Author: Latish

Recently I had a experience where in i had to reverse the migration of Linux to Windows. Although I was not really happy doing it , the job needed to be done. I needed information which was present in the Linux system and needed to be copied to the Windows system. The difficult part used to be that moment when i used to realize that the info needed by me was present in the ext3 file system which needed a reboot in to the Linux System.
But as they “Necessity is the mother of Invention”..I googled for something which would allow me to read the ext3 file system in Windows and within minutes i was using a tool called LinuxReader by DiskInternals. The program has a Windows Explorer like interface and does its job pretty well. I was able to access all my files and could save into the Windows file system.

A good tool for those dual booting between Windows and Linux and looking to share information between the 2 systems.

The only disadvantage is that this tool can only read ext2/ext3 file systems and will be of no use if u r file system is different.

U have installed u r favorite Linux Distribution and now r ready to rock. The next thing required would be something which can play your precious music collection. In the Windows world Winamp was the good old music player. The good news is that there’s a similar application available called XMMS. It was written to be a clone of Winamp. It looks similar , it can even use Winamp skins, so that u feel at home when using it.
Here’s a screen shot. Can u tell the difference ????

I keep on hearing many success stories of Windows to Linux migration . I feel some major credit should go to OpenOffice for making these migrations successful (atleast for non-technical users) .

Any Office package mainly consists of a Word processor, a Spreadsheet software and most probably a Presentation software. There are many packages available in Linux which can be called as an Office package. I personally feel OpenOffice is the best one can get in the Linux world, although there are many who hate OpenOffice for being bloated and terribly slow. I wouldn’t oppose this argument coz these are true to a certain extent but its advantages outweigh its disadvantages.

The official site is at http://www.openoffice.org

At last what matters is personal taste…and the best of the lot can only be found by experimenting.

I have been using Gnome 2.14 with Fedora core 5 for some time but recently felt the need to edit menus. At that point I realized that a simple menu editor was missing for Gnome. I tired to look in the menus but could find nothing. At last i googled for the info and found some piece of info which made me laugh at myself. The editor was sitting right in front of me but i couldn’t notice it. Actually it was not fully my fault . The editor is only accessible if u ‘Right Click’ on the Feodra Logo sitting usually on the top left corner of u r screen (unless u have changed it) . The logo can be seen in the following image.

The Menu editor looks as follows

This is a basic Menu editor but is sufficient for the job most of the times.

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program.It is a software similar to Photoshop and has many features which makes it a strong competitor.
Many people and even those in the world of graphic designing have not heard about these tool. This tool is freely available on all major Linux distributions and other operating systems such as Windows. So u might already be having it on u r system.

The official website is at http://www.gimp.org/

I found a tutorial while googling for some gimp help at http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/gimp/

Will post it here as i find some more….

Meanwhile Happy Gimping!!!!

In my previous post I had written about IE specific websites. Though u may have started using Linux and are really loving u r Firefox browser there are many more who use Windows and Internet Explorer on their systems and such users are the dominant force. Many web developers therefore create IE specific websites and don’t care about the rest non IE users.

This doesn’t mean that u have to throw away u r Linux and go for Windows where IE is available. ies4linux comes to the rescue. It uses WINE and runs IE on top of it. The application comes with a script which does all the job right from downloading the required dlls to installation . No extra configuration needed.

Till the time IE specific websites are created software such as ies4linux would be saving non Windows users from considerable pain.

The only thing almost all non windows users may miss from time to time is Internet Explorer on their systems. Though with Firefox now on the rise this need has gone to a drastically low level but there are some instances when u need IE coz the website which u r visiting may provide some service which simply refuses to work on non IE browsers.

I have found 2 categories where IE is forced on u. One being the use of ActiveX controls on the webpage which simply cannot work on non Windows OS such as Linux. I hope all such service providers provide a desktop version for everybody for their respective OS.

The other category of websites come under lame coder websites who prefer to use VBScript in their webpages instead of Javascript . I simply cannot understand their logic behind this. Just because the developer knows only VBScript is really a pathetic excuse for any body to give. Even Microsoft the inventor of VBScript themselves don’t use Vbscript everywhere and instead use Javascript in many places.

Infact such websites reduce their coverage (in this case non Windows users) and they are the ones to lose finally.

Sorry to disappoint a lot of my friends but WINE in this case is simply another piece of software present in Linux.

The official definition states the following “Wine Is Not a (CPU) Emulator.”

Wine just provides the windows API for u r windows software to run under Linux , It comes as a blessing when u r stuck with the Windows only version of u r favorite software in Linux.

Head on to WINE home at http://www.winehq.org/ for all the info u would ever need about it.

Although its a good attempt but i must say that its still not perfect . Since it tries to emulate Windows API, where there are many undocumented features there are times when not all u r favorite software may run under it as it may be using those undocumented features.

During such times its best to pray that there exists a similar or better version or clone of the software u are suck with. A little bit of Googling helps in almost all such cases though.

Many recent distributions come with the latest stable version of WINE and are also configured to execute Windows executable’s with WINE.

So just click and see u r Windows program’s come alive in Linux with some WINE 🙂 .

This is a common scenario….u have installed Linux. u r really excited about it and immediately start checking out the software, games and other cool things already present in the package. After a certain amount of time (which is directly proportional to the level of u r excitement) u realise that u r not able to find u r games , pictures, documents etc which was present on u r Windows system. You start looking for the panic button.

Relax! U r data is most probably safe , depending upon which options u chose on the partition screen during install time.

For accessing other filesystems u need to “mount” that filesystem in Linux.

Windows uses 2 types of file systems FAT32 and NTFS . If ur Windows data is on a FAT32 partition u needn’t worry much as almost all of the popular Linux distributions have FAT32 support enabled. If u Windows system uses NTFS as its file system then a little bit of extra work is needed.

Read the following info on http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/mounting.html for some information regarding mounting.

For those with NTFS system ,head on to http://www.linux-ntfs.org/and download the required packages for u r system.

Follow the documentation and if everything goes well , u will be having access to u r documents,pictures etc in Linux also.

Linux is known to be as a programmer’s OS i.e that the OS had been built by programmers for programmers. It is really a good system to learn programming on. The OS design is really neat and best of all its open. Everything is well documented . You know how and why a particular thing works and that’s what every programmer wants , coz programmers are inquistive by nature.

The best thing i like about is everything is file based. What this means is that almost everything on the OS is configurable by changing the right settings. If u know what exactly u are doing u can write u r own shell script for small tasks or write a full fledged program in u r favorite language to perform the function u need instead of depending on some external tools which will some other bells and whistles attached to it.

I have been a Visual basic programmer myself and i must say that i enjoy programming in Linux much greater than in Windows.

Its not necessary for u to be C or a C++ programmer to program under Linux. C or C++ is best suited for system level programming. There are lot of applications which can be written in a language such as Java. Many also prefer Python which is also a popular OO language.

So don’t worry, be Happy….Start Programming under Linux.