After a long break

Its been more than an year since I have blogged on something. Life has changed a lot in the last year. So far it has been the most eventful year in my career. It is an year in which I had put an end to my life as a techie and started a new one as business man. Yes, I always felt that "Money is the mother of all sins" :).

    Living in Saudi Arabia is one among the worst things that you could do to make money. As Pinky's dad use to tell "It is an open jail". But yes, you make big money here. I always feel sorry for pinky for all the suffering she takes to be with me.

   Time to catchup with some Linux, Else I may loose it all..

Up and running on Fedora14

In suzie's words .. "bashmonk is a bleeding edge user of Fedora".. Yup! I proved it again. I got Fedora 14 on my TP before anyone else in IBM :) India Labs..

The new bundle from Heaven has arrived

Yup! she is finally there. The lil one.. :). After the long wait of 9 months she has made her way to our life. Our new gift from God.. She has made our home to grow by ~1.5 fts and 3.2 Kgs.

Test from Blogilo

Yup !! It works!!

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Linux Process States

The Linux kernel stores the list of processes in a circular doubly linked list of structures task_struct, called the task list. The process descriptor (task_struct) contains all the information about a specific process.Each task_struct structure has a state enry which describes the current state of the process. At any time on a Linux machine the processes running on it are in exactly one of five different states. The struct task_struct and the five states are defined in linux/sched.h.

TASK_RUNNING - runnable; The task is either running or ready to run and waiting in the runqueue.

TASK_INTERRUPTIBLE - sleeping or blocked; In this state the process is waiting for some event to complete. When it completes, the kernel puts back the process to the runqueue and make it runnable by changing the state to TASK_RUNNING. The process can also respond to a signal in this state.

TASK_UNINTERRUPTIBLE - Uninterrupted sleep; This is exactly the same state as TASK_INTERRUPTIBLE but it cannot be interrupted by any signals to make it runnable. This happens typically with the IO operation. This is used when the process must wait without interruption or when the event is expected to occur quite quickly like an IO operation. They are unkillable as the task will not respond to signals(SIGKILL wont work). These are the D state process that you will find with the ps command. Its not advised to attempt a kill on this process (by killing the parent), as the task may be in the middle of some important operation and may be holding some resources.

TASK_ZOMBIE - Zombie; A special case when the task has completed but its parent has not yet reaped it, by issuing a wait4() system call. A zombie process just occupies an entry in the process table. This entry exists because in case the parent wants to access it, the descriptor should be available. When the parent calls wait4() a zombie disappears.

TASK_STOPPED - All is well :) and is stopped; The task is not running and will not be scheduled.May be killed or caught by other signals.

Google Chrome on Fedora

Yes, Now its available on Linux. The much waited Google Chrome on Linux. Its still an unstable version available on Linux, but is worth a try.


Create a file /etc/yum.repos.d/google-chrome.repo with the contents below

[google-chrome]
name=google-chrome
baseurl=http://dl.google.com/linux/rpm/stable/i386
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0

Install chrome

yum install google-chrome

Enjoy

I'm There with FC12 (Fedora Core 12) and IBM desktop apps :)

Well it was a journey of a Linux freak . I lost the data in my entire TP. Thank heavens, I had my backup done in my USB HDD.

It all started up with FC12 The installation went fine, I didn't take a chance with putting ext4 file system on /boot partition as it was not working on FC11. The installation went fine and I got the IBM layer installed on it. Thanks to Grant Williamson for making appropriate packages available in the IBM yum repo. He was too good with his support. I was happy except that the mouse pointer was slow after the installation of the IBM layer. I tuned it through the Gnome preferences. Thanks Srini for the autoten repo to make the nonfree stuff working . Everything was set up and I was ready to click the Lotus notes icon. To my surprise nothing really happened. I tried the command line notes85.sh and it failed telling that the libnotes.so is not able to create a stack.

Phew!! the entire work has gone on a toss. I checked the logs and it showed that the Selinux is giving some permission errors. I turned the Selinux policy to permissive and then restarted notes. It worked like a charm!! :).

Now came the next issue. The Clearcase client which was running fine on FC11 has started giving me some errors. It started telling me that the libswt-mozilla-gtk-3236.so has some undefined symbol _ZN4nsID5ParseEPKc. Hmm.. I know what it means :-P. I got the xulrunner-devel package installed and made clearcase happy.

I haven't tried KDE yet. I want to keep up suspense and excitement, and gift me a surprise.

Here are my favourite apps, Being a hardcore KDE fan some of the apps below may not work well with Gnome.

Chat/IM - empathy/pidgin/sametime
IRC - Konversation
Password management - Kwallet
Personal Finance - kmymoney
Email - Lotus Notes / thunderbird
Twitter Microblogging - choqok
Notes - Tomboy/Kjots
Editor - vim/gedit/kate
Browser - Firefox/chrome/seamonkey
Music - amarok/rhythmbox
Other tools- rsibreak,digikam,gimp,picasa
IDE - Rational Application Developer/Eclipse