Praveen Arimbrathodiyil blogs here

I have been reading about Mark’s recent switch from Apple Mac to Ubuntu and he has come up with his list of Necessary Apps

1. Debian sid on my desktop in office as my main production system.
2. Mozilla Mail (I used to use Thunderbird but one fine day it stoped working and Mozilla mail saved the day, tried evolution and Kmail but Evolution kept crashing and Kmail, I didn’t like)
3. Firefox, (no doubt the best browser on the earth) + Session Saver ( A must have extention, it will be available in by default with Firefox 2). I use BlogLines as my RSS reader to keep track of the blogs mainly. So I have a BlogLines Bookmark on my Bookmarks Toolbar Folder
4. GNOME Terminal — It rocks
5. vim
6. Eclipse with E-P-I-C, Perl IDE, It is an overkill but it helped to get familiarised with the Perl World in the beginning and now back to Vim Green on Black
7. Xchat for IRC
8. Gaim for all my IM needs.
9. Tomboy Notes – It is a really nice application and it is very useful. Especially for me since I keep forgeting things very easily.
10. Rhythm Box for Music – It is a really cool application to manage your music collections. Search while you type that is common across all the GNOME tools is also cool.
11. Sunbird as a calendering tool – Not too keen about it.
12. Deskbar — It is such an amazing software. Whatever you need to do you can type it in there, whether it is running a command, searching wikipedia, google or yahoo, searching your address book, search for files using beagle — it is ‘The’ place for you.
13. Character Map — It is a special tool that lets me write in Malayalam – my mother toungue, you can use this tool to write in any unicode complaint language. It is like an online keyboard.
14.Star Dict — A very useful dictionary tool with the dictionary as a local file so useful even if you are offline. I installed it for my school
15. K3b — It is the best CD/DVD burning tool available. I have burned a lot of CDs with this tool so is many who burned CDs from our college main Computer center at NITC.
16. Ksnapshot – It is so cool (even though I am a hard core GNOME fan, I have to use many of the KDE tools over GNOME). It makes GNOME’s screenshot tool a kid. It can capture full-screen, a window or even regions while GNOME’s tool has just the full screen mode and you will need gimp to get what you want from it
17. GIMP – It is a great tool mostly used for manipulating screenshots
18. Ataxx and GNOME Mines – time pass
19. Open Office – extensively used for all kinds of documents.
20. GNOME-RDP – It is a very cool remote desktop client for Windows Terminal Servers (Job requirements!)
21. Evince – It is a cool PDF reader and it can select texts from pdf files — which is a feature missing in all the Free PDF viewers
22. Gedit – Simple and powerful, used when I wanna blog offline
23. kdesvn as a svn client
24. git for tracking my projects and I love it.
25. Mplayer for all my video and audio requiremets – especially for talks and email attachments (most of them are wmv)
26. OpenSSH
27. Qemu – This is the superstar, it let me run GNU/Hurd on my system without disturbing my existing setup.

That is pretty much all of it.

What does your list look like?

Necessity is the mother of invention

I found this saying to be true when I realised how delicious was the curry I made last day tasted [1], I discovered [2] that I am not that bad a cook after-all Let me tell you about it.

It all started when I got sick last Friday, I was suffering from fever. I was so tired in the evening that I didn’t take dinner and slept. But I woke up at around 1 in the morning and I couldn’t sleep any more. After some time I just checked kitchen to see if anything was there. I was happy to see some rice and some onions. I thought I will make some Upma. I have been so lazy to cook [3] these days. There was no option left so I started cooking again.

This particular thought occurred to me on Monday when I made some onion curry and it tasted so good. I am bit disappointed since there was no one else to taste it. But Muthu tasted upma with me, Zahir was there to taste my peas curry on Sunday.
OK. Let me explain the recipe.

raw materials

* coriander power
* chilly powder
* mutton masala
* salt
* onion
* neem
* coconut oil
* mustard

Heat coconut oil in a china dish [4] and crackle mustard and put some curry leaves. Mix it with coriander powder, chilly powder and salt. Add some water and sliced onion with chilly. Add some mutton masala and keep it for some time.

Now have it with rice. Believe me it was so delicious !!

[1] But some say any thing tastes delicious when you are hungry, I would like to dismiss this view with contempt it deserves
[2] I am sure there will be some one who would want to argue that discovery is not an invention but again I have to look away from those
[3] we started cooking some months back and I have scribbled about it.
[4] someone correct me if cheenachatty is not china dish

The world number 2 and Euro cup 2004 semi finalists are out of action from fifa world cup 2006. Pavel Nedved and co will be watching the fun on TV. But I’m happy to see so many friends are now calling me, messaging me, scraping me, mailing me …
Thanks for all your wishes. If you have not done so, you are most welcome to use this chance.

The same story continues … Norway (1998), Spain (2002) and now Czech.

Creating a bootable qemu image from a root filesystem and bootloader

1. Create a hard disk image

qemu-img create -f qcow <imagename .img> <size>G

2. Use a live CD (better to have a lighter OS like system rescue CD to make the process faster) and the image created to boot.

qemu -cdrom /dev/cdrom -hda <imagename .img> -boot d

3. Once system is booted use a partition editing tool (like fdisk, cfdisk, parted, gparted, qtparted …) to partition the image.

cfdisk

4. Create a file syatem for the root partiotion

mke2fs /dev/hda1

5. Mount the partition

mkdir disk
mount /dev/hda1 disk

6. Copy the file system from the host machine to the mounted directory (use a compressed file system to make the copying faster)

scp <user>@<host>:<path to the compressed file system> disk

7. Uncompress the files

cd disk
tar -jxvf <compressed filesystem>

8. Unmount the mounted partition

cd ..
umount disk

9. power off the guest OS.

poweroff

10. To make the file syatem bootable download a grub floppy image ( grub.img)

11. Run qemu to boot into your brand new system

qemu -hda <hard disk image.img> -fda grub.img -boot a

Happy Hacking !!

Make your new system boot from the hard disk

1. Mount your grub image

mkdir floppy
mount -t ext2 -o loop grub.img floppy

2. Use previous steps 2 and 5 to boot from a liveCD and mount the partition

cd disk/boot
scp -r <user>@<host>:<path to mounted floppy image directory>/boot/grub .

3. Poweroff the guest

poweroff

4. Boot new system using floppy image previous step 11

use install to hard disk option if you used the above grub image

or go to grub command line and type

root (hd0,0)
setup (hd0)

Now you have a bootable system image. Enjoy Maadi !!

See also : howto use this tutorial to create a qemu image from AMS’s GNU snapshot