I have now been a Linux user for a while. Working on Fedora in my lab and Ubuntu on my laptop, I find both comfortable. I prefer Ubuntu on my laptop because, I liked it to be simple and clean. And als0 I like the install command, sudo apt-get install guake, for example.

One day I saw my friend working on his laptop. He too was on Ubuntu but it read Ultimate Ubuntu. A quick google search brought me to the new world of Ubuntu. I never knew that there were Linux distros which were based on Ubuntu! Wow! So many flavors, t hat can leave any newbie confused.

I searched for “Top 10 Ubuntu based distros”, and found this. Since I liked the idea of Ubuntu Ultimate, which came with all the softwares we required preinstalled, we liked it.  So I first switched to Ubuntu Ultimate from Plain Ubuntu 8.10. I was running on 64bit OS, and it was pretty much heating up my laptop. I had also downloaded the iso for Linux Mint and gOS, as they sounded cool. I like Linux Mint and did not like gOS.

I installed Linux Mint first on my friend’s laptop and I fell in love with it! I had never had such a linux experience! Everything simply worked out of the box! I had always wanted to have a provision to backup and also restore the computer whenever I screwed it up like in windows. You ask for it and Linux Mint had it.

Since I stay in a hostel and don’t have easy internet connection, it is expected to have essential softwares like rhythmbox, vlc, amarok, mplayer and the required codecs preinstalled. Yes, Linux mint was the obvious choice for everyone in the hostel, who were interested in Linux.

It’s been a week, now since I installed Linux Mint and everything is cool and awesome. And till now I must have installed it on some 10 other laptops of my friends! It’s the Mint revolution! Waiting for Jauty and Gloria!

P.S. Jaunty refers to 9.04 Ubuntu – Jaunty Jackalope and Gloria refers to Linux Mint 7 which is based on Jaunty. I wish to see the windows 7 kind of taskbar in Linux now.

Am addicted. Addicted to Twitter. I am reminded of the song “Am addicted to YouTube.” Twitter has become a very good source for me. Source of news, blogs, articles, facts and fiction. So if you have started twittering and are not sure whom to follow, here are some suggestions.

I first invited my gmail friends to twitter. Only a few of my friends were on twitter. I stopped using chats. It’s all on twitter. More people, more blogs, articles, news. And thanks to firefox and twitterfox, it has all become more easy. 

Getting to know what’s going around you is important. News. Information from North, East, West and South. I first followed BBC, but later stopped as the news headlines weren’t good enough. Then I followed BreakingNewz and finally digg_worldnews. But the best I felt was BreakingNewsOn. Worth following that one. I stopped following digg_worldnews, as I was also following digg_popular.

I follow problogger and labnol, as it gives me ideas for new blog posts. You can use the twitter search (search.twitter.com) to find tweets and help twitterers who share interests with you. 

And do read this article, to find more. You can find god, DarthVader and other eminent people. Twitter is here to stay. God I am gonna be missing it when in college.

I am on lots of social networking sites now. Orkut, Facebook, Twitter, and then. Ok. Not lots a few networking sites. And most of you, my readers too should be using social networking sites. You can add a link to your website or your blog so that people can get to know more about you and of course you will get traffic.

I am an avid follower of problogger Darren Rowse. I read about landing pages in his blog. And I felt it was essential. Essential because it is human beings like me whom I expect to visit and just like me, everyone is in a hurry to know what’s going on around them. So they click a link, go somewhere, come back, and they may forget where that page came from. 

So I need to make sure how my about page came there. For that I tweaked the about page (later added a new one) so that they can know that they had come here after clicking the link on my twitter profile. This is my twitter landing page. I found another landing page. I liked it very much, so lovely. Do check it out. Dushan Wegner Twitter Landing Page.

So have you started twittering? Have a peep at my tweets here.

You might be familiar with the post title. Yes, it is about Twitter, which I am now finding very interesting, thanks to digital inspiration, problogger, common craft, twitterbar and twitterfox, and of course not to forget twitter itself. 

Twitter is all about micro-blogging. And it’s easier and free! You can use your twitter page as an asset. To tell the world what you are doing, to know what your friends are doing and also know what is happening around the world.

I first read about Twitter in some news article where a reporter who was imprisoned somewhere in middle east used twitter to inform his followers and the world that he needs help(He tweeted from his mobile phone). And help flowed to him! That was long back, and for me twitter still looked complicated.

Again I came across twitter in Digital Inspiration during the November 26th, Attack at Mumbai, where twitter was extensively used to transfer information about family and friends. That’s when I thought of trying out twitter. And now I am addicted. Thanks to firefox addons like Twitterfox and Twitterbar, I needn’t dedicate a firefox tab for twitter website.I just use the address bar to tweet.

It’s easy to tweet, you see. You just have to tweet the answer for the question, “What you are doing?”. That simple question, inspired a website and it is now a huge success. Almost all professional bloggers use twitter, because it is a great medium to obtain traffic. For me twittering is fun. Before you go on do watch this video. Twitter in Plain English by Common Craft. I am sure you are gonna love using twitter.

So when will you start tweeting?

You can catch my tweets here.

P.S. I am unable to tweet from my mobile phone. (Don’t tell anyone, I own <hide>Nokia 1600</hide>). Guess I have to change my handset to tweet when offline.

I had some weird blogging experience because of stealing bandwidth by hotlinking images in my blog from sources I didn’t care to know. It resulted in switching of my images with irrelevent images. Be careful while blogging. Avoid hotlinks. Read more about my experience and what you need to make sure you don’t reach such embarrasing conditions at The Hacker’s Library.

Google Services are cool. They keep coming back with awesome services that leaves you awestruck. Be it orkut, gmail, gearth, gsearch anything. Gmail gained popularity exclusively because of the 7+ GB of space it gives for free and also it’s cleaner and easier to use interface. Google has always known to keep things minimal yet fulfilling. Then came Picasa which gives about 1GB of free space for photos. Also if you are using Blogger, then the images you upload are stored on Picasa.

It’s great isn’t it. Almost 8GB of online space for free! Google does know the tricks to please it’s customers. So how do you find how much space in your services remains. Make sure you have logged into your account and click on the link below to find out how much you have used.

Manage Storage

So how much have you used up?

I started learning Object Oriented Programming and I am feeling great. As if I am gifted with a powerful weapon, a great skill. Indeed it is. There are several concepts easy, difficult and confusing. Pointers is one such. Pointers will be confusing if you do not devote you full concentration.

What are Pointers good at?

They Point!

They point at things like Objects and Variables. They store the address where the Object or Variable is stored hence point at them. Lets understand what Pointers are and how they can be used using the example of a Pointer pointing at a Variable.

Since C++ is a good language to learn OOP I will be using it to explain (in fact this is how I learnt about pointers properly).

Lets first a declare a Variable of the type integer.

int intVar;

intVar = 5;

So a variable by the name “intVar” with the value 5 is declared. Now I will show how to declare a Pointer that points at this Variable.

Declaring a Pointer

int* intPoint=0;

intPoint = &intVar;

Here * represents that intPoint is the name of a pointer. It is first initialised to 0. That means it is now pointing to a address 0. If not initialized then it will be a wild pointer which is dangerous. Trying to access it’s value will give “Segmentation Fault”. So in the   next line you assign it to the address of the variable “intVar”. &intVar represents the address of intVar. So now this pointer can be used to access the Variable’s address and also it value.

For accessing the variables value we use *intPoint.

So if you put *intPoint = 9 it means we are reassigning the value of intVar as 9.

So now

cout<<intVar<<endl;

will give 9 as the output.

Note that the data type of the Pointer is int * which represents that the pointer will store an address of a variable whose value will be an integer.

A Variable has a value and an address. A pointer also has an address of its own. It also stores a value which is the address of a Variable, hence points at its Value. *Pointer means the value at Pointer. Value at operator (*) is different from the one used in declaring the pointer. The value at operator (*) is used to retrive the value stored at an address. &Variable means address of Variable. &Pointer means address of Pointer.

In programming Var = 5 is semantically correct while 5 = Var is not. Similarly &Var = Pointer is semantically wrong.

So &intPoint and &(&intVar) won’t represent the same thing. The second one represents the address of the address of a Variable, which is meaningless.

Many Variables can have the same value, but One Variable cannot have many values.

Similarly, Many Pointers can point at the same address (of a variable), but One Pointer cannot point at many addresses (of variables).

*Variable is invalid, because this means value stored at Variable. Variable itself represents the value and &Variable it’s address. *Variable has no meaning and should give a compile time error.

Whereas *Pointer is valid, because this means value stored at Pointer or value stored at address of a Variable.

The valid way to assign to a Pointer

pointer = &variable;

This is valid always.

*pointer = value;

This is valid only if the pointer is pointing to some valid address else during runtime “Segmentation Fault” will be displayed.

 This post was about what pointers are and how they are declared and used. Why should we use them should be your next question. Because if we use pointers to access only the value of a variable via its address, then it is unnecessary as we can just use the variable! Well, pointers have a lot of other usage that makes it essential.

For my web designing and related activities I needed a server running on my laptop. That meant I would need Apache, MySql and PHP running on the laptop. Since I am using Ubuntu, (Linux), hence we can say we are setting up a LAMP server.

What all we need to do

We need to install apache, php, mysql and phymyadmin.

All the required packages are available in the repositories. All the things to be done are provided step by step in this website. I felt this tutorial very very helpful. Hope it helps you too.

Installing LAMP on Ubuntu for Newbies

The next best thing to happen to my Ubuntu was the setting up of compiz fusion. It just add some great new features in some real cool fashion. The first thing after having my graphics up and running was to google about compiz-fusion.

Forlong’s Blog had everything that was required to be done.

First Things First

I had to install the ccsm, that is the Compiz Config Settings Manager.

sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager

Note internet connection or some source for repositories required for the above code to work. And it has to be typed in the terminal.

Next ccsm, had to opened.Typing ccsm in the terminal opens the Compiz Config Settings Manager. Here we have a lot of options which are called plugins. To find what we need, we have the filter box, which filters the plugins based on the search string.

Get the Cube!

Enabled Desktop Cube, Rotate Cube, Cube Reflection and Deformation and 3D Windows. (Type cube in filter to get these options). Also enabled Cube Caps and Cube Gears after meddling with the Transparency of the Cube in Desktop Cube.

Now using the keys [Ctrl] + [Alt] + [Right/Left], moves me to the next or the previous workspace, and the cube isn’t an actual cube, rather it is a cylinder. And the 3D Windows shows the different windows opened in a workspace in the form of layers. You can always experiment with the plugins.

Scale and Expo

Scale decides about the applications and Expo the Workspaces opened I guess. I set Scale to Bottom Right instead of Top Right and Expo to Bottom Left instead of Top Left. Looked convinient. Also set the expo initiate key to [Ctrl] + [Alt] + [Down]. The tips and trick given in the blog are also interesting. Do check out the Scale window title filter. Will be useful when you have lots of windows open in different workspaces and you need to search for it. You can get to the window you want just by typing out a few letters of it’s title!

Cool Window Switching

There are now two kinds of window switching on my laptop now. Switching using [Alt] + [Tab], or using [Win Key] + [Tab].

I enabled Ring Switcher and Shift Switcher and disabled Application Switcher. Now [Atl] + [Tab] works for Ring Switcher to choose between windows in the same workspace. While [Win] + [Tab] works with Shift Switcher to choose between all open windows and that too in Vista Aero style. For Vista Aero style select Flip in Shift Switcher -> Switcher Mode.

There are many more tips and tricks to make your desktop more eyecandy. It’s all trial and error. Try them out. Like it, Keep it.

Now I really loved Compiz Fusion, but because of it I started facing some problems in playing vlc videos, they started to flicker and stuff. So I needed to temporarily switch Compiz off. But that resulted in loss of all my customization. That’s when Compiz-Switch came to help. It’s now real easy to switch on or off Compiz-Fusion and there is no fear of loss of the customization!

Happy Customising!

Finally, made the switch. I am now entirely a linux user. Of course, I do have Windows installed on the Laptop, and don’t have plans of uninstalling it. I use Windows once in a blue moon.

I will share in this post with you my experiences and hindrances I faced (and to date facing) while using Linux.

The distro I use is Ubuntu Hardy. I work on my HP-Compaq Presario CQ50 laptop which has an AMD Athlon X2 64 bit. When I was at home, there was no problem. Just plug in the ethernet cable, connect to the internet and install the required software using apt-get or synaptics.

But after coming to college it’s not that easy. I can access Internet only via a proxy. Hence even if I plug the cable into my laptop, I need to connect to a different server and use internet on it. Hence my laptop is not ‘directly’ connected to the internet. Hence

sudo apt-get install <package>

simply won’t work. I have to manually download packages, copy it to my laptop from the other account on the server and then install. If there are any missing dependencies, then I have to hunt them up again.

I figured out that there were repos available on the college lan. That’s good, and that should do. But unfortunately, the repos were of i386 binary. I needed amd 64 bit repos. Can’t use those repos either.

So, chuck that for now. I will go home at the end of this semester and get all I need.

The next thing I notice is that my laptop doesn’t have a proper sound driver for Ubuntu. The sound is all cracked up and popping. So it isn’t a nice idea to run multimedia on Ubuntu. That helps in some ways for now.

And, my wireless. The red glow never turns blue in Ubuntu Hardy. So can’t use wireless either. Again it is because of the absence of some driver or other, which can be installed only with a direct internet connection. Well, it’s ok for now.

The most irritating problem I face is regarding the touchpad. There is some malfunctioning with it (of course on Ubuntu). Doesn’t entirely work the way it is intended to work.

Now that’s too much of problems. I look at them as challenges rather than trouble. It has made me read a lot on a lot of topics. It’s made me wiser.

If it was on Windows, just a click and it would have repaired everything itself. It would have never let us properly know, what was wrong and how it was rectified. For the comman man that may be more than what he would have expected. Well, not for me, cause I am not the comman man, I hate to be just the comman man.

Currently I am typing out this post from Ubuntu, and I am happy for choosing Ubuntu over Windows. It’s free, safe and beautiful.

P.S. : Waiting for October 10th, waiting for Ubuntu Intrepid. Hope it will put an end to my woes.

Please don’t come to the conclusion that this post is some sort of negative campain for Linux. In fact I love Linux. I have just tried to tell all of you that, when starting to use Linux, everyone shall face some problem or the other. Don’t be a coward and move back to Windows. Face them and Learn from them.