Azaad Source

Hibernate and suspend works perfectly fine on ubuntu 8.04

Hameedullah Khan — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 23:55:01 +0000

Wowwwwwwwwww! yes this was what I shouted when I installed Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy and enabled restricted drivers for my ATI card and found that Hibernate and suspend just works out of the box. Brilliant. I don’t remember where but I read somewhere that even sky is not the limit for Ubuntu and Mark Shuttleworth. This is so true, so true that it is just difficult for me to express.

The only thing that I didn’t liked is Firefox 3 bet 5 is forced on you, even though Firefox-2 is available in repository but making Firefox 3 beta verson a default choice is not the good decision. Because my beloved Google browser sync does not work with Firefox 3 and neither many of other available extensions.

I have tried both Ubuntu and Kubuntu flavors of Hardy and both are impressive. I will keep posting updates and my experiences with Ubuntu from time to time. For now, I have to leave we will do it later.

Google App Engine comes with sweets and cakes

Hameedullah Khan — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 09:10:51 +0000

Google App Engine is like a treat to Python developers which comes with sweets and cakes. From sweets and cakes I mean like Google App Engine for Google Apps (I hope you know about Google Apps). The availability of SDK so it can be ported to other platforms like Amazon EC2 appdrop.com is now offering to host Google App Engine applications. And none the less support for Google App Engine has been added to Google Data Python Libaray.

All of these are available for your webapps if they are either built on Google Apps Engine SDK or Django web framework. Google App Engine being a buzz word now a days has brought attention of developers specially Python developers from all around the world to Google.

Many of them like me still waiting for their trun to be invited to sign up for Google App Engine Account. Hope our turn will come soon. Google will also be adding support for other languages like PHP and others, and that would be a turning point for Google App Engine. In my view as soon as the support for other popular languages will be available in Google App Engine, it will become the first choice of web application development framework.

For More information:

Google App Engine invites more and more Python programmers!

Hameedullah Khan — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 09:48:32 +0000

Google App Engine’s first signup batch was filled in hours after the first preview launch. Google has invited yet again 10,000 developers to signup for App Engine account as 2nd batch. I am still in the waiting list and I hope there will be many more. Lets hope we will get our invitation soon. Until that have a nice play with App Engine SDK.

Also Google App Engine team has anounced that they are actively working to support other programming languages on Google App Engine platform, so stay tuned guys PHP, Ruby, Java, Perl and even fortran will be supported.

A small but irritating bug in wordpress.com

Hameedullah Khan — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 08:08:25 +0000

Although the bug found on my personal blog, but I am posting about it here. As you all know recently wordpress.com has got new looks with all new dashboard and everthing. The dashboard looks great, many of you might have noticed a small tip (like below) on your dashboard if you haven’t updated your about page.

WordPress.com Tip

Problem:

The tip is good to remind you if you have forgotten about page. Now the problem is when I click on “Update your about page” in the dashboard tip, it takes me to edit the page with post id = 2 which does not exist, so it looks like post id = 2 is hard coded in that link.

Page ID

Error Message when the I access the above link

Although I have an about page on my blog which can be access via /about/ but its not the original about page with post id = 2 that was created when I registered that blog. I deleted that page quite a long time ago and then I created a new page which has now post id = 5.

New About Page

Solution:

It would be nice if its changed to read the page id from permalink that points to /about/ as I and may be many others don’t have the about page with page id = 2 any more.

So for me this irritating tip will never go away until the problem is fixed by the great guys working at wordpress.com. I hope they will soon get time for this ;). Beside this wordpress.com is great.

Happy blogging!

Python Developers build your apps for Google servers!

Hameedullah Khan — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 14:54:15 +0000

Google has launched Google App Engine which will host web apps for anyone. This is another great service launched by Google. Now developers don’t need to worry about their applicatioin’s growth because it will be now hosted on Google servers.

Google App Engine SDK allows developers to develop application locally. SDK also comes with the development web server just like Django. The database API is almost same as provided by django, so django developers will not have many problems developing application for Google App Engine.

What are you waiting for? Go and signup for Google App Engine at: http://appengine.google.com/

Read more at:

How You can create xen VM without installation

Hameedullah Khan — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 08:24:42 +0000

Download the CentOS 5.1 image from jailtime. http://jailtime.org/download:centos:v5.1

At the time of writing this howto the current image file name is: centos.5-1.20080125.img.tar.bz2

Untar the image:

# tar -xjf centos.5-1.20080125.img.tar.bz2

Create directories under /mnt to mount image your downloaded from jailtime and in our case lvm parition.

# mkdir /mnt/img # mkdir /mnt/vm

Mount jailtime image and lvm partition image.

# mount -o loop centos.5-1.img /mnt/img # mount /dev/vg/ComC /mnt/vm

Copy the image files to our VM image i.e on lvm parition.

# cp -a /mnt/img/* /mnt/vm/

Configure IP for domU. I don’t think I need to explain this step.

cat /mnt/vm/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

TYPE=Ethernet
DEVICE=eth0
ONBOOT=yes
BOOTPROTO=static
IPADDR=192.168.1.10
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
GATEWAY=192.168.1.254

Configure domU hostname.

[root@aag ~]# cat /mnt/vm/etc/sysconfig/network

NETWORKING=yes
HOSTNAME=complay

For me the xm console never worked until I have used this line in /mnt/vm/etc/inittab, I hope you know where to put following line in /mnt/vm/etc/inittab, other wise learn about inittab first please.

1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty console

root logins are not allowed on default jailtime image, so if you need them you can enable them too, or if you change your SSH port to something unusual you can do that too in /mnt/vm/etc/ssh/sshd_config change following:

Port 2023

PermitRootLogin yes

Unmount both images.

# umount /mnt/img /mnt/vm

Create initrd image for your domU

# mkinitrd /boot/xen-guest-initrd `uname -r` --with xenblk --with xennet --preload xenblk --preload xennet

Create a xen config file, as I was using LVM partition so my config file will look bit different.

My domU config file looks like following:
[root@aag xen]# cat complay.cfg

kernel = “/boot/xen-vm-kernel”
ramdisk = “/boot/xen-guest-initrd”
name = “complay”
memory = “128″
disk = [ 'phy:vg/ComC-swap,sda2,w', 'phy:vg/ComC,sda1,w' ]
vif = [ 'mac=00:14:d1:3e:F9:f1', ]
root = “/dev/sda1 rw”
vcpus=1
on_reboot = ‘restart’
on_crash = ‘destroy’

Start your domU

# xm create -c /etc/xen/complay.cfg

You will see a nice login prompt like following:

CentOS release 5 (Final)
Kernel 2.6.18-8.1.14.el5xen on an i686

complay login:

Login as root, default root password for jailtime image is “password”
Change your root password first
Enter nameservers in /etc/resolv.conf
Now this small CentOS 5.1 image likes many usefult softwares, few of which I really like and need I will install here. If you don’t find your favourite software you know how to install it right?

# yum -y install logwatch postfix vim-enhancd iptables anacron

Now your VM is ready to be used.

Possible Errors

If you get following Error:

Error: destroyDevice() takes exactly 3 arguments (2 given)

Make sure you have unmounted your image: umount /mnt/vm

GetUTube: YouTube Video Downloader in Bash

Hameedullah Khan — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 08:14:12 +0000

Below is the script I wrote in hurry for a friend. Many of my friends wanted to download Videos from YouTube for later viewing but they always complained about available scripts or programs, so I decided to write my own quick and simple script which work as we want it ;).

I know below script does not have any comments or checks, but this is what I wrote in hurry.

#!/bin/bash


TMPFILE=”/tmp/getutube.$$.data”
if [ "$1" == "" ]; then

  echo “Please provide YouTube Video’s Page URL”

fi
VIDEOID=”${1#*v=}”
echo -n “Getting video URL…”

wget -O $TMPFILE $1

echo “DONE”
UGETURL=”`grep video_id $TMPFILE|grep fullscreenUrl|head -1`”

rm -f $TMPFILE

URLPARAMS=”${UGETURL#*/watch_fullscreen?}”

URLPARAMS=”${URLPARAMS%\’;}”

FILENAME=”${URLPARAMS#*&title=}”

echo -n “Downloading Video…” wget -O “${FILENAME}.flv” “http://www.youtube.com/get_video?$URLPARAMS” echo “DONE”

Ubuntu 7.10: Hibernate or Suspend does not work with restricted ATI drivers.

Hameedullah Khan — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 08:28:12 +0000

Due to a bug in restricted ATI drivers Hibernate or Suspend does not work on Ubuntu 7.10. When I tried to Hibernate/Suspend I got a blank screen which waited for nothing for ever. So I put a little search on the issue and found that this is the problem with ATI restricted drivers. Currently there are only 2 solutions for the problem:

Use OpenSource ATI drivers.
Stay with Ubuntu Fiesty, which is absolutely not a good option for many of us.

Note: I haven’t tested any of the above solutions. But this is what I found while doing the search for the solution of this problem.

I am not going to use OpenSource ATI drivers, because I don’t really need Hibernate/Suspend currently. When I will be needing them I will surely go for the OpenSource drivers. But maybe by that time we will have a fix/patch for the solution available.

Ubuntu Compiz Fusion on ATI

Hameedullah Khan — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 20:27:12 +0000

I tried Ubuntu on Acer Ferrari, it worked like charm. But when I tried to enable compiz fusion or so called desktop effects it wasn’t that straight. I would say it was a problem because every howto I found about enabling compiz fusion or desktop effects was missing the very basic requirement for desktop effect. That is xserver-xgl package, this package needs to be installed before you can enable desktop effects on your Ubuntu desktop. Use the command below to enable xgl on your Ubuntu.

Note: From Ubuntu 7.10 you only have to install the package, the xgl server will be automatically enabled.

apt-get install xserver-xgl

There wasn’t any other problem, the fglrx drivers from ubuntu repository worked fine for me. I have ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 256MB that cam with my laptop. Need to check the rest of features, like camera, bluetooth mouse and connectivity my Nokia E50. I think enough for now.

Related Posts:

Python gaming challenege is coming…

Hameedullah Khan — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 15:40:58 +0000

Python gaming challenge PyWeek 5 is ready, Registrations are open and the theme voting has been started. It is a fun challenge you will get only one week to code a game from scratch. There is no prize money involved but the fun which is worth of your time. Read more about it on PyWeek site.

Below is the time table.

Timetable
Friday 2007/08/03	Registration open
Sunday 2007/08/26	Theme voting underway
Sunday 2007/09/02	Challenge start
Sunday 2007/09/09	Challenge end, judging begins
Sunday 2007/09/23	Judging closes, winners announced