pandita putra

Friday, November 26, 2004

yay!!! e17 in cvs....!

Yo! I checked raster's website today and saw that he has put e17 in cvs! I hadn't checked his website for the last two days, no wonder I missed it earlier. Now, I'll be able to show off the coolest desktop on earth to my colleagues and friends! Thanks to the enlightenment team. :-D

Another interesting piece of news is that Nat Friedman has broken his wrist (I think) and has got titanium inserted into his hand... $18,000 ... whoa! Wonder when I'll start earning that kinda money! ;-)

Linux-Bangalore 2004 is going to happen between Dec 1st and 3rd. 3 days' freedom from office, yay! There are lots of talks scheduled. The number being somewhere in the vicinity of 40 (too lazy to count them, there are just too many). Herald Welte and Brian Behlendorf among the speakers.

thats it for now... bbl

Friday, November 19, 2004

TV on GNU/Linux...!

Yo!!! TV on my GNU/Linux installation is finally working!
But I deserve a kick in the butt. Thanks for Nitin who put
me on the right track for troubleshooting the issue. I
hate it when I do this.... I forgot to check syslog :(

Nitin suggested that I insmod the bttv driver and see if
syslog records any errors. So I got around to removing the
bttv module first, then inserted the module with the card=37
option. The module got inserted without any hitch and syslog
didnt report any errors. But what caught my eye was a line
which said "using tuner=-1". Now I was sure that I had given
tuner type=5 in modules.conf. So removed the tuner module as
well and then inserted it back by
insmod tuner type=5

Then I check syslog and aha! I see a line "tuner type forced
to 5 (PAL-BG...". Now I was pretty sure that xawtv would work.
I ran scantv and sure enough it picked up all the channels.
THen I ran xawtv. But this time there was no video, but only
audio... Thankfully xawtv gave a very informative warning
message that both DGA and GLX were not enabled in the xserver.
SO i had comment out a line that disable DGA and uncomment
a line to enable GLX in the xorg.conf (yup, me running xorg
6.8), restart the xserver and voila! Now, days of the Windows
installation on my PC are numbered... :-D

Boy! Am i happy.....

Wednesday, November 17, 2004

Windows nirvana

The one issue I had with my old PC was that I couldnt get the sound card
to work on GNU/Linux. Recently, I upgraded my computer, and with the
upgrade came a TV tuner card. Now, I cant get the TV card to work on
Linux.... :(

* If I can get the TV card to work on Linux, I can safely delete the Windows
partition residing on my hard drive forever! (sigh! what a nice thought...).
The TV card I have is a Prolink Pixelview PlayTV Pro (It uses the bt878 chip
with a Philips tuner). Now, wherever I search, people seem to have no
problems getting this card to work. Somehow, its not so here. I have loaded
the bttv module, the tuner module, have chosen the correct card and tuner
type but still no go. Some people on the net have put up that PAL and
Europe-west table works for India. But not only have I tried these, but all
other frequency tables that xawtv provides. I also installed tvtime, which
doesnt rely on any table, but scans the whole range of frequencies, but still
no go.... :( Any body who's got this to work? I believe this is a pretty common
card around here.

* Another issue that has me puzzled is the sound. When I use either
mpg123/xine/xmms, they refuse to play anything. But then one day I compiled
mplayer and it seems to have no problem playing the videos and ogg's and
mp3's that I have got. mpg123 though says "No supported rate found" before
quitting. Odd....

When will I find mukti from windows....????

Thursday, November 04, 2004

In the pursuit of Metaphysics of Quality...

I am spending more time reading Lila than anything else.
And these are the most satisfying moments of the day! A
lot of questions which arose while reading Zen and the
Art of Motorcycle Maintenance have been answered in Lila.

Aside, I have recently been very interested in learning
Sanskrit. What better way to learn Sanskrit in this age
time than relying on the internet? So I decided to google
around for online Sanskrit resources. I am pretty impressed
at the amount of information available on the net about
Sansktrit. Anybody seriously interested can indeed learn
the language using the net! A good start would be here:
http://sanskrit.gde.to/
There are other sites as well, but I made my start here.
During my search, I also found that there is a German
gentleman who has a sanskrit website!(http://sanskritweb.de)
I am also very impressed by SankarAchArya's bhaja govindaM.

Hopefully I'll start learning the vedas sometime soon :)