Ubuntu has a package called Popularity Contest (popcon), where you can vote on your popular, most-used application every week. It is fully automated and once configured, it takes care of the rest. This information will help the developers to make decisions over which packages should be promoted and which should be in standard installs.
To set it using the command:
$sudo dpkg-reconfigure popularity-contest
You can send the information through HTTP or via EMail. I have set it up through HTTP. The results is updated in popcon.ubuntu.com.
Evolution, the favourite Outlook replacement for Linux is now available for Windows. It provides integrated mail, contact management and calendaring. You can download the windows installer for Evolution and it is a big 50meg download. Evolution is an MS Exchange client and should work with Exchange servers. Though I find no use for an email client as of now, I would try it later - when I get my ADSL connection.
This week I had installed Ubuntu Dapper 6.06 and tried really hard at making my SmartLink Internal Modem to work in it. It hadn’t worked in any other distro other than Debian Sarge. I started with a 64 bit version of Ubuntu, but it didn’t help. I followed the instructions in Launchpad and configured the modem. So here are the steps that I followed to make my SmartLink modem work in Ubuntu 6.06.
- First we need to have a few packages which need to be installed before installing the driver. You need to have build-essential, linux-headers-ARCH (where ARCH is your kernel version and can be found with uname -r in the terminal), fakeroot, module-assistant and debhelper. All these can be installed (with the dependancies) using apt-get.
- Then you need to install ungrab-winmodem from the linmodem website. Just extract it and make; make install to install it.
- Download slmodem-2.9.11-20051101.tar.gz from http://phep2.technion.ac.il/linmodems/packages/smartlink/
- Download sl-modem-daemon_2.9.10+2.9.9d+e-pre2-5build1_i386.deb, but don’t install it yet.
- Extract the tar.gz file and type make and then sudo make install in the folder where you extracted it.
- Type sudo modprobe slamr
- Then install the sl-modem-daemon using
dpkg -i sl-modem-daemon_2.9.10+2.9.9d+e-pre2-5build1_i386.deb command.
- Type
sudo /etc/init.d/sl-modem-daemon restart to restart the daemon.
- This ends the installation part of the modem. Now you can setup your internet connection.
- I used wvdial and unusually, the modem redialled every time the ISP showed the Login prompt. So, I put in the Stupid Mode = 1 in the
/etc/wvdial.conf file.
Mark Pilgrim had recently switched over from his Mac to Ubuntu and has compiled a list of essential software list for his Ubuntu. This is a nice list for all those who wish to switch operating systems
UnixLite is a lightweight unix/linux compatible operating system written in C++. Just like Linux, it is just a kernel - written from scratch and most of the part is written in C++. However the library used by UnixLite comes from uClibc and applications running comes from the GNU project. UnixLite kernel implements some frequently used system calls of linux, furthermore, it is binary compatible with linux, and some GNU software have been ported to unixlite.
Due to the small size(the kernel is made up of about 20000 lines of code) and the object oriented programming using the c++, the kernel becomes more modular and easy to understand.
Technical Features:
- Support paging and flat memory model, nearly same as linux
- Implements about 80 posix compliant system call
- Binary compatible with linux
- Able to run bash/gcc, and some other common UNIX tools
- Very rudimentary TCP/IP support, able to run a simple http server
- Very small, about 20000 lines of code
- Written in c++, highly modular and extensible
- Minix’s 32-bit file system
Webrick is the built-in Ruby web server that is the default for each Rails app you create or download
Of late I have been using SciTE, a lightweight text editor available for both Windows and Linux. It is based on Scintilla - a free source code editing component for Win32 and GTK+. It features syntax highlighting for many popular languages and also automatic indenting of source code. Also you can export the source code into many formats like:
There has been a long complaint of Linux users that there is no flash player released for the platform.
Are you a device driver developer who longs for a proper device driver development kit for Linux? Here is a Linux Device Driver Kit which is released as a CD image for download. This CD image consists of everything a device driver author would wish for - copy of linux kernel source code, pre-built copies of all of the in-kernel docbook documentation for easy browsing, a full copy of the O’Reilly book, “Linux Device Drivers, third edition”.
There are also few things that would be included in the future releases, like
- searchable index of all documentation
- prettier webpages
- more documentation
- possible inclusion of the KernelNewbies wiki.
There is also a CDROM label included in the root directory which could be printed.
Here is a survival guide for the famous editors of all time - vi. This vi survival guide was written in vi and is a nice tutorial to know how to get yourself familiar with the keystrokes required in vi. However I use emacs - which I think is more easier to use than vi or nano.