Partition Magic

Prabhu anna’s friend Senthil wanted to install Ubuntu, GNU/Linux in his laptop. But he had only one partition (ntfs) in it. So we thought of using partition magic to resize that partition and to create new partitions to install Ubuntu. We downloaded and installed Partition Magic. When we tried to resize the partition, it showed the information “Its a demo version”. After that only, we came to know that, that demo version is unfunctional 😦 Then after some googling, we came to know about gparted LiveCD. Gparted-LiveCD is running Fluxbox, small in size and comes with the programs parted, fdisk, ntfs-3g, partimage and testdisk. gparted-LiveCD can be used to play with partitions.

I’M using Yahoo IM from emacs

Last week I read about yod.el, a client for the Yahoo! Messenger chat protocol. It is written in emacs lisp, and supports Yahoo! chatrooms, instant messages and conferences. By installing it, you can use your Yahoo! IM from emacs. I installed yod.el and started chatting from emacs. If you want to use your Yahoo! IM from emacs, visit yod.el.

How to speed up OpenOffice

To cut down OpenOffice.org’s startup time:

1. Start OpenOffice (it doesn’t matter which application you load, Calc, Impress, or Writer will all work)
2. Click Tools>Options
3. Select Java menu and uncheck “Use a Java runtime environment”
4. Select the Memory Tab and change the following options:

• Number of steps: 30
• Use for Open Office: 128
• Memory per Object: 20
• Number of Objects: 20

Next time you start an OpenOffice.org application it should open much more quickly. But it will also eat up more memory. If you have an older computer with less than 1GB of RAM, you might want to just live with a slow load time.

GNU/Emacs starts singing

When I was studying second year in college, during FStival one guy showed demo on GNU/Emacs. He played songs, read mails and etc in Emacs. After some days I asked my Emacs to sing. But it refused to sing at that time. Today Senthil came to my home. While chatting about Emacs, we decided to configure EMMS.

I am using Ubuntu Feisty Fawn in my laptop. To listen songs in Emacs, we installed emms, emacs21-el and emacs-extra. After going thro docs and adding the given below lines in .emacs file, I asked my GNU/Emacs to sing. Wow, my GNU/Emacs starts singing now. The first song we listened in my emacs was “Natpukkulae oru …” from Chennai-60028.

.emacs

(require ’emms-setup)
(emms-standard)
(emms-default-players)

In simple words, emacs rocks 🙂

LiveStrong

Some weeks before SAP told about Livestrong wristband. This wristband was developed by Nike and the money that comes by selling this band, is used for cancer research and to raise cancer awareness. Yesterday Prabhu and myself bought this in the Nike showroom near our home. Hope after reading this post, you will also buy one.

Using a variable inside ‘sed’

I have declared a variable in a file. I want to set the value of this variable, to a variable in a different file. When I tried to use ‘sed’ to accomplish this, I encountered an error. The error was, its not getting the value from the old file and just places the variable name in the new file. By changing the command slightly, It works fine. Given below are the commands I used.

OLD-FILE

a=one

NEW-FILE

b=four

$ source OLD-FILE

$ sed -i ‘s/b=.*/b=\${a}/’ NEW-FILE    #Output : b=${a}  #Wrong

$ sed -i ‘s/b=.*/b=’$a/ NEW-FILE         #Output : b=one    #Correct One