How many of you feel frustrated having to burn a CD/DVD every time you want to try on a new OS? Well UNetbootin helps create bootable USB drives, which you can use either as a live CD or as an installation media.

UNetbootin is a very handy tool, which runs on both Linux and Windows and offers a wide variety of operating systems that you can choose to load to your USB disk. It can even download all the popular distributions off the internet for you. It can also be used to boot many system utilities from the USB disk. It uses syslinux to make the USB disk bootable and thus any distribution or utility that can be booted via the syslinux interface works with UNetbootin.

UNetbootin offers two variations for installation. One is to create a USB disk and the other is a “frugal” install. A frugal install means that the iso resides on your hard disk and only the boot loader is reconfigured to run load the compressed kernel image from the hard disk, which can then be used to install the OS, or just run as a live CD.

Using UNetbootin is quite easy. If you are on windows just run the utility and you will be provide with a screen like this:

Now you can either choose an operating system or specify your own ISO image for which you want to create the bootable USB disk.

The second option is to specify the USB disk or the hard disk (in case of frugal install) and you are all set. The target disk is not formatted so you will not lose any existing data on the disk.

What’s more it supports 9 different languages but if you want to change the language the only way you can do that is by providing command line argument <lang = xy> where xy is the language code. Here is the list of languages supported with their codes

• English (en)
• Español / Spanish (es)
• Português / Portuguese (pt)
• Français / French (fr)
• Italiano / Italian (it)
• 中文 / Simplified Chinese (zh)
• Русский / Russian (ru)
• Norsk bokmål / Norwegian (nb)
• Magyar / Hungarian (hu)

Links:

UNetbootin Homepage

continuing from the last post. If your network is all Windows based, then using the tricks mentioned in the previous post are of no use to you. That’s because Windows servers use NTLM authentication. It’s different from normal authentication, in the sense of a user, you won’t be able to use Linux happily on a network with that kind of authentication scheme. You need to keep an eye on how to use this tip to your benefits.

You need this to create your very own NTLM workaround proxy server. It’s called NTLM Authorization Proxy Server.

Setps for those-who-don’t-know-and-want-to-learn

1. Download the NTLMAPS script.
2. Download python.
3. Unzip the NTLMAPS zip file and install python.
4. Configure(edit and save) the server.cfg (read below).
5. Double click on runserver.bat

voila, you see a console!

Configuring the server.cfg

You will need to modify these variables in the config file named “server.cfg” according to your network needs

LISTEN_PORT:5865

PARENT_PROXY:your_parentproxy

PARENT_PROXY_PORT:8080

NT_DOMAIN:your_domain

USER:username_to_use

PASSWORD:your_nt_password

And these variables if you need, normally they won’t require a change, but you might need to.

LM_PART:1

NT_PART:0

SCR_DEBUG:0

ALLOW_EXTERNAL_CLIENTS:0

FRIENDLY_IPS:

For me the configuration looks like

LISTEN_PORT:4000

PARENT_PROXY:10.100.56.45

PARENT_PROXY_PORT:3128

NT_DOMAIN:your_domain

USER:200301001

PASSWORD:

LM_PART:1

NT_PART:0

SCR_DEBUG:0

ALLOW_EXTERNAL_CLIENTS:0

FRIENDLY_IPS:10.100.90.90 10.100.96.69

Note, if you don’t fill in the password, it will automatically ask when you run the “runserver.bat” file.

So now it’s all done, tell me if you use it successfully, or failed at it miserably!

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Hi,

If you are frustrated by Linux and your college’s network, which is windows based or sysadmins can help you with windows only, and sysadmins for a request call, replies as “use Windows”. If you are in a university then I am sure they use that damned( or good) software called as proxy (squid proxy to be specific). And you are a linux newbie then, here are some quick tips for you.

TIP # 1

You want your download manager (wget), updates by apt or aptitude to use a http proxy, you can type

export http_proxy=http://user:password@proxy:port/

or

export http_proxy=http://proxy:port/

Things to note here are

• Type the command as it is, don’t leave unnecessary spaces.
• Username/password is the username and password you use to access the proxy, that is the same password which you type when you access internet using a web-browser. If you don’t use one, then use the second version of the command
• Proxy and port are the values that are the same as used in your web-browser, or you can ask check them out with your sysadmin, or anyone who has a working internet on the same network.

After you do this you can use apt or aptitude and it will use the http proxy you specified!

Preferences –> Network Proxy

It also allows you to specify username/password, by clicking on “Details”

sudo apt-get install tsocks

for Ubuntu users

or you can download it from here, http://tsocks.sourceforge.net

then just type

tsocks evolution

you might want to read the man page for configurations too.

So, that’s it. I hope it makes your life a little easier with Linux on network. Tell us about your experiences of using Linux behind proxies. Remember google search is your best resource!

DarK is a Linux newbie who is frustrated by network admins across India. His recent project is installing Linux-from-scratch. He is the How to’s master here!

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For those who are a fan of yakuake terminal on GNU/Linux systems, Humanized has something serious to offer for windows platform with Enso. Although the program seems fairly simple it works wonders for those who don’t want to move their hands off the keyboard, especially the laptop users. Before going in the details I must specify, that few of the things that Enso provides you can be implemented by Windows terminal, but the program has more to it.

Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal explains:

Enso is dead simple to use. You just hold down the Caps Lock key and type an Enso command, which is displayed in a translucent overlay. Once the command is typed, you simply release the Caps Lock key to activate it, and the overlay disappears. If you type fast, it all happens in a flash. For instance, to launch the Firefox Web browser, you just hold down the Caps Lock key and type “open firefox.” To look up the meaning of the word “proclivity,” you just hold down the Caps Lock key and type “define proclivity.”

Using the single “CAPS LOCK” key they offer

Enso Map Anywhere v0.1

Easily add maps to your documents and emails, and look up phone numbers and addresses.

Enso Media Remote Control v0.2

A remote-control for your music: Play, pause, and skip tracks in your favorite music player from any application.

Enso Web Search Anywhere v0.1

Provides commands for performing web searches using a variety of web services, from Amazon to Youtube to your Gmail account.

Enso Translate Anywhere v0.1.1

The power to translate English to and from eight other languages. In any application.

Enso TeX Anywhere v0.1

Effortlessly render T_EX markup into beautifully type-set equations (and convert them back again) everywhere from Powerpoint to Gmail.

So for all the touch typing enthusiasts, try this application out. I bet you won’t be disappointed.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: Windows, Linux, Technology

MSN India is going to have a live telecast of all the Indian Cricket League Matches on http://www.indiancricketleague.in

These live telecasts are going to be based on Microsoft silverlight.

The ICL 20:20 Indian Championship looks promising to be good stuff for Indian cricket freaks!!

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I was already quite impressed by Live Writer. But to add to my excitement, I just found a great plugin for it to ease my blogging experience.

Previously we used to manually add Social Bookmarking tags in our blog posts, so that the user can share the posts on their favorite online bookmark sharing site. Since our blog is hosted on a free blogging site “WordPress.com”, modification of source code is not possible and we cannot add code which can auto generate these tags for every blog post.

Thanks to a plugin called “Insert Bookmarking Tags!” I will tell you how to add these tags on a free blogging service provider like “wordpress”, “blogger” etc. (all blogging services which Live Write supports)

Follow these steps.

1. Get Live Writer and configure your blog in it.

2. Get the plugin and rest of instruction from here.

3. To get More Live Writer plugins, just click on “+Add a Plugin…” in your right pane of Live Writer.

4. Happy Blogging!

To know how the inserted bookmaking tags will look, see the bottom of this post.

To other Authors of Gurus: I am inserting the following set of bookmarking sites in all my blogpost. You can choose a different set if you want.

• del.icio.us
• digg
• live
• technocrati
• yahoo

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A simple geometry problem. Shouldn’t take more than a minute to come up with the answer.

The following diagram (not to scale) shows a circle with the center at point C. What is the radius of the circle?

Give proper explanation with your answer.

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Here is the link.

PS: IMAP access is available on iPhone too!

Enjoy!

OK, I have it enabled now. Free IMAP for GMail. But first for those who don’t know what IMAP is, go to this link . How is IMAP any different from POP3, or wait what I am talking about. I have this small FAQ for newbies.

Q. What is POP3/IMAP?

A. To simplify this, they are mail accessing protocols which are used by your Desktop E-mail Client.

Q. What is a protocol?

A. From wikipedia “A Protocol is a set of guidelines or rules that help in governing an operation on the internet and communications over it” . Simply put it’s a way to communicate over internet.

Q. What is a desktop e-mail client.

A. An e-mail client is a computer program used to manage e-mail. Few examples are

Linux : Mozilla Thunderbird, Evolution, KMail, Pine, Mutt (pine and mutt are console based)

Windows : Mozilla Thunderbird, Outlook Express (not free), Microsoft Outlook (comes as a part of Windows), Windows Mail (comes in windows Vista)

PS : This is by no means the whole list of E-mail Client available. This is just the list of client I have used in the past, and in the order of my liking.

Q. What is an E-Mail?

A. Seriously man, stop reading this! Anyways. Read this for information about E-Mail

Ok, so now we are out of the viscious cycle of jargons, lets come to the point. GMail has added IMAP service to their currently 4.4GB E-mail inbox. How does this matter to you. Well if you have a E-mail account with services like Yahoo or Hotmail, I can say IMAP wins over almost every service they have to offer.

Q. How? ( You can say to me, you dumb ##$##@$, that BIG editor gave Yahoo a better score than GMail!)

A. How does IMAP change your life. Well in simple terms, you might never need to open the web browser for any of your emailing needs. Is that big? Well lets add this to the list, unlike POP3, you can use multiple E-Mail clients at the same time on the same account. It means you can receive the same e-mail on your PDA, Laptop, Desktop and if you mark it as read on one of them, it will be marked read in all of them, it keeps everything in sync. You will love this feature if you have a history of using POP3 and the mails once downloaded and read are again marked unread once you shift to some other computer.

Q. I still don’t get it, how does it makes GMail any better?

A. Well any standard IMAP client can be configured to

• Run in system tray, without take any place in the tasks list
• Check one or more, e-mail accounts simultaneously
• Check the accounts after a fixed interval, again and again and again, so that you don’t have to
• Notify in case you get a mail

Q. Still doesn’t makes any sense to me!

A. Using and e-mail service with IMAP access (like GMail) and a desktop client you can send/receive your e-mail (with attachments) from your desktop without using a browser, and you will be notified of new mails automatically.

Q. Why is your english so bad!

A. I am working on it

Q. So I what do I do now?

A. I’ll suggest create an account on GMail and see it working first hand.

This what IMAP changes for me and many other GMail users, although Google might have big plans with this offering !!!

MSDN brings you digital editions of two premium international magazines followed by developers worldwide, absolutely free. (Actual cost is $60 and $30 annually).

What more, we also get to win XBOX 360, or Portable Music players.

While MSDN magazine offers valuable content on Microsoft development technologies besides solutions to real world problems you face every day, Dr. Dobb’s Journal covers all essential tools, languages and platforms along with the latest technology updates.

Hurry! Grab the offer with both hands!

-Fr0z3n

TopCoder has made an announcement about the 2008 TopCoder Open to be held once again in *Las Vegas* (Yes! Las Vegas and programming !!)

What more, the finalist pool has been increased to 120 competitors. (Looks like I will get the chance to go Vegas this time )

The 50% growth promises the toughest onsite competition in TopCoder history!

There’s going to be a TopCoder Masters Invitational also, which will have all of the previous onsite TCO finalists competing head-to-head. WOW! Thats going to be really exciting to watch..

These competitions are going to be bundled with top notch selection of educational sessions.  The TopCoder Software Symposium will feature a lineup of the most talented engineers in the business who will share their expertise with TopCoder members in attendance.

Mark your calendars and start planning and practicing now!

Check out the website for more details: http://www.topcoder.com/tco08

See ya at Vegas

-Fr0z3n

Great news for game lovers seeking freeware stuff! Electronic Arts has released its classic strategy game Command & Conquer as a free download.

FilePlanet has released free (advertising supported) versions of following four popular games:

1. Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon
2. Prince of Persia: Sands of Time
3. Far Cry
4. Rayman Raving Rabbids

Happy Gaming!

FYI: This one is a great to participate contest for college students of India. Have a look at the website to know the details.

Student Rockstar

Good Luck!

Hello windows users!, and hello fellow Linux (in particular Fedora 7) users

Yeah, I just installed Fedora 7 on my new Sony Vaio laptop, and it works great. I still have to figure out few new things, but I am happy as it’s working for almost everything I need(I just need a console, few manuals, a browser and Internet). Here are few tips for people who don’t find much help on ATI Graphics cards and Linux(in general).

1. Install Linux in text mode, few Linux distro’s (like ubuntu) use graphical install, which won’t work for you. There are bootup commandline switches (generally accessible by hitting F1). Fedora 7 has command line installation option from the boot menu itself so it’s easy there. Note you might need ubuntu alternate disk to use the commandline install, I used alternate-install disk. Always try to get DVD versions of installations whenever possible.

2. Fedora 7 DVD version has support for my Wireless Card (Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Adapter) out of box so it saved me hassle of getting on to a wired network for installing the ATI Graphics Drivers, which can be found at ATI website. Here is the kink in the story, I needed to download it from the website, and I don’t know how to use those text based browsers, so I needed to use laptop of my room-mate to get the link of drivers I needed.

3. Used wget to download the drivers ( The link for Linux x86 32 bit computers is https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/drivers/linux/ati-driver-installer-8.40.4-x86.x86_64.run ) Pasted the link so that you can (type it for wget), Alternately the link is here.

4. To install the drivers you need to execute this command

./ati-driver-installer-8.40.4-x86.x86_64.run –buildpkg Fedora/F7

If you are using some other distro of Linux you will need to find the correct switch, execute this command and read the instructions that come on your screen.

./ati-driver-installer-8.40.4-x86.x86_64.run

a useful hint is you will need something like

./ati-driver-installer-8.40.4-x86.x86_64.run –buildpkg <switch>

where <switch> is the missing argument.

5. One you get the things set, under Fedora 7, you will get about 5-6 RPM files, you might choose what you don’t want to install, but for me as a new user, I just installed all! If you are interested in finding out which file does what, then you might want to go on some IRC Channel to ask. Nuf said, to install the rpm files use

rpm -ihv *.rpm

in the directory where the driver rpm’s are present.

6. If you get dependencies error use

yum install <missing dependency filename>

under Fedora 7, I believe “apt” can be used in similar way

7. Type gdm while you are logged as root, or use startx as normal user

8. All done? You need to follow this link to get a graphical display on bootup

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=7381

9. All right reboot!, use reboot command on the console.

10. Post as comment what you see when you reboot

Note : This guide is written by a Linux newbie for Linux newbie, who has experience of working on Linux for few months, mostly for shell scripting and network programming, so he mostly worked on a terminal. Keep that in mind. This guide is written by sheer lack of Google results and support on forums for “Linux and Sony Vaio” or “Linux and ATI” when compared to “Linux and Nvidia” on any forum. Use it at your own risk. I am not responsible if anything goes wrong with your system/computer/laptop.

A classic puzzle involves being given 2 ropes and a lighter. The burning of one rope from end to end takes 1 hour, however the ropes do not burn in a uniform manner (ie: if you light it at one end, the first half of the rope could burn through in one minute while the second half may take 59 minutes to burn). Your goal is to measure out 15 minutes using the two ropes and the lighter.

You can assume that lighting a rope takes zero time.

Hint: You can break the rope with your bare hands..

This is good news for book lovers. World’s first Online Book Fair which started on 4th July 07 have lots of E-books from variety of domains, available for access and download. 

Visit http://worldebookfair.com/ 

One can download the books from this site till Aug 4th, 2007. 

World eBook Library Catalogs and Collections The World eBook Library Consortia Collection shelves more than 330,000 PDF eBooks in 100+ languages contained in 112 of the finest eBook and eDocument collections published on the Internet today. The mission of the World eBook Library’s Acquisition Department is to add new eBooks every day.

So hurry up! Donwload them before the fair is over..

The warden meets with 23 new prisoners when they arrive. He tells them, “You may meet today and plan a strategy. But after today, you will be in isolated cells and will have no communication with one another.

“In the prison is a switch room, which contains two light switches labeled A and B, each of which can be in either the ‘on’ or the ‘off’ position. I am not telling you their present positions. The switches are not connected to anything.

“After today, from time to time whenever I feel so inclined, I will select one prisoner at random and escort him to the switch room. This prisoner will select one of the two switches and reverse its position. He must move one, but only one of the switches. He can’t move both but he can’t move none either. Then he’ll be led back to his cell.

“No one else will enter the switch room until I lead the next prisoner there, and he’ll be instructed to do the same thing. I’m going to choose prisoners at random. I may choose the same guy three times in a row, or I may jump around and come back.

“But, given enough time, everyone will eventually visit the switch room as many times as everyone else. At any time anyone of you may declare to me, ‘we have all visited the switch room’ and be 100% sure.

“If it is true, then you will all be set free. If it is false, and somebody has not yet visited the switch room, you will be fed to the alligators.”

Mail your answers to gurus [dot] comments [at] gmail [dot] com

Also comment if you have mailed the answer.

—————————————————————————————-

This problem is taken from a site which I will put up later, so that you don’t ruin the problem by looking at answer. Till then you brainstorm. It’s an awesome problem.

This one is simple…

You have eight balls and a balancing pan (the one on which you have two pans and can compare weights), one of the eight balls is either heavier or lighter than the rest. The remaining 7 have the same weight. How many least no of weight comparisons will it take to find out the defective ball and also weather it is heavier or lighter.
Also tell how you achieved at the number… mail your detailed reply’s to gurus [dot] comments [at] gmail [dot] com and put up the least number you required here as a comment

Solution (by ross):

put 2 balls on each side(1st weigh), if they balance put them to one side and mark as OK if they don’t balance then mark the other 4 as OK.

take 3 of the 4 NOT OK balls, put 2 on one side and 1 on the other with 1 of the balanced balls (2nd weigh). if they balance the only ball that hasn’t yet been on the scales is DEFECTIVE, weight it against one of the OK balls(3rd weigh) to see if it’s heavier or lighter…

if the balls don’t balance on the second weigh then take the known OK ball and the one that you put with it (let’s call it ball A) off then weigh (3rd weigh) the other 2 balls (call them B & C). If B & C balance then A is the defective ball. We now know that B & C are OK balls so if A & OK were heavier on the 2nd weigh then A is HEAVY DEFECTIVE, if A & OK were lighter on the 2nd weigh then A is LIGHT DEFECTIVE…

If B & C don’t balance on the (3rd weigh) then we know one of them is DEFECTIVE so we know A is OK. If B & C were heavier than A & OK (on the 2nd weigh) then we know the defective ball must be HEAVY so which ever is heavier out of B & C is the HEAVY DEFECTIVE ball. If B & C were lighter than A & OK (on the 2nd weigh) then we know the defective ball must be LIGHT so which ever is lighter out of B & C is the LIGHT DEFECTIVE ball.

Thought of sharing information about ongoing contests.

1. Microsoft High Performance Computing Scholars program

Prizes: Student Awards of $1000 and Faculty Research Grants worth  $5,000, many more prizes can be avaialed just by registering.

Target Audience: All undergraduate, postgraduate, diploma and training students (along with supervising Faculty) of India.

Duration of contest: 15th May 2007 to 30th June 2007

2. Win 1 in 3 copies of Microsoft Expression Studio Commemorative Editions

Prizes: Microsoft Expression Studio Commemorative Editions

Target Audience: General

Duration of Contest: Running..till 6th of July 2007

3. Win with Windows

Prizes: Cafe coffee day vouchers.

Target Audience: General

Duration of Contest: July 2 to July 14, 2007

4. Project Shutter Photo Contest!

Microsoft has initiated a Photography Contest – the Project Shutter Photo Contest! This is aimed at enthusiasts with an eye for photogenic visuals across three themes that best represent the individual’s locality – Food, Culture and Architecture. There are tons of goodies up for grabs, including a T-Shirt every 30-minutes through the next 12 days.

Be sure to check out their gallery to find some of coolest pics.

Good Luck! 

This is one of my favorite puzzle. Please don’t put spoilers if you already know the answer.

“If a bear walks one mile south, turns left and walks one mile to the east and then turns left again and walks one mile north and arrives at its original position, what is the color of the bear.”

Please give answer alongwith valid explaination instead of wild guesses.