Teddy on Desktop just for fun.

People often complain that Linux users are mostly geeks. Does that seem to be true if you have a package that is just to display a teddy in the desktop. True, its completely true that Fedora has a package called xteddy, whose whole purpose is to display a teddy on the desktop and I must admit that it really looks very good on the desktop 🙂

Here’s a snapshot:

<img class="size-full wp-image-645" title="xteddy" src="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/teddy.jpg" alt="xteddy" width="840" height="525" />

Bash styling(themeing), the stylist way.

For last couple of days, I have been looking for solutions to make stlying my bash easier. So, first a screenshot of the effort:

<img class="size-full wp-image-703" title="bash style" src="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/a.jpg" alt="bash style" width="511" height="332" />

I was looking for the simplest solutions to do this. So, I installed two packages to make my life easier :  bashstyle and fortune.

sudo yum install fortune\*

For bash-style you can download the source files <a href="http://www.nanolx.org/bashstyle-ng/" target="_blank">here. Download the file, then do the following:

Wallpaper designed by me with GIMP.

Here&#8217;s the wallpaper, did not spend much time but I think this came out quite good.

<a href="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Untitled.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-1551" title="Wallpaper" src="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Untitled-300x225.jpg" alt="Wallpaper" width="300" height="225" />

Click to view full size or to download.

Gentoo, Knoppix and Linux Console Screenshots

Finally I decided to try a few distro&#8217;s that I downloaded with Beldi.

1. Gentoo: Quite Small distribution. Did not configure my DHCP address and also did not start a X window also so did not try too much.

<a href="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/gentoo.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-204" title="gentoo" src="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/gentoo-300x224.jpg" alt="gentoo" width="300" height="224" />

<a href="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/gentoo2.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-205" title="gentoo2" src="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/gentoo2-300x224.jpg" alt="gentoo2" width="300" height="224" />

2. Knoppix: Well known for its recovery functions, the Live CD does discover all the hardware and boots pretty nicely to the X windows directly with the ethernet configured.
   I specially liked the fact that the boot up to X window theme looked quite similar and the background did not change which is quite soothing. And no doubt the desktop background included by default is quite good.

<a href="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/knoppix.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-207" title="knoppix" src="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/knoppix.jpg" alt="knoppix" width="192" height="144" />

Installing Sofware on Linux, easier and finding alternates.

There are already some great blogs on this, why write another one. Let me just point you to the best one <a href="http://http://blogs.computerworld.com/installing_linux_software_101_for_windows_users" target="_blank">here.

Here are sites that will help you find the alternative to your favourite Windows programs:

1. <a href="http://www.osalt.com/" target="_blank">http://www.osalt.com/

2. <a href="http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Linux_software_equivalent_to_Windows_software" target="_blank">http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Linux_software_equivalent_to_Windows_software

3. <a href="http://www.linuxalt.com/" target="_blank">http://www.linuxalt.com/

Last access time for file

The C program will print the last access time for the file.

This is quite helpfull program when you want to find old files. Modifying the source to take the filename as argument and take multiple arguments is left as an exercise.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <time.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
int main(void)
{
    char datestring[80];
    struct  stat a;
    //int fd = open("ak",O_RDONLY);
    if (stat ("iptc.c", &a) == -1) {
        perror("stat");
        printf (" Error");
        return;
    }
    printf (" Last Access Time is %s", ctime(&a.st_atime));
    printf (" Last Access Time is %s", a.st_atime);
}

Built-in lists in vim

<a class="zem_slink freebase/en/vimscript" title="Vimscript" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vimscript">Vimscript provides excellent support for operating on collections of <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/data" title="Data" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data">data, a cornerstone of programming. In this third article in the series, learn how to use Vimscript&#8217;s built-in lists to ease everyday operations such as reformatting lists, filtering sequences of filenames, and sorting sets of line numbers. You&#8217;ll also walk through examples that demonstrate the power of lists to extend and enhance two common uses of <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/vim" title="Vim (text editor)" rel="homepage" href="http://www.vim.org/">Vim: creating a <a class="zem_slink freebase/en/user_defined_function" title="User-defined function" rel="wikipedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User-defined_function">user-defined function to align assignment operators, and improving the built-in text completions mechanism.