LINUS TORVALDS – One of my favourite person

Currently I’m studying a book named “Beginning Ubuntu Linux”. Where I found some words of Linux Torvalds (the creator of Linux Kernel). So, I think to share that words to my blog readers:

Linus Benedict Torvalds was born in Helsinki, Finland, in 1969. A member of the minority Swedish-speaking population, he attended the University of Helsinki from 1988 to 1996, graduating with a Masters degree in Computer Science.

He started Linux not through a desire to give the world a first-class operating system but with other goals in mind. Its inspiration is in part due to Helsinki winters being so cold. Rather than leave his warm flat and trudge through the snow to the university’s campus in order to use its powerful minicomputer, he wanted to be able to connect to it from home! He also wanted to have a platform to use to experiment with the properties of the Intel 386, but that’s another story. Torvalds needed an operating system capable of such tasks.Linux was born.

It took Torvalds the better part of a year to come up with the very first version of Linux, during which he worked alone in a darkened room. In 1991, he announced his creation to the world, describing Linux as “just a hobby,” and saying it would never be big. It wouldn’t be until 1994 that it reached version 1.0. In the early days, Torvalds’s creation was fairly primitive. He was passionate that it should be free for everyone to use, and so he released it under a software license that said that no one could ever sell it.

However, he quickly changed his mind, adopting the GNU Public License. Torvalds was made wealthy by his creation, courtesy of the dot.com boom of the late 1990s, even though this was never his intention; he was driven by altruism. Nowadays, he lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and children, having moved to the United States from Finland in the late 1990s.
Initially, Torvalds worked for Transmeta, developing CPU architectures as well as overseeing kernel development, although this wasn’t part of his official work. He still programs the kernel, but currently he over-sees the Open Source Development Lab, an organization created to encourage open source adoption in industry and which is also referred to as the home of Linux.

Internet Explorer in Ubuntu Linux

As a web application developer, we have to support our application in every (at least recognized) web browsers. That’s why after developing our application, we have to check it in Internet Explorer. And we all know well, if there is the worst browser, then it is IE. However, we need to install IE in Ubuntu linux to check our application properly. Here is a way:

1. First install wine. sudo get-apt install wine
2. Next install cabextract. sudo get-apt install cabextract
3. Now download ies4linux. You could download it by running this command .
   wget http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/downloads/ies4linux-latest.tar.gz
4. Unzip the file. tar zxvf ies4linux-latest.tar.gz
5. Go to the directory. cd ies4linux-*
6. Run the application. ./ies4linux

You could install IE 5.5, 6 and 7. I successfully installed IE 6.

J2ME – in Ubuntu

First of all, I want to say myself as a J2ME expert. In my university life I spent too much time in it. However come to the point, after completely changed my platform from Windows to Ubuntu Linux I’m free from pirated software.

For developing java application j2se+j2me I prefer to use NetBeans IDE. In ubuntu it’s very easy to install. But after installing I could develop j2me application using it but the emulator doesn’t run perfectly. I tried many times and installed all J2SE runtime and library like gcj …. and more … But I was failure to run using NetBeans IDE’s Emulator for J2ME.

Today I download the J2ME development environment from java.sun.com. I installed it and it runs perfectly. I could run j2me application also.

But I need to run application from NetBeans IDE. So I did this, tools->java platform->add platform
Then I set the location /opt/WTK2.5 . NetBeans IDE detects J2ME platform. And finally I’m success and happy to run J2ME application in Ubuntu using NetBeans IDE.

Ubuntu – Enable mod_rewrite in Apache server

At first I should define, what is mod_rewrite?
mod_rewrite is a part of Apache server that can rewrite requested urls on the fly.

To enable mod_rewrite in Ubuntu, you just need to write this command in terminal

sudo a2enmod rewrite

After enabling mod_rewrite you can write .htaccess file for your web application.

So what is .htaccess?
.htaccess file provides a way to make configuration changes on a per directory basis. It is a file contains configuration directives is placed in a particular document directory and the directives apply to that directory and all subdirectories thereof.

Some example:

Nice looking URLs (no querying) with pagination:
Suppose your url is: domain.com/article.php?name=title&page=5
You want to change: domain.com/articles/title/5/
Then write in .htaccess file:
RewriteRule ^articles/(A-Za-z0-9-]+)/([0-9]+)/?$ article.php?name=$1&page=$2 [L]

The rule is defined in regular expression. Here [L] means Last Rule. It’s called RewriteRule Flags.

Another example:
Suppose your site has permanently moved to a new domain.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule  ^(.*)$ http://www.domain2.com/$1  [R=301, L]

Here [NC] means case insensitive and its called RewriteCond Flags. [R=301] means moved permanently. Its called redirection header code.

Lots of game in Ubuntu/Linux platform

Do you need free/open source game for Ubuntu / Linux? Then visit this site: http://www.happypenguin.org
The title of this site is: “The Linux Game Tome” . You’ll find lots of game here for linux distribution.
The Linux Game Tome was started by Tessa Lau in 1995 when the phrase “Linux game” meant either sasteroids or xtetris. She culled the best games from sunsite’s Linux games directories, scoured the net for classic X11 games, and put together a compendium of amusing ways to waste time. After two years of regular updates, the Tome started to sprout cobwebs as its creator lost interest in downloading the latest and greatest in Linux entertainment.

Finding Ubuntu Resources

❑ http://ubuntuforums.org — In this searchable web forum and moderated
social network is a diverse, talented, and moderated community of Ubuntu users
and support staff. Here people share their success and setbacks with each other as
well as offering assistance and guidance. Chances are good that if you’re having
difficulty with something in Ubuntu, someone has already run into the same prob-
lem and found a solution.

❑ www.ubuntu.com/support — This site offers paid support from Canonical Ltd.,
the company behind Ubuntu. If you don’t want to spend time searching through
the forums, or waiting for responses, Canonical Ltd. is one avenue for telephone,
e-mail, and web support costing around $20 a month. There is also Ubuntu train-
ing available aimed at companies and corporate users.

❑ https://help.ubuntu.com — This site contains the official, up-to-date, online
documentation for each Ubuntu release. As newer Ubuntu releases come out, you
can come here to find out what’s new.

❑ http://screencasts.ubuntu.com — View recorded desktop sessions on how
to do different things with Ubuntu, from setting up a printer, to setting up Samba
file sharing, to installing updates to keep your Ubuntu system in top shape. Ubuntu
users are encouraged to join the Ubuntu Screencasts Launchpad Team (https://
launchpad.net/~ubuntu-screencasts) to contribute.

❑ https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users — Join the
Ubuntu-users mailing list and interact with Ubuntu users over e-mail to discuss
and solve problems that come up with everything from implementing mysql
databases to setting up a problematic network devices. An archive of past threads
can be viewed at https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users.

❑ https://wiki.ubuntu.com/IRCResourcePage — If you are interested in live
IRC chat support, you can visit the Ubuntu IRC resource page to find guidelines,
clients, and chat servers which are an available source of support, free at any time.
It is advisable to visit the Ubuntu Code of Conduct page (www.ubuntulinux.org/
community/conduct/) if you have not taken part in IRC chat before.

DBDesigner in Ubuntu

DBDesigner is a nice database design tool. In ubuntu I installed DBDesigner in this way.

1. First of all you need to download the DBDesigner package. There is no debian package. So download the .rpm package.http://fabforce.net/downloads.php

2. After downloading this file you will need alien to convert it to .deb, so just type in your terminal

sudo apt-get install alien

3. Now, go to the location of your hard drive where you downloaded the rpm package and install it using:

sudo alien -i DBDesigner4-0.5.4-0.i586.rpm
4. Now install the  shared library libborqt-6.9-qt2.3.so,

First Download the library package and extract it using:

tar xzvf kylixlibs3-borqt-3.0-2.tar.gz

5. After extracting it do the following:

sudo cp kylixlibs3-borqt/libborqt-6.9.0-qt2.3.so
      /lib/libborqt-6.9-qt2.3.so

finally the executable DBDesigner4 can be found at /opt/DBDesigner

Cheers 🙂

XCHM – A .chm reader for Ubuntu :)

Hi, I found this little app is very essential who wants to read .chm file in Ubuntu. You could install it in Ubuntu just write this command in your terminal:

sudo apt-get install xchm

CHEERS 🙂

How to install amaroK (multimedia MP3 player)

Open a terminal window and type in:
sudo apt-get install amarok

After that you can find amaroK in the Gnome menu under Applications -> Sound & Video. cheers. 🙂

RapidSVN software for Ubuntu

As a developer, it’s very urgent to use Subversion. I found a nice and powerful GUI tool for Ubuntu. Just install it. It’ll create a link to programming of start menu.

sudo apt-get install rapidsvn