with Linux. I was shocked. I asked him to open the pack and told I will try it out. And like he said it did not work. I was in a fix!

Now, i just did a dmesg to find out what’s happening – found that the device also mounts a “Mass Storage” device and a “SD Storage” device. I was happy. Below is the output of dmesg

scsi16 : usb-storage 2-1.1:1.3
scsi 16:0:0:0: CD-ROM            HUAWEI   Mass Storage     2.31 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0
scsi 16:0:0:1: Direct-Access     HUAWEI   SD Storage       2.31 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
sr1: scsi-1 drive
sr 16:0:0:0: Attached scsi CD-ROM sr1
sr 16:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 5
sd 16:0:0:1: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 0
sd 16:0:0:1: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk

So, now we know that there is a CD-ROM like device on sr1 and I just have to mount the same.

avinash@joshi:~$ sudo mount /dev/sr1 /mnt
avinash@joshi:~$ sudo su
root@joshi:/home/avinash# cd /mnt/
root@joshi:/mnt# ./install_linux

Once the above commands are executed, you will get a new dialogue/terminal. Just follow the instructions. If the installation says “Unable to install NDIS” do not worry. Still it will work. Once its done, exit out and re-attach the modem.

I thought this would be it, and yes… I did get “Tata Indicom (Photon+) connection” in my network manager!

Note: Close the Tata Photon Plus application after it starts up. This application might not always work!

Hurray… But when I tried clicking, the connection would not get established… I tried a few time. Still no luck. Tried in windows and it works. Finally I got to know from the Tata Indicom people that there is a username and password for this connection. The username and password both are “internet”.

All you got to do is – Click on the network icon > Edit connections > Mobile broadband tab > click on Tata Indicom and click on edit. There you supply the username and password and wala! you are done. Connection finally works!

So, finally I am able to connect to the internet… Hope this helped you guys!

For this, you will need an aux-in (3.5mm) stereo cable i.e., 3.5mm audio jack on both side. This may also vary depending on your mobile or fm player. Here is a WikiHow you may find interesting! Here is the image of the same:

So, All you got to do is have an ubuntu machine. Open terminal and run:

pactl load-module module-loopback

The above command will have only temporary effect. The module will only be loaded for that session that means that you will have to load the module after the next reboot again. The command below adds loading the module on every boot:

sudo sh -c ' echo "load-module module-loopback" >> /etc/pulse/default.pa '

If you have root permissions, you can leave out the sudo of the second command. After this, you will see the change in your Volume Control / Sound preferences.

Below is an image of how my config looks!

Here is the the link I followed to get the information.

Happy listening!

VIM in itself is a very powerful text editing software. It has a range of features that can aid you in writing! By default, vim does not come with any configurations. That is, it looks plain. VIM can be configured using the .vimrc file which contains the optional runtime configuration settings to initialize Vim when it starts. In this post, I will give you a brief introduction to what more you can do with these vim configuration file!

Below are some of the configuration commands (most basic ones) that i suggest one must use! All you have to do is copy the code below into a new file namely .vimrc (vim ~/.vimrc) and store this in your home folder. (Note that the text followed by “ is comment and you may delete them)

set number “Sets line number
syntax enable “Enables syntax highlighting
filetype indent on “Enables automatic file type indentation
set et “Inserts space characters whenever the tab key is pressed
set sw=4 “Sets the number of space characters inserted for indentation
set smarttab “Automatically sets tab spaces when you press enter
set incsearch “Sets incremental search
set tabstop=4 “No tabs in the source file
set showmatch “Shows matching braces
colorscheme evening “Sets a nice theme (there are many other schemes)

Please note that this configuration will work only if you have vim installed. By default, most *nix systems come with just vi. Install VIM:

• For Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install vim
• For Others, visit http://www.vim.org/download.php

Here are some more resources where you may find other interesting configuration commands!:

1. All about Vimrc: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Vimrc
2. The ultimate Vim configuration – vimrc: http://amix.dk/vim/vimrc.html
3. Vi-IMproved: http://www.vi-improved.org/vimrc.php

Hope you enjoyed this post. Will keep you updated if i have anything new! Until then,

Cheers!

The name of the software is blob. You can see a demo at http://avinashjoshi.co.in/blob

You can download the source in two ways:

1. HTTP Download: https://bitbucket.org/avinashjoshi/blob/downloads
2. Mercurial Repo: hg clone https://bitbucket.org/avinashjoshi/blob

You can also report issues and request for enhancements here: http://bitbucket.org/avinashjoshi/blob/issues

I will try my best to add the enhancement or resolve an issue.

More installation details given in the README file.

LICENSE:

blob is a micro-blogging service where you can share notices about yourself with friends, family, and colleagues!

blob is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

blob is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

Manually copying each address into a table in the OpenOffice Writer and then printing ain’t an option! Come on, you got like 500 entries. What would you do??

Luckily OpenOffice has the Labels feature (similar to mailmerge). This is really useful for creating and printing the labels…

In this post, I will give a demo on how to create and print labels from a spreadsheet (using spreadsheet as the data source)

What will you need?

1. OpenOffice Writer (comes default with most ubuntu distros)
2. OpenOffice Database (usually does not come by default)
   Install
   • OOo Base: sudo apt-get install openoffice.org-base
   • OOo Full (ubuntu): sudo apt-get install openoffice.org
   • Ooo Full (others): Download from http://openoffice.org
3. And, ofcourse the spreadsheet containing the details (Here is an example: Univ_Address)

Once you have everything in place…

Step I] Import the data from the spreadsheet to OpenOffice.org Database

• Open OpenOffice.org Database from Applications > Office
  This will open Database Wizard
• Now the “What do you want to do?” questions, click on the Connect to an existing database button and in the dropdown, click on Spreadsheet option and click next [Screenshot 1]
• Now, browse the ods file that has your database of universities and click next (Sample: Univ_Address) [Screenshot 2]
• Click on “Yes, register the database for me” – This makes OOo Database register/save/remember the database for you. Click on finish [Screenshot 3]
• Now save the database as Univ_list [Screenshot 4]
• After this, your database window will open. You may now close the window

Screenshot 1

Screenshot 2

Screenshot 3

Screenshot 4

Step II] Create the lables using OpenOffice.org

• Open OpenOffice.org Word Processor/Writer from Applications > Office
• Click on File > New >Labels [Screenshot 5]
• This will open the labels dialogue/window
• Now you have to select the data source [Screenshot 6]
  • In the database drop-down, select Univ_list
  • Table select the OpenOffice Spreadsheet’s “sheet” from where you want the data. In my case it is “Address”
• Now you will have to add the fields one by one. For e.g. Screenshot 7. That is, select the dropdown column as you see in the spreadsheet and click on the left button
  To,
  <Univ_list.Address.0.To>
  <Univ_list.Address.0.University>
  <Univ_list.Address.0.Address>
  <Univ_list.Address.0.City> – <Univ_list.Address.0.Pincode>
  <Univ_list.Address.0.State>, <Univ_list.Address.0.Country>
  Ph: <Univ_list.Address.0.Phone>
• For the brand, select Avery A4 and in the type, you can choose from the many available options! In this case, I choose J8563 Clear Address
• In Format, choose Sheet [Screenshot 7]
• Go to the options tab and check “Synchronize Contents” [Screenshot 8]
• And the click on New Document

Screenshot 5

Screenshot 6

Screenshot 7

Screenshot 8

• This will open a new writer document with frames. Here, you can create a borders, format etc.
• Right click on one of the frames and choose Frame in the drop down [Screenshot 9]
• Choose a border, preferably thick so that its easy to cut it out. [Screenshot 10]
• You may also format the page and decrease the margin on the top etc.
• Finally, you got to click on the print icon or press Ctrl+P
• Answer Yes to the questions
• In the print window, click on “file” if you want a pdf else just click print to print to a printer! [Screenshot 11]
• In the save dialogue, select file type as PDF and give a file name [Screenshot 12]

Screenshot 9

And you are done! Here is the sample pdf file – Univ_list. This is very helpful if you have a lot of address like I had! Hope you enjoyed the tutorial.



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What you need to do?
1. Form a team (max five members from your college)
2. Approach a faculty/mentor and request him/her to mentor your team
3. Register online at http://inctf.in

Whats more? There is no registration fee this year!

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Suddenly after many years, I was reminded of those cute games – Dave and Pacman and wanted to play them badly. So, entering the lab I thought, just downloading the Dangerous Dave freeware from http://www.dosgamesarchive.com and running using Wine on Ubuntu would do. But to my dismay, it just wouldn’t work! So, I looked for alternatives and found the best solution – DOSBox

So, I installed DosBox, a Free and OpenSource DOS emulator for almost any OS. I will tell you the steps to install DOSBox and run games like Aladdin, Dave, Mario, PacMan, Need for Speed, Prince, Skyroads and much more (those are my favourites)

Step I: Install DOSBox

Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install dosbox
Other OS: Go to http://dosbox.com/download.php?main=1 and choose your operating system

Step II: Download the game

Now, Download your favourite DOS games from http://www.dosgamesarchive.com and save them in the folder say /home/avinash/Games (have a short folder path – you will soon know why!)

Step III: Start DOSBox: Now, open terminal from Applications > Accessories > Terminal and type dosbox or you can go to Applications > Games > DOSBox Emulator. This will open the DOSBox emulator and throw a DOS Prompt Z:\> to you. Now, follow the commands below:

Z:\> mount c /home/avinash/Games
Drive C is mounted as a local directory /home/avinash/Games
Z:\> C:
C:\> cd DAVE
C:\DAVE> DAVE.EXE

And you have your Dave running on Linux! The feeling of playing the game again was just awesome – No words can describe that! So, you guys have fun playing the DOS Games and remembering the good Ol’ days – Happy playing . . .

Step IV: Auto-mount: You need  not type the mount command every time you start the dosbox program. Follow the below steps to enable auto-mount of your games folder:

1. Open DOSBox and type the following at the Z: prompt and type exit
Z:\> config -writeconf /home/avinash/dosbox.conf

2. Go to your home folder and edit the dosbox.conf as root
sudo gedit dosbox.conf

3. Add the following lines to the end of that file and save
mount c /home/avinash/Games
C:

And you are done!

Some screen shots:

DOSBox Main

The Dave Game running on DOSBox

Here is what you can Do:

1. Go to System > Preferences > Startup Applications and add the following:

Name: Lock Screen
Command: gnome-screensaver-command -l

2. Go to System > Administration > Login Screen and Have the button “Log in as <username>” checked and you are done

]]> http://avinashjoshi.co.in/blog/2010/10/24/lock-screen-after-log-in-gnulinux/feed/ 0 http://avinashjoshi.co.in/blog/2010/10/08/how-to-change-mac-address/ http://avinashjoshi.co.in/blog/2010/10/08/how-to-change-mac-address/#comments Fri, 08 Oct 2010 05:33:17 +0000 Avinash Joshi http://avinashjoshi.co.in/?p=1247 This is a very common question that I come across. Yesterday, I had to change my MAC address temporarily to get internet access on my laptop (More details cannot be disclosed)

I really do not have much idea on how to change a MAC address on window. May be you can google, download a tool for the same. You are really not sure if the software you downloaded is a trojan, virus or some kind of a malware! If you come across an authentic software, please do feel free to write down a comment…

Well, I am safe as I use Ubuntu (GNU/Linux). The ifconfig networking command-line tool is very powerful and useful for this. So, here are the steps that you can follow to change your MAC address temporarily.

Firstly, you got to note down the MAC address to which you want to change. (Something like: aa:1b:2c:d3:ee:ff). Now open terminal on your laptop or the machine where you want to change the MAC address and:

$ sudo su
#ifconfig

Note down the network interface (in most cases it will be eth0)

# ifconfig eth0 down
# ifconfig eth0 hw ether aa:1b:2c:d3:ee:ff
# ifconfig eth0 up

To make the mac address change permanent, just edit the /etc/network/interfaces file (open as root) and it should look something like this:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp
hwaddress ether aa:1b:2c:d3:ee:ff

And you are done! Happy browsing…

I am sure that many of you watch English series. For instance, some of my favorites are White Collar, How Heroes, Castle, Bones, FRIENDS, I Met Your Mother and in Regional languages, CID, Sasural Genda Phool, Sarabhai vs Sarabhai, Indian Idol and many other (Though I really do not get time to watch all of them, I am just listing my favourite). Similarly, you will also be having your Series that you missed or cannot watch on TV as it is not aired in India or movies you love you would like to download. You are reading the right post as you will for sure learn something new today

PS: For any of this to happen, you will either need to be damn rich (internet bill) or simply have unlimited download plan

This post is divided into four parts:

(1) Torrents/BitTorrent (2) File Hosting (3) Download ebooks (4) Download Indian TV Shows

There are many ways in which you can download your favourite movies or series or e-books. Let me start with Torrents first.

But, before we go ahead with the various methods, let me tell you the naming conventions of Series. Every English Series has a Season and Episode. You can get them by searching online. For e.g., you want to download Friends season 3 episode 10, your search text will be “Friends S03E10″. For ebooks, you can search with the title of the book or author name and for Movies, the title should be enough.

I] Torrents/BitTorrent

Let me just briefly tell what BitTorrent is. According to Wiki, “BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol used for distributing large amounts of data.” Torrents are generally the preferred way to download movie, books, and even series. To know in detail how Torrent/BitTorrent works, look at the wiki article here. In brief, BitTorrent works on sharing basis. That is each and every user has bits of the file and share it over the internet. The file is not physically/electronically present on one server/computer from where people can download but rather it is shared over many users and computers.

You may also learn the concept of Seeders and Leechers, ratio etc. Will be useful

So, how do you download using a torrent?

1. Firstly, you will need to have a BitTorrent client like:

Windows: µTorrent, BitComet, Vuze, BitTorrent and many others
GNU/Linux: My personal favourite is KTorrent

Note: To download KTorrent on ubuntu, just open terminal and execute this command:

$ sudo apt-get install ktorrent

You may also view the “Comparison of BitTorrent clients“

2. Next choose your BitTorrent search engine (You may search in all of them to get better results)

A. Hollywood Movies, Series and ebooks

You can download the .torrent file from the below websites (These websites usually host torrent files of foreign language movies and series, Indian Movies are very less found)

http://isohunt.com | http://thepiratebay.org | http://mininova.org | http://btjunkie.org

But there are these other sites like http://www.torrentz.com/ which collect torrent files from various BitTorrent search engines mentioned above.

Anyways, once you get a particular torrent file which is usually a file of size less that around 400kb. Open that file using your BitTorrent client/software. The client connects to the tracker(s) specified in the torrent file, from which it receives a list of peers currently transferring pieces of the file(s) specified in the torrent. The client connects to those peers to obtain the various pieces. If the swarm contains only the initial seeder, the client connects directly to it and begins to request pieces. And you have your file downloaded

B. Indian Movies

The best website I have come across to download Indian movies (Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada) is

http://spicydesis.net/ or http://spicydesis.net/forumdisplay.php?f=11

But you will have to register a free account to get full access But this forum is just awesome! A must see.

Please note: This is a general warning to everyone. There are people who upload fake torrents. Please read comments before downloading Just be sure that you are not download the wrong torrent… Thanks to Chaitya Shah for this addition. This is not at all a problem in spicydesis.net

II] File Hosting Service

This is another way in which you can download, generally a series episode or ebook. This is a service which allow us to share files and images with others. There are two basic types of account (1) Free (2) Premium. The upload, download limit and features differ for different hosting service provider. For example in rapidshare, a free user can upload a file of max size 500MB. Whereas a premium user has no such limit. Even while downloading, a premium user can have any number of parallel downloads and can use a download manager. But for a free user, only one download at a time

There are many file hosting services:

http://megaupload.com | http://rapidshare.com | http://hotfile.com | http://www.mediafire.com/ | http://www.filedropper.com/ | http://www.filefactory.com/ | http://4shared.com | http://www.sendspace.com/

but, here you can only upload a file and send that link to your friend or post it online. How do you search for a particular file in any or all of these hosting service?

This is where you have FilesTube, a website which allows you to search for files on rapidshare and download sites Now, let us take “Friends S03E10″ for instance. Just put that text on the search box and check out the result Simple right? Now let us take some book for e.g., “operating system concepts” again, just put that text on the search box and check out the result. Just click on one of the result and download the file Simple ain’t it?

III] Download ebooks

GigaPedia is a great website i came across that has the list of many ebooks. The only thing is that you will have to register(for free) to make full use of that powerful search engine. Just enter the author name or book name

PS: Gigapedia is now Library.nu

IV] Indian Television shows [Watch online or download]

Even Indian serials are hosted on various file hosting service websites. The best forum I have come across to download or watch Indian TV is

http://desitvforum.net/ or directly go to their TV forum http://desitvforum.net/forum/

Again, this is one of the best way to watch any unwatched Indian TV show. PS: The shows are promptly updated just after the serial is over on tv

Hope you ejoyed the post and learnt something new. Feedback and Suggestions are always welcome