chain reaction

I've gone into a Linux package-install chain reaction of sorts.. each package I want to install needs another basic package and I've gone one downloading and building sources so much that I've forgotten what it is that I wanted to install in the first place! Only in Linux! :))

OpenSUSE - missing gcc?

Just after observing how good suse is, I'm surprised to see that it doesn't even have a basic C compiler. I wanted to install Emacs (an editor I used to use at work and one I'm more comfortable with than vi) and when I did a quicj configuration check I found no cc or gcc! I was surprised that this distribution didn't come packaged with it.

When I tried to download the source code for gcc, I read that the system needed to have another basic C Compiler to compile the gcc source! Catch 22s all over the place! I was considering just downloading a binary release when I thought of using SUSE's own application installer software. That seemed to be much better. I first selected gcc and it included all dependent packages and downloaded and installed it. It didn't however let me know when the installation was done. That would have been a little more helpful. I was about to try the same process again before I tried invoking gcc from shell and it was there!

Then I thought of going ahead and installing emacs also from SUSE's application installer. It didn't get me the most recent release however - but something is better than nothing.

openSUSE is pretty good

Here I was trying to look up how to best format a new partition so that I can share data between Linux and Windows, when I look up the /windows folder and there it is! The whole Windows partition mounted and ready to be navigated! That's progress! In retrospect I remember seeing some mention of creating a mount-point named 'windows' when I was installing from the CD but who pays that much attention.. :D

I still had to mess around to get the Wireless connection working though.  I have a broadcom modem and SUSE had to download some files from repositories online. It was a vicious circle - I had to go online to go online! So:
- I looked up the script
- found out what files were needed to install the broadcom firmware
- downloaded them manually in Windows
- copied it to a USB flash drive
- copied from the flash drive to Linux partition (after rebooting of course)
- and then made the script point to these files instead of the URL.

Phew! That worked though. It had, of course, to be followed by the usual:

ifconfig wlan0 up
/etc/init.d/network restart

Pretend you have more CD/DVD drives than you do

Mounting images on a Virtual CD/DVD drive is pretty handy. I tried Magic ISO to first create a virtual drive. Turns out it needed something called 'MagicDisc'. MagicISO itself was sweet enough to link me to the page where I could download that extra bit of software. Then first I set the number of drives. You can set it to as many as 5 drives I think! I set it to 1 for testing. Then in Magic ISO go to Tools->Virtual CD/DVD options and then choose the drive where you want to mount an image. Then choose the image you want to mount - it has an accepted list of image types. I tried a .bin image and it nicely mounted it as a CD drive and auto play options came up. Pretty efficient. I don't know if there are better software to mount images but this one sure works.

Software Bundling

I don't like that some software companies bundle other software (sometimes not even related to the one we want to install) with their package. But I used to like it when they at least gave us the option of refusing to install any other software. Now even that freedom has been revoked and that is irritating!

I recently updated my adobe reader from version 9 to Adobe Reader X. Adobe also installed Mc Afee security software and went right ahead installing it without asking me! Now I have to go separately and uninstall that program. We have the rug of freedom pulled from right under us without noticing..

Read Out Loud

I tried using the text-to-speech feature on Adobe. It was really nice. But the document that I used was not structured right and the audio didn't seem to be fully understandable.

Here are the instructions for using the read out loud feature on Adobe.

It was pretty decent, for ex. it paused when it encountered a comma. I need to test it out a little more but its doing wonders for accessibility..

Customized iPhone ringtones

If your phone is NOT jailbroken:

Getting a customized ringtone:
- Go to iTunes and find the track that you want to convert to an iPhone ringtone. If you don't see the track in the iTunes library, then click 'File' menu on iTunes and select 'Add File to Library'.
- Right-click on that track
- Select 'Get Info'
- Select 'Options' tab
- Check 'Stop Time' and enter a number based on how short you want the track to be. For example if you just want the first 30 seconds of the track, then 'Start Time' would be 0:00 and 'Stop Time' would be 0:30. So like this you can even select a section of the track from the middle.
- Click 'Ok'
- Now you will see the track listed again on iTunes.
- Right-click on the track and select 'Create AAC version'
- In a short while a copy of your track will be created. But the length of the track will be limited to the time that you chose.
- Now go back to the original track, right-click and select 'Get Info' and reset the stop and/or start time that you changed so that the track can be played back completely like before.
- Now find where the copy of your track (the short one) exists on your hard drive.
- The track would be listed as a .m4a file. Rename it to be .m4r
- Now go back to iTunes and add this file to the library.

Syncing:
When you connect iPhone to your computer iTunes will start syncing everything by default. So you should be able to find the ringtone after the 1st time you connect your iPhone to your computer. If not, go to iPhone details in iTunes. Select 'Ringtones' tab and make sure 'Sync Ringtones' is checked and also 'All Ringtones'.


If your iPhone is jailbroken:

Follow same steps as above to get your custom ringtone.
To get that ringtone on the phone, you need to have Cydia and OpenSSH. I'm still figuring out the details. Will post as soon as it's done.

Basic HTML note to myself

I learned HTML a looong time back as a hobby. I think I was in high school and during summer break I thought it'd be fun to learn HTML from a book my cousin had. It did turn out to be fun and I've been thankful ever since for that little project of mine. I've tweaked the frame and header and a lot of settings on my other blog using some html basics that I picked up.

But I do use one trick every time I post a link that I keep forgetting and have to look up every time. I thought it'd be good if I put a note here in this blog so I don't have to look it up every time. It is this:

To include a link so that if a person does open the link it opens it in a new tab/window (instead of in the same one my blog post is in) do this:

open-angle-brace a href="http-address-you-want-to-link-to" target=blank close-angle-brace Some text saying what the link is open-angle-brace /a close-angle-brace

Simple..

DejaVu

I was sampling some Dejavu readers for some of the files I had. I first tried "djvureader" from here. But in some of the files, the text was rotated by 180 degrees and mirrored! I was scared that some pages hadn't been scanned right and those files were a total waste.

It was then that I came across STDU Viewer here. When I opened the same djvu files using this software the pages were displayed exactly right! Weird that the previous one didn't nail that. So I would recommend STDU Viewer for djvu files.

Wonder what Google Books uses for their documents?