Satish's Blog

This blog is not active anymore , u can reach me at : http://satisheerpini.net

well it is a lot easier than on Fedora 8( which i could never complete though i posted the method here ), it is just the installation of an RPM , just do this if u want to write any GUIs with Ruby based on Qt4 yum install kdebindings u are ready to roll !!!

i have been learning gui programming with Ruby, .. it is a lot more easier designing GUI's with languages like Ruby or Python , than C . I actually wanted to write a kernel installer , which would work like this , .... nothing related to the kernel is involved in the functioning of the installer , here is how it would go step by step .... : ask for the kernel archive file .(or may be just ask for the patch file and do the rest as same after applying the patch ). process the available config techniques based on the presence of libraries (like make gconfig, make menuconfig , make xconfig, ... etc) ask the user to choose the config technique give the option for the user to load the .config file from the installed kernel and then compile the kernel , the progress being shown in a display window and then complete the installation and ask the user to reboot to use the new kernel i just got this idea, .... does a tool like this already exist, ... or would it be worth it , to develop so

so if you have used the user_relationships module in Drupal ( 5.x) , u would know that the My relationships link in the navigation menu , when clicked displays a page with two internal tabs, 'all' and 'pending'. If u didn't like the tabbed display , (i did not like it , so i made this change)u can as well change it to display any one of the options , pending or all , this is what has to be done , u will have to edit the hook file for the user relationships module , so the required file is "your drupal installation"/modules/user_relationships/user_relationships_hooks.inc find the following code in the file and make the following changes . $items[] = array( 'path' => "relationships/list", 'title' => t('All'), 'access' => $view_access, 'type' => MENU_NORMAL_ITEM|MENU_DEFAULT_LOCAL_TASK, 'wei

This is an excellent initiative by one of the members of the Fedora Ambassadors Project , Susmit. He created a list and we( members from india) have been adding to it. It is a list of volunteers , who could copy Fedora install media for people who would require them. This is not limited to the present release and will continue for all the future releases i guess , ... here is the link , .... http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Distribution/FreeMedia/India/LocalContacts

i installed the qt4-ruby bindings just now. It is a little confusing ( for me atleast), so i describe here the process to install the bindings, (for linux, i am using Fedora 8)..... -> install qt4 on your system -> get the qt4-ruby bindings from the RUBYFORGE site or from the following link, the following link might contain an old version , so go to the rubyforge site for the latest stuff, .... http://www.filekeeper.org/download/eerpini/qt4-ruby-1.4.10.tgz -> install cmake on the system if it is already not present on a Fedora system u can do this by just using 'yum install cmake' -> then extract the archive and change to that directory , -> then run ' cmake .' this will automatically configure and create makefiles . -> then run ' make ' this should automatically install the bindings, just write a sample ruby program to check if it works !

I could not find a proper answer when i wanted to install RadRails on eclipse . This is how it is done , .... in the Eclipse menu go to Help-->Software Updates --> Find and Install.... then in the pop - up window which appears ,.. Search for new features to install and then click next and then u will have to add 2 new remote sites, .. the details for the sites are the ones which were very difficult to obtain , they are site 1 : Name :RadRails URL : http://radrails.sourceforge.net/update site 2 : Name :RDT URL : http://updatesite.rubypeople.org/release then click on finish , u are almost done with the installation , u have to just follow the instructions from here on to finish the installation .

can understand ur feelings .... this sometimes happen to me also .. its called the controversy of the way we live life !! ... Every day we look at the sky dreaming of what would happen but not quite sure of what is our desire ...then comes the pigeon ... disturbing our peer sense of onlooking insight into our future .. but then again .. thats how lief goes ... like a rail ... chuk chuk ... thoy thoy ... its fast .. and sometimes u don't even catch the glimpses of what is going on ... so ... whaT my intension behind the mail is ... pigeons may come on the platform .. but what makes u outstanding is when u kill the pigeon on the spot and roast it and eat it up ,... and say ... blurp !! ... i am satisfied now .. i can continue my ruby !! ... and then catch up with ruby in rails .... let go pal .. this is life ... u've done ur part ... its up to others to decide ur credentiability .. but never loose hope in urself !! . and always stay on focus ... thats the way the great karthi

Hi ... How are you?? I am fine thankyou...Do not bother mailing back :).. I am doing great and am currently on the platform... Long to go before I get on the rails.. Well, I am a star waiting to be adorned by Ruby and PERL.. I have to make a rail journey once my platform work is done with. There seems to be one thing that bothers me... Piegons!!! They are on the platform as well.. But, why rails for them?? They have the sky... While they'll be airborne once they are done, I'll be on rails.. Believe it or not, I am not even going to get sailing!!! Rail gadi.. Rail gadi... Chuk chukk.. chuk chuk chuk... A very bored Programmer

the little book of ruby is one of the best things i have ever seen , it describes all that is to ruby , the most part of the language in a very short and sweet way . This book is all u need if u want a brief introduction on Ruby . But the Ruby cookbook provides lot more information . It provides some very neat questions, indeed some of the best questions i have ever seen . My journey into ruby has just started today , so have to see how all this finally turns up !

the latest kernel release is 2.6.25.3 , and i have already compiled it and no problems at all. All i had to do was copy the config file from the 2.6.25 version and compile the new versiion .

The random number generator function in the C lib is quite predictable. My friends at LUG@VITU, wrote this function which generates a random number by utilizing the noise level from the devices from a file in /proc . I have made small changes to the make file to create a library when compiled and thus the lib can be directly installed . I have also added make install support to the code .The code is available at : http://www.filekeeper.org/download/eerpini/random_lib-1.0.1.tar.gz

the next version of the endswith program which i had started a few weeks ago , is out, this release contains a library function implementation of the endsWith program called iendswith() , a header file has been included in the source code, including this header file and after compiling the library , the function iendwith can be used in regular C programs , ........ unlike the actuall endwith binary, iendswith only returns the number of matches for the given pattern in the given directory ..... i am presently working on a library function implementation which could return the matching file names in the form of a string stype structure, .... but that needs some work,... the included library function is just a rework of the original program. More changes have actually gone into the Makefile , just running make compiles only the binary as usual . Running 'make library' compiles the library function and creates the endswith.a library . A test driver function has also been included

here is a screenshot of my Fedora 8 desktop with the new theme , it is just great ...... i am lovin it !!

reference : http://satisheerpini.blogspot.com/2008/04/endswith-function-in-c.html i have been having enough problems getting the main logic of the endswith function right, .... the code for the main loop in the program which does the string matching is as follows : ____________________________________________________________________________________ for(i=0;i dir_recd_len;i++){ if(i<(dir_recd_len-comp_str_len)) continue ; else{ /* * the first error lay here , i forgot to give the * brackets at (85,19) and (85,45), that gave negative values * during iterations , which was disastrous */ if(argv[2][i-(dir_recd_len-comp_str_len)]==dir_recd->d_name[i]){ flag=1; } else{ flag=0; /*

to say the least , the next two weeks is going to be the most boring time of my life, ... it is sem end exams coming up , so have to do some serious studying !!! miss u guys !! :-( .........

well i have compiled the latest kernel (2.6.25) , without any problems on Fedora 8. ... it appears to e a notch faster than the previous stable release, ....... but i have realized one thing, on Fedora, just compiling and installing the kernel image also automatically generates the 'initrd image, . While it does not on other distros, most of which i have used !!!

well this function already exists in Java , so i just wanted to write a similar thing in C , it was pretty simple work , the source code can be downloaded from , http://filekeeper.org/download/eerpini/endswith-1.0.tar.gz and a lot of things are yet to be added , which can be found in the TO-DO file .

by default ubuntu does not come with the privileges to login as root in GDM , ... here is what can be done , there are two steps , first to enable root login and the second to know the root password : 1) go to the following in the panel menu: System--> Administration--> Login Window There in the Security tab , check the option , Allow local System Administratotr Login . 2) go to the following in the panel menu : System--> Administration--> User and Groups then select root, and click on Properties , then select Generate Random Password and note down the password displayed in the Password set to field. This is the required root password , change it if u want to from the terminal . Now logout and login back as the root user . Logging in as the root user provides a lot of functionality, but it may get very messy at t

A small project has been planned at the LUG@VITU , it consists of coding a simple C library having helper functions which are not available in the standard C library .More details about the project and how to contribute to it can be found here : http://220.225.214.101/node/115

i had absolutely nor problems with compiling the latest kernel and installing it on my laptop running Ubuntu 7.10 . The only cliche was that when i copied the config file from my installed kernel for the compilation , my sound drivers were not enabled by default , so had to check them out manually, then i just used the make-kpkg provided with ubuntu , to make the kernel headers and image debian files , which i installed and then booted. The only thing left to be configure is the WI-FI card, ipw3945 card.

i have already talked about both the problem and the first solution , which can set it right when used it from the command prompt , but here is another method if u are opening mplayer from gnome , ... click on the video to be opened and select ' open with other application ' , there select ' use custom command ' , then enter ' mplayer -zoom 200 ' , this will open mplayer properly , the next time u need not enter the whole thing, ....... selecting only mplayer also works, because mplayer automatically generates an alias withing the filesystem . But there is a problem , now suppose if u plug in a removable media , u will have to enter the whole command with the zoom option again , because it is a different filesystem . I am not yet confirmed on this point , have to do a little more testing . But i have not encountered the problem on the same machine when i compiled and installed MPlayer-1.0rc2 . Have to test the whole thing a litlle more to confirm the bugs .

i was facing this problem when installed MPlayer-1.0rc1 on ubuntu 7.10, the problem was that the video would come up only in the center of the screen even in the full screen mode ,i had installed the player from source . Now there are two solutions for this, the first one works perfectly , but the second one is a little problematic .They are : 1. Create an alias to the mplayer command and place it in the bash configuration file, so the line to be placed in the file is: alias mplayer='mplayer -zoom 200' and place this in the file ~/.bashrc . This works fine if u are running mplayer from the command line , i will post the next method a little later .....

Here is a series of posts on the very basics of how one can configure a kernel and then compile it and install it. If anything appears to be wrong or something more has to be added please feel free to add or comment .... http://220.225.214.101/forum/59

ext3grep seems to be one awesome of a creation . It was a result of, what drives most work in this world, ' a personal itch ' . The description and details given by the creator Carlo Wood are too great for me to provide a new definition over here , so take a look at the HOWTO here, http://www.xs4all.nl/~carlo17/howto/undelete_ext3.html , the page has a really good explanation of how ext3 works and how actually ext3grep retrieves the files . You can have a look at the various releases of the utility //code.google.com/p/ext3grep/downloads/list and one can download the latest release from http://ext3grep.googlecode.com/files/ext3grep-0.5.0.tar.gz i bet it is one thing every linux user should have at hand , because as Carlo says , it happens to everyone sooner or later . The utility still need s a lot of testing and improving i guess, so joining the mailing lists would be a great idea .

The first planned saturday round-up at the LUG , VITU , took place yesterday in the evening . It was a pretty private one , but the discussions that went on were great . Lot of plans were proposed for improving the website and for involving more people . A lot of techincal and interesting discussions also went on . A review on the discussions can be found at : http://220.225.214.101/forum/57 .

i never actually knew that there was a macro provided by ANSI C which contains the current line number of execution , it is the __LINE__ macro here is a sample program to show its usage and after that follows the ouput : int main (){ int a; printf("\nHello testing the use of the __LINE__macro \n"); a=__LINE__; printf("The current line number is 5 \n and the value of __LINE__ is :%d \n",a); return 0 ; } Output: Hello testing the use of the __LINE__macro The current line number is 5 and the value of __LINE__ is :5 the preprocessor directives such as #include do not come under program lines so i have not included them here ....

the discussions i have been involved in on the YUM mailing lists are still going on , and a very recent and important issue has cropped , consider if i have mysql installed in my system and i am upgrading to a higher version , now if i want to rollback then i would have to rollback to the previous version of the database server but not affect the databases and the data , so that would be a tough asking . well a solution proposed for this was that if rollback was developed as a plugin or something for YUM , then it would during package installation warn the user that he is making changes that cannot be rolled back or may be the rollback utility will create a list of applications that cannot be rolled back and thus be excluded during rollback . the final suggestion was that it was not a very good idea to actually implement the rollback utility as a part of yum or as an external module, that was quite disheartening , but looking at the issues there seems no other go , or is there one

The posting of this idea for Gsoc has indeed brought out a lot of defects and inconsistencies in the idea and the proposed implementation , I have been having a good set of discussions with the GSoc mentors , my application doesn't seem to be going anywhere but the idea has been getting a lot of shaping and chiseling, ...... to say in short , there are a lot of shortcomings which were not identified before, and the main drawback was that i had not discussed these ideas with people from the YUM mailing lists, the recent discussions i had on the mailing lists show the following shortcomings, which seem to be very obvious now : 1) the utility would be very slow if it used YUM again for the rollback process also 2) i was suggested to use conventional backup and recovery methods, and try improving the backup storage methods and improve the speed eventually . 3) the system would be left very inconsistent , if the rollback process anywhere involved the use of commands such as 'rpm -e&

So finally just a few hours before the closing date for the applications for GSoc , i have submitted my project Application for YUM Rollback Utility to The Fedora and Jboss project, truly speaking i am not actually very sure whether the applications are still accepted or if the time is already up. But people wish me all the best :-) !!

i recently was involved in the discussion , where we were talking about how Linux was going to be the next big thing, i didn't say that , someone else did , but i totally disagree, is Linux truly the next big thing ?? well , tell u what , i thing it has already begun , and other things are going down , and u know who i am talking about , BIG DADDY, ..... its time things changed for the good,....... but i think people don get along with Linux , because it is going to be the next big thing or it already is , ... but because, it is a passion , it is a culture, which many love and even I do !!!

this actually has been rolling in my mind for a long time now , how would it be to design an app, which would make it a click's work to plan for the design and coding of a project or a software application, which would produce text like what i have posted below for the 'diff'ing and'patch'ing application , and along with that also the deadlines, and sort of provide the functionality for adding new goals and decisions dynamically, ? that would be great , i guess, a lot more thinking and discussion has to go in there, but it would be awesome and highly customizable !!!

i have decided to write a small GUI based app for taking out the diff of two files and applying patches to files, well i don have any idea how the actual programs work , but i have decided to write new algos for them , and a little innovation with the GUI , ... the plan goes as follows, : ------> creation of own diff and patch algorithms | |___--> better diff algo proposal # char wise diff if line length > 256 (set arbitrarily) ------> designing the GUI through manual programming ( no GLADE ) | |___--> components of the GUI # textarea for displaying the diff output # input and output file selector # file selector for patch operations # selector between methods patch/diff ------> writing the appropriate configure scripts for the gui code, as the autoscan may not always generate the appropriate scripts well actually , i was inspired by meld, but actual

some platform details first : laptop : HP compaq nx 7400 Linux Distro : Ubuntu Gutsy Gibson (7.10) Linux Kernel : 2.6.24 Wifi Card : Intel Pro wireless 3945 card I compiled the kernel and created a kernel debian package using 'make-kpkg' , the list of commands i used are the following : cd [kernel source directory] make gconfig make-kpkg --initrd binary after the execution of the above commands is done , the debian packages for the kernel image, the headers, the documentation and the source are created in the parent directory of the linux kernel source directory . And after that it is simple installation to get the kernel working, ... but when i tried to compile and install the ipw3945 drivers from the source code, i had some really tough time, ...... later found out from a little googling that the wifi drivers to be used with the kernels version >=2.6.22 are the iwl3945 driver packages and not the ipw3945 , ....... th iwl3945 drivers can be configured to be compiled in

it was a long time ago that i had tried a simple hello world program from 'Beggining' Linux programming and failed badly , going by the difficulty i had in figuring out the flags to be given to gcc and and the directories and libs i had to explicitly include, but i hvae atlast found some success, well it is not a achievement as all i did was follow the same book and do what it said , but i feel relieved , it has been my dream to develop a GUI based software for managing 'small business' . Which can be easily configured and used for any sort of 'small ' range business, as all of them have the same basic backdrop. So finally i have started working with GtkObjects and GtkWidgets, so it should not be long before i am grinding out some really good stuff !!! Everytime we compile a program using the Gtk+ packages, we have to include some metadata about the include directories containing the headers, the directories to find the libraries in and all such stuff, it is qu

well i should say the past week has been tough , preparing for the exams and also working on this, . . and the good news is that i have almost achieved the initial goals for which this idea was proposed on the forums at www.vit.ac.in/lug/ , some of them are as simple as just uninstalling all the packages that were installed after a particular date using YUM . Well here goes a short summary of some of the work i have put in , the code consists of a set of perl scripts that parse the log file created by yum and then decide which are the packages that are to installed or uninstalled , all these perl scripts are managed by a single 'bash' shell script and this executes the rpm -e and the other commands used for manipulating the packages , and the main puprose for this idea was initially proposed was to undo the changes done through yum and i have achieved that , but at present the scirpts look kind of crude and lack a lot of valuable documentation i should be able to give a lot o

well again back with the sick exams , and i am doing what i generally do the best during exams , ...... no guys its not preparing , it is sleeping , sleeping and sleeping all day , hey but i do give out time for filling up my stomach , ........ well the last useful thing i remember doing was writing a perl script to categorize the list of packages in /var/log/yum.log into installed and erased lists , and print them out to temporary files, well that was pretty cool stuff, but since then i have been sleeping !!!!

here are a few simple steps for compiling the linux kernel and installing it !! first download the source code of the kernel version you want to install from http://kernel.org and extract the archive into the directory /usr/src/ , now after u have finished this run the following commands : # cd /usr/src/ [kernel source directory] where kernel source directory is the one created on extracting the archive , ... now the next command is # cp /boot/config-$(uname -r) ./config this copies the configuration options for your current kernel to the one you are going to compile and install now , after this to make any further changes to the options execute the following command ,: # make menuconfig note : there are other options that can be used for configuring the kernel such as " make gconfig " which gives a GUI based configuration window, but they require extra library support , for example to use make gconfig u need to have installed the 'gnome software development ' libr

just finished with installing the kernel 2.6.23 wifi drivers ( ipw3945) , well the actual kernel compilation took me some time , getting my wifi card working took me longer !! . The one reason i very musch wanted to install this kernel was the fact the native kernel provided with CenOS 5.1 does not have NTFS support and i was having a tough time installing the fuse kernel modules on that kernel , so decided to better shift to a kernel with native support , .......... but then after doing that , i had to download the latest source for the ipw3945 driver and install it , now my wireless-tools package was a little old for the driver version , so had to upgrade that too from a Fedora 8 package , ....... now finally everything is going fine , tell u what , even the power manager which gave me a lot of problems in the 2.6.18 kernel is working great now !!!!

well actually this concept was first proposed to me by one of my seniors in the following post http://220.225.214.101/node/76 , in short yum is a software manager used in RPM based systems , if u are new to this world u can get more on yum at : http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Tools/yum what we propose to do here is provide a functionality which rollbacks all the software modifications done by yum to a particular date following are two basic ideas for doing exactly that the first one was what i thought of and the second one a little more innovative was the one suggested by my friend : 1 . parse the contents of the yum.log created by yum and issue a recursive command " rpm -e [package name] --nodeps " , where the user enters a date to rollback to and the [package name] stands for all packages that were installed after that date , this will recursively remove all the files after that date without checking for dependencies , and i planned to do this all in a C program . 2. this

now was wondering what was that supposed to mean , when i first saw the makefile for the sample driver module i had written , and now after having some personal time with the kernel documentation , i have found out that this stands for object module goals , i had suspected this already ..... so that gives me the reason why my module was compiled by make even though i didn't give the goal for the specific target object !!!

ever taken time to go through the kernel documentation , well i have not till now , ..... and there i found this file which read as 'Coding Style ' and believe it is nothing like what i have read before , .... if u have kernel source code go into the source directory and look for a file 'coding style' in the Documentation directory or else here goes the file or rather a part of it ......... _______________________________________________________________________________________ Linux kernel coding style This is a short document describing the preferred coding style for the linux kernel. Coding style is very personal, and I won't _force_ my views on anybody, but this is what goes for anything that I have to be able to maintain, and I'd prefer it for most other things too. Please at least consider the points made here. First off, I'd suggest printing out a copy of the GNU coding standards, and NOT read it. Burn them, it's a great symbolic gesture. Anyway, h

this seems to be getting more and more interesting , ... there is a hell lot of information on 'kbuild' and using the same for developing the modules form outside the kernel ,..... if u have kernel source code then the following is a good place to search :: /[path to kernel source directory]/Documentation/kbuild/ check out all the text files in there !!

the content i posted just before , that is on compiling kernel modules , i have tried going through the contents of the makefile and found the following solution , the technique used was something called kbuild, it provides a standard method for building external modules from the kernel environment ,................. for the sample.c driver i wrote the contents of the corresponding makefile were : _____________________________________________________________________________ default : make -C /usr/src/kernels/$(shell uname -r)-i686/ SUBDIRS=$(PWD) modules obj-m :=sample.o clean : -rm *.o *.ko *.mod.c _____________________________________________________________________________ according to the kernel module programming guide this is a method provided by the 2.6x versions called kbuild a little more intorduction at the following link http://www.tldp.org/LDP/lkmpg/2.6/html/x181.html

so here we go on with our story , the other day when i was working on CentOS i opened Kdevelop ( an IDE for programming ) , and started a new project under the 'C --> Kernel module ' and it gave me a sample kernel module , very similar to the one i had earlier written , i just executed the program ( in other words compiled it ) , it finished succesfully , i was confused at first , ...... then i looked at what was going on behind the curtains of Kdevelop , i jumped into the directory Kdevelop had created for the kernel module , btw make is a wondeerful utility which comes very handy when managing large projects ,...... and checked the 'Makefile '( the configuration file used by make ) that had been used to Kdevelop for compiling and installing the module , the makefile was using the includes from the kernel source directory and was starting a submake in that directory which was in turn compiling my module , ........ i will post the details of the 'Makefile'

i have had a tough time compiling kernel modules and then inserting them , and the reason , for me the very troublesome /linux/module.h , the most important of header files required when you are writing a kernel module , you can't write a kernel module without including this file , ....... my problem started here when i was writing a kernel module , a very basic hello world module , on Fedora 8 , when i tried compiling it , it showed a lot of errors ( obviously though ..) , later i realised that there was no file /usr/include/linux/module.h , and after some research found out that the kernel headers RPM provided with Fedora 8 doesn't have this file , so even on installing the kernel headers the file was missing , and then with some help from the posts on the Twincling Discussion list ( twincling is an open-source community based in hyderabad ) , i downloaded the kernel source RPMs and recompiled the kernel using the Kernel-spec files for generating the Kernel installation and

finally i have installed debian , and if it doesn't sound routine i should say i have mixed feelings about the whole thing, first of all i was very happy that all my multimedia needs were satisfied with the installation DVD itself , but there are many other issues, my external storage device suddenly shows up problems , i will post a detailed review of my installation a litlle later !!!!

i was thinking about the way make works , when i had this thought ,..... could i make an entry in the makefile , which would indicate the directory containing the project source code and running make from anywhere with that file as the make file would compile and install binaries from the project directory , so that user who downloads the source code of an utility may not have to always go and run make from that particular directory ,..... especially for a novice user ? what say ? but i am not sure if such a functionality of 'make' already exists or not !!!!

i can't write a kernel module, there is no module.h, and later i found out that the kernel headers rpm which comes with fedora doesn't have this header , ............. i was still hopeful , tried compiling the kernel back from the source rpm, but what i ended up finally with were nothing but the same old rpms provided in the Installation DVD, ......... the other day i decided to get 'into' GNOME, my gnome headers won't work , ........ and had enough of crashes , god knows when my nautilus is gonna crash , the day before i was in the middle of a seminar and my desktop was gone, .......... i have decided to move on to something sturdier and faster , .... ordered Debian etch , .... but have yet to test it, ...... curse the Courier fellows my DVD's are yet to reach me :-) .........

i was recently coding a sample Qt based widget in C++ whic contained a button and gave an output to the terminal when ever it was clicked ,. .... and had to work with the header which had to be compiled using the MOC ( meta object compiler ) , which i suppose is for working out with the SLOTs and SIGNALs . ....... i then implemented the whole thing with make , that was pretty cool , and in a short time i was using make to do the installation too after my compilation ,..... ( though i wud suggest u first go through some shell scripting before doing this .. if u don wanna confuse yourself wih all the weird '['s and '@'s ...)................ now that is what is called 'making ' made easy !!!

Finally , i am blogging, after all the turmoil and thinking ,found some time with my very slow internet connetion ( never properly connected though), to create a blog , .... so all of u people reading this, can expect some fine articles here, and may be some tech news, but only if my internet connection doesn't trouble me more .........