It’s (not) Alright

YES… THIS IS IT… (Sorry for the caps people but I am excited). OpenSUSE team has announced the release of RC1 for the 11.0 release. Only 20 days are left before the final stable release and I am getting desperate to try it as the day comes closer. You can read more about the release here.

The reason I am excited is the new features this release holds as compared to the previous one. There are almost 200 changes since the last, 10.3, release and more than 600 bugfixes and counting. The complete list of new features can be found here.

You can download openSUSE 11.0 RC 1 for x86, x86_64, and PPC at http://software.opensuse.org/developer. Deltas from Beta 3 are also provided. Note that you will need the latest deltarpm from Factory, or for openSUSE 10.3 you can use the home:coolo repository to grab it.

So hurry up people. Go get your copy today and help test one of the best operating systems the world has ever seen. (Okay, no flame wars, I said ONE of the best. Not THE best.)

Aditya

I have already written about a method of creating the alarm clock using mp3blaster and cron. That method (described here) however does not work well with some programs running or if you do not have X session. This may prove problematic. So, I am here with a new way of doing the same thing that uses a software called screen¹. Using screen can make this task very easy.

I have a file named alarm.mp3 in my home at /home/aditya/alarm.mp3. Once I install screen, I can edit crontab using ‘crontab -e’ command and then insert a line,

30 07 * * 1-6 screen -d -m -S mp3blaster mp3blaster /home/aditya/alarm.mp3

That’s all. Once you do that, the file ‘alarm.mp3′ will be played every weekday and Saturday morning at 0730 hours. What it does it, the option -d and -m, when used together, create a screen session (if you do not know what screen is, please ignore this as your work is done now. Wait for my post about screen to follow) and it is detached. So, the commands used previously for display and other environment options are not necessary. This reduces the possibility of failure.

Next up is the -S command that gives a name to the session. The first mp3blaster is the name of the session, second is the command to execute. So that’s it. Go and change your code if you had one. This one is much better I can guaranty you.

Links

• Screen
• mp3blaster

Aditya

1. More about screen to follow in the Completely going the CLI way series [↩]

I have already written about my experiences with other torrent managers and rTorrent in this series before in this post. Now I am set to review rTorrent because, believe it or now, I am actually using it as my primary torrent manager for past 1 month. Don’t worry… I am not going to write a “1 month with rTorrent” here. I am going to review it in short for performance and how to optimize it to use it better. I will start with a short review of rTorrent.

rTorrent - Review

As I said, after using it for a whole month, I am beginning to like it and also getting a little anxious for future releases. As already mentioned, I had many problems with other torrent clients. You can read more about them here. And then came the day when I decided to take a brave step and use a client that is completely based on *nix console. I am happy to say that I, in no way, regret that decision.

Things started with little bumps along the way. I had to do a little research on the site of rTorrent and find some settings which would work on my system. Then I began downloading.

I was immediately surprised with 2 things. First was that even though there Continue reading »

Finally the painful period of the 10 everlasting days has ended with quite a positive note. I can say that except the first paper which was crash and burn, I did pretty well in the remaining papers.

As usual, I thought that the first paper, actually the subject was easy. In fact it is very easy, but the problem was I took it too lightly and missed out on 2 very VERY simple formulas. Mixed them up and it cost me 10 marks. That was really crash and burn. Even the crash in Lost looked pale in front of it. But I am confident that I will pass it.

As for the rest of the papers, the first one worked as a wake up call and the next 3 papers were very good, except for my usual silly mistakes where I knew the answer, but thinking that “So easy and 8 marks?”, I did experiments and I fear that it will cost me marks.

The last paper also, I took very lightly. I feared that it will be bad, but my ‘purvapunyai’ (all the good deeds I did (:-|) in the past) helped me out and I emerged with a good paper. Now it is time for enjoyment. All the work that I had to leave behind like the website project, a new project I am starting with Tushar Gokhale. (Or atleast we are saying that we will). Plus I am learning python. Many things to do. More and more blog post to follow.

I am soon going to write about the configuration or rTorrent and little info about irssi also. Once I am through with conky, I will write about that too. Keep watching the space for updates.

Aditya