/DEV/ZERO

With release of Lucid Beta it was time to upgrade my MacBook as well. However the cdrom on my Mac is non functional. I was stuck with using the live usb stick. But unfortunately MacTel EFI firmware has a poor support for booting from USB sticks. There is long list of web pages on net that will tell you to try it once and give up if it doesn't work. The USB stick created with Ubuntu's live image creator did not work at all. It keeps giving message "BOOT ERROR" after the reFIT tries to load the disk.

But all hope is not lost. After a loooooonnnnnng search and countless number of permutations finally I found a solutions. The trick is to make the live USB stick with no partitions. By formatting your USB stick to VFAT directly without creating any partitions on it apple's firmware will be able to boot from it.

However if you format your disk directly with VFAT, the usb disk creator from Ubuntu refuses to use this disk as a target. Asking the utility to format it, will result in the /dev/sdb1 partition being created again. So you will have to create the live image manually. But it does work fine in the end. Read on for full howto.

 This is great. Sure shows how far we have come in the maturity race.

I am running Lucid Alpha3 on top of custom compile 2.6.33-rcX (x because i have my own v4l-dvb patches and few other btrfs stuff integrated in the tree).

And some 7-8 years back it would have meant the system no longer runs most of my apps.

But look its performing so well and it freaking boots under 20 sec on my laptop. The milestone achieved only after some ummm 8 years when i first did a linux from scratch build for my desktop.

Go ubuntu/debian/gnu/linux  :D

 Widgets on desktops (large or small) don't make sense. I have reached this conclusion after a long deliberation. But it just struck me i had already concluded this about ten years ago when i played with Windows Active desktop. What a tragedy.

Ever had a "but didn't i say no to you already?" moment?

 Skype is great, even if its closed source. It just works even behind proxies and firewalls :o

But whats more awesome is kopete skype wrapper, Its works perfectly fine even for video calls. Me likes it 

It even takes care of starting and stopping skype client. I would have liked an open skype protocol instead but since thats not gonna happen this thing atleast makes life a little easier.

sudo apt-get install touchfreeze

Disable annoying rehashing of your typed text... And world will make sense again.

Any reason why this isn't a default on laptops with touchpads?

Q: When will you know its finally a time to start looking ahead for the year of linux desktop?

A: When you find a proper linux nay KDE4 based computer being sold at local super market.

Yesterday i went for weekly grocery shopping in the local super market "Big Bazzar". At the entrance i was quickly annoyed by a salesman offering some pamphlet about a computer, whom i quickly gave a very frustrated look and walked passed him completely ignoring his product. But while doing this i had forgotten to pick up my shopping cart, and hence i turned around again. Suddenly something in the corner of the eye caught my attention. "Hey something usually only seen in my bedroom has appeared in the Big Bazzar"  i remember thinking.

And yes there it was, a shiny black KDE4.1 start menu on one of the monitors. The sales man was actually trying to sell a product by kompkin.com which is making education oriented PC's for kids, built on top of KDE desktop. How great was that? a pune local supermarket selling KDE!!! and not just for the sake of getting replaced by Windoze later. It was fully loaded, with a cool-dock at the top and kicker, oops a plasma panel at the bottom. everything from kde-edu to kstars to wikipedia preloaded. 

www.kompkin.com

My web 2.0 experiments have failed miserably.

Now i can finaly relax and let alone all hope to resurrect it.

All things must end.... And so does teamgit develeopement.

Main reasons for the record,

1. Lack of time

2. Availibity of alternatives

and last but most importantly,

3. it does what i need it to do and without further external interest/contributions the extra overhead of actively maintatining it does not make sense.

4. ???

5. profit :D

Unfortunately as of now my future in software industry as a professional looks bleak and i don't see any need for teamgit in not so distant future.

The git-hub project will live obviously and current devslashzero.com/teamgit section will be kept alive till further maintainance is required. (Although link from main is removed).

I will continue using teamgit as i haven't yet found equally convineint commit tool for git.If at all required (and feasible) i will keep making it work on latest ubuntu systems,( but no promises).

Thanks to all who showed interest and especially to "markus" who sent in a lot of patches to make rebase actually work.... i use it all the time these days.

To sum it up all... teamgit was one of the most usefull things i did in life (if nothing atleast it was useful to me).

I remember about ten years ago when in my late teens and early twenties i was addicted (still am) to internet. Could not be at ease when our connectivity would go down. Dialup connectivity that too shell account based.

My father used to say the govt. should ensure roti, kapda, makan aur bandwidth.......

And now his words have come to reality...... atleast in finland, the land of the gods (torvalds).

Finland just declared 1MBps bandwidth as a constitutional right to its citizens.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10374831-2.html

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/10/14/2229231/1Mb-Broadband-Access-Becomes-Legal-Right-In-Finland

I just can't help but keep comming back to the same advise

DONT PANIC

Can't believe how SciFi becomes reality, I believe it use to take generations, now it all happens in a single life time....

http://www.thewikireader.com/index.html

Well DONT PANIC