aashiks'in

So finally Google got their act together and released a googletalk plugin for GNU/Linux systems – they released it for Ubuntu. A sensible option since a large number of desktop GNU/Linux users use Ubuntu. They might make an RPM available. So what about the Arch people ?

Aah. Thats the point cpcgm goes ahead and creates a PKGBUILD and puts it on AUR. You can look at it here and install it (if you have yaourt ) using

 yaourt -S google-talkplugin

This – the self dependence and readiness to understand and fix the systems – is why Arch has the best documentation around , and at the same time a small,close community. I love being a part of it

From a discussion on ilug-tvm mailinglist

Prerequisites : yaourt should be installed

Installing the server

Step 1: Issue the following command on a terminal and answer whatever questions may pop up. This will install the dictd server to your system: yaourt -S dict-freedict-eng-mal

Step 2: start the dictd server by issuing the following command :
* If you have sudo installed , then : sudo /etc/rc.d/dictd start
* else become super user by typing in su at a terminal and inputting the super user password . Now run /etc/rc.d/dictd start

Step 3 [ optional ] : If you wish to use the server quiet frequently, you might want to have it running always.  For that, add dictd to the end of DAEMONS list in your rc.cof

eg: (syslog-ng dbus hal @cpufreq @net-profiles @network @netfs @crond alsa @sshd @dictd)

The @ makes your process startup in backround and init wont wait for the startup to complete before proceeding .

Installing the client :

I use a client called dikt. I installed it by issueing the following command  : yaourt -S dikt. Once this is complete, startup dikt. Click on Settings>Configure Dikt. In the window that pops up , you can add your own dict servers. Just type in ‘localhost’  and add it to the servers list. It will be better if you can move the dict.org entry or  you can remove the dict.org entry if you will be using only English-Malayalam dictionary. Now you can start using dikt to lookup words.

I know the whole thing looks a little tedious, but this is what i did ,  and it works

Great news . Pidgin 2.6.1 came out – this now means that I no longer will be forced to use proprietary software for audio chat.

I have started testing it on my Arch linux system. I have to try compatibility between the following : Pidgin, GTalk client, empathy. So far the results using pidgin 2.6.1 are :

Pidgin test results

Remarks : So far , only GTalk has been tested.  Accepting calls initiated by GTalk doesnt work with pidgin. I cannot start my video while on an audio call with GTalk client.

I will update the rest of the columns as soon as I finish testing.

I wrote a small plasmoid that will display fortune cookies from fortune-ml database for the fortune program. A new cookie appears every 30 minutes or on every click on the plasmoid.

Santhosh put the code into smc git yesterday. The plasmoid is written in Python and is generic enough that it will accept any fortune database. I have hardcoded it ( for now ) to use fortune-ml though. Until I figure out how to create dialogues in pyQT and learn to use the KDE configuration framework, its going to be just fortune-ml.The code is pretty straight forward. More time was spent looking up APIs and Python stuff than actually writing it down

Thanks to Praveen for testing the code and Santhosh for creating the fortune-ml database.

Summary : Plasmoid written in pyQT, depends on : KDE 4.2 , fortune-ml (available in SMC git )

Shew. 2009 begins well for FSUG-tvm. We had four installfests planned this year.  One each at Barton Hill, Mar Baselios, SCT and LBSITW. The reason why there are no individual posts on each is because installfests have lost their novelty and has become generic. Nothing big to report you know. Routine stuff.  We have a set process now, and we can conduct an installfest anywhere, given enough notice. The toaster is helping us out too.

But the news here is not that.

The news is , we don’t get any install requests during our installfests.  All the installfests this year were more of public interaction sessions rather than extensive installation processes. In fact, only less than 5 systems were installed this time around, counting in all the installfests.

My theory is that everyone is now aware of what this whole “Linux” ( GNU/Linux) thing is about. GnU/Linux usage has risen so much that the curious ones , i.e) the ones who would have come to installfests , now have easier access to someone who knows how to install GNU/linux . They don’t need installfests now. They might have friends or relatives who will help them out. GNU/Linux users in Thiruvananthapuram are no longer a hobbyist crowd.

So FSUG-tvm will be moving on to the next stages. Giving hands on workshops. I don’t have a clear idea about how we will go about doing this, but the mailing list discussion seems to be evolving into something that will be viable.

Onward to a small report of each installfest

Barton Hill installfest borked. I think the event itself was cut down massively. I do not know the reason. And this was the only installfest in which I didn’t show up.

Mar Baselios installfest would have gotten more attention had we been placed a bit more closer to the main venue. We did get a few visitors and a bunch of mech students.  I can say that we did quite a lot of preaching there. Just four snaps, here.

SCT installfest : By far the best setup we ever got anywhere. Undeniable. Plus the organizers were very thorough. We could have handled a hundred installs in a day. We had enough (willing) volunteers. Anoop Jacob Thomas seems to have done awesome work there, motivating the students. The toaster was there too. But unfortunately, not many showed up. So we stood around watching people, chatting among ourselves, while the students handled the occasional visitors. Of course we preached to a few people there too.

LBSITW’s installfest was awesome in the sense that we broke through into a particular community which so far had not responded to all these happenings in technology.  LBSITW is the lone women only engineering college in India. And the fact that FSUG-tvm was able to reach into this women only community shows that women are interested in tech and they need only a venue which respects them.

The students at LBSITW who organized the fest were very motivated. While we expected these levels of motivation from any group,  LBSITW surprised us by exceeding them.  Hand drawn posters, a nicely positioned venue and well trained volunteers who really were eager and passionate about what they were doing.  And these students seemed to be loving the tech part too. The fact that all of them were women and they managed to arrange so much with little external support is appreciable.  I feel that everyone should learn from these students about how they approached the whole thingy. They knew exactly what they wanted and was ready to learn and work for it. Awesome job there, people. I expect them to carry it on and participate more actively in FSUG-tvm as well as other groups like Swathanthra Malayalam Computing . I took some photos of what they did.

Even though this post is about installfests ,  I would like to highlight one more thing. We managed to reach into CET. Contrary to what I expected, CET was the least enthusiastic student community when FSUG-tvm was started. They had stayed off even when the rest of the colleges took an active interest in FOSS. But now it seems that the sleeping giant is waking up.  When we went to give a talk there, we could feel it. I am hoping that they will gate crash the whole FOSS scene in Kerala and will take the lead when it comes to contributing code to other projects. They have that stuff in there. They just need some prodding .

Indeed , good things have been happening in Thiruvananthapuram  since 2009 began. I am happy to see a vibrant community in place of the ten member group that started off in 2007. Hats off to everyone.

Enabling Malayalam on Mandriva Linux 2009 is slightly different from Mandriva 2008 . I am using an installation from  Mandriva One 2009 KDE version disc

This is how you do it :

Download and install latest Meera and Rachana from
http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/smc/fonts/malayalam-fonts-04/ .
Installing involves right clicking on the file and choosing actions->install. ( This is with KDE, something similar should be there on GNOME )

1. Invoke the Mandriva Control Centre [ Menu->Tools->System Tools->Configure your Computer ] choose Software Management -> ‘Install & Remove Software ‘
2. There are two drop down lists on the top left , choose ‘All’ in both .
3. Search for scim-tables-ml and select it.
4. Accept the dependencies. It will also ask you to choose from scim-, scim-bridge, and skim. Just choose scim
5. Click on Apply.
6. Invoke the Mandriva Control Centre [ Menu->Tools->System Tools->Configureyour Computer ] choose System->’Manage localization for your System’ . Now choose Malayalam in the Window that shows up. Click next and carry on with the default choices to complete the wizard. When the last Ok button is clicked, it will present you with a logout/restart/shudown window. Click logout.
7. Log in now
8. Open up a terminal ( ALT+F2 invokes a run dialogue and then type in ’konsole’  (without quotes) in it and press enter )
9. Type in ‘su -’  (without quotes)  and enter your root password when prompted.
10. Now run ‘kwrite /etc/sysconfig/i18n’ (without quotes)
11. Add the following text to its end

GTK_IM_MODULE=scim
XIM_PROGRAM=”scim -d”
QT_IM_MODULE=scim
XMODIFIERS=@im=SCIM

Now  Logout and log back in.

The scim icon should be there in the system tray and you should be able to type in Malayalam anywhere now, just by pressing Control+Spac and choosing Swanalekha/inscript  from the input method list that pops up.

I have packaged, rather created the PKGBUILD scripts for Malayalam fonts (from SMC repos) and the latest scim-tables for Arch Linux. Both PKGBUILDs are hosted at the AUR repository. The fonts package are just that – the fonts from SMC repos. The scim-tables package in the current arch official repos are outdated and does not include swanalekha input method.  So I created a PKGBUILD script for it and put it up in AUR. Please verify and vote for these packages if you have tested them and they work well. [ Update : scim-tables might go into the official repositories as per this ]

There are two ways to go about installing packages from AUR.

1) Get the PKGBUILD from AUR and create a package yourself. Then install it using pacman. This involves the following things

• Get the PKGBUILD and put it in a directory
• Open a terminal and execute the following commands

cd Directory/where/PKGBUILD/resides
makepkg # This creates the package.
sudo pacman -U pkgname # pkgname is the name of the file that makepkg just created.


2) The easy way is to install yaourt from AUR first and use it to search and install the packages. After installing yaourt run the following commands in a terminal.

yaourt -S scim-tables-v0.5.8

yaourt -S ttf-malayalam-fonts

These are the standard ways of getting these packages. I have hosted the fonts package alone  here .You can download it and then use the ‘pacman -U’ switch to install it like above. The scim-tables package is too big to be put up here.

Report bugs to aashiks at the rate gmail dot com.

I installed Arch. The setup is neat and I like it so very much , I am going to keep this for a while ( thats all I can say because my friends know me as a distro hopper ). Only one thing bugged me. I could’nt get Malayalam input methods working. Even though I tried copying Santhosh’s swanalekha m17 script, it didnt work properly. Yesterday I had a chat with Santhosh and he asked me to check the m17 version. On a whim , I checked scim-tables version too. It was 0.5.7 and scim-tables 0.5.8 contains Swanalekha. So I thought, why not try building it. I installed the Arch Build System ( pacman -Ss abs ). Running abs as root got all the build scripts that are used to build the distro into my system.

Now comes the actual package build part. I went digging into the tree that abs created in /var/abs. Thanks to the locate command, i found where scim-table package’s script resides. This build script, named PKGBUILD is an awesome piece. The makepkg program uses this script to create an Arch package. If you write this script properly, the package creation process is a breeze. It has all the information needed to get and build a package from source – its version,download URL, dependencies, build time dependencies, and md5 to verify if the downloaded package is corrupted and a lot more information. It also contains a function called build() which is called by makepkg to compile the package.

What i had to do was copy the PKGBUILD corresponding to scim-tables to an empty directory ( a work area ) of my choice, change the package version number from 0.5.7 to 0.5.8 and change the md5 sum to the one corresponding to v0.5.8 source tarball. Thats it .. or so it seemed, until I ran makepkg and I saw the build failing.

Now, what goes on during the build is simple. makepkg parses the PKGBUILD and uses the source found in it to get the source tarball. Then it extracts it to a sub directory called src and calls build(). The build(0 function usually contains the standard ./configure , make and make install ( to a sub directory called pkg in the work area directoy, not to the system directories ).

The build failed during make. This was shitty. I googled the error and found that a bug was filed against it in Debian tracker ( build fail ). Santhosh appeared online right then, and he asked me to go check Debian’s sources. And voila ! there was a patch !. But that patch contained a lot lot more other patches. So I checked what the patch did. It was just changing <string> to <cstring> in a source header. So I made the change and took a diff ( I used Kompare to do this. I like GUIs ).

Now i need to stick the diff file in the PKGBUILD script somehow so I can run patch inside the build() function just before ./configure. So I went to the Arch Package Making wiki. It said that I can just put the diff ( or any other file I want to use during build ) along with the PKGBUILD script and then refer to it from inside the script. I did so and added a line to patch the source file just before running the configure script.

Now I ran makepkg again, and Voila ! there it is. The shiny new scim-tables-0.5.8 package. I installed it ( pacman -U pkgname)

അതു കഴിഞ്ഞു സന്തോഷിന്റടുത്ത് മൊട കാണിച്ചു കഴിഞ്ഞപ്പൊഴേ സമാധാനമായുള്ളൂ. All this took around half an hour. I am loving it

The build script and patch I used are here.

I installed Arch Linux on my laptop. I started yesterday and finished today. That is a little long for a GNU/Linux installation nowadays, but Arch is special. Arch claims to be a simple lightweight linux distribution. And after using it for 24 hours I must say that it is.

Imagine Debian and Slackware coming together. Slackware’s simplicity in configuration and the vanilla approach and Debian’s powerful package management. Add in some Gentoo like source package management and an excellent community that provides these packages. There, you have it. That is Arch linux. Now I have my share of glitches to solve, but what I have now gives me satisfaction. I now know exactly what hardware my system has and what all drivers should go with them. I know exactly how the computer goes about from loading the kernel to the login manager. And I can manage everything on my own. No silly GUI needed . Thats not what Arch Linux stands for though. It stands for the Arch Way. A.k.a Keeping it simple

Why Arch ? Well I hated the initial partitioning scheme I had and had wanted to do something about for a long time. Since I have some time on my hands now, I was planning to re install my Mandriva One 2009 ( which by the way is an excellent OS ). Now I had a CD burned off my desktop computer ( or so I thought ) only, I found that I had forgotten to click the ‘Burn’ button, and I instead had a blank CD. This was kind of rummy. I absolutely _had_ to get a newly partitioned laptop running a fresh GNU/Linux install. I had no ISO files to burn and hence no install media. So I headed over to distrowatch.com and decided to try something different. And I picked Arch , because I had no idea how it worked and whether it was a derivative of some distro. Imagine my surprise when I found that the ISO file was just under 300MB. Anyways I downloaded it, and burned it on to the CD and had the install going.

The install process is kind of like Slackware, only here we have to do more work. It is text based and is fairly straightforward if you know what you are doing. So before starting the install, I headed over to the Arch Linux website which again is well designed and well maintained with a wiki that will guide you through anything concerning Arch. I have not had to consult any other source for documentation on Arch. The beginner’s guide posted there is excellent and is a good read even if you are not installing Arch.

The following is not a walk through for arch install. You will get a better one at the Arch wiki. This is just what I felt about Arch

Okay so I got started with the installation which was run of the mill- partition disk,choose mount points, start install. At the end you are left with a bare bones system sporting nothing other than the barest minimum of what you require. A shell to login to, an editor and the package management tools ( of course along with network management tools). Anyone installing Arch has to build the system up, according to his needs, just like Gentoo.

All configurations are handled inside a single config residing at /etc/rc.conf. You define the OS here in this config file. Very well documented with sane default values and neatly laid out. There is no fiddling with GUI’s, editing init scripts and such lot here. Just a simple little config file. After you have stopped admiring the way the system is organized, you turn your attention to package management.

Pacman is the name of the tool that takes the role of apt-get here. This guy is introduced very early on. While the initial install goes on, you can see that the packages are all just tgz files, just like Slackware, only pacman manages them. After the system is built and configured, you use pacman to install all software you want.

For installing packages

pacman -S packagename

For updating the system.

pacman -Syu

Nothing great in that. Yum, urpmi and apt-get does that. Well, the great thing comes when you need some software that’s not there in the core/extra/community repositories. That is when you head over to Arch User Community Repository. You can download packages sources from there and get build scripts to build them. Then you can just use pacman to install the generated package. If all that sounds too tedious, there is a package in AUR called yaourt that does exactly this, only you use it like pacman. I know . This build script thing sounds like Slackbuilds.

I ended up installing fluxbox first to get into a graphical system ASAP and then getting firefox. I got KDE 4 yesterday night and tonight I am all set. All of the packages are vanilla ( except the most arch specific things like yaourt and arch linux artwork ). I have most of the things i need now. Except …

• Wireless [ UPDATE : I fixed it after reading through the Wireless Setup ]
• Malayalam input [ UPDATE : I fixed it by creating an Arch package for myself. Took about half an hour.]

I haven’t yet been able to get wireless working, but I haven’t spent much time on it either. Malayalam input is a pain. They don’t seem to carry swanalekha yet. I got the m17n version of swanalekha working with scim, but it seems to be full of glitches.

I almost forgot to mention. The system is superfast ( like F10 ) and is super responsive now.  I couldn’t believe it when i clicked on OOO Writer menu entry , it showed the splash screen for a moment and then Writer just appeared. Thats the fastest OOO Writer launch I have ever seen.

Overall, I don’t feel like moving away from it. This feels like Slackware done right. For someone who has been stuck to Slackware for three major versions, it is too good.

I was editing a document today . And I needed a dictionary . At office ( where i do most of my editing ) I have to use Windows XP . I had wordweb there . Of course I can use Openoffice.org’s spell check , but then I wanted something like wordweb. I was looking around and suddenly remembered that Anoop John uses KDict to do the job. It looks kind of odd on his desktop because he uses GNOME .He had written down the instructions for setting up KDict here. The instructions are for Ubuntu – GNOME .� The following instructions are for Mandriva KDE ( Mandriva Spring 2008 ) . Actually from step 6 onwards, it should be generic and should work for any KDE system. Instructions before that simply installs dictd and Wordnet .

1. Menu-> Install Remove Software
2. Search for ‘dictd ‘ and select it
3. Now search for Wordnet ( Make sure you click the binocular icon near search box and select ‘in Descriptions’ )
4. In the results that come up select the one with description� ‘WordNet for dictd’
5. Click on Apply
6. Run KDict from Menu->Tools->Dictionary
7. Go to Settings menu and choose ‘Configure Dictionary’
8. In the dialogue that shows up , type� localhost .
9. If there is some error saying there is no server , just do a reboot or do the following CLI magic : Menu->Tools->Konsole .Type su and then your root password . Then type service dictd-server restart . Now repeat steps 6 to 8 .

10. Well KDict installation and config is finished , but now to make it act like wordweb , something more has to be done. Go to Menu->Tools . Now right click on Dictionary and choose ‘Edit Item’
11. In the dialogue that shows up , there is a field called Command. Its contents would be kdict -caption "%c" %i %m. Change it to kdict --clipboard -caption "%c" %i %m
12. Towards the bottom of that window , there is a button with description ‘Current Short Cut Key’. Click on it and then press a key combination that you would like to use to invoke KDict . I chose CTRL + ALT + W .
13. Press the save button in the window and close it. We are done.
14. Select any text in any window and press your chosen key combination to invoke KDict.
15. Get back to me if this doesn’t work