My Gadgets (powered by Linux only)

Linux is everywhere. That’s easy to say but I decided to find out what all I have. So given above is the shot of all the Linux powered devices that I have. Also, they are all the wifi devices that I have. I as not sure if my canon sx30 is running on Linux hence not including in the list.

My Linux gadgets

In the order of size they are .

• Samsung Laptop:

Bought about 4 months ago. Bought for study purpose but have not done anything till date. Also wanted some thing lighter and this is not. Couldn't get something in 11 to 13” range. Some new stuff is now launched but too late for me now. Came with FreeDOS. Currently running Ubuntu 11.11. It has seen Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSuse till now and might get to run OpenBSD in some time. Have to get some time for that. Don't like the new Widget-y look of the new Oss though.

• HP touch-pad 32GB:

Most recent purchase from Amazon.com. The shipper did not account for import tax and had to visit the local customs office for this. Apart from this I have no complaint regarding this. Comes with WebOS which is a nice OS. Also installed Cyanogen Mod Alpha 2 on Touchpad which runs nicely. very good performance for an alpha release of Android. But I have decided to stick to WebOS. Its nice has overclock support to 1.5Ghz and has the games that run nicely. I play bug life, Asphalt6, NFS hot pursuit, etc on this and they run great.

Recommended for everyone if they can get it cheaply. 20k Android 10" tablet. Others are nearly 30k I am lovin this one

• Amazon Kindle:

Great single purpose device for reading books. Got it last year for preparing/studying for the job change. Not very useful for the technical .pdf format books that I wanted to read. but should be great for the pocket sized books that are available for casual reading. I think it should always be bought with the case, kindle is a bit difficult to hold without it. Also, it plays mp3 file and now Amazon has added Audible audiobook support as well. Am a big fan of the Audiobooks now. but most of my time is spent listening to podcasts and not getting the time now.

• Samsung Galaxy S II (SGS2 9100) :

After the LG Optimus one I wanted a bigger screen and this was the best handset a few months ago and surprisingly it still is. Wonderful screen, Fast processor So much memory. Optimus one has 200MB of app memory and it was a struggle to have apps and worry about app2sd and all that. This has 2GB of app memory and I have not even used 1 GB of it. Choice is a wonderful predicament. The newer handsets are just about equaling this one and it is a testament to the work of Samsung that even after nearly a year of launch the is is still the best phone. Hopefully it'll get the the ICS soon.

• LG Optimus One:

Got this last year along with my car for the interviews. Having a car would increase my area of jobs to target and with no knowledge of Bangalore roads I needed maps. So this was my navigation device. A good handset which gave me no problems. Still working and is now my moms gaming device where she plays angry birds rio all the time. Coming from the normal feature phone this was a big change for me. Changing from nokia was also a big decision but they did not have any good handsets then. Soon realized that the smart phone needs a big screen for the maps and browsing. The medium sized screen was becoming a problem. 

 That's it for now.  TC and Enjoy life.
PS. Thanks to my friend blogger who inspired me to take up blogging again.

Additional Memory: RAM and Hard Disk

I recently succumbed to some online temptation and did some IT shopping buying RAM and other stuff for my computer. I brought them from www.computerwarehousepricelist.com and it was delivered to home. I got  extension cable for USB, Sound and LAN, Belkin Gold Series 8-Socket Surge Protector, 512 MB of SDRAM for my old machine at home. Shouldn't ignore it just because of this new machine  :)

I also brought Seagate Goflex Desk 2 TB  external disk drive to move my media collection from my main machine. I got this one from Ebay for 6500. I got the USB2 interface but it is possible to just purchase the FreeAgent® GoFlex Desk Desktop Adapter Kit USB 3.0 separately and upgrade tfrom 2 to 3 which I believe is very fast and near native. I asked the Ebay retailer and according to him the prices of USB 3 Goflex Desk kit should drop by year end.

Nice useful device to have and after I move the resident stuff to it and free up space I'll be able to start with fetching new data. I was struggling with disk space problem since some time and HDD and RAM solves my current problems and also provide a bit of future provisioning. No more thinking or clearing other stuff before downloading new one. Also useful when I visit my hometown.

Further Details about RAM : 

Corsair TWIN2X4096-6400C5C 5-5-5-18 dual channel RAM sticks. : Now my machine has a total of 6 GB of RAM running. Other is Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400.

Since I run a custom crosshair BIOS version 1304 V2 made by GinieMaster and published at computerbase for which the creator has given a warning that 4 RAM sticks might not work, I bought 4 GB in case the previous 2 stopped working.

I connected the new ones and started the machine. It started. Cool!

I added the old ones too and was not very optimistic about the machine starting. It started !!! Great! :)

The machine booted up and I checked Task Manager, System Properties, RAM status widget and other places it shows the RAM amount and speed. I was happy to see all 6 GB reported and working. Now what? 

I didn't notice anything different. And then I felt that Firefox was not grinding to a halt after consuming > 1 GB of RAM. OK great, That was just the reason I bought the RAM for. 

I Happy. 

[My Windows Experience Index for memory is 7.1 now.]

Windows 7 at office

I recently got a new machine at office. I have Windows 7 loaded on it now. It is an Acer Emachine 1210 with 19" monitor.

That model originally had Vista but now they provide it loaded with windows 7 also. I was waiting for this to happen since I did not want to work on Vista. I mean, Vista is ok, I have used it at home for more than a year but at office I do not want to use my time on solving Software issues and learning the difficult method to do something which was easy in Windows XP. Furthermore the Vista installation did not have any drivers installed. The display was weird with the wide-screen monitor trying to display standard 4:3 resolution screen. I had to install the drivers for graphics, monitor, and even the mouse driver to be able to use it for a week.

The story goes like this. The support guys tried to upgrade the OS for that machine to Win7 from Vista(Upgrade is a misnomer here since there were going to replace it with blank copy of a new installation requiring all software to be reinstalled) but for some reason the machine refused to listen to him and kept rebooting in Vista.Then complete machine was replaced and he brought another machine which had Win7 already on it. That was disappointing since I wanted to see how they upgrade to Win7.

So my emachine now has Win7. It was disappointing to see that Aero was not working and hence I was not able to change the color of the task-bar. It looks so irritating that I had to change the theme to Windows classic to be able to tolerate it. It seem there is some problem with the rating system and it crashes, so the machine is not able to rate itself and turn ON the more advanced feature like Aero.

Apart from that it is better than Vista in speed and smoothness. I was not able to install Cisco VPN client on it. I have to figure out how to do it since it is very important for my work. Right now I also have another machine so it is not much of a problem.

All in all it is OK. Provides good functionality. Uses less memory and the hibernate function actually works this time around for me to resume all my open windows the next day directly. And this means that I can switch off the machine and save some power to do something good for the mother earth.

Solved: Problems installing VirtualBox 2.2.2 over 2.2.0

I use VirtualBox on Windows host with Linux running as guest. Usually it is Ubuntu, Fedora or both. I was running VirtualBox version 2.2.0 and tried to install the latest version 2.2.2 (as of 05/03/2009 ). It has a fix for the clipboard problem in which copy paste operation stopped working.
When I tried to install the new version of VirtualBox it would ask me all the questions and permissions and just about when it should be finishing the install, it rolled back the install process. Also uninstalling of the VirtualBox 2.2.0 failed with the same style. Rollback at the last step.

I searched around and they said some workarounds to install the new version.

• Search in the c:\windows\inf folder and delete .inf files which refer to the VirtualBox. (Didn't like the idea of deleting files manually)
•  There was a registry copy paste from LOCAL_USER to LOCAL_MACHINE. (The paste part did not work for me. regedit refused to paste the .reg file)

Step followed by me as follows:

1. I tried to repair the setup by running the old setup file and selecting the repair option.
2. Then I disabled all the network interfaces of the VMs and tried to remove the VirtualBox from the old setup. Surprisingly it worked. Maybe the new Host Only networking added recently has been the problem.
3. Then I rebooted the machine just to be safe.
4. Started the install of the 2.2.2 version and it successfully finished.

I don't think the first step did any good. Had tried it earlier on another machine and nothing happened. Step 2-4 are what it seem is the solution.

Currently I'm running the Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope as VM.
The Visual Effect for Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope is enabled in VirtualBox and the 3d accelaration seems to be working better now. It did not work on 2.2.0 and earlier.

Windows 7 : Windows Experience Index score -> 5.5

I had posted my WEI score for Vista previously here and now that the new version of windows is available(Windows 7 beta) I thought I should do that for this one also.

So. I got the score of 5.5 in Windows 7. The sub scores are as follows

Processor 6.3
Memory(RAM) 5.5
Graphics 7.9
Gaming graphics 6.0
Primary Hard Disk5.9

This is with the AMD 6000+ Processor running at an overclocked speed 3300Mhz.

The score for my previous HDD (WD 250 GB PATA  ) was 5.3. This is my relatively new HDD Seagate 500 GB(32 MB cache) so the score for Hard disk has jumped a little.

Now an Interesting thing with the score is that some scores have moved up even though the hardware is the same. I mean I have not changed my graphics card, processor RAM etc. But the scores are different this time. Maybe the 64 bit OS makes some difference

My previous scores were 5.6, 5.9, 5.9, 5.9, and 5.3 respectively for Vista. The scores for Vista were capped at 5.9 so its understandable why the score graphics increased. But my Memory score has actually gone down and processor score has moved up. Very Interesting.

Since the WEI Base score is the least score out of the component scores, I got the Windows 7 base score of 5.5.
My plan to have a Hard disk setup in RAID 0 has still not materialized. Now I think Its better to have a single fast disk rather than couple of  disk in RAID. Maybe my troubles with partition disappearing due to infighting between Vista and Windows 7 has something to do about my new belief. The WD veloci-raptor might be something I'd like to try out.


Also I have managed to attach three 1200 mm fans for cooling and circulating air in my cabinet now and the temperature is in control. I've got 2 intake and 1 exhaust fans.
The motherboard temperature keeps exceeding the values set by ProbeII monitoring software. Maybe my change of CPU heat sink-Fan has left little airflow over the Crosshair motherboard chip set.

 The video driver is an beta provided by nvidia and available by Windows update and the other drivers are as provided by Windows 7 default. Hopefully these scores will go up when Windows 7 hits the stands and vendors provide optimized drivers for the new OS.

My upgrade wish list would be additional RAM, a new fast veloci-raptor HDD, and wireless kbd-mouse.

Cheers
Kunal