My B’day Gift

Krish always surprises me with unexpected gifts. He gifted me a Digital Pen Tablet (iball) of 4″ X 3″ size on this b’day. I loved the gift a lot.

iball pen tablet

The Driver CD was for Windows and Mac only.   My distro is openSUSE11.0, in Sax2 settings there was no iball option.
So, I used Wacom and configured the pen tablet the same way as in this link http://www.arahne.si/setup7.html.

KDragons using inkscape tools

After I configured the pen tablet, checked whether it was working in inkscape and gimp. It worked but, there was a problem with pressure and tilt options. I couldn’t adjust them and asked on irc channel. They weren’t aware of iball coz it is an Indian Company and not well marketed in US (think so). They uses Aiptek and Wacom. Then I deactivated the pen tablet in Sax2 settings and still I was able to use the pen tablet the same way (pressure and tilt wasn’t working). Now, I am using without activating as it doesn’t make any difference. And also it won’t take more lines in my  /etc/X11/x.org.conf

Krish once gave me a Konqi drawing which he drew on a paper and asked me to draw that for his game. I used inkscape tools as I didn’t have pen tablet at that time. My first trial on the pen tablet was also Konqi. I used the paper drawing on the pen tablet and traced Konqi. After this trial I felt that I needed to practice a lot. I had to trace it without lifting my hand or pen, because I was unable to get back to that correct position if once lifted.

Tracing on paper is much easier than on the pen tablet.

Artwork for mukt.in

I volunteered for mukt.in 2008 (Free and Open Source Software event) artwork. They were support buttons, posters and Openmoko phone for mukt.in banners.

The first artwork done for mukt.in was two support buttons. One green buttons and the other was black & white support button. I liked green whereas Krish (Lead Organiser for mukt.in) liked black button. He used black & white support button almost everywhere.

mukt.in v2 poster

openmoko artwork

Krish helped me with the posters. And everyone in the team member liked the posters except one. He said “The poster sucks like hell. Keep that poster for a 10th class science of compscii fest or MS Office training class.” I just IGNORED it (bold, italic, arial, 14, underline – learned from Thyagu).

There was a talk on Openmoko. So, Krish asked me to do Openmoko phone. I did that and exported as .png  file. Krish opened .png one and thought that it was downloaded picture until I told him that it was  not a photo but done by me. He loved that artwork.

Finally accounts of mukt.in is completed 3 days back. Yes, it was too late, would have completed long back.  Krish fell ill, some of the bills were missing mainl was hotel bill. Tired of searching for the bill we decided to get duplicate one. Thank God that we got the missing hotel bill  from a magazine (Linux for You). Krish kept the bill in that magazine and forgot. Anyways after some days of searching we got the bill and entered it to the accounts.

limited -> admin rights

Tata indicom technician provided wired modem and static IP to the training centre. We got D-link DIR300 wireless router.Then we connected modems LAN port to internet port of the router. Then tested if the windows machine were connected to internet via the router.

Since, all machines got successfully connected, they were also in LAN. Then we configured file sharing in one of the windows machines, downloaded tortoiseSVN in the shared path.
We copied it to other machines by accessing shared path from Start -> run and typed \\IPaddress.

Since last time we created one limited account on every machine, we changed the account to admin type to enable students get going with the software installations.

remote login, transfer & network gaming

My downloaded question papers and games were on my boyfriend’s lappie. I installed openssh-server and ssh client to copy those files to my PC. But, then I found out that I can copy files using secure copy. So I used scp -r sourcepath username@IPaddress:/destinationpath. Then it asked for password.

Since I installed openssh, I wanted to try it. So, used ssh username@IPaddress and it asked password. The prompt changed to my username@my machine name.

Then I learnt to play Frozen Bubble in LAN. Started Frozen Bubble game and went to start LAN game option and create new game. This will start the game server on the machine. Then from another computer start Frozen Bubble -> start LAN game and the game server created will be listed, select it and join the game.

Network Configuration

Today again I went with my boyfriend to the training centre. There I learnt to configure network on Windows. My boyfriend showed me for one computer and I configured the remaining ones. I assigned static IP address.
NetGear drivers weren’t installed in two of the computers, so I installed it . There were two computers which weren’t detecting PCI cards, which aren’t on network yet. We sent ping request from one computer to another. It worked except one – Linux server.
And also I downloaded three dosbox games (puzzle games).

Windows XP on VirtualBox

My exams are approaching, I’ve computer exams this time. So, today I installed VirtualBox on my blackcutie (PC). And then installed Windows XP on it. The configuration of this is 512MB RAM and virtual hard drive image (created only c drive) 7.97GB.
It took me about 30minutes to complete the installation. But MS-Office didn’t come by default in windows as Open Office came in Linux. Now who will give me Ms-Office?

Windows installation

Today I accompanied my boyfriend on a project for a new training centre to help as well as to learn windows installation.
There we connected brand new Dell LCD monitors (I wish I had one of it) and peripherals and then installed Windows XP home edition. Always I had a fear to connect PS/2 keyboard and mouse to its sockets as its pins are delicate and prone to bending. But he taught me how to connect it. And now I feel its one of the easiest parts to connect. Today I had a new problem i.e; with monitor power socket. As it was LCD monitor (that too not mine) and have to be very careful while handling it. So, I wasn’t able to see the pins. I connected only three monitors, I dont know how I did that (may be due to fear of my boyfriend).
Also I learned to add new NetGear Wi-Fi card in PCI slot and installed the drivers. But I missed doing Ghost copy from hard disk to hard disk. Thats ok coz I learnt other things and I am very much satisfied. Waiting for Monday to learn Ghosting.

Inkscape Drawings

I have started learning Inkscape from ‘Inkscape: Guide to a Vector Drawing Program’. Now I am practising Chapter 2 – Quick Start.

This is my first drawing. At present I am drawing ‘A Can of Soup – A Three-Dimension Drawing with Gradient’. Drew one side of the can and facing problem with the second one as I am having trouble joining two nodes on the left side. So stuck with that one.
Having little difficulties while drawing, might be coz am new to this. Before this I have never tried such things i.e. drawing coz nothing strikes my mind. Thats why after completing drawing (even if its simple) I feel as if I am on the top of the world and of course proud of myself.

NVIDIA drivers troubles me

At last I got Kubuntu7.10 64-bit cd. Installed it & partitioned the same way as I did while installing Kubuntu7.04cd.
I like Mario type games so downloaded SuperTux game. I eagerly waited for completion so that I can open and start playing SuperTux game, at the time of downloading. Downloading was successfully done. I opened the game and went to options and clicked OpenGL and started the game. The game was very slow, so installed NVIDIA graphics drivers. After installation I went back to the game and to my shock it wasn’t opening.
Then I tried to start through terminal and it was showing an error supertux: error while loading shared libraries: libGL.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory. I opened Adept Manager and installed libGL1-mesa-dev and reinstalled libGL1-mesa-dri & libGL1-mesa-glx. But of no use. Reinstalled the game and it was showing the same error.
I lost my game and not even played a single game.

Triple booting

Since there was no game in Kubuntu7.04, I installed Ubuntu 7.10 64bit cd. Then i started playing games, after sometime my mom also joined me to play SameGnome.

After 5days, installed Kubuntu7.04 64bit and CentOS 5.0. The next day, installed Slackware11.0, but the grub didnt show the triple boot.
Then from CentOS5.0, I changed the grub.conf to boot kubuntu. Somehow I couldn’t enable it to boot in slackware.

Another few days with CentOS, it was time to try more distributions. This time I found DreamLinux, Mandriva and Linuxmint. All the 3 installed smoothly on my PC.
I found traces of ubuntu in Linuxmint and it was slow too.
XFCE rocks in DreamLinux and Mandriva plays my mp3 songs

These will stay for a while, until I get my kubuntu 7.10 64-bit .