Fedora Core 9 Live Preview

Okay, so yesterday Fedora Core 9 was released, in two flavours, one a Gnome 2.22 and the other a KDE 4.0.3. I googled the two desktop environments and after finding inconclusive results as to which of the two is better, I decided to try out the K Desktop environment since my current Ubuntu (Gutsy) uses an older version of Gnome and I do intend to upgrade it the hardy release, which too is equipped with a Gnome 2.22 DE. So anyway, I downloaded the FC 9 installable live CD for x86_64 and burned it onto a CD. Rebooted and waited patiently for the Live OS to boot. Unlike Ubuntu's live it didn't ask me a million questions about my hardware and the settings I wanted to keep, so far so good. While the OS was loading its various components, I instinctively clicked on the detailed view, only to realize that it required my approval for loading most of the components. I chose to hide the details just to check if it prompted me for my response in that mode, but it didn't. So I went back to the detailed view and strangely most of the times I had to enter 'Y' twice. Baah! it finally loaded after what seemed like a million 'Y's. Okay, it looks cool, except for the giant sized KDE panel which I am sure quite a few not-so-young linux users would appreciate. Here is the screenshot of the default screen with the main menu open and set on applications.

Notice that cool search option like that in Vista, Nice. So I typed firefox in the search window but nothing turned up. Browsing through the options showed Konqueror as the default browser. Of course, how silly of me, KDE remember. We'll come back to Konqueror later. Next I checked if my drives mounted on it's own. Yup, all the drives, NTFS, FAT32, and ext3 showed up. I create a textfile in the NTFS drive, just to see if it is write enabled, click it once to select it n then double click it. 3 Kwrite instances open up. Damn it! I hate single click for opening. Now for the important stuff, the default music player. Click click, okay a music player and a media player. But none of which would play a MP3 file. This must be because of the lack of open codecs, which I had read about somewhere. FC 9 KDE live is slightly below the Ubuntu Gutsy (the predecessor to the latest Ubuntu version (hardy heron)) live at the moment. Then I click on the install to hard drive button and my system went catatonic for a while 5 minutes. When it finally came back from the dead, it asked me for a few of those settings which I gave but I aborted the install when it asked me about the drive to install it on. I opened Konqueror and went to google, for which the browser took my permission to accept the cookies. I opened about 4 tabs and my desktop environment crashed and then recovered in a couple of minutes. Now I'm up to 10 tabs but it is running fine. But there is something wrong about this browser. Firstly the JavaScript doesn't work. I checked and it is enabled. So gmail is running in the HTML mode right now, and I have to refresh it to check my mail. Even the blogger create post is working in the HTML mode. Also, the alignment on the page is not perfect. If and when I install this OS the first thing I do after I install the codec library for MP3s is installing firefox. I think It wouldn't be fair to judge this OS on the basis of how its live version ran and it would only be fair to compare it with the latest version of Ubuntu, and not an older one. So I am going to end this post without giving my comments on whether I liked the distro or not. You can get your own copy of Fedora Core 9 from here. I will surely post more details when I install and compare the two distributions.


For a detailed review check out Fedora Core 9.


For more linux reviews check out my linux blog.

Installing GRUB on a USB drive

About a month ago, I finally bought a flash drive (a 4GB one) for myself, to replace the antique 256MB MP3 player. As this was intended to be a pen drive and not an MP3 player, it supported USB booting. Unfortunately, each time I plugged it in, the flash drive became the default hard disk, since it apparently had priority over SATA disks for booting. Now you might say I could simply set the SATA drive as the preferred hard disk for booting, but once you remove the drive, and the BIOS detects that it is missing, it no longer keeps a track of the flash drive, plug it in another time and it tries to boot from the flash drive. I did try looking for a way to disable USB booting, but to no avail. I couldn't locate it neither in the motherboard manual, nor in the BIOS itself. I could have probed the matter a bit more, but then I decided to install a GRUB in my pen drive. After all, it takes a mere 170KB, I could install a regular OS in this thing (4GB pen drive). Okay so here's how I did it.
Plug in the drive and make sure it has a file system, format it if it doesn't.
Make a folder called boot in the root directory of the pen drive. Or simply execute the following command in your terminal.
sudo mkdir -p /media/drive_name/boot
Of course, needless to say, you'd have to replace drive_name with the name your drive is mounted with.
Now you have to copy your grub to the boot directory you created. Use the following command to do so.
sudo cp -r /boot/grub /media/drive_name/boot
Now, there is a need to activate the GRUB prompt, to do so simply type
sudo grub
You will notice that the GRUB prompt (GRUB>) appears. Now we need to find where all the GRUB exists. In order to do so, type in the following in the GRUB prompt.
find /boot/grub/stage1
What this command did was that it looked for a file called stage1 (which I know exists in the grub directory) and reports where all it found it. This is what the output should look like,
(hd0,0)
(hd1,9)
Now to check out which of the hard-disks is the pen drive. Type in
geometry (hd0)
and it displays something like
drive 0x80: C/H/S = 3841/33/63, The number of sectors = 7987200, /dev/sdb
Partition num: 0, Filesystem type is fat, partition type 0xb
Okay, since I have set my pendrive as number hdd1, this is it. If you see more than one partitions, chances are this is not your flash drive, check out the next one that showed up, until you have found the one that you are sure is your pendrive. Now you don't want to rewrite your MBR when there is not the need to do so, do you?
Now that I know the hdd and partition name (hd0,0) in my case which would be different in your case, we need to specify the grub we need to install in the MBR by:
root (hd0,0)
Now to write the stage1 of the GRUB onto the boot sector of the USB, which would be different in your case
setup (hd0)
which would give a message like
setup (hd0)
Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exists... yes
Checking if "/boot/grub/stage2" exists... yes
Checking if "/boot/grub/fat_stage1_5" exists... yes
Running "embed /boot/grub/fat_stage1_5 (hd0)"... 17 sectors are embedded.
succeeded
Running "install /boot/grub/stage1 (hd0) (hd0)1+17 p (hd0,0)/boot/grub/stage2 /boot/grub/menu.lst"... succeeded
Done.
Do I need to tell you that you are done once it says done? Well actually, I wasn't quite done here, but if you weren't facing the problem I was, this is your exit. Type
quit
If you were, then I'm afraid you'd have to read on, since this is the main reason for writing this post. You see, each time you plug in your pendrive, the hd0 and the hd1 get messed up, because the boot order changes. So now, if your pendrive was hd1 like it was initially in my case, it becomes hd0 when it becomes the primary hdd. So now you need to change the grub in your pendrive to modify make this grub run. In order to allow you to make changes to all its files, type in this command in the terminal
sudo chmod -R 777 /media/usbdisk/boot/grub
Disclaimer : What ever I did from here were my own instincts, you could follow the steps since it worked for me, even if the steps don't work, they worst case scenario would be that you mess up the GRUB you copied, that didn't ever work (But make sure it doesn't work before you mess with it)
Now in the grub folder, in the boot folder you made in your pendrive, you will find a file called device.map I simply interchanged the assignment of sda (the hard drive) with the sdb (the pen drive). Then in the menu.lst file, replace the drive numbers with their appropriate ones, like in my case, hd(0,9) was replaced with hd(1,9) in the case of linux booting, and hd(0,0) was replaced by hd(1,0) for the Windows Vista bootloader. But don't let this confuse you, my boot procedure is really messed up. I have a windows vista bootloader which manages XP by default and I added Linux to it using easy BCD. Let me finish my exams n I will sort things out. Instead of replacing the drive number in each place, you could add something like
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
which simply changes the mapping dynamically. It works, but you have to put it before each root instruction in the menu.lst Any way I guess that is it. In case anybody reading this needs any help, I am pretty sure I'd be proficient with stuff like this by then (going by the number of people who visit this blog). Though it would be a nice idea to join a good community, and ask your doubts there, because there are a lotta knowledgeable people out there, willing to help you with your problems.

Do visit my Linux blog

And then came Linux

Following my recently found obsession for operating systems, I have now installed Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) for AMD64 on my system. I now have a triple boot system with XP, Vista and Ubuntu. I have also acquired a copy of Ubuntu 8.04 Beta (Hardy Heron) which I plan to Install after my exams, by when i think the final version would also be out too. So anyway, my plan after my exams is to check out all the other distributions of Linux (I can lay my hands on) as well, comparing each one of then in terms of user friendliness as well as performance. Though in order to implement this plan of mine, I think i will have to buy a new hard-disk... probably a 250/400 GB PATA (cause i believe PATA is cheaper) one would suffice and I could back up my the data from my 160GB hdd onto the new one n use the SATA one that I own as the one on which I install all the OS. One more thing i require is RAM... My system is getting old n it has got a mere 512 MB of RAM... Another 512 MB in the only remaining slot would surely make things faster. But the RAM can wait right now. If my current configuration can run vista with ease, I am sure i don't need more RAM for the time being. I still have little knowledge as to how Linux is working but i hear it is much simpler to understand than in case of windows. My final aim is to tweak a distribution of Linux to a point where it performs better than my XP which i haven't logged on since the Ubuntu install (until today). The last time I installed Linux on my system (about 2 yrs ago), it was too complicated for me to understand, I really couldn't do much with it n it took me a week just to understand how to mount my drives automatically at startup. But Ubuntu 7.10 is simply awesome... for starters you could install it from your windows installation, just like you install your programs. I took a more traditional approach and booted up with the CD which booted up in Ubuntu Live version with access to my hard-drive n all (all drives mounted on their own). On the desktop there was an install icon clicking which i experienced one of the most pleasant OS installation (after the XP auto-setup, which i worked on one summer vacation, one in which u don't have to even be around to install your OS) I was playing Freecell, one of my many vices, and browsing the internet while Ubuntu was installing itself. Even the graphics are really pleasant. I really loved the wobbly window effect n also I am big fan of transparency as u will notice in my screenshots... Another interesting feature of Ubuntu was frequency scaling... What it does is that it lowers the frequency at which your processor is working at and makes your system more power efficient as well as keeping it cooler (not supported by all hardware)... a must for laptops. For eg, my processor is a 1.8 GHz one... but most of the time my system is running on 1.0 GHz (55%)... where the frequency would increase to 1.8 GHz only when the OS needs the processing power. This feature comes switched on by default and there is a meter you could add to your panel to know at what frequency your processor is operating at. The down side of frequency scaling that I have noticed is that sometimes my system is slow to respond and more importantly when i reboot, it gives a CPU over-voltage error quite often. Although you could disable this option from the BIOS, there is also this command you could type in your terminal window, ie,

sudo /etc/init.d/powernowd stop

And of course you replace that stop in the end with a start in case you want to start the service. In case someone is reading this (remote possibility) who has knowledge of advanced stuff (that's almost impossible... I say almost because they say impossible is nothing... yes, i guess i am branded too) could you please guide me how to do toggle the feature on and off using the GUI??? Installing softwares in Ubuntu is pretty simple too (if u have a decent unlimited net connection) there is this cool Synaptic Package Manager which allows you to install packages from the net. You could also add a software repository manually and install really cool stuff... for free... Oh! and the stuff that they say is non-free, doesn't mean that you have to pay for it... It means that its source code is not available for viewing and modification :D I leave you with the sceenshots of the three operating systems which i took using the same wallpaper :

The XP screen:The Vista screen:
The Ubuntu 7.10 screen: