My Experiences with Free Software

Starting MySQL Server in Fedora 16

2011-11-18T11:24:00.001+05:30

The selinux-policy package in Fedora 16 had a bug which prevents MySQL server from starting when SELinux is in enforcing mode. Fedora has released an update for selinux-policy which can be updated from updates-testing repository.

To install thisupdate run the following command:

yum update selinux-policy --enablerepo=updates-testing

The relevant error messages in /var/log/message:

Nov 17 18:44:12 es016 kernel: [ 172.476165] type=1400 audit(1321535652.092:14): avc: denied { read } for pid=1907 comm="mysqld_safe" path="/bin/bash" dev=dm-1 ino=396459 scontext=system_u:system_r:mysqld_safe_t:s0 tcontext=system_u:object_r:shell_exec_t:s0 tclass=file
Nov 17 18:44:12 es016 systemd[1]: mysqld.service: control process exited, code=exited status=127
Nov 17 18:44:12 es016 systemd[1]: mysqld.service holdoff time over, scheduling restart.
Nov 17 18:44:12 es016 systemd[1]: Job pending for unit, delaying automatic restart.
Nov 17 18:44:12 es016 systemd[1]: Unit mysqld.service entered failed state.

More details:
Bug Report: RHBZ #754072
Package update: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/selinux-policy-3.10.0-56.fc16

GNOME 3 - A Quick Review

2011-05-24T11:53:00.003+05:30

I have been experimenting with the latest and greatest version of GNOME desktop for the last 4 days. I was allured by the Simply Beautiful tag line of GNOME 3, and it was not completely wrong. The new desktop is really clean, simple and elegant. But there are some usability issues which made me crazy while using the new desktop. I did an upgrade to the beta release of Fedora 15 to test GNOME 3.

I don’t want to re-iterate all the fancy features of GNOME 3 which have been discussed else where. This scribbling is basically about the issues I faced while using the desktop and I'm not sure whether it qualifies as a review. May be the issues I faced are side-effects of a better desktop architecture and it’s due to my ignorance or unfamiliarity with GNOME 3.

The notable change in the new desktop is the absence of the bottom panel, which saved some space for the opened windows, but it costs several clicks to re-open a window. In GNOME 2, I need only a single click to re-open a window from the bottom panel, but in 3 I have to click on the Activities, and then click on the Favourites icon to get the previously opened window. If you have multiple windows opened, then you have to do another click to open the window other than the last one.

I was really frustrated, whenever I need a fresh Terminal. I was able to open a new terminal only by right clicking on the Favourites icon, if there is already an open terminal.

The Activities-->Applications has a section called Other. I thought that it may be some less important applications/utilities for the desktop. But, later I discovered that it had some really important utilities such as Firewall, Network, Input Method, Date & Time, Printing, etc... I’m not sure why these are aggregated under Other.

GNOME 3 doesn’t have a easy Shut down button to power off the machine. However, if I click on the username on the top-right corner and then hold the ALT key, I can see the Power off menu item.

I cannot change the format of date & time displayed on the top panel. The main issue is that if I have to check today’s date, then I have to click and open the calendar every time. The panel displays only the weekday and hours. I still can’t figure out how the date can be displayed.

A really great application I missed in GNOME 3 is the Hamster Time tracking applet. I know that it’s not a GNOME issue, but I have to return to gnote for tracking time at work.

There are no Minimize and Maximise button for the windows, but it’s not a big issue since I rarely used them. I always preferred double-clicking on top of the window to maximise/minimise them.

The keyboard shortcut to move files to trash have changed in Nautilus. I have to press control+delete(Same as copy, paste, etc..) to move files to trash. This is useful, since it avoids accidental removal files to trash. But it's an important usability change and users should get used to it.

I’m still exploring the new features and I wish to update the list as I progress. Since I’m using the bleeding edge of Fedora, things may change in the GA release.

Update - 6/6/2011

Solved the date issue on panel by running the following command:

 $ gsettings org.gnome.shell.clock show-date true

You can also install gnome-tweak-tool(available in YUM repository) to change the advanced settings in GNOME 3.

Shotwell replaces F-Spot in Ubuntu

2010-09-03T13:13:00.000+05:30

Shotwell, the GNOME application developed in Vala and SQLite, is the default photo manager application in Ubuntu 10.10(Maverick) replacing F-Spot. It is also the default photo manager in Fedora 13 (Goddard). F-spot is the second Mono based application after Tomboy(replaced by Gnote) which is removed from the "default application" status in popular distributions. Shotwell is licensed under GNU GPL v2.1

Shotwell is still in early stages of the development, but it has proved to be a stable application to import, manage and edit(with limited capabilities) on GNU/Linux desktop. The current version of Shotwell is 0.7 and Fedora 13 ships with version 0.5. Here are some of the key features of Shotwell-0.7:

Import photos from digital cameras supported by gPhoto or from a disk or from F-spot
Supports JPEG, PNG and Raw formats.
Automatically organise photos based on events and collections.
Organise photos using tags and titles. A photo can have multiple tags. The tags will be included in the metadata when you export the photo.
Publish photos to Facebook, Flickr and Google Picasa
Rate the photos
Photo editing - crop, rotate, auto-enhance, red-eye correction, colour adjustments, etc..
Edit the photos which are not imported to shotwell.
Allows the user to set the photo as the desktop background and slideshows
Automatically detect missing photos
The original photos are stored in ~/Pictures

Shotwell seems to be fit for all the basic photo management tasks. However, there are some minor disadvantages which I noticed in version 0.5. The tags are case-sensitive and each time the user have to remember the exact case and spelling of the tags used earlier. An autocomplete feature which will solve this issue partially is already in the trunk. A feature request for case insensitivity is also reported in the bug tracking system.

The Shotwell team has published a short, but comprehensive user guide for end-users, which can be accessed here. Shotwell packages are available for Fedora, Ubuntu and OpenSuse. It has also a Microsoft Windows version with limited features.

Note on editing features:
Shotwell doesn't write the edits(crop, rotate, auto-enhance) to the image file. Instead it records the changes in a database and apply them on the fly when the image is viewed. This will make sure that the original image file is not tampered even if you do something wrong while editing. You can always get a modified version of the photo by exporting it. The RAW editing features are also limited in Shotwell. This may improve in the course of development.

References:

Ubuntu Release Notes: http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/maverick/beta#New%20features%20in%20Maverick
Fedora release notes: http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/13/html/Release_Notes/sect-Release_Notes-Changes_in_Fedora_for_Desktop_Users.html#sect-Release_Notes-Fedora_Desktop
Shotwell Wiki: http://trac.yorba.org/wiki/Shotwell

64-bit Firefox and 64-bit Flash plugin

2010-06-28T14:47:00.005+05:30

Adobe has temporarily closed the Labs program of Flash Player 10 for 64-bit Linux to revamp it's architecture and release it with more native support. They have also removed the downloads link for older release of 64 bit packages. However, if you wish to have flash-plugin without installing 32 bit libraries, follow these simple steps:

Download 64 bit plugin from this direct link (I'm not sure how long this URL will be available).
Uncompress the downloaded file and copy(as root user) the shared object(libflashplayer.so) to /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/.

Restart Mozilla Firefox and visit about:plugins to verify the plugin. The above steps have been tested in Firefox-3.6.4 running on Fedora 13.

Reference:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AMD64/FirefoxAndPlugins

Caveat: Adobe flash-plugin is not FOSS.

Pino and Gwibber

2010-05-25T17:16:00.000+05:30

Following the suggestion by one of the readers(Jeugo) of my earlier post, I did a quick comparison between Pino and Gwibber.

Gwibber supports a wide variety of social networking services, but Pino currently supports only identi.ca and twitter. But this doesn't sound appealing to me as I need only a twitter client.

The UI of Gwibber seems to be cluttered when compared with that of Pino. The huge font size was also annoying which reduced the number of messages shown at a time.

Pino has a tray icon through which I can easily access the application. When using Gwibber, I have to keep the window open or minimised to view the updates.

P.S: May be I will switch to Gwibber, when I start using a service which is not supported by Pino. But for now Pino is the better option.

Pino - GNOME client for Twitter

2010-04-21T12:42:00.000+05:30

I was in search for a decent desktop application(in GNOME) for twitter and finally the search ends at http://pino-app.appspot.com. I haven't tried too much apps for twitter, but was not really happy with the firefox extensions available.

Pino is a simple, fast and easy to use twitter/identi.ca client with a nice user interface. It fits into the panel as a tray icon and notifies via the notification system whenever a new tweet pops up. Setting up an account is easy and you can also use the URL shortening(goo.gl, is.gd) service from Pino.

The source package is available for download from the above link and also available as RPM package for Fedora. If you are using Fedora 12, then just run the command "yum install pino". Pino is available as a default application in the upcoming Fedora 13 release. Check the announcement here : http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/announce/2010-April/002787.html

Visit the project website for more details and screenshots. Feel free to use and contribute to pino.

കേരളത്തില്‍ ചൂടു കുറയുന്നു

2010-03-16T12:24:00.002+05:30

കേരളത്തിലെ താപനില കഴിഞ്ഞ ചില ആഴ്ചകളായി 35 ഡിഗ്രി സെല്‍ഷ്യസിനു താഴെ വരുന്നതായി കാണുന്നു. താപനില 35നു മുകളില്‍ നിര്‍ത്താന്‍ ഇതാ ചില കുറുക്കുവഴികള്‍ :

പറമ്പിലോ വഴിയോരത്തോ നില്‍ക്കുന്ന മരങ്ങള്‍ ഇനി ഒരിക്കലും വളരാന്‍ കഴിയാത്തവിധം വെട്ടിക്കളയുക. മരമുത്തശ്ശിയായാലും മുത്തശ്ശനായാലും അതുമല്ല ശിശുവായാലും ശരി, അതിനെ വെട്ടി, തായ് വേരു് തോണ്ടി അപ്പുറത്തെ പറമ്പിലോ അല്ലെങ്കില്‍ റോഡിലോ കൊണ്ടിടുക. വികസനത്തിന്റെ എറ്റവും വലിയ ശത്രു മരമാണു, അതുകൊണ്ടു അതിനെ വച്ചു പൊറുപ്പിക്കരുതു്.
മണ്ണുകൊണ്ടുള്ള മുറ്റമോ നടപ്പാതയോ ഉണ്ടെങ്കില്‍ അതിന്റെ നാലു വശവും കരിങ്കല്ലു കൊണ്ടു കെട്ടി മിനിമം 6 ഇഞ്ച് കനത്തില്‍ കോണ്‍ക്രീറ്റ് ചെയ്യുക (ഇനിയെങ്ങാനും മഴ പെയ്താല്‍ കാലില്‍ ചെളി പറ്റാതെ നടക്കാല്ലോ).
എത്രയും ഉയരത്തില്‍ കെട്ടിടങ്ങള്‍ കെട്ടാമോ, അത്രയും ഉയരത്തില്‍ കെട്ടി, അതിന്റെ നാലുവശവും അലൂമിനിയം ക്ലാഡിങും ചില്ലും പിടിപ്പിക്കണം.
കുന്നുകളും ഉയര്‍ന്ന പ്രദേശങ്ങളും ഇടിച്ചു നിരപ്പാക്കി തരിശാക്കണം. ഇടിക്കുന്നതിനു മുമ്പ് തന്നെ ചെറിയ കുളമോ തോടോ കണ്ടുപിടിച്ചാല്‍ മണ്ണു വെയ്സ്റ്റാക്കാതെ ഉപയോഗിക്കാം (ഒരു വെടിക്കു ഡബിള്‍ ചൂട്).

വേറെ വഴികള്‍ വല്ലതും ഉണ്ടെങ്കില്‍ അറിയിക്കുമല്ലോ. ഇതെല്ലാം കൂട്ടി കേന്ദ്ര-സംസ്ഥാന സര്‍ക്കാരുകള്‍ക്ക് ഒരു proposal കൊടുക്കാം.

Fedora 12 - a quick review

2009-11-19T18:04:00.009+05:30

Fedora 12 was officially released on Wednesday(Nov 18th) and I installed it on my office desktop today. The installation took less than 45 minutes(of which I spend 15 minutes to clean my two hard disks and select packages). Within 1 hour I was able to login to the fresh Fedora 12 desktop. As per the Fedora Project Wiki, there were lots of new features and changes. Some of them caused minor issues, but I was able to quickly overcome those and return to normal work within another 1 hour.

Here is a list of some quick changes in Fedora 12:

Gnote is the default note taking application.
Empathy is the default Instant Messenger.
Enhanced PackageKit for installing new software
The Download folder in the desktop is renamed to Downloads. (Of course the word Downloads makes more sense).

However, I had some issues with the new desktop. The most disturbing issue was about the screen resolution - I was able to get only a resolution of 800x600. The desktop had a Intel Original Motherboard and LG Flatron L1730S monitor. I have to install system-config-display from the yum repository to manually configure the display, but it didn't succeeded. After some quick search in Fedora Wiki, I tried the nomodeset option in boot parameters and I was able to get 1024x768.
Reference: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F12_bugs

The second issue was not that much important - missing menu icon for Epiphany Web Browser. This was not a big issue, but it will surely affect the look and feel of the desktop.

Last but not least, I took some screenshots while installing the OS, but unfortunately I couldn't find the images after logging to the desktop. I found a folder named anaconda-screenshots in /tmp, but it had only one screenshot of the 15 screenshots.

Overall, the desktop is really good and is performing very well. There are yet more features to be explored, and I will update this post as I progress.

Update 1:
The Epiphany icon problem was solved after updating the gnome-desktop package(gnome-desktop.x86_64 0:2.28.1-3.fc12)

Update 2:
The screen resolution issue was reported in redhat bugzilla and it is fixed:
See the bug here #538761

ഗൂഗില്‍ വാര്‍ത്തയില്‍ കണ്ടതു്

2009-08-06T17:19:00.001+05:30

രാഷ്ട്രീയവും ഒരു തരത്തിലുള്ള കളിയായതു കൊണ്ടായിരിക്കും ഗൂഗിളിനും ഇങ്ങനെ തോന്നിയതു.

Goodbye Tomboy

2009-05-13T15:12:00.007+05:30

Today is my last day with Tomboy, the note taking application in GNOME. I have been using Tomboy for the past few months and was impressed by it's features. However, there has been two issues which annoyed me. The first is Tomboy's performance - the time taken to launch the application is considerable. I have 1GB ram in my PC, but Tomboy hangs whenever I have some potential applications(Firefox, Thunderbird) running in my desktop. Secondly, Tomboy is based on Mono, a patent trapped implementation from Novell.

Thanks to Hubert Figuiere, who has ported Tomboy to C++ and released it as Gnote. Gnote is a lightweight application which is superior to Tomboy in terms of speed and has all the basic features of tomboy. The earlier version doesn't have applet support and hence we may have to start it from the Applications menu in GNOME.

The latest version(0.3.1) has fixed this and now you can launch the application right from the panel. It also supports printing via an add-on. Another interesting feature is that you can add bug reports from bugzilla using the bugzilla add-on. The latest news is that the developers are working on a feature which do automatic import from Tomboy.

Gnote is a budding application and have gained applause for it's speed and usability. I'm sure Gnote will surely reduce the dependency of GNOME on Mono.

Update:
An useful Tip : To import all your Tomboy notes to Gnote run the following command and re-login:

$ cp .tomboy/*.note .gnote/

Gnote may be slow when you first open your old notes, but it won't be an issue afterwards.

Stop Automount of Fixed hard drives

2009-04-03T10:43:00.002+05:30

Fedora(9 and 10) shows all device icons for all the fixed drives on the GNOME desktop, which is annoying, especially if you have another distribution/operating system installed. The following links provide a useful tip to hide the unwanted device icons from your desktop.

Remove only HD-Partition-Icons from Gnome Desktop and keep the Hotplug-Icons

Hiding unwanted device icons on your Fedora desktop

An advertisement

2009-03-09T15:23:00.003+05:30

A funny advertisement as seen on www.irctc.co.in.

Not sure what would be the exiting prize :-)

Save Trees in Eranakulam District Court Campus

2009-02-09T11:33:00.004+05:30

The Eranakulam District Court authorities have decided to cut down some decades old trees claiming that they are dangerous to people and property. In addition the authorities have also decided to remove some of the trees in the Maharajas College Campus. This news was reported in the city edition of Mathrubhumi daily on Saturday(6th February). There has been a strict protest against this anti-environmental act from the Town Planning Committee and various other organisations.

The authorities have found that some of the branches of the "accused" trees are fatal to the property and life. Instead of removing only the "fatal" branches, they have decided to remove the entire trees. The Social Forestry Division immediately issued the consent and the Public Works Department also acted quickly.( It would be nice if this enthusiasm was also shown in repairing the roads and bridges also. )

The District Court campus and Maharajas College campus are some of the remaining greenery spots in Kochi. The lush green in the city have been replaced by huge and colourful concrete mansions. Almost 60% of the roadside trees have been cut down by the public and government in the last 3 years. The temperature and the climatic conditions of the city is turning extreme. But still, people are not at all aware about the significance of trees in maintaining our environment and nature.

If you feel that this move is an anti-social and anti-environmental act, then join this cause in facebook

News Update:

KOCHI: The seven trees on the Ernakulam district court premises that were marked for cutting down have been saved from the axe for the time being.
The decision to cut down the trees has been put on hold following protest from environmental groups and the Town Planning Standing Committee of the City Corporation.
The fate of the trees will be decided after a spot visit by Kurian Joseph, judge of the Kerala High Court, on Wednesday

Source: http://www.hindu.com/2009/02/09/stories/2009020955330900.htm

First time on Fedora Live CD

2008-12-16T16:48:00.008+05:30

I have been using Fedora GNU/Linux since it's first release and have worked on almost all versions of Fedora. But I never got a chance to test or use the Live CD version of Fedora. It is this post(appeared in fedora-india mailing list) that tempted me to download and install the Live CD version of Fedora.

The booting procedure was straight forward and plymouth(the graphical boot loader for Fedora) is really fast. It's much faster when compared with Ubuntu boot proces, but the desktop preparation process took more time than Ubuntu.

For testing purpose I used the Malayalam interface. It's really cool to see the traditional Malayalam font(Meera) on the desktop interface.The default input scheme, SCIM, supports four input methods - inscript, itrans, mozhi and swanalekha. Here is a screenshot

The Fedora Live CD contains almost all of the popular applications such as Mozilla Firefox, Pidgin Instant Messenger, Transmission BitTorrent Client, Totem Movie Player, RhythmBox Music Player, GIMP, Gthumb, Gedit, SCIM, etc.. But it's really disappointing that OpenOffice.org is not included in the Live CD version, instead Abiword is included. Abiword is a great word processor, but it's not at all a complete office suite.

Live CDs are commonly used by end users who only requires a web browser, instant messenger or an Office suite. It may be nice if the Fedora community takes steps to include OpenOffice in the Live CDs so that it can gain more popularity among end users.

റെഡ്മണ്ട് ഭൂവില്‍

2008-11-13T15:49:00.012+05:30

എന്തൊക്കെ തമാശകളാണ് കാണേണ്ടി വരുന്നത്. സാമൂഹ്യ അടിത്തറയുള്ള സോഫ്റ്റ്‌വെയറുകള്‍ക്ക് ഉപയോക്തൃ സമൂഹങ്ങള്‍ (users group) ഉണ്ടാകുന്നത് സ്വാഭാവികമാണു്. അതിന്റെ ഉപയോഗവും വികസന രീതിയും അതു ആവശ്യപ്പെടുകയും ചെയ്യുന്നു. എന്നാല്‍, ഒരു കുത്തക കമ്പനിക്കും(സോഫ്റ്റ്‌വെയറിനു അല്ല) കേരളത്തില്‍ യൂസേഴ്സ് ഗ്രൂപ്പ ഉണ്ടായിരിക്കുന്നു. കെ-മഗ്(k-mug) എന്ന പേരില്‍ 2001 മുതല്‍ കേരളത്തില്‍ നിലവിലുണ്ടായിരുന്ന വിവിധ ഗ്രൂപ്പുകളുടെ ലയനം കഴിഞ്ഞ മാസം കോഴിക്കോട്ടു നടന്നു. കൂടുതല്‍ വിവരങ്ങള്‍ ഇവിടെ.

കെ-മഗിന്റെ ഉത്ഘാടനം നിര്‍വഹിച്ചത് കേരളത്തില്‍ സോഷ്യലിസ്റ്റ് ആശയങ്ങള്‍ ഘോരഘോരം പ്രസംഗിക്കുന്ന, ശ്രീ എം.പി വീരേന്ദ്രകുമാര്‍ എം.പി യാണെന്നതു ഏറ്റവും വലിയ വിരോധഭാസമായി. സോഷ്യലിസവും മുതലാളിത്തവും തമ്മിലുള്ള അഭേദ്യമായ ബന്ധത്തിന്റെ പേരിലായിരിക്കും അദ്ദേഹം ഇതിനു കൂട്ടു നിന്നത് എന്നു വിചാരിക്കുന്നു. സ്വതന്ത്ര സോഫ്റ്റ്‌വെയറിനെ സിപിഐ(എം) പരസ്യമായി അനുകൂലിക്കുന്നു എന്നു ശ്രീ. സീതാറാം എച്ചൂരി പ്രസ്താവിച്ച (ഇവിടെ നോക്കൂ) സ്ഥിതിക്ക് സഖാക്കളായ ബഹുമാനപ്പെട്ട മേയര്‍ ശ്രീ. എം ഭാസ്കരനും, കോഴിക്കോട് എംഎല്‍എ ശ്രീ. പ്രദീപ്കുമാറും മൈക്രോസോഫ്റ്റിന്റെ(അഥവ കെ-മഗിന്റെ) കോഴി ബിരിയാണി തിന്നാന്‍ പോയത് നാണക്കേട് തന്നെയാണു്. മാത്രമല്ല, ഇടതുപക്ഷം അംഗീകരിച്ച സംസ്ഥാന ഐടി നയരേഖയുടെ ലംഘനവും.

കോഴി ബിരിയാണി അസ്സലായി എന്നാണു് പങ്കെടുത്തവരുടെ സാക്ഷ്യപ്പെടുത്തല്‍.

"Lunch coupons were given during registration time and K-MUG served Kozhikode Chicken Biriyani and Vegetable Biriyani for the attendees. As per the feedback from participants, lunch was excellent... "

എന്തായാലും അടുത്ത വയലാര്‍ അവാര്‍ഡിനായി ഒരു പുസ്കകം കൂടി നമുക്ക് പ്രതീക്ഷിക്കാം - "റെഡ്മണ്ട് ഭൂവില്‍".

അവലംബം
http://pramode.net/2008/11/12/kerala-microsoft-users-group-launched
http://boycottnovell.com/2008/11/11/kerala-ms-user-group

A Quick Glance at Fedora 10 beta

2008-10-07T16:49:00.007+05:30

Note: This article is not a comprehensive review of all the features in Fedora 10 beta.

The Fedora 10 beta or more precisely Fedora 9.92 was released on 30th September 2008. I decided to give it a try using Xen virtualization in Fedora 9, as I don't want to install a "bleeding edge" distro in my desktop. But unfortunately, Fedora 9 has an issue with Xen Virtualization and the only work around was to get it installed through qemu. The documentation at the Fedora wiki is enough to get it started.

However, I had a bad luck with with CD-ROM image, except that I was able to run anaconda. The first thing I noticed is the Malayalam strings in anaconda interface was not properly displayed. I discussed this matter in the IRC channel of SMC, and filed a bug in Redhat Bugzilla. I was also struck with another bug when I tried to disable the installation media and use only the Rawhide repository. The good news is that Fedora developers responded quickly to the two bug reports. Since I didn't bothered to download minimal set of the CD-ROM images, I decided to proceed with netinstall image available at Fedora download server.

A fresh installation attempt using the netinstall image was problematic. But after several failed attempts I could connect to the fedora mirrors and start the installation. The installation took more than 4 hours. All the packages where downloaded from Internet and qemu environment was also slow. At the end anaconda hanged with the message "installing kernel-2.6.xx... ". I just closed the qemu window and boot the newly installed system using the following command:

# qemu fedora.qcow -boot c -net nic -net user -m 512 -localtime -no-kqemu

The graphical boot loader, rhgb has been replaced by Plymouth and if you press ESC key, then you can view the entire boot messages. After several minutes of wait, I was able to login to the new Fedora 10 desktop. may be the virtualized environment degraded the performance of the desktop.

As soon as I logged in, the first major change I noticed is the new Echo-Icon theme. The icon set is great and gave the desktop an elegant look and feel.

Malayalam Support

I was curious about the Malayalam rendering and language support. Fortunately, Malayalam rendering was perfect with the patches from SMC and the new Malayalam font, Meera developed by SMC itself. Mozilla Firefox 3 and OpenOffice.org 3.0 rendered Malayalam perfectly. However, in OpenOffice there were some issues with some complex conjucts. But I won't think that these are used frequently in Malayalam content.

The font size problem which was a major issue in the prior release was resolved and it's really cool to see Malayalam on the desktop without any rendering errors.

Fedora also has 7 other unicode Malayalam fonts - smc-anjalioldlipi, smc-kalyani(previously MalOtf), smc-rachana, smc-raghumalayalam, smc-dhyuthi, samyak-malayalam and lohit-malayalam. However, I'm not sure whether the issues with lohit-malayalam is resolved.

The input method configuration is also very easy. The im-chooser application guided me to configure all the required input methods in different languages. There are 4 Input schemes for Malayalam - inscript, itrans, mozhi and swanalekha.

I think Fedora 10 may be the first GNU/Linux distribution with complete Malayalam rendering and input methods.

Other Applications

Fedora 10 comes loaded with GNOME-2.24 which provides many robust desktop applications. The prominent change is the inclusion of Empathy instant messenger which supports gtalk(voice and video), yahoo and several other IM protocols.

I was also curious about the webkit powered Epiphany. But the webkit switch was not complete and the version 2.24 still uses the Gecko engine. Visit here for more details.

This release also has better webcam support through the GNOME application called Cheese.

There is also some menu re-arrangements in the new desktop. The Dictionary application have been moved to the Office section, earlier it was included in the Accessories section.

To summarize, I believe that Fedora 10 is a distribution which is worth waiting for. Here is the schedule. The stable release is planned for November 2008.

സി-ഡാക്കിന്റെ ക്രൂരകൃത്യങ്ങള്‍

2008-09-05T11:46:00.009+05:30

കഴിഞ്ഞ ആഴ്ചയില്‍ ഇന്ത്യയിലെ സ്വതന്ത്രസോഫ്റ്റ്‌വെയര്‍ സമൂഹത്തില്‍ സജീവ ചര്‍ച്ചയ്ക്കു ഹേതുവായത് ഒരു കേന്ദ്ര സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ സ്ഥാപനമാണ്. കമ്പ്യൂട്ടറിലും അനുബന്ധ മേഖലകളിലും ഗവേഷണവും വികസനവും (Research & Development) നടത്തുന്ന സി-ഡാക് ചില സ്വതന്ത്രസോഫ്റ്റ്‌വെയറുകളില്‍ നടത്തുന്ന വിഭജനമാണ്(forking) ചര്‍ച്ചാവിഷയമായത്.

സി-ഡാക്കിന്റെ ചെന്നൈ കേന്ദ്രം ഗ്നോം പണിയിടത്തിനു വേണ്ടി മലയാളം അടക്കമുള്ള ഇന്ത്യന്‍ ഭാഷകളില്‍ തര്‍ജ്ജമ ചെയ്തതാണ് എറ്റവും ഒടുവില്‍ വാര്‍ത്തയായത്. സി-ഡാക് പരിഭാഷപ്പെടുത്തി എന്നു അവകാശപ്പെടുന്ന പല ഫയലുകളും സ്വതന്ത്ര മലയാളം കമ്പ്യൂട്ടിങ് എന്ന കൂട്ടായ്മ മുന്‍പ് ചെയ്തിട്ടുള്ളതാണ്. പല വാക്കുകള്‍ക്കും വിചിത്രമായ തര്‍ജ്ജമയാണ് സി-ഡാക്കിലെ പരിഭാഷകര്‍ കണ്ടെത്തിയിരിക്കുന്നത്. ഏറ്റവും നല്ല ഉദാഹരണം Free Software എന്നതിന്റെ തര്‍ജ്ജമയാണ്. "സൌജന്യ സോഫ്റ്റ്‌വെയര്‍" എന്നാണ് സി-ഡാക്ക് കണ്ടെത്തിയ വാക്ക്. സി-ഡാക്കിന്റെ ഭാഷയോടുള്ള വെല്ലുവിളി ഇവിടെ കാണാം : http://downloads.bosslinux.in/Translated_Po_files/Translated_Po_files_18_languages/malayalam%20ml/

ഇതിനു മുന്‍പ് ഡെബിയന്‍ ഗ്നു/ലിനക്ലിനെ വിഭജിച്ച് ബോസ്‌ ലിനക്സ്, ഓപ്പണ്‍ഓഫീസിനെ വിഭജിച്ച് ഭാരതീയ ഓപ്പണ്‍ഓഫീസ് എന്നിങ്ങനെ രണ്ട് "സൌജന്യ സോഫ്റ്റ്‌വെയര്‍" സി-ഡാക്കിന്റെ ബാംഗ്ളൂര്‍ കേന്ദ്രം പുറത്തിറക്കുകയുണ്ടായി. ഭാരതീയ ഓപ്പണ്‍ഓഫീസിന്റെ Credits and Contributions പേജില്‍ യഥാര്‍ത്ഥ ഓപ്പണ്‍ഓഫീസിന്റെ പരാമര്‍ശം പോലുമില്ല.

മേല്‍പറഞ്ഞ എല്ലാ സംരംഭങ്ങള്‍ക്കും സജീവമായ ഒരു സമൂഹം ഉണ്ടെന്നിരിക്കെ, നാട്ടുകാരുടെ നികുതിപ്പണം ഇത്തരം അര്‍ത്ഥശൂന്യമായ പദ്ധതികളില്‍ നിക്ഷേപിക്കുന്നതിനെ കുറിച്ച് സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ ഗൌരവമായി ആലോചിക്കേണ്ടതാണ്. സി-ഡാക്കിനു സ്വതന്ത്രസോഫ്റ്റ്‌വെയറിനെ പിന്തുണയ്ക്കണമമെന്നു ആത്മാര്‍ത്ഥമായി ആഗ്രഹമുണ്ടെങ്കില്‍ സംരംഭങ്ങളുടെ യഥാര്‍ത്ഥ സമൂഹവുമായി(upstream community) ചേര്‍ന്നു പ്രവര്‍ത്തിക്കേണ്ടതാണ്. അല്ലാതെ, സംരംഭങ്ങളുടെ വിഭജനം ഒരു തരത്തിലും സ്വതന്ത്രസോഫ്റ്റ്‌വെയര്‍ സമൂഹത്തിനു ഗുണം ചെയ്യില്ല.

One Year Old Bug Passed Away

2008-08-08T17:46:00.005+05:30

A popular Malayalam rendering bug, known as the Karkkodakan bug, in GNOME which was active for 1 year, 2 months and 10 days was resolved last Wednesday(6th August 2008). This was the last known bug in GNOME Malayalam rendering. Swathanthra Malayalam Computing(SMC) have come with a solution some months before, but the GNOME community didn't accepted the patch since the solution was not perfect. However, SMC was maintaining patched packages for all the popular distributions, which is no longer needed. Hopefully, the next major release of Fedora and Debian shall have 100% bug free Malayalam rendering in GNOME.

The bug was basically an issue with the Pango package which caused the incorrect rendering. The technical details and discussion can be found here. The bug was reported by Praveen A, and the Swathanthra Malayalam Computing team members actively participated in providing test cases and testing. It was one of the most complicated bugs in Malayalam rendering and several people including Sayamindu, Suresh and Baiju M contributed patches. The submitted patches have several rounds of review and finally the patch submitted by Rahul Bhalero got accepted.

A special thanks to all the people who commented, tested and helped to resolve the bug.

Praveen A
Hiran V
Sayamindu Dasgupta
Ani Peter
Santhosh Thottingal
Rahul Bhalero
Behdad Esfahbod
Baiju M
Suruma
Cibu C J
Mahesh T Pai

This was an achievement of SMC, after the KDE Malayalam Translation campaign.

Even though, the bugs in GNOME are completely solved, there are still bugs reported OpenOffice.org and Qt. The complete status of Malayalam rendering issues are available here

P.S : SMC is organizing a release party at Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala on 9th and 10th August 2008 to celebrate the official inclusion of Malayalam in KDE-4.1. More details are here

Sychronize Gmail Contacts and Thunderbird Address Book

2008-06-25T22:23:00.007+05:30

I was googling to find a solution to an issue with Thunderbird and Dovecot IMAP server and accidentally hit with an interesting Thunderbird extension viz Google Contacts. For a long time, I was searching for a solution to synchronize my Gmail address book and Thunderbird address book. Some of them have uni-directional syncing, while some other need weird configuration and just provided only auto-complete of email address. Eg. the Zindus extension has too much problems in syncing the contacts and Gcaldaemon, which requires Java, was very difficult to configure.

Google Contacts is a very simple add-on which can synchronize between the contacts on Gmail and Thunderbird. The add-on is very easy to install and configure. It's marked as experimental in the Thunderbird website and you may have to login to the website before downloading the extension. I tried this extension in Thunderbird-2.0.0.14 on a Fedora 7 box and so far there were no issues. It's being developed by H Ogi and he has maintained a good knowledge base in his blog. The only disadvantage is that it's not possible to sync the contacts created while Thunderbird is in off-line.

You can download the extension from here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/downloads/file/31555/google_contacts-0.2.60-tb.xpi
(Don't forget to login to the add-on website before downloading. If you don't have an account, create one, it takes less than 5 minutes ).
To install the add-on , open Tools --> Add-ons --> Install and then select the downloaded file. You may have to restart Thunderbird to enable the add-on.

I am sure that Google Contacts is a very useful extension for Gmail and Thunderbird users. Thanks to Google for releasing the Contacts Data API and also to H Ogi who developed this wonderful extension.

Tired of searching for Malayalam Unicode fonts

2008-06-17T16:02:00.006+05:30

Swathanthra Malayalam Computing(SMC) has come up with a list of beautiful Malayalam fonts licensed under GNU GPL (excluding AnjaliOldLipi which is in Public Domain). All the latest versions of Rachana, Meera, Dyuthi, RaghuMalayalam, Suruma and AnjaliOldLipi can be previewed and downloaded from this page.

http://fci.wikia.com/wiki/SMC/Fonts

All the fonts except RaghuMalayalam are traditional fonts. RaghuMalayalam font was designed for the Typewriter script. Meera font is being used by two popular Malayalam dailies, viz Mathrubhumi and Mangalam. Rachana font released by Richard Stallman, is the default font in UbuntuLinux and Debian GNU/Linux. Currently these fonts are maintained and packaged by SMC and available for popular distributions such as Debian and Fedora. Thanks to Santhosh for setting up the page.

P.S: In addition to the fonts, you can also read the beautiful nostalgic poem by O N V Kurup.

Why do we need this font?

2008-06-09T13:07:00.013+05:30

Recently I upgraded my Fedora desktop to the latest Fedora 9(Sulphur). There are several features which are worth mentioning, but I was more concerned about the Malayalam rendering issues. I have been an ardent fan of GNOME for 7 years, but this time also it disappointed me in Malayalam rendering. As an alternative I tried Konqueror(KDE-4.0.4) but still it had problems. Here is the screenshot:

But I was amazed when I removed the lohit-malayalam-fonts-2.2.1-2.fc9 which is the default Malayalam font in Fedora. See the difference here:
Even some of the Karkkodakan problem is resolved in konqueror:
I was wondering why the Fedora community is repeatedly including the buggy fonts as default, when there are better alternatives. I think, for every Malayalam user who uses Fedora 9 desktop, the first command he should learn is :

# yum remove lohit-fonts-malayalam

I think, until the pango issues are resolved, it's better to use Konqueror as the default browser.

P.S: To install Konqueror alone, just run the following command:
# yum install kdebase

Padma extension for Firefox 3

2008-06-03T16:03:00.007+05:30

Padma is a Mozilla Firefox extension for transforming indic between public and proprietary formats. This extension is a great boon for users of Indian languages such as Malayalam, Tamil, Bengali, Kannada, etc.. However, this extension doesn't work in beta version of FireFox 3. Thanks to Mr. Anil Kumar who has hacked this extension to make it work in Firefox 3. Please see this post. The modified extension is tested only in Malayalam websites and works fine.

Update : Padma development team has released an update for padma. You can download it from here : http://downloads.mozdev.org/padma/padma-0.4.13.xpi

പ്രവീണ്‍ സത്പുതെയ്ക്കും രാഹുല്‍ ബലേറോയ്ക്കും അയച്ച മറുപടി

2008-05-02T13:12:00.008+05:30

മലയാളം യൂണിക്കോഡ് ഫോണ്ടുകളായ മീരയും ലോഹിതും തമ്മില്‍ പ്രവീണ്‍ സത്പുതെ ഒരു താരതമ്യം നടത്തുകയുണ്ടായി. എന്നാല്‍ പ്രസ്തുത ബ്ളോഗിലേക്കുള്ള കമന്റുകള്‍ അദ്ദേഹം മോഡറേറ്റ് ചെയ്യാന്‍ തീരുമാനിച്ചു. അതുകൊണ്ട് , അതിനുള്ള മറുപടി ഇവിടെ പോസ്റ്റു ചെയ്യുന്നു. ഇത് മെയ് 1 ന് ഇവിടെ പോസ്റ്റു ചെയ്തതാണ്.

രാഹുല്‍ ഇതൊന്നും കണ്ടില്ലേ ?
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അതോ ഇതൊന്നും "ബഗ്ഗ്" എന്ന വിശേഷണത്തില്‍ ഉള്‍പ്പെടില്ലേ ? മലയാളം റെന്‍ഡറിങ്ങില്‍ നിലവിലുള്ള 2 പ്രധാന പ്രശ്നങ്ങളാണ് ഈ 2 ബഗ്ഗിലും വിവരിച്ചിട്ടുള്ളത്. ലോഹിതിന്റെ പ്രശ്നങ്ങളും ഇതില്‍ ഉള്‍പ്പെട്ടിട്ടുണ്ട്. മലയാളത്തില്‍ ഒരു ചൊല്ലുണ്ട്: "ഉറങ്ങുന്നവരെ ഉണര്‍ത്താന്‍ എളുപ്പമാണ്. എന്നാല്‍ ഉറക്കം നടിക്കുന്നവരെ ഒരിക്കലും ഉണര്‍ത്താന്‍ പറ്റില്ല". അല്ലെങ്കില്‍ റിപ്പോര്‍ട്ട് ചെയ്തുതിന്റെ ഒന്നാം വാര്‍ഷികം ആഘോഷിക്കാന്‍ പോകുന്ന ഈ ബഗ്ഗുകള്‍ക്ക് ഒരു പരിഹാരം ഉണ്ടായിട്ടുകൂടി അതു നടപ്പിലാക്കാത്തത് എന്തു കൊണ്ടാണ് ?

5 കോടി ജനങ്ങള്‍ സംസാരിക്കുന്ന ഭാഷയുടെ ലിപി എങ്ങനെ വേണമെന്ന് തീരുമാനിക്കുന്നത് ഒരിക്കലും മലയാളം ഉപയോഗിച്ചിട്ടില്ലാത്തവര്‍. കഷ്ടം !!!

It's ridiculous that people who don't know or use Malayalam are commenting about Malayalam font and rendering issues. So I purposefully posted this in Malayalam.

Ubuntu 8.04 - Review by a Malayalam User

2008-04-28T15:00:00.027+05:30

I was very much excited when I saw the announcement about the new release of Ubuntu in the mailing list and curious to give it a try. The new release, according to http://www.ubuntu.com is a Long Term Supported(LTS) version for 5 years and has numerous features including virtualization. It took almost 7 hours to download and upgrade the latest Ubuntu 8.04, code named Hardy Heron, in my office desktop. I preferred network upgrade since I don't want to affect my office tasks during upgrade process. The download started on Friday(25th April) and then I have to suspend it for a while and completed on Saturday. (Even though Saturday was a holiday, I couldn't wait till Monday :) ).

The upgrade completed successfully, but the new Ubuntu booted up with the old kernel which was installed with 7.10. I have to modify the grub configuration file in Fedora 8 to include Ubuntu in the grub. So I copied the following lines to the /etc/grub.conf and it was done.

title Ubuntu 8.04, kernel 2.6.24-16-generic
root (hd0,8)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-16-generic root=UUID=9c040612-4dbd-4dd8-9845-9a1050d7cbfe ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-16-generic

I did another reboot to pick the latest kernel with 8.04 and now I am ready with the login screen.

Cool desktop and Applications:
The artistic login screen and the desktop wallpapers are appealing and cool. The panel has a new icon named Search Tracker which allowed to search the desktop files and emails. It's a very user friendly and unlike other GNU/linux searching tools, it was very fast also. The new desktop came with the latest version of OpenOffice-2.4 and Mozilla FireFox-3 (beta 5). Even though , Firefox is still in beta, the new location bar search and unicode URLs are noticeable features. It seems that firefox is much faster than it's predecessors.

The desktop effects have been enabled by default and this gives more dynamic look for the desktop. In earlier versions, the desktop effects tend to consume more system resources, but 8.04 has improved a lot I didn't realised any performance issues. However, if you are upgrading from 7.10, then you probably need to delete all the preference files(files startiing with . (dot)) in your home directory and files related with your username in /tmp.

Disappointment for Malayalam users
I was very keen about the Malayalam support in the new release. Recently the Swathanthra Malayalam Computing(SMC) community have conducted aggressive campaigns for translating the interface and as a result more than 80% of the translation has been completed in GNOME. See the screenshot:

The new Ubuntu is not that much appealing to Malayalam desktop users. However experienced user can tweak the system so that it correctly renders the language. The only noticeable feature is the Firefox's ability to interpret the URLs in unicode. Earlier the unicode URLs seems to be a junk of characters and even techies can't interpret it correctly. I'm sure it's a wonderful feature for non-english users.

The Malayalam support in 8.04 is not installed by default and the first step is to install it from System --> Administration --> Language Support. Ubuntu will then automatically install the packages related to Malayalam including m17n, aspell and Malayalam fonts.

Unfortunately, the Malayalam rendering in 8.04 is very bad and when I opened the Malayalam wikipedia in Firefox most of the sections are unreadable. See the screenshot :
The rendering issues are mainly due to font issues and the Malayalam fonts developed by SMC, which is available for debian, resolved majority of the issues. I have to manually download the fonts from the debian repository and install them using the dpkg command.

# dpkg -i ttf-malayalam-fonts_0.5.2_all.deb

Here is the screenshot with Meera fonts maintained by SMC:

Now the rendering is perfect except this bug.

Since the rendering was OK, my next objective was to set up the Malayalam input in the desktop. Of course this is one of the failure with 8.04. The scim-m17n packages where not installed by default and I have to manually install them using the Synaptic Package Manager. I searched for "scim-m17n" and then applied it. SCIM was then configured using System-->Preferences-->SCIM Input Method The irritating stuff is that I have to start scim manually before typing anything in Malayalam. The following commands helped me to set up SCIM in startup:

sudo -i
touch /etc/X11/Xsession.d/74custom-scim_startup
chmod 646 /etc/X11/Xsession.d/74custom-scim_startup
echo 'export XMODIFIERS="@im=SCIM"' >> /etc/X11/Xsession.d/74custom-scim_startup
echo 'export GTK_IM_MODULE="scim"' >> /etc/X11/Xsession.d/74custom-scim_startup
echo 'export XIM_PROGRAM="scim -d"' >> /etc/X11/Xsession.d/74custom-scim_startup
echo 'export QT_IM_MODULE="scim"' >> /etc/X11/Xsession.d/74custom-scim_startup
chmod 644 /etc/X11/Xsession.d/74custom-scim_startup

Reference : http://www.mrbass.org/linux/ubuntu/scim/

The scim setup was complete, but again there were problems when using ZWJ and ZWNJ. Both these characters were not properly identified and this caused problem with chillus when typing Malayalam. I was using the default inscript tables by scim, and it had some bugs. To correct this I have to install another package named m17n-contrib which also has a transliteration based input method. I searched for "m17n-contrib" in Synaptic Package Manager and applied it and then I have to relogin to effect the changes in scim. Thanks to Santhosh Thottingal who guided me to troubleshoot this issue.

The Dejavu and freefont packages installed in Ubuntu has included Malayalam glyphs but it seems that they have some bugs. This may prevent rendering Malayalam perfectly in OpenOffice Writer and rich text boxes in Firefox. Even though it's not recommended, finally, I have to remove them from the system.

The Padma extension, which is used to read Malayalam news papers in dynamic font, is not supported in Firefox 3beta5. This turned to be another disappointment as a Malayalam user. Now, I may have to search for the Padma patch developed by Sri. Anil Kumar K V, one of my favourite teachers :).

Even though the issues discussed above can be solved easily, these are real obstacles for an average Malayalee desktop user. I hope that the issues may be resolved soon and shortly we may have a complete GNU/Linux desktop.

ഒരടി മുന്നോട്ട്, രണ്ടടി പിന്നോട്ട്

2008-04-04T16:07:00.001+05:30

അടുത്ത കാലം വരെ മലയാളമനോരമയുടെ ഇന്റര്‍നെറ്റ് പതിപ്പിനു ഫയര്‍ഫോക്സിനോട് വല്ലാത്ത ഒരു അടുപ്പമില്ലായ്മ ഉണ്ടായിരുന്നു. ഫോട്ടോ ഗാലറിയില്‍ ആകെ കാണാന്‍ പറ്റുന്നത് ആദ്യത്തെ ചിത്രം മാത്രം. അതിനു ശേഷം എത്ര ക്ളിക്കിയാലും മുന്നോട്ട് പോകില്ലായിരുന്നു. ഈ യൂണിക്കോഡ് യുഗത്തിലും ഡൈനാമിക് ഫോണ്ടുകള്‍ ഉപയോഗിക്കുന്നതു കൊണ്ട് പദ്മ ഫയര്‍ഫോക്സ് എക്സ്റ്റന്‍ഷന്‍ ഉപയോഗിച്ചാണ് മനോരമ കമ്പ്യൂട്ടറില്‍ വായിക്കുന്നത്. അല്ലെങ്കില്‍ മനോരമയുടെ ഫോണ്ട് ഡൌണ്‍ലോഡ് ചെയ്തു ഇന്‍സ്റ്റാള്‍ ചെയ്യണം. എന്നാലും ഗ്നു/ലിനക്സ് + ഫയര്‍ഫോക്സില്‍ ചില വാക്കുകള്‍ വായിക്കാന്‍ ജോല്‍സ്യനെ കാണണം. പരസ്യങ്ങള്‍ കൊണ്ട് കുത്തി നിറച്ച സൈറ്റ് കണ്ണിനു അരോചകമായി തുടങ്ങിയപ്പോള്‍ അവിടത്തെ വായന മതിയാക്കി മാതൃഭൂമി RSS ഫീഡ്സ് ബ്രൌസറില്‍ ചേര്‍ത്തു. മനോരമ ഓണ്‍ലൈനിന്റെ കെട്ടും മട്ടും ആകെ മാറിയെന്ന് ഒരു സുഹൃത്ത് പറഞ്ഞ് അറിഞ്ഞാണ് ഏറെ കാലത്തിനു ശേഷം വീണ്ടും ആ സൈറ്റ് സന്ദര്‍ശിച്ചത്..

പുതിയ ലോഗോയും, നിറങ്ങളും , ലേ-ഔട്ടും ഒരു പുതിയ അനുഭവമായി. AJAX സാങ്കേതിക വിദ്യ വളരെ ഫലപ്രദമായി ഉപയോഗിച്ചിട്ടുണ്ട്. എന്നാല്‍ ഉള്‍പേജുകള്‍ക്ക് കാര്യമായ മാറ്റമൊന്നും സംഭവിച്ചിട്ടില്ല. പരസ്യങ്ങളുടെ അതിപ്രസരം കാരണം പേജ് സ്ക്രോളിങ്ങ് വളരെ ദുഷ്കരമായി. എന്നെ ഏറ്റവും കൂടുതല്‍ നിരാശപ്പെടുത്തിയത് പുതിയ സൈറ്റിനു പദ്മയോടുള്ള പിണക്കമാണ്. AJAX ഉപയോഗിച്ചതു കാരണം പല വിഭാഗങ്ങളിലും യൂണിക്കോട് പരിഭാഷ പ്രവര്‍ത്തിക്കുന്നില്ല. നമ്മളെക്കെണ്ട് മനോരമഫോണ്ട് ഇന്‍സ്റ്റാള്‍ ചെയ്യിച്ചേ അടങ്ങൂ എന്ന വാശിയുള്ളതു പോലെ തോന്നുന്നു. അല്ലെങ്കില്‍ സാങ്കേതിക വിദ്യ ഉപയോഗിക്കുന്നതില്‍ മുന്‍പന്തിയിലാണെന്ന് അവകാശപ്പെടുന്ന മനോരമ ഇപ്പോഴും ഡൈനാമിക് ഫോണ്ടില്‍ തന്നെ നില്‍ക്കുന്നതെന്തിനാണ് ?

ഐ. എസ്. ഒ അംഗീകരിച്ച യൂണിക്കോടും സ്വതന്ത്ര ഫോണ്ടുകളും ഉള്ളപ്പോള്‍ മലയാളം പത്രങ്ങള്‍ ഇപ്പോഴും മാനനീകരിക്കാത്ത ഡൈനാമിക് ഫോണ്ടുകള്‍ ഉപയോഗിക്കുന്നതെന്തിനാണെന്ന് മനസ്സിലാവുന്നില്ല. മാതൃഭൂമി പത്രം, മലയാളം വിക്കിപീഡിയ, പിന്നെ സ്വത ന്ത്ര മലയാളം കമ്പ്യൂട്ടിങ് വെബ്സൈറ്റും മാത്രമാണ് എന്റെ അറിവില്‍ ഇന്‍ര്‍നെറ്റില്‍ മലയാളം യൂണിക്കോഡ് ഉപയോഗിക്കുന്നത്.

CATS Open Source version discontinued

2008-03-21T14:54:00.014+05:30

The companies which I work for, uses Source version of CATS Applicant Tracking System(CATS) for managing the internal recruiting and applicant tracking. Today, I was looking at their website for new software updates and noticed that the Open Source version of CATS is no longer available for download. I checked their news/blog site and found that there is no reference about the discontinuation. As a developer I was disappointed with the company's deal with the Open Source version. There was a vibrant community around CATS which helped in testing and debugging the software and I was also part of them on behalf of my employer. It's really shocking to see that all the reference to user/developer forums, bug tracker systems and the download area are removed from the website and no one can access the knowledge base which was built with the help of developers from all over the world.

The CATS project was claimed to be industry's first Open Source Enterprise Applicant Tracking System. The "About Us" page which appeared during 2007 August in CATS website says:

Industry's First Open Source Applicant Tracking System
Welcome to CATS, the industry's first Applicant Tracking System (ATS), written by recruiters, for recruiters! CATS has a clean user-interface, is easy to use, and has all the bells and whistles of expensive proprietary commercial ATS packages. See for yourself and learn why CATS is being implemented by thousands of Human Resource (HR) professionals, recruiters, staffing and placement agencies around the world.

Quoted with the help of http://archive.org

CATS is being developed by Cognizo Technologies with the help of an active community moderated by the same company itself. Until version 0.9.1 CATS was available for free download under the terms of CATS Public License Version 1.1a (a modified version of Mozilla Public License Version 1.1). CATS released the first version of the Applicant Tracking System about 2 years back and acclaimed good feedback due to the intuitive interface and simple application process. CATS can be installed on a server which supports PHP and MySQL and can be used on any standard web browser.

Initially the project was developer-friendly and offered Subversion repository access to the community developers. But even after 2 years, the company didn't provided the Subversion access. After discontinuation, the company removed all the hyper links to the forums and bug tracker systems from the website. However I was able to access the bugs through these direct URLs FS#113 and FS#108 (I don' think that these URL will be there for a long period).

From the user perspective, there won't be any impact on the company's move, because they still offer the free hosted version of the software. There are also additional features which can be utilized if the users subscribe to the paid plans. I don't see any issues in providing such a service. But denying access to developers who contributed to the project is not graceful from the perspective of a Free Software enthusiast. May be the project haven't accepted any code from the developers outside the company. But I'm sure that there are people, like me, who helped in testing, reporting bugs and feature request.

Cognizo used the buzzword Open Source to publicize their product and once they got a stable project, they simply locked the "Open" Source project. Who knows whether Open Source projects like OrangeHRM KnowledgeTree , or VtigerCRM may follow the same path and close the source code. However I hope that it won't happen and soon there will be a better replacement for CATS.

P.S: The opinions expressed in this article are not of my employers and doesn't have any relation with Ascella Technologies and Ejyothi Services (I work for them).

My checklist for Fedora desktop

2008-01-04T17:48:00.003+05:30

I have been using GNU/Linux since 2001, and experimented various versions of RedHat Linux and Fedora and currently using Fedora 8. Whenever I upgrade( or sometimes do a fresh install) it's very difficult to setup the commonly used applications, so I have compiled a list of applications in a text file in my desktop. I thought that this would be helpful for others also, so I added some brief notes.

1. Xine - Multimedia player:
xine has been my favourite multimedia player for several years. Unfortunately due to legal issues xine is not included in the Fedora repository but it is available in the Freshrpms fedora repository. The Freshrpms also contains several other add-ons for Fedora. It's quite easy to setup the yum to access Freshrpms repository, just run the following command from a terminal:

rpm -ivh http://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/fedora/linux/8/freshrpms-release/freshrpms-release-1.1-1.fc.noarch.rpm

Once the repo is enabled the following command can be used to install xine.
# yum install xine

2. xmms-mp3 - MP3 plugin for xmms:
XMMS is one of the simplest audio player available for GNU/Linux. The XMMS package should be installed prior to xmms-mp3. This apckage is available in freshrpms repo. I used the following command to install xmms and it's plugin.
# yum install xmms xmms-mp3

3. dvdrip - DVD ripping utility
This package is also available in freshrpms. The following command will install dvdrip.

# yum install dvdrip

4. gstreamer-plugins-ugly - Proprietary codecs for gstreamer
Totem and other native gnome media players doesn't play the media files enoded in proprieatary formats. gstreamer-plugins-ugly will help you to overcome this limitation.

# yum install gstreamer-plugins-ugly

5. rar and unrar - compression utility
Occassionaly some of my friends sent files compressed using the M$ Windows compression utility. Freshrpms has the rar package which can be used to compress and decompress files in rar format.

# yum install rar unrar

6. libquicktime - Library for reading and writing QuickTime files
The libquicktime package is necessary for reading quicktime files(*.mov) in GNU/Linux. This package is also provided by Freshrpms.

# yum install libquicktime

7. Flash Player:
Even though I'm not a big fan of flash movies, occasionally I have to visit websites that supports flash movies. The adobe website provides a yum repository of the flash plugins so that you can view flash movies in your web browser.

Install the adobe-release package using the following command:
rpm -ivh http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm

Now you can install flashplayer using the following command:
# yum install flash-plugin

8. Java:
Java can be downloaded from java official website. I prefer to install sun java in /opt since Fedora already has a java version (icedtea).

9. Malayalam support:
Using Malayalam in my computer was my dream and it seems that it's almost perfect now. Most of theissues are resolved but I have to do some kind of tweaking to read and write Malayalam in Fedora. I have to install the latest updates of pango and libicu packages from the smc repository. (The packages in this repository will soon be available in the official fedora repository also). Pango is the rendering engine for GNOME and libicu is the rendering engine for OpenOffice.org
Download the smc repo file from here and copy it to /etc/yum.repos.d/.
After setting up the repository update the pango and libicu packages using the following command:

# yum update libicu pango

The lohit-malayalam fonts distributed with Fedora is buggy and you have to install the Mal0tf or Rachana_g02(traditional) fonts to render malayalam properly. You can download these fonts from here . The installation instructions can be found in my previous post.

10. Firefox Padma
There has been issues in reading Malayalam websites (www.manoramaonline.com, www.deepika.com etc ..) which uses the dynamic fonts. The Firefox community has come up with an add-on called Padma, which can be used to convert the dynamic fonts to unicode fonts so that they can be read correctly. To install Padma in your firefox, open the url https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/873 in Firefox and click the "Install Now" button.

11. K3B
Even though my favourite desktop environment is GNOME, my all time favourite in KDE is K3B, which is the superior CD/DVD burning software in GNU/Linux. K3B is available in the official Fedora repository and it can be installed using yum.

These are just the preliminary list. I will keep on adding to this whenever I get time.

Experimenting with Fedora 8

2007-11-12T12:41:00.005+05:30

The Fedora Community released the latest version of Fedora on Thursday, 8th November 2007. The new Fedora 8 came with numerous enhancements and features and I was thrilled to start experimenting the new distro. Since I don't want to hinder my work at the office, I tried to upgrade my desktop using YUM. The upgrade instructions can be found here : YumUpgradeFaq

The upgrade process was smooth, except it took too much time, because of slow Internet connection. The process took place in one of the text console, and I was able to work on the desktop without any problem. The process took about 6 hours and then I rebooted the machine.
The desktop graphics looks very cool and nice. But there are couple of issues that I had to came across with the new desktop. Some of them are listed below:

1. Unable to set the Screen Resolution
But I was struck with the screen resolution in the newly upgraded machine. I tried to set the resolution to 1024x768, but each time I login, the screen resolution immediately changed to 800x600 after a while. I had a Intel Original Motherboard and /etc/sysconfig/hwconf said that the Graphical Controller is "Intel Corporation 82915G/GV/910GL Integrated Graphics Controller".

I tried to upgrade the kernel and different options in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. But all the experiments failed. Finally, with the help of the guys from #fedora@freenode.net I tried to install 915resolution. After installing 915resolution using YUM, I have to reconfigure the display and now the screen resolution issue is solved. Thanks to the guys at #fedora.

Info: The Summary in the 915resolution rpm package says the reason:

Intel video BIOS hack to support certain resolutions.

915resolution is a tool to modify the video BIOS of the 800 and 900 series Intel graphics chipsets. This includes the 845G, 855G, and 865G chipsets, as well as 915G, 915GM, and 945G chipsets. This modification is necessary to allow the display of certain graphics resolutions for an Xorg or XFree86 graphics server.

915resolution's modifications of the BIOS are transient. There is no risk of permanent modification of the BIOS. This also means that 915resolution must be run every time the computer boots inorder for it's changes to take effect.

915resolution is derived from the tool 855resolution. However, the code differs substantially. 915resolution's code base is much simpler. 915resolution also allows the modification of bits per pixel.

2. Too Small desktop Fonts in GNOME-2.20
Fedora 8 uses GNOME-2.20 and I was faced with unusual(small) size of the fonts in the desktop and Google fetched me to the fedoraforums.org. The small fonts issue can be resolved by setting the default font dpi to 96 (This value can be found at /etc/X11/Xresources, the Xft.dpi: 96). The exact reason why this happens in GNOME is still unknown to me. May be I have to dig the gnome bugzilla.

Apart from the font issue, the GNOME desktop looks extraordinary, one of the best experience ever had, since I started using it on 2001.

3. Reading and Typing Malayalam
I was very much disappointed when I accessed the Malayalam Wikipedia page in Firefox. In Fedora 7, there were some issues, but in Fedora 8 it was really worse. The default Malayalam font used in Fedora 8 was lohit-malayalam and I removed it and installed Rachana-g02, but it didn't helped. This was a known bug(#242016) in lohit-malayalam and pango in Fedora 7 and 8, and I have added some screenshots for a comparison of the issues.

With guidance from the Swathanthra Malayalam Computing(SMC) community I tried the Suruma patch. Since there was no Suruma patch for Pango-1.18, I tried patch4pango-1.16.4.

Installing Suruma was very easy, I need to just run the install script and the installation wizard guided me to complete the operation. Then I installed the Rachana-g02 fonts which render traditional Malayalam glyphs.

To install Rachana fonts, download the fonts from here
Copy the fonts files(*.ttf) to /usr/share/fonts/malayalam-sm/
Change to /usr/share/fonts/malayalam-sm and run the following commands

# cd /usr/share/fonts/malayalam-sm
# mkfontscale
# mkfontsdir
# chkfontpath -a /usr/share/fonts/malayalam-sm
# fc-cache

Open your Mozilla Firefox and access http://ml.wikipedia.org to check whether the fonts are correctly displayed.

In order to type Malayalam, you should first set the Input Method:
To chose the Input method go to System --> Preferences -->Personal --> Input Method.

Enable SCIM and now click the Input Method Preference :

In the Global Setup you can configure the trigger key, which is CTRL+SPACE by default. In the IMEngine menu, you have to chose which languages you need support. You can also chose transliteration or the inscript method. Apply all the changes and re-login to your desktop. If everything is OK, then you will be able to read and type Malayalam in your desktop.

Hello World

2007-08-10T12:51:00.000+05:30

I am a Free Software enthusiast working as R&D Manager in one of the growing organizations in Kerala. I am excited to experiment and evaluate Free, Libre and Open Source Software(FLOSS). I would like to share my experiences with FLOSS in this blog.