The Pensieve

The other day, I was thinking of consolidating all my music collection from various machines and burn them into a DVD as a backup. There were various ways that I could have done the transfer: Extract the music back from the disk originals Copy them using a rewritable media like a pen drive or a writable media like a CD Connect over the network and copy the files I can use Samba as some of my machines are Windows based Setup a FTP server to copy files I can setup a ssh server and securely copy the files to my Linux box That was how I discovered ssh, the secure shell. I had originally been looking at setting up Samba on my Linux box, but was frightened with the possibility of it suffering a virus attach as most of the viruses / botnets would be scanning for a windows PC and this would become a backdoor for entry. The other option was ssh which was simple to setup and quite secure. It basically provides a secure way to connect to a computer that enables the ssh service. You are presented ...

The other day, I saw news item at slashdot where people mentioned that Linux seemed to perform better that Windows on network throughput. Some attributed it to the ISP throttling the bandwidth for the first few minutes where as others mentioned that the Linux network drivers seemed to be configured to maximize network performance where as the Windows settings are sub-par. An indepth article depicting based on actual data is provided which eventually leads to thinking perhaps, you should tweak your windows network settings... Though people had complained that both the machines tested had slightly different specs and hence the performance results could be skewed, I have been browsing on both a windows PC and a linux box and it does look like (no systematic tests conducted!) the throughput that I get on a Linux PC is much higher than as experienced on the windows PC so far. The windows PC or laptop has 512MB RAM and is an Intel Centreno Duo 1.66GHz where as the Linux Box is a older AMD...

After numerous hours of tweaking, I resolved the problem with my WG311v3 NetGear PCI card. The problem? The router was too far away! Now that I am online using my Linux box, here are a few screen-shots of my desktop! The next time your supported WiFi card acts up, you know what to do... For those inquisitive lot, I am currently using the XP drivers with ndiswrapper.

A few months back, I had requested Canonical to dispatch me (they still do it for free !) a CD of Ubuntu Linux 8.04 LTS (hardy heron). I was still running an older version of the same distro for quite some time and this was an opportunity to change. I had installed the newer OS and these are a few observations: Display is much better, with my ancient VIA chip-set getting recognized with 3D acceleration too. Now, I can play most of the 3D games (tuxkart, supertux, billards GL) and a few non 3D games (chromium) in full glory. Wireless is still a problem. My netgear wireless adapter was able to recognize my ADSL router among the other routers in range in my neighborhood, but fails to connect frequently. But once connected, they blaze through at 200kbps. I have not been able to see this kind of speed on a windows machine though... Audio CDs are mounted properly. This happened to be a problem with 7.04 when only data CDs were recognized. Video / audio codecs are easier to download from the ...

Linux - still going strong Over three years of running my home PC on Ubuntu Linux, and looks like it's going good. Here are my rants and raves. + Application availability and easy install if your desired app is hosted in the apt system. From openoffice to k3b to edutainment (gcompris, tuxmath, tuxpaint, frozen-bubble) The availability of kid friendly educational games is much better with Linux that Windows. Agreed, that there are commercial software packages available, but the ones you find at Landmark or Music World are sub-par and look as if they are created out of flash, with a few randomized questions and shoddy art-work. Compare this to Gcompris , it is much more polished with a whole gamut of games and activities that teach kids about maths, time-telling, typing and computers and an external interface (python or GTK based) to add your own lessons or games. All other standard apps are provided and are quite capable, be it a browser, word-processor (though not as good as Micro...