Getting DSL Broadband to work in Zenwalk 6

after installing a fresh distro, the first thing a person would want is to get the box connected to internet, so that essential packages can be installed.

i am having dsl broadband connection and my login credentials are not stored in router. i prefer the store the credentials in the system itself. getting the internet to work here was tricky as pppoeconf is not present in the system.

pppoe-setup was used to configure the internet connection
pppoe-start used to start the connection
pppoe-stop used to stop the connection

connection was established successfully, output of ifconfig showed that ppp0 interface is up and running. however, dns resolution was not working.

i tried entering exact dns server ip address in pppoe setup, but it didnt work. a posting on linuxforums about slackware pppoe showed that eth0 (lan interface) should be down before starting pppoe connection.

running this as root solved my problem.

ifconfig eth0 down
pppoe-start

this problem doesnt come in ubuntu, probably because pppoeconf is smart enough to handle it.

My First Experience With Zenwalk 6

i wanted to lay my hands on it because my current version was 4.8 and i seldom used it.
that was because of some flaky performance and serious bug with adobe flash 10 with led to abrupt system restart.
i hate it when my system restarts without my performance.

other than this, it had many latest packages like pidgin, transmission were not yet present in ubuntu 8.04 hardy heron repositories.

i keep looking for minimal things so that things are responsive enough on my p4 pc.
i expected xfce not to have lag like gnome has.

i can live without gnome, but as of now openoffice is a must for me.
zenwalk gave me exact thing, a stripped down version of latest openoffice.org 3.0

i ran into 2 major problems:
configuring pppoe broadband (zenwalk doesnt have pppoeconf)
changing monitor resolution to 1024x786

nearly after a week of hunting, i was able to solve both problems in a single day.
apprantly pppoe-setup is not as good as pppoeconf, and pppoe-start can start the internet connection properly only if the network interface card is inactive (ifconfig eth0 down).

logically this means that the dns binding would happen only when the lan card eth0 is able to accept dynamically assigned dns servers.

root cause behind monitor resolution problem was a bug in latest xfce4.6
i desperately tried to look for a workaround, but failed.
a user on zenwalk irc guided me through lot of steps, but in the end updating xfce and a restart did the trick.

long live zenwalk, its fast, rapidly updated, and it doesnt have 6 month release schedule.

Comeback...

its been a while since i wrote anything in by blog..
it show how lazy i am, or how lazy humans are..

when i started this blog, i was filled with positive energy,
i was trying out new things, wanted to jot them down,
then some changes took place in my personal life,
and my focus shifted away from my best hobby,
which is to tinker with pc, digging deep into things.

now again i am having positive energy,
i think that this spark would last longer,
provided i can strike balance between work and life,
provided i dont loose focus,
provided i keep emotions and logic apart,
provided my objectives well defined somewhere,
provided they are continuously updated..

what i intend to do now is to be active jotting things down,
a time will come when my blog would influence my actions,
a time when my blog will become integral part of my daily routine..

lets hope for the best..

Freenode.net #linux-india webchat using mibbit

This posting is only for test purposes. I am trying to add #linux-india chat channel (server: freenode.net) using a widget from mibbit.

Free / Open Source OCR software

I came across a nice, easy and free OCR software.

The name is "Softi Free OCR Software"
http://www.softi.co.uk/freeocr.htm




















I have personally found it very accurate and free.
It had a downside in version 1.0, as you were not allowed to perform OCR on a portion of image.
In version 2.4, that problem is not more as you can easily select a portion of image on which OCR is to be performed.

I wish it had automatic layout detection. At least the ability to identify that the image contains two page scans would be really useful when it comes to scanning from paper book.

I hope in future release, they would add the functionality of performing OCR on images in PDF document. That would be really handy.

P.S. :: The software itself may not be open source, but it doesnt matter much as it is only a GUI frontend to popular command-line OCR engine name Tesseract.
http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/

Pidgin Portable 2.4.1 issues / tweaks

i had a few issues with latest version of pidgin portable.

first, i wanted to use escape key to close chat window
second, type ahead search in buddy list was not working.
third, launching pidgin ( when application was already open ) resulted in opening of new instance. i wanted the buddy list to get opened instead.

solution of first:
add this line to accels file located in .purple directory
(gtk_accel_path "

/Conversation/Close" "Escape")
then you would have to press "Escape" instead of "Ctrl W" for closing chat window

solution of second:
this issue is already discussed in below mentioned link. the problem is not is pidgin, but with gtk software which is a dependency.
http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/4966#comment:4

Temporary solution is to copy file: %GTK+_WORK_DIR%\bin\libgdk-win32-2.0-0.dll from GTK+ 2.12.6 which can be downloaded from this link.
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/binaries/win32/gtk+/2.12/gtk+-2.12.6.zip

solution of third:
not yet out. however, i have raised this issue in portableapps forums, and am waiting eagerly for reply.
http://portableapps.com/node/12980
as an alternative, i keep the buddylist window open all the time. in this case i can reach pidgin by alt tab window switching keyboard shortcut.

PodcastAlley.com - one stop location to find podcasts

i recently caught up with the fever of listening to linux podcasts. in the process of exploring web, i came across this website which can be used to find any podcast of your interest.

http://www.podcastalley.com

if you dont know what a podcast is, it is a site which provides audio episodes on some topic, over a regular interval of time, in a format playable by most of the digital music players, like iPod.