Anuradha Online

Build VirtualBox in Ubuntu 11.04

2011-09-20T15:23:00.000+05:30

What is VirtualBox?
VirtualBox is a general purpose cross-platform virtualizer. It can be run on Linux, Mac, Windows and Solaris systems.

Purpose of VirtualBox

Simultaneously run multiple Operating Systems in a single machine
No hardware virtualization needed
Test systems, software without effecting your running system
Pack complete solutions as a virtual image to save the burden on configuring systems from scratch
Save cost on hardware, power and other infrastructure needs to run multiple systems to achieve a purpose.

Read the Complete features list.

Some Terminologies:

Host OS : The system that runs the VirtualBox application
Guest OS : Systems run inside VirtualBox application
Virtual Machine (VM) : This is the environment which your Guest OS is running
Guest additions: Some features to improve the functionality of VMs running in VirtaulBox

This post is about building VirtualBox 4.1.51 from source in a Linux (Ubuntu 11.04) host.

Prerequisites:

Java Runtime Environment
Several packages and libraries for the Linux distribution
Subversion client

Prepare your system:

Installing necessary packages

$ sudo apt-get install gcc g++ bcc iasl xsltproc uuid-dev zlib1g-dev libidl-dev libsdl1.2-dev libxcursor-dev libasound2-dev libstdc++5 libhal-dev libpulse-dev libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev python2.5-dev libqt4-dev qt4-dev-tools libcap-dev libxmu-dev mesa-common-dev libglu1-mesa-dev linux-kernel-headers libcurl4-openssl-dev libpam0g-dev libxrandr-dev libxinerama-dev libqt4-opengl-dev makeself subversion

If you run on 64bit machine (As I'm now) you'll have to install the following 32bit packages too.

$ sudo apt-get install ia32-libs libc6-dev-i386 lib32gcc1 gcc-multilib lib32stdc++6
g++-multilib

(Note:I've copied the packages from VirtualBox web site but practically I've installed them one by one checking what that package really does. And some times the packages are named differently in other systems.)

Install and setup Java RE 1.6.x

Check whether you have the Canonical partner repository is enabled in your sources.list

$ sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-jre sun-java6-bin sun-java6-plugin
sun-java6-fonts

Setup the Java home in your system into environment variable.

Append the following to the ~/.bashrc

export JAVA_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.26"

Checkout the source code from VirtualBox SVN

$ svn co http://www.virtualbox.org/svn/vbox/trunk vbox

Building the VirtualBox

1. Navigate to vbox directory and run configure script

$ ./configure --disable-hardening

2. To build the VBox you need to source the generated environment script
$ source ./env.sh

3. Build the package

$ kmk all

4. Build and install the VirtualBox kernel module

$ cd out/linux.x86/release/bin/src

$ make

$ sudo make install

$ sudo modprobe vboxdrv

$ sudo chown user:group /dev/vbodrv

Once the kernel module is installed and loaded in to the kernel, navigate to "/vbox/out/linux.amd64/release/bin" and you can run the VirtualBox by issuing the following command.
$ ./VirtualBox

That way you can build the Oracle's VirtualBox from source. For the easy of running you may create a local alias or a menu icon to run VBox.

$sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/virtaulbox ~/vbox/out/linux.amd64/release/bin/VirtualBox

VirtualBox source code is under GNU GPL V2.

Great (Presentations, knowlege sharing, entertaining, conference)

2011-09-16T23:14:00.007+05:30

Past week was the biggest event we (WSO2) had in 2011. WSO2Con 2011. It's a successor of the WSO2Con 2010 and was 100 times improved. It wasn't a typical boring conference where attendants fall asleep after settling down in the hall. It was a dynamic and thrilled series of presentations and events lined up in two tracks.

In summery:

Great keynotes from various speakers across the world
For the first time, "Google" spoke in Sri Lanka
Panel discussions were amazing where audience and panelists had hot discussions on various technologies
It's not only WSO2 Products people interested about, they also impressed about our culture too
At live demonstration on StratosLive, in few minutes the conference hall turned in to a hands on workshop (where folks fired up the laptops and started to work on SLive)
It was great to hear how people use our products in their business, education and research
People realized that, being an open source company does not mean being looser
WSO2 is not a startup company any more!
#WSO2Con was in the 70th position in trending topics in Twitter
We don't settle, we are an agile company, we go where our customers takes us
Pre and post conference tutorials helped the attendants to get some deep understanding in some areas of our technologies
Sri Lankan cultural dances and Elephant rides gave an insight of our heritage to the foreign participants
WSO2 Music Jam session showed that WSO2ers are not just bunch of geeks who married to computers - They got other talents too!
It's not the technology that does magic, it's people who make the technology.

Looking forward to the WSO2Con 2012.

WSO2Con 2011- learn : share : middleware

2011-08-19T06:28:00.012+05:30

If you are interested to know how enterprise grade middleware plays a major role in today's businesses and also in IT world in general, WSO2Con 2011 would be the ideal conference for one to be.

With the boost we got from last year conference, this time we have lined up speeches from more than 30 experienced speakers from more than 10 countries, tutorials by experts from WSO2 and Apache committers, and interactive panel discussions.

This will be a great opportunity to build your networks with different communities in the technology spaces like, distributed web application development, PaaS, SaaS, Cloud computing, Governance, Business process flows, etc. And also communities from government and corporate sectors.

Above three para's are the high level view of the event. For more details visit WSO2Con 2011 Event page.

Become an early bird and enjoy discounts and more great deals. - "REGISTER NOW".

Important Info :

Happy Birthday Son

2011-03-28T11:52:00.003+05:30

Today (27th March 2011), my little son celebrated his first year birth day. It was a fast year filled with joy and love. We went to the temple early morning, observe pansil and our son was calm and trying to control his noise and the active actions. We offered a tea session for an orphanage and we thought of making it a habit to offer some thing in our capacity to help them. (They also need all the things we need in our lives). And I want to set this example to my son, when he enjoys his life to maximum always think about those who don't have and care for them as much as possible. And there is a fine line to think when it comes to actually care for them. You should not treat them as a different person, it's not sympathy, it's actually equality and treat every one as humans. There is only two categories of people. "Good" and "Bad". He needs to identify those two types.

We arranged a simple dinner for our close relatives and every one had a good time with my son. He got lots of presents kisses and he enjoyed the day to the max!.

I wish a happy birthday and a bright future for my son Saveen.

Amma and Thatta loves you a lot!.

Enterprise Ready and Open Source, join WSO2 community

2010-09-24T14:20:00.004+05:30

The term "Open Source" has a wider meaning. It's not just about making Open Source Software. It's about making any of your work/idea/software/handcraft (any thing shareable) Open to the public with permission to read, modify, improve and also redistribute. In coupled with Open Source, Open Standards also play a key role on standardizing the processes with Open Formats. Computer software industry is one of the major industries which uses Open Standards and also Open Source Software.

WSO2 Inc is an award wining Global Open Source SOA Middleware company. All the software delivered from WSO2 are 100% open source under Apache License. The business model is basically selling the services such as 24x7 customer support, on site, phone, on-line support and training. And we have all our products on cloud platform too. If you want more details, please visit the corporate web site.

This post is not about how we sell our services. It's about another important mission we drive for the benefit of the Open Source Software community. Most of the time, the community edition of software are not the actual product that's being sold out to customers. And some times, the source code is not fully open sourced. Our mission is all about sharing a set of fully functional enterprise ready software with the global community and make a platform to work, communicate, collaborate and get paid for some of your work.

Interested? OK. The place to start is WSO2 OxygenTank.

WSO2 OxygenTank is the developer portal for the projects hosted by WSO2 Inc. It's a one stop resource center for source code, discussions, documentation, issue tracking, Wiki, articles, tutorials, KBs, Webinar recordings and many other resources. All you got to do is register (it's free) and start working on projects!

OxygenTank consist of the following main sections.

Downloads

You can download the source pack, binary pack and documentation pack of each project from there. All packs are digitally signed to ensure the trust.

Forum

This is the place for technical discussions. Your questions will be answered by an Engineer who actually working on that project or some one from the community.

Library

You can find SOA web services related content from OxygenTank Library. These content (Articles, Tutorials, KBs, Videos, Pod-castes, etc) are written by current and past Engineers of WSO2 and also some enthusiastic community members. If you need to read some thing more than the product documentations, this is the place for you.

Mailing Lists

You can subscribe to any of the mailing lists based on your interest of project. You'll be able to discuss about project architectural matters and also about all the project development related matters through each channel.

Code base is maintained in a Subversion system. You can become a part of the community and check out the source code of the products, and become a contributor.

Webinars

WSO2 conducts regular webinars on many areas of SOA, Web Services and also about all WSO2 Products. These Webinars are useful to get an understanding of the projects as well as WSO2 as a whole. You can view/download past webinar videos, slides as well.

Apart from being a code contributor, you can write content (Articles, KBs, Tutorials) for OxygenTank Library. We have a payment scheme for content contribution. You need to follow the standards/templates and we are doing a thorough technical review before publishing. Your content must be genuine and your unique work!

We have the Public Issue tracker to track the project's activities. You can use your OxygenTank credentials to log in to that.

This would be a great opportunity for those who are interested in joining with enterprise ready Open Source SOA projects. And many of our projects are related to Apache projects too. And most of our developers are Apache Contributors. So you'll be able to work with many great Hackers who build great software.

So what's stopping you from being a part of this community? Join Today!

WSO2- We are 5!

2010-09-13T07:49:00.003+05:30

WSO2 Inc became five years on 4th August 2010. We had a small in-house birth day party. :-). With all fun and excitement we had throughout August, we are organizing a conference targeting professionals and University students on this month at HNB towers. It's called WSO2Con 2010. Well known Industry professionals like Sanjiva Weerawarana, Ph. D, Founder, Chairman & CEO, WSO2 Inc, Paul Fremantle, Co-Founder & CTO, WSO2 Inc, Jonathan Marsh, VP, Business Development & Marketing, WSO2 Inc. Prof. Rohan Samarajiva, Chairman & CEO, LIRNEasia, James Clark, Father of XML & Founder, Thai Open Source Software Center will be delivering keynotes and there are other professionals willing to share the insights of Web Services, SOA and Cloud technologies. Event is a two day conference starts tomorrow (14th Sep 2010). We'll be doing a live streaming of the speeches too. You can access the webcast by going to http://wso2.org/events/wso2con-2010-colombo-sri-lanka. Be there or watch online and get involved!.

Follow WSO2 on Twitter : http://twitter.com/wso2 and also on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/WSO2Inc

The Art of Community by Jono Bacon

2010-05-16T11:43:00.006+05:30

I'm in the transition period of being a Tech to Semi-Tech guy. I was looking for some resources to read on "Community Management" and found this great piece of work done by Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu Community Manager. I was reading the e-book version of his book "The Art of Community" until Lavi gave the actual book to me as a present. The book was autographed by Jono and Lavi has got it at a Global event (not sure what). Thanks to Lavi, now I'm reading the actual book and will write about it once I finish reading.

Every body out there in to Community Management, I recommend you read this book!. Thanks Jono for writing this!.

Family ranks upgraded

2010-03-28T08:18:00.004+05:30

Yesterday was a day which falls under the category of "Unforgettable days" in my life. Every body wishes to have a promotion in some way during the life time. So all of our family members got their promotions yesterday.

Person	Then	Now
Dasunpriya Anuradha (Me)	Husband	Father
Madhusha Shirangika	Wife	Mother
M.D. Weerasinghe & P.G. Piyarathne	Fathers	Grand Fathers
Sunanda & Jayanthi	Mothers	Grand Mothers
Chanusha & Umesha	Daughters/sisters	Daughters/Sisters/Aunties

The reason for this upgrade is our new born son. He started a whole new chapter in all of our lives. Another interesting/challenging chapter. Okay this post will be very short. cos, I have to go to my Son and Madhu. Will update more details and some photos in the following days.

I wish all the best for my son. Be a good person, not just a "Person". Live a simple life with a deep understanding of it. And my wife Madhu, you are the most beautiful mom and the strongest women in the world. Every woman is a mother, respect them, love them as you love your own mother.

New Decade New Life

2010-02-03T07:59:00.003+05:30

After couple of months silence, I thought of doing a blog post. My life has being an active and dynamic one since I've born! :-). It has come to this state passing various stages. Once I turned back and look at my life, I don't have any regrets! I've done almost all the good, bad, fun, adventure stuff that a boy could do. I heard most of the people answer the question in TV etc, "if you want to go back to a state of your life, to which part you would go?" and they answer "My school life". If I would have to answer that question, I would say "I don't want to go back, I just want to move forward and end this life happily". It's because I've done all the things in my capacity and have enjoyed the life to the maximum, gained lots of knowledge and experience. I haven't missed any thing! Those who missed certain things in their pass wishes if they could go back and do those things!.

Now that I'm 30 years old, and going to be a father soon, yeh my wife is 7 months pregnant as at now. I'm a happily married family guy! Now I'm enjoying being a husband, father and the total family life. We should not postponed the good things we need to do. Since I'm following a middle path and living a simple life with basic needs it's bit easy for me to do good things, like going to a temple, keeping fit, taking my family on a trip, etc.

In this 2010, I thought of changing my career from being a high-tech to a semi-tech and more human oriented. I had this concept of being a "Human Oriented IT Person" for a while and I got a golden opportunity to move in to that level. Last month I joined WSO2, one of the world's leading Open Source SOA Company runs in US, UK and Sri Lanka, founded by a great Sri Lankan scientist Dr. Sajiva Weerawarna. I joined WSO2 as the Community Manger and the Editor of the Open Source Community Developer portal called OxygenTank. With this new role, I'll be able to get more closer to the Open Source Community as a whole and specially around WSO2. Since I have experience in Network/Systems Administration, Engineering, Project Management, Training, Consultancy, FOSS Advocacy, public speech, etc I have a good understanding in IT, Business and Community.

Well... It's a new decade, and a new life! Have to do lots of new/good things. Catch you all soon!

Apache hitting the road!

2009-11-25T10:08:00.002+05:30

If you were dreaming of meeting Apache (World's No 1 web server) big shots Greg Stein, Justin and our own Sri Lankan Apache contributors, this will be the best opportunity for it. Apache Asia Road Show is a 3 day event with 2 days Conference and a single day hackerthon. Hurry!!! reserve your seat now before it too late.

My house for Sale

2009-09-29T14:30:00.002+05:30

This is not a spam. :). Yes I'm selling my house. Here's the details.

Location: Ampara, Sri Lanka.

Directions: 1.3 KM from Ampara Town, 1KM to Ampara Base Hospital. ( Located in a Residential area)

Description : 3 rooms, 2 bathrooms (one attached to master bedroom), Living room, Dining hall, Kitchen. Full ceiling, fans in every room, 24 hour water supply, electricity, overhead tank Land is 43 perches and have 5 coconut trees (grown for 30 years), 2 King-coconut trees, Jack tree, Mango, etc. You have enough room to park more than 4 vehicles in the garden area. Fully covered boundary wall.

Price : 5, 000000/- (Negotiable) US $43555/-

Those who are interested please call

Weerasinghe (My Dad) : +94 714446404
email : mdweerasinghe@gmail.com

I'll put some photos later. Still couldn't find time to visit Ampara as I'm stuck in Colombo.

It's 09/09/09

2009-09-09T19:42:00.003+05:30

Life has many patterns. And we always like patterns. For example, many people love to have a phone number with some kind of a number pattern. (688688, 566566, etc). We can pay some extra cash and get a vehicle registration number with a pattern, like PP-1111. In another hand, some numbers have some value to it, like "Lucky 7", "Hero Number 1". Even our Postal Department have issued 9 new stamps to remember today. Same way in Sri Lankan culture many people consider the number 9 as a bad number. (නවය නපුරුයි). But personally I don't believe such things. But I like patterns. So this blog post is to denote the pattern of the day, 09/09/09. September 09, 2009. Wish you all a bright future. :).

Using iPod Nano (3Gen) with Ubuntu

2009-08-09T13:05:00.006+05:30

Couple of years ago, using Apple iPods with GNU/Linux was not an entertaining experience for most of people. But now the FOSS world is more promising on that and also in many other apps on cross platform interoperability. Earlier, My wife asks me and I used to sync the movies, music vids, mp3 to her iPod using gtkpod. I had to do it because i used ffmpeg to convert the videos to MOV format and then sync them to the iPod via gtkpod. But here after she's going to do it by her own. So I had to find some "click and go" way to covert the files and had to teach her on using gtkpod.

YouTube and google video are the main search repositories for music videos. The best tool I found for this was DownloadHelper extension for Firefox. The version I'm using here is 4.3. It can download videos and convert them to many formats as single files or as a batch. And the extension is actively developed and updates are released frequently.

After converting the downloaded video you can put them to the iPod using gtkpod. Using gtkpod is not a big deal. It's simple and any one can catch the features within a half and hours time.

Click "Save Changes" to write the changes to the iPod. And you can use Sync Directories or files options in the File menu of gtkpod. In order to perform the tasks smoothly you need to have some software pre-installed in your GNU/Linux system.

ffmpeg
libmp4v2-0
All other multimedia codecs

If you have a movie file (avi, wmv, or any other type) you can use ffmpeg to convert them easily to MOV and can be used with your iPod Nano. Haven't try it with iPhones and iPod classics, cos I don't have those with me yet. ;-).

This is the basic way to use the iPod with gtkpod. You can try out other stuff like online music syncing when you have time. :)

Cheers!

King of Pop, no more

2009-06-26T11:10:00.005+05:30

Yesterday I lost another "one of my legendary characters". I have few favourite entertainers, namely; Bruce Lee, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Michel Joseph Jackson, Dr. Dre, Eminem and few others. But among them, there are very few who I call " A Legend". Bruce Lee was a legend. And Michel Jackson.

I still remember when I was 8,9 years old I didn't know that was MJ who dance like that, sing like that, but I liked the moves he make and the accent. I started to immitate him by wearing cloths like him and shout "aauww" like him. As I grow with the time, finally I managed to catch the moon walk and some other dancing movements he made by watching his videos. I started to collect the lyrics, CDs and sang alone with the CD. No one told me he's the king of pop but he was a king to me. No one told me nor I didn't have Internet or Sat TV to get to know about his unmatched skills, but I thought to my self no one in this earth can do break dance as he does. Finally today he leaves at his 50th year of life, leving my childhood memories with me.

Dear Michel Jackson, you were the hero of dance world to me. And you'll always be in my heart till I die.

"There's a place in your heart
And I know that it is love
And this place could be much brighter than tomorrow
And if you really try
You'll find there's no need to cry
In this place you'll feel there's no hurt or sorrow"

Dear King, thank you very much for the joy you gave me from my childhood and for the unbileiveable contribution to the music world and for helping many of the helpless people in the world.

Image from celebrity-blogger.com

Welcome to new Sri Lanka

2009-05-17T09:29:00.002+05:30

By now we know and believe Velupillai and Other terrorist leaders are killed by our Armed Forces or they have suicide. We knew this will end soon. I like to give my sincere gratitude to our Three forces, Police, Civil security forces and Mr. President for scarifying their life for the future of Sri Lanka and for our lives.

I salute you all!!.

A disaster happened, what should we do?

2009-05-04T12:55:00.006+05:30

As at today, the war is officially over but rescue missions are still undergoing in Sri Lanka to securely rescue Tamil civilians trapped in LTTE barbarians. This is the final few days of Prabhakaran and his followers. So I'll not talk about him or LTTE here now.

We saw hundreds of thousands of people fleeing from LTTE to safe zone controlled by SL government. All of them are residing in refuge camps. They need food, water, cloths, medicine, sanitary facilities and many other general human needs. And the great thing is people around the country were organized and collected many essentials and quickly sending them to those areas with the message "We all are a one big family, we love you". This has being the one and only humanitarian war ever happened in the world and will be on the history books for sure.

Now that we had a disaster, and we see the aftermath too. But on the other hand, we are getting lots of goods and services to this affected areas from all around the country and globe. We need a proper Disaster Management plan to handle the received donations such as food, water, cloths, medics, etc. This remembers me the Tsunami 2006. We did not had a proper disaster management plan or a system (manual or computerized) so we wasted lots of valuable goods received for afforded areas. And distribution of the donations were highly disorganized where some areas receive excessive amount of donations and another area had nothing at all. So we had that experience, no need to repeat that same process.

We need to mange the donations (all types) properly so that each and every one gets the proper benefit out of those donations without wasting them. Here it comes the need of a well structured computerized Disaster Management System. Ok... do we have to spend another million rupee on this? Absolutely not. There is this free and open source software system call "Sahana" (www.sahana.lk) developed by Sri Lankan FOSS community, where you can use for these kind of scenarios. You can download it for free, use it conjoining with any number of donating organizations and government. I know most of the organizations using this system today. But this is a reminder for those who still not aware of such system. Next question would be support on using this software, and make it work in your organization/group on the double. There is a strong community support through mailing lists , IRC. And if you want fully featured professional/commercial service you can contact Respere, the Sahana Company (http://www.respere.com/). They provide island wide commercial training, support for Sahana Disaster Management System.

So now that we have donations, and human resources to handle them and a Computer Software System to help manage those donations and also to maintain missing persons registry, where many people are missing and to be found. So I request all the donors, organizations, to be wise, and manage the peoples hardly earned donations so that each and every family member in north will receive the goods and services equally and minimize wastage.

I can see clearly now the war is gone...
I can say all the problems will fly away...
And there will be safer life for all our friends...
It's gonna be a bright, (bright) bright Sunshiny day......

Sri Lanka or Tamil Eelam?

2009-04-09T07:09:00.006+05:30

This post is dedicated to all "Tamil Eelam" fans...

Velupillai and his friends started an Ealam war before I born. But I couldn't stay away from it by saying "I'm not a part of this war". We all in Sri Lanka suffered from this war, and still there is a little more to suffer. I came to know by reading the history of the crisis, in late 70s Velupillai's initial idea of fighting against the majority of Sri Lankan Sinhalease was truly liberal, that he was standing against for step-mother treatments for the tamil minority (quantity wise) in Sri Lanka. Those early rulers in the country have done some thing really wrong in ruling the country and Velipillai triggered this liberation fight pointing that. But the country changed with the time, rulers changed, political views were changed. And poeple wanted to end this fight and stay together as one nation. But, Velupillai did not want to see a happy ending of it as he has nothing else to do (killing) if this war ends. So he gathered as many people as possible (mostly by force) and kept killing and disturbing the people's life for the last 30 years. And there were many helpers, money donors in Sri Lanka itself and some other countries around the world who financially supported this terrorists. Many of them were doing illegal business like drug dealing, arms dealing, robberies, kidnapping, hijacking, etc. So now think , what has happen to the liberal fight? where it has being leading to? Finally, the innocent Tamil people were aside suffering from the business work of Velupillai, but he did not give a shit. He holds the banner "We are freedom fighters", but kills hundreds of innocent Tamils who have not obey him. Now every body knows that Velupiiai is not the "leader of Tamil union", but the "executioner of Tamil union".

Separate a part from the Sri Lanka and having an Eelam is not an effective solution in the long run too. The land is too small and when the population grow the land will not be sufficient for the crowd, so a new war will start in addition to the ongoing one. And if Velupillai creates a native land for Tamils and kill all the Sinhalease in that area what about the Tamils who live in Sinhalease areas? Shall they all be killed as Velupillai does for others? Is that the solution for this problem?. NO. There is no ethnic problem in Sri Lanka, there wasn't for decades. Sri Lanka have a one BIG problem, it's this Velupillai's LTTE Terrorist problem.

Here is the map that Velupillai draw for the Tamil Eelam.

He thinks, this small land can occupy all the Tamils in this country, and make this is the heritage land of "Tamils". Why he want to cage the Tamils in to a small area while the whole Sri Lanka is wide open for all Sinhalese, Tamils and every other one? Now see for your self, look at the Sri Lanka map, which has more space to live, have access to more resources.

Any one can see that Tamils have more land now than before, and Sri Lanka is a country were many raises lives peacefully and care for each other. People in most countries are very narrow minded and raises. They don't accept the humans as a one kind. But here in Sri Lanka, people don't care of the skin color or the language a person speak. They only care about sharing and living a happy life with each and ever one together as a one country.

Velupillai brought death and fear to every one in this country by many means. Now it's time for him to end his life inside his own dream. So Eelam fans, I think it's better stop dreaming now. You will never see that Eelam within Sri Lanka, try to find a different country for that. Ask for a land from a country that really support your crazy ideas. But in Sri Lanka, there is no space for you. We (Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims, etc) live as a one nation, under one flag, singing "Sri Lanka Matha" national anthum. No one will be able to change that.!. So Sorry Velupillai, so sorry Eelam fans all over the world. Your dream ain't gonna be a reality...

Good Bye Tamil Eelam, Go to Hell LTTE...

Peace.!

Instant Internet Connection Sharing

2009-03-10T17:49:00.004+05:30

Today I came Kandy for 5 days stay due to some functions lined up to attend. My office provided me a HSPA dongle to keep my self online during the stay. Nah.. it's not about the dongle. ;-). I wanted to share the Internet connection with another computer at home. I only had a crossover cable with me, which I always carry in my backpack. So I connected the two Laptops with it and shared my primary PPP connection with the guest Laptop. Both Laptops are runnung on GNU/Linux. The simple setup I had is as below.

Host PC Settings.

I already received an IP for my ppp0 connection from my ISP. So I only had to assign an IP to my LAN card (eth0)

# ifconfig eth0 10.0.0.1 netmask 255.255.255.0

(Don't need to set the default route in the host, cos it's already set to ppp0)

Enable NAT in Farewall and IP forwarding.

# iptables -P FORWARD ACCEPT
# iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o ppp0 -j MASQUERADE

# echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forwad

Guest Settings.

Set up the Interface.

# ifconfig eth0 10.0.0.2 netmask 255.255.255.0

Set the default route of the GUEST to HOST eth0 IP

# route add default gw 10.0.0.1

Put the name server IP which received to the HOST PC from ISP in the GUEST /etc/resolv.conf

# echo nameserver xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx > /etc/resolv.conf

That's all. I simply enabled Internet Connection Sharing in my Laptop.

Mandriva One 2009... You made me say "WOW"

2009-01-23T14:15:00.001+05:30

Today I installed Mandriva One 2009, a distribution which comes with a Linux Kernel, GNU software and many other custom made and free software. I installed this as a virtual machine, to test it and to see how Mandriva Directory Server performs on her own man's lap. ;-). So I started to install the packages requred for it, and while they are downloading, I went an inside tour. I was amazed, and couldn't hold the "wow" came from my inside...

Mandriva One 2009 comes with a Linux 2.6.27 kernel and I installed the KDE version of it which runs KDE 4.1. There is Gnome version too. Even though I'm not a KDE fan, I wanted to see how is KDE doing it to satisfy me. I was pretty amazed, the start menu is well organized, not too many options, and looked neat. That's some thing I was looking forward to see from a KDE main menu.

There were some cool widgets Which are ready to use and I activated couple of them just to see. And the default wallpapers are very eye catching.
Mandriva One comes with OpenOffice 3.0.0, and it was loading faster than the 2.x versions. Then I quickly went through the applications installed. There is almost all the major apps you need to run a Desktop enviorenment, Internet, Multimedia, Software Installation, Systems Tools, etc. If you need further apps you can easily installed using various methods, rpm, GUI based, or urpmi, etc. And Compiz was packed with the OS, and have all the 3D desktop effects you nee.

This version of Mandriva One 2009, comes with good collection of apps for the desktop users and is in a single CD. You can download it from their official mirrors. The System Requirements need is (as in the web site)

Processor: Any Intel®, AMD or VIA processor
RAM: 512MB minimum, 1GB recommended
Hard disk: 2GB minimum, 6GB recommended
Graphics card: NVIDIA®, ATITM, Intel®, SiS, Matrox,VIA. 3D desktop functionality requires an NVIDIA GeForce (up to 8800), ATITM Radeon 7000 to HD 3870, or Intel® i845 to x4500HD
3D acceleration is supported on most capable hardware. For more details, check the hardware compatibility database
Sound cards: All Sound Blaster, AC97 and HDA compatible cards are supported. Note: Creative Labs X-Fi cards are not currently supported
DVD drive required
SATA, IDE, SCSI, SAS: most controllers are supported in non-RAID mode, and some are supported in RAID mode

So for those who are willing to kick Windows Vista away and also for those who are interested in trying out KDE 4.1 without the messy look, I think Mandriva One 2009 is a good distro to try out. It comes as a live user version and can be installed and make secure as a regular GNU/Linux distribution.

Okay It's time for me to get back to the work I was doing... Got to start playing with the Directory Server of it...

Mandriva Team, Good Work fellas!!!

Fedora Directory Server, NFS, SAMBA in action.

2009-01-22T14:01:00.010+05:30

I was working on a Centralized authentication system in the past couple of days. I was comparing Mandriva Directory Server with Fedora Directory Server and testing them in various levels. I thought of make the work available online so any one else in the world can benefit from this. This will not be a step-by-step guide sort of a thing, but have methods of performing the tasks.

My setup was able to;

Authenticate Unix and Windows users from an LDAP server (Fedora Directory Server).
Map a dedicated network drive for all the users under their username using SAMBA.
Enable roming profiles for POSIX accounts using NFS exports.
Control hardware on GNU/Linux based systems using PolicyKit.
And some other stuff... Like mail server authentication, etc

Scenario

Users must authenticate using LDAP user credentials from a central server.

Existing/New Windows and GNU/Linux Clients should be authenticated via LDAP server.

Use e-mail facility.

Control over selected client hardware (eg:usb pen drives, digital cameras, etc).

A very rough diagram ;-)

Testing tools

Hardware

* Intel Core Duo2
* 512MB RAM
* Networking Hardware

Software

* Fedora Directory Server 8.0
* Zimbra Collaboration Suite
* Apache 2.0
* Bind

Operating Systems

* Fedora Core 9 (For Authentication Server)
* Ubuntu GNU/Linux (Clients)
* MS Windows (Clients)

Server Installation

* Installed Fedora Core 9
* Installed Fedora Directory Server 7.1
* Installed Zimbra Collaboration Suite.

Client Installation

GNU/Linux

I have to perform few steps to set up GNU/Linux clients to authenticate with the Fedora Directory Server.

* First install the meta-package for LDAP authentication.


# apt-get install ldap-auth-client

* Then edit the /etc/ldap.conf file to suite our setup. I have to put following details in the ldap.conf file.


##Host

host  192.xxx.xxx.xxx

##The distinguished name of the search base

base dc =mydomain,dc=net

##LDAP version to use

ldap_version 3

Fiter to AND with uid=%s

pam filter objectclass=Account

pam_filter objectclass=posixAccount

Group member attribute

pam_member_attribute memberuid

pam_member_attribute uniquemember

##Password hash

pam_password md5

Leave the rest of the file as it is.

NFS Server set up

I thought of keeping the user’s files in a different server for security reasons. Hens I installed the NFS server in a different computer running Ubuntu GNU/Linux . (Actually I’m running the NFS server in virtual host)

* Installed NFS Server


#  apt-get install portmap nfs-kernel-server

* I created a directory /home/nfs to create user home directories.

* edit the /etc/exports and added the following lines. This is to create the network shares.


/home/ *(rw,sync)

The above lines will give permission to all users to access /home/nfs with read write permissions.

After that I have to do export the shares


#  exportfs -ra

* Restart the services


# /etc/init.d/portmap restart

#/etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server restart

After I’ve done with the server side, next thing was to set up the clients to auto mount the NFS share.

* Installed the nfs modules in clients


#  apt-get install portmap nfs-common

* Then installed the automount module


#  apt-get install autofs

Then I need to deny access to all others and allow only for set I want.

* Edit the /etc/hosts.deny and enter the following lines.


portmap : ALL

* Edit the /etc/hosts.allow and entered the IP address of the NFS server


portmap : 192.xxx.xxx.xxx

Tip : When ever I edit a configuration file, it’s always better to put a comment before the edition. That way you can track your changes easily.

eg: in /etc/hosts.allow I’ve put a comment


#Anuradha added these lines..

portmap : 192.xxx.xxx.xxx

After that, try to mount the NFS share manually to check whether the setup is working.


# mount 192.168.0.166:/home/nfs /media/netdisk

(This is done in the client machine, and I have created a mount point in client’s /media directory.)

* Then add the following line in /etc/fstab to mount the share automatically at the computer startup.


192.xxx.xxx.xxx:/home/nfs  /media/netdisk nfs rw initr 0 0

Tip: Set the permissions on the nfs share as read, write for every one in the /home/nfs. (This is until I separate the user directories for each user)

This was okay to mount a particular share in a client computer at every bootup. But, what I want is to mount the relevant users share up on his login. So at this moment I create a small shell script to get the user ID and mount the particular share. In order to get the job done from this script, I need to have the user NFS share being created in the NFS server. eg: /home/[username] in the NFS server.

The script looks like this.


#!/bin/bash
#Get logged in user and mount the NFS share.
logname > /tmp/users.txt
mount 192.168.0.116:/home/`cat /tmp/users.txt` /media/netdisk

I have to make this script run after the user login.

But this way the user’s profile will not be in a roaming mode. I wanted to test this as Ill. So made the /home directory of the user available from the NFS server.

* Create a directory for each and every user in the NFS server by the user’s user ID.


eg: # mkdir /home/user1

(I have give the mode as 777 for the time being…)

In the client machine, I have to configure the autofs.

* Add the following line to the /etc/auto.master


/home   /etc/auto.home

* Then create a file /etc/auto.home and put the following line there.

* soft, initr, rsize=8192,wsize=8192,nosuid,noexec 192.168.0.116:/home &

* I added the following line in the /etc/auto.misc too.


/home      -fstype=nfs     192.xxx.xxx.xxx:/home

* Finally you have to edit the /etc/fstab and make the /home directory hard mounted.


192.168.0.116:/home       /home nfs rw,intr 0 0

When reboot and log in as test user “foo” with passwd “foo123”. The login was successful with one error.

“$HOME/.dmrc… some thing

To resolve this error, I setup a directory in the NFS server and named it same as the LDAP user ID and gave the permission as follows.


chown -R [usr_name] /home/[user_dir]

chmod -R 770 /home/[user_dir]

Then it set the home partition and also set the permission “world non-writeable”.

Authenticating Windows Clients.

* Use pGina plug-in to handle the ldap authentication.
* In pGina configuration select the ldapauto.dll plugin to configure the authentication.


Server 192.xxx.xxx.xxx
mode : Search

* Put the total dn and dc entry to the search base
* in pGina configuration you have to put your profile


H:\\192.xxx.xxx.xxx\home\samba\%username%

(this way it’ll seek the profile that comes under UID each login)

I Have to attach the /etc/samba/smb.conf file, that is the file which handles the sharing thing. But It's too long and will not be suitable for this post.)

Note: All unix users who wish to authenticate as NT users have to have samba user credentials too)

Blocking USB storage mounting.

In GNU/Linux

* Use Polkit-Gnome

Define policy kit in the client machine as below.

Under “Storage” section find “Mount file systems from removable drives”.

Then edit it;

Anyone : No

Console : No

Active Console : Admin Authentication

Then using Webmin, I can log in to LDAP server and manage LDAP users and groups. I can give sudo poIr to some user by adding that user to an admin group (GID 123). After I add the user to the admin group that user have sudo power and can mount USB pen drives. And keep in mind that the user gets admin power of that particular system too.

Tip: In Ubuntu Systems it's always a good idea to create the super user and secure it with a password. Else any one can activate the super user account and your system will be in risk.


sudo passwd root

In Windows

* Windows Local Security Policy.

Map a Samaba Share as a Network Drive for Windows.

* Installed samba in a GNU/Linux (ubuntu) server (In this case in the same machine which runs the NFS)
* Add a samba user to validate access


smbpasswd -a ‘username’ (here you enter a valid LDAP user name)

* Create directories under the same name, as in NFS and make them shared.


# mkdir /home/servername/share/user1

I created a small shell script to automate the user creation in NFS. (just for fun) But thought some one might get use of it.


#!/bin/bash
echo "Enter the new user name: "
read name
echo "Creating account for $name..."
sleep 2
echo "Creating NFS Share..."
`mkdir /home/$name`
`chown -R $name:2000 /home/$name`
`chmod -R 770 /home/$name`
echo "/home/$name --done"
sleep 2
echo "Creating Samba Share..."
`mkdir /home/virtual/$name`
`chown -R $name:2000 /home/virtual/$name`
`chmod -R 770 /home/virtual/$name`
`smbpasswd -a $name`
echo "NFS Share and Samba Share is ready for user $name"

The above script will get the input of the user name from the keyboard and create the NFS and SAMBA shares for that user. I only had to give the userID which I created in the LDAP as it is.

Please accept my apologies in not arranging this as a step-by-step how to. In GENERAL, I don't follow a structure when I work (In some CRITICAL cases, yes I do follow the steps...). I try to combine the work pieces from here and there and build a system in my way of doing it.

Cheers!

SMS Alerts on root logins

2008-10-31T14:00:00.002+05:30

Last week I met Anuradha at Kandy and we talked about various stuff. At one time, Anuradha mentioned about this sms alerting method and how we can use that tools in our working environment. So I thought of trying it out (not in an operational server but in a testing server).

There are several ways to get an alert on your mobile phone when there has being a root login in your server. This is not for a critical server set up. There are other better alert systems for those kind of systems. But, for a small business server, home network this is a very cheep and cool solution.

Assumption:

Your server is a GNU/Linux (I used debian/Ubuntu distribution)

What you need :

A Mobile Phone with USB cable.
smstools package.
Your time.

Let's start.

Install smstools.

# apt-get install smstools

Plug in the phone with the USB cable. And get the device name.

# dmesg |grep usb

eg: You should see some thing like /dev/ttyACM0 or similar. If your phone is not detected then you have to troubleshoot that. ;-)

Now you can edit the configuration file and set up the device and baudrate.

# vim /etc/smsd.conf


       #init =
       device = /dev/ttyACM0
       incoming = yes
       #pin =
       baudrate = 460800

Most of the time you don't have give modem init commands, cos modern phones have their own init commands.

Start the smstools

# /etc/init.d/smstools start

The location where your messages handled is;

$ /var/spool/sms/

There you have several directories.

checked - Messages cued for various checking, and ready to send after checking.
failed - Messages which being failed to send, and the reason for the failure is stated inside the sms
incoming - This is the place where the system stores incoming messages.
outgoing - This is where the message to be sent is stored as a text file.
sent - Messages which sent successfully.

To test your configuration, create a simple text file and put it in the outgoing directory. It should be sent in seconds to the mobile phone number specified in the text file.

Format of the message.


From : Foo
To : 9471XXXXXXX
This is the message, Testing...

If the number specified in the file gets the sms, you are ready to do the real thing. :-) Else you can always manually edit the /etc/smsd.conf or run dpkg-reconfigure smstools and set the values.

Now you want to be alerted via a sms when some one loged in as root to your server locally or remotely.

What I did was very simple. I created the text file in somewhere (/home/user/alert.txt).


From: Server1
To: xxxxxxxxx
A Root Login Detected.

Edit the bashrc file (expecting your default shell is bin/bash) and put the line showed below to get my job done.

# vim /root/.bashrc

And put the following at the end of the file.


cp /home/user/alert.txt /var/spool/sms/outgoing/

Done.!

What it does is each time some one loged in as root, the text file which I created will be copied to the smstool's outgoing directory and cued. smsd will send it to the phone number I specified in the text file. And a copy of the sent message will stored in the sent directory too. If you want you can clean it later (manually or by using cron with a rm /var/spool/sms/sent/alert.txt).

You have to keep a phone attached to the server and the phone should have credit to send out going messages!!:D

Hope this help.!

Word Children's & Elder's Day

2008-10-01T10:03:00.003+05:30

Children are the future of the world. We must protect them and guide them to make the world a better place for every species. We must teach them good habits and develop a good mind set on them. If we don't guide them on the right track, future of this world is not going to be a very nice one.!

Elders are those who have made this world what it is now... (I'm NOT referring to the elders who made this world a living hell). They have sacrificed their lives to make ours a better one. So we have to protect our elder generation with love and care.

My Blog in Sinhala

2008-07-03T13:47:00.002+05:30

I started to blog in Sinhala. "Sinhala" is my first language. I thought it would be nice if I keep a separate blog for Sinhala postings. And there in that blog, I will talk about the life, imotions, etc. Less or no technical stuff. And I will write this blog as usual, in English.

My Sinhala Blog is : htpp://anuradha-life.blogspot.com

Cheers!

Synaptic Scrolling Problem

2008-05-22T23:00:00.002+05:30

- GSynaptics couldn't initialize. You have to set 'SHMConfig' 'true' in xorg.conf or XF86Config to use GSynaptics -

Is any one there who got this error message when trying to configure your touchpad using gsynaptics? "Yeh I had that message"... I installed Debian lenny by saying "See you later" for my neat, one year and three months old Ubuntu installation. after completing the installation my touchpad's scrolling feature was not working. I googled for a solutoin and found several tips and tricks to overcome this, but didn't help, so had to read up a bit about it and found a way to get it working.

Even though it says "set 'SHMConfig' 'true', it did not work. Then I add the server layout and second InputDevice to the xorg.conf.

Here's what I did to over come the issue.

added this section to the xorg.conf

# vim /etc/X11/xorg.conf


Section "InputDevice"
      Identifier   "Synaptics Touchpad"
      Driver      "synaptics"
      Option      "SendCoreEvents"   "true"
      Option      "Device"      "/dev/psaux"
      Option      "Protocol"      "auto-dev"
      Option      "HorizEdgeScroll"   "0"
EndSection

Then I add the following lines to the bottom of xorg.conf to specify the server layout. I did not have any of the parameters for server layout, so I added all the sections to it.


Section "ServerLayout"
       Identifier "Default Layout"
       Screen "Default Screen"
       InputDevice "Generic Keyboard"
       InputDevice "Configured Mouse"
       InputDevice "Synaptics Touchpad"
EndSection

After doing this I restarted the Xserver (Alt+CTRL+Backspace). Scroll works fine! but I still get that error message when I try to run gsynaptics. :-) But for now I'm not going to worry about the gsynaptic, but will have a look at it later.

Ceylon Tea Musium

2008-05-06T19:28:00.010+05:30

Last weekend I had an opportunity to visit the World's one and only Tea Museum, Ceylon Tea Museum. The museum is located in Hantana, 3KM drive from the beautiful “world's heritage city” Kandy. The museum building itself is an abundant tea factory (built in 1925) for more than a decade.

The museum has 4 floors. Ground floor occupies with heavy machinery like tea rollers, power generators, and other large mechanical equipments which being used in the very first tea factories in Sri Lanka. The first tea roller which were used in year 1889 and many other machineries are displayed in the ground floor. And most of the engines and rollers used over a century ago have being restored to working condition.

When you go to the second floor you will be able to see the whithering process and some other equipments used for drying, and categorizing the tea for various qualities. And there is a section which contains the equipments used by Mr. James Taylor, the father of the tea manufacturing in Sri Lanka. In 1867, Mr. Taylor planted the first tea to be grown commercially in Sri Lanka.

The third floor occupies with more drying racks and two shops where you can buy quality Ceylon tea. And I didn't forget to visit the top floor for a nice warm tea. (for those who don't know, my favourite drink after water is "Tea", I never say no to a cup of tea at any time of the day). While the tea is getting ready, I enjoyed the view from the top floor window. And there was a telescope which we can nicely see the hills belong to Hunnasgiriya region.

I think this museum is a place where every one should visit. A place with a value of informational, and historical, which tells the story of the tasty tea manufacturing in Sri Lanka.

Some facts at a glance;

Location : 3 KM from Kandy town, towards the Hantana road.
Ticket Prices : Students : Rs. 10/= Adults: Rs 25/= (As at 03 -05 -2008)
A friendly staff, with a person who explains every thing through out the tour inside the museum.

P.S:
My camera was broken that day so could not get good pictures of the factory, but I got some photos from my phone, which are poor in quality. Sorry about that.

ගනූ/ලිනක්ස් සිංහළෙන්

2008-03-29T23:02:00.002+05:30

අද දිනයේ මීගමුව පිහිටි A.G. School of Management Studies හි පැවති ගනූ/ලිනක්ස් වැඩමුලුව අතරදී මා, අනුරාධ, ඩනිෂ්ක, යජිත්, රවිත්, කුංචන (සාකච්ඡාව අතරමැද නිදා ගත්තේය) ගනූ/ලිනක්ස් මෙහෙයුම් පද්ධතියට සිංහළ සහාය මුසු කිරීම පිළිබඳ සාකච්ඡා කළෙමු. මම මෙතෙක් කළක් සිංහළ ලිනක්ස් පිළිබඳ අවධානයක් යොමු නොකිරීම පිළිබඳ කණගාටුචක් ඇති වූ අතර අද සිට හෝ ඒ හා සම්බන්ධ ව්‍යාපෘතියකට සම්බන්ධව කටයුතු කිරීමට අසහස් කළෙමි.

අද දින මෙම ස්ථානයේ පැවති වැඩමුලුව සඳහා සිසුන් 50 කට ආසන්න ප්‍රමාණයක් පැමිණි අතර ඔවුන් සියලු දෙනාම ලිනක්ස් මෙහෙයුම් පද්ධතිය පිළිබඳ දැඩි උනන්දුවක් හා කැමැත්තක් දැක්වූහ. මෙම මොහොතේ (රාත්‍රී 11.55) මම, කුංචන, යජිත්, චනුක, ඩනිෂ්ක A.G. School of Management Studies ආයතනයේ පරිඝණකාගාරයේ අවදියෙන් සිටින අතර අනුරාධ මුලින් අප හා සිටින බව කීවද හවස් යාමයේදී පැන යන ලදී. :-)

හෙට දින මෙම වැඩමුලුවේ දෙවෙනි සහ අවසන් දිනයයි. තව ස්වල්ප වේලාවකින් මා නිදා ගත යුතු වේ. දැනට නවතිමි.

Workshop on Unix (GNU/LInux) Shell

2008-03-15T15:36:00.000+05:30

We (LKLUG) organized a workshop on Unix Shell, to provide some hands on training about the Unix Shell. We used GNU/Linux, a Unix like Operating system as our platform. Today is the first day of the workshop where we covered basics of the shell.

Introduction to Shell by Anuradha R.

Basic Filters by Bud

Advanced Shell usage by Sapumal

We conducted this workshop in the Lanka Software Foundation's Lab at UCSC. We expected 20 participants but there were around 25! Since we planed this as a geek's event we didn't mind standing positions and shared seats. :-) Right now Sapumal is conducting his session, the last session for the day and tomorrow we'll cover up some more advanced stuff in Shell Scripting.
Anuradha's Session.

Bud's Session.

Sapumal's Session.

Insert a copy right label to a set of photos.

2008-01-27T20:17:00.001+05:30

Most of us have photo galleries in the Internet. And we upload hundreds of thousands of photos to the Internet. I started to use this nice image manipulation tool named "Imagemagick" to insert a label (a copy right label or some thing) to a set of photos at a one go. since I felt it's very easy to do it by saving it as a script so I can just run it any time I want. Imagemagick is a very famous tool and it has various set of tools to manipulate images. You can check the man page for all the commands and syntaxes, or from web too. Since couple of people asked about this from me I thought of sharing it among all. Imagemagick is available for Mac, Unix and Windows platform too. But I'll stick to my favourite GNU/Linux way of doing it.

First check whether imagemagick is already installed in your system

In Debian based systems issue this command and see the result

#dpkg -l | grep imagemagick

If you don't have the package, install it using your favourite method. I used the apt.

#apt-get install imagemagick

I have collect all the steps and create the script below and run it inside the directory where the photos are located. Actually I reduced the image size to suite for upload, and reduce the quality a bit too. Then inserted the label to all the photos and finally open the photos in gthumb image viewer. First of all it copies all the photos in to a directory to preserve the originals. So you always have the original photos you've taken.


echo "Resize, Convert, prepare photos to publish for web.";
echo "==================================================";
ls *JPG;
mkdir temp
cp *JPG temp
cd temp
for PICME in `ls *JPG`; do convert $PICME -resize 800x600 -quality 80% $PICME; done
echo "Photos resized to 800 x 600";
for PICME in `ls *JPG`; do convert -pointsize 12 -fill Black -draw 'text 20 20 "Copyright 2007. M.D.D.Anuradha Mallikarachchi. All rights reserved."' $PICME $PICME; done
echo "Label inseted."
gthumb *

You can see the inserted label, at the top right of the photo. and it's very convenient for me, when I have to insert a label for set of photos at a one go.

Oh don't forget to make the script executable (chmod +x script) and put it in /usr/local/bin.

Hope this will be useful to some one. :-)

Minister Dr. Marvin Silva (Bad Marvin) got served!

2007-12-27T17:24:00.000+05:30

Today I saw a very interesting news about Mervin Silva's latest thuggery incident. He's being treated very nicely by the staff of Sri Lanka Rupavahini Corporation, with an ink bath and smashing stones and bottles. Well done guys and ladies at Rupavahini. This is what happen when you mess with the wrong people in the wrong territory.

He has entered to the SLRC and threaten to a News Director regarding not publishing a peach he gave in a function, in the news. In the mean time one of his guards had hit the news director and the war started.! The guard is being arrested and minister and rest of his crew being held up in the Rupavahini premises and on the way they go out, all the people have hit them with bottles and stones. His head is damaged and now he is in accident ward.

This guy should be kicked out from politics, father shows his colours in one side and son also follows the father and show the power to innocent people from another side. This is unacceptable. Politics should have a disipline, which is not happening here. And Foolish ministers like this should be banned from politics and should quarantine.

Good work SLRC staff and this is a good lesson to other organisations too, if Mervin comes to your door step and threat you, call the police and don't forget to treat the fucker like SLRC guys!.

I don't think Mervin is going to learn a lesson from this, he will continue to act same way, but Dear Hon President Mahinda, please take necessary actions against this idiot.!

Say NO to Marvin

Some pics at http://www.lankadissent.com/sinhala/news/04_27_12.htm
Video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvY8hBb44c8

A Small Idea for Mobile Service Providing Companies.

2007-12-16T12:26:00.000+05:30

Time to time I hear new inventions, added features to mobile phones from the mobile communication world. And I'm very happy about the current level of mobile telecommunication capabilities we have in Sri Lanka. I had this idea for a long time and didn't have a time to blog about it. One day when I was with few friends of mine, one of the friends mother said "I was in a deep sleep when my son calls me, and it's a big disturbance to me when people call me while I'm resting". That's the day I got this idea right up in my head.

People who use an Internet Messengers even gmail with chat are already known to this feature and it's not a new thing in that context. I'm talking about setting a status in the IM. For those who don't know this feature yet, here it is. We can type some text and set a message as our status in the IM so all in my contact list can see my status (Available, busy, don't disturb, meeting, etc). Just take a look at the image below, this is a screen shot from my Internet Messenger (Pidgin). I'm sorry about making it horrible to see by erasing the names of my buddy list, it's due to privacy issues. Just take a look at the circled areas. :-)
You can see "Away", "I'm Awake" (My status) and a red sign means "Do not disturb". I can get an idea of the current status of my buddy before I call/text him/her. And that is a small but great feature.

But what I think is, how can we take the benefits of that feature if we implement it in Mobile telecommunication world? Even in other telecommunication fields? Lets see some advantages and disadvantages in my knowledge scope, any one free to come up with more ideas for this.

Advantages

If the person is in a meeting, he/she can set the status to "meeting". When caller dials his/her number and hit send/call button he/she can see the receiver's status as "meeting". So he can hangup the call. And a miss call alert will send to the receiver. When the caller is unaware that you are in a meeting, he/she will keep on ringing and it's a big disturb to you even your phone is in silence mode.

When you are driving (actually before you start driving) you can set your status to "Driving", so callers can see you are driving and can hangup if the call is not urgent. It's better not to have strong conversations while you drive, cos that may drive your attention away from the road.

When you want to rest and do not want to be disturbed, but in the mean time, you do not want to switch off your phone either, you can set the status "sleeping" or "do not disturb" so caller can hangup right after he/she sees the your status message.

When you want to show the callers that you are busy with your studies/office work, while you are truly busy with your girlfriend/boyfriend and do not want to be disturbed, you can set a customized status, "Studying", "Busy" so callers can get a picture of your current situation. (Kidding but true)

List can go on... but let me stop from here.

Disadvantages and how to over come those.

People are used to dial the number in the key pad and keep the phone on the ear right after hitting the send button, so the chances of seeing a status which display on the screen is very low.
How to over come this? How about sending a beep signal once caller get connected to the receiver's phone which has a status set. The signal can be send from the receiver's phone to the caller. And yes, advertise about this feature nicely using some celebrities :-)

People will not use this feature if they have to walk deep in menus.
If this feature is embed in to the SIM card, Service providers should find a short way to enter in to "set your status" feature. I have seen there are so many value added features uniquely set for each service providers.

Any one who find your number can call you and will see your status. So if some one want to spy on you also have a chance to get an idea of what you are doing now.
It's bit complicated when it comes to security and privacy. So it's bit difficult to come to a compromise situation here. But the service provider always can provide this as an optional feature so any one who like to use it can use, others just don't have to use it. So both service provider and customer are safe!. Customers can't say "ABC Phone company have violated my privacy". Cos it's a feature that user can turn on or off.

There will be more disadvantages too. It's up to the people who are interested in implementing this idea as a feature in their service to find solutions to all the problems that arise.

This feature can be implemented either in the phone or in the SIM card. At present I'm not capable of actually implementing it. But I'm sure mobile phone companies, telecommunication service providers can do this for sure.!

I have a very important thing to say.If one phone company implement this feature in their phone models, they should not patent on this feature, also service providers. This feature should be globally available. Like we all used it in our Internet Messengers. And it should be freely available to customers/users.

So I hope my post will be useful to those who are interested in this field. And I'm sure one day we all will see this feature and many more attractive and very useful features in our hand held communication devices.

Cheers!

Suchetha joined the "CoolKids Club"

2007-11-13T08:44:00.000+05:30

My good old friend Suchetha stepped in to his new life with a lovely lady "Varuni" on 7^th November 2007. I still remember the words he told me when I got married, "Marriage = License to misbehave, not to you, to your wife!". Don't try to interpret, it's not what you think! :-D.

Some of our friends from LKLUG and also from out side, participated in the wedding at Waters Edge Battaramulla. Music was so lovely at the wedding, which conducted by Jaylath Manorathne, Nishshanka Digdeniya and group. All were stage drama songs and other classics. And of course the couple also was very beautiful. Hummm... I don't know about the beauty of Suchetha, but Varuni was stunning. What Suchetha said was, "It doesn't matter if a broomstick were there next to the bride, cos no one is paying much attention to the groom, bride is the one should be looking good". It was true, Suchetha was out of focus! (kidding).

Right after the wedding Such and Varu took few of their friends (including me and Madhu) on a trip to Deer Park Hotel, Girithale. Thank you Such and Varu. We had a joyful, crazy, 3 days. Went to see elephants safari, Pool party, Pool throw ball games, etc, etc with loads of fun with very nice and crazy other guys and girls who were in the gang. All the exiting moments captured by me are in my Picasa Web Photo Galerry.

We returned to Colombo on 10^th and 11^th was the Home Coming. It was a lovely party at Mt Lavinia Hotel and we danced and did some thing unusual as well. Hope some of you know the "Haka". There were two cousins of Varu who came from New Zealand and they trained few of us and we all did the Haka at the Home Coming while guests were looking shocked! We all were so happy for Suchetha and Varuni, and I wish all the best and success for them from the bottom of my heart.

Welcome Gibbon

2007-10-18T20:10:00.000+05:30

Today Ubuntu released the version 7.10, code named "Gusty Gibbon". After Suchetha's wake up call for upgrading from 7.04 to 7.10, I upgraded to the development version of 7.10 few week ago. I will not explain the whole set of new developments and added features here, you can see the full release note in the Ubuntu web site. But I see some improvements in this version and hope to explore the Gibbon to see whether it is really gutsy.

Ubuntu users, happy upgrading to you all.

Share your photos with F-Spot

2007-10-02T10:57:00.000+05:30

Last week, I was looking for a simple and fast tool to organize and upload photos to my flickr and picasa galleries. After going through the photo management software tools available for GNU/Linux, I found this nice, "free and easy", software called F-Spot. This is a product from Novel Inc and more details can be found in F-Spot web site.

Some basic but main features.

Import photos directly from the camera, disk or from a directory.
Organize photos according to your selection criteria.
View as a slide show, full screen.
Upload your photo set directly to Flickr, Picasa, etc.
Resize your photos on upload by selecting all at once.
And many more feature for you to explore. :-)

I found this tool very useful, cos it was a headache uploading photos to Picasa or flickr from the web interface. And F-Spot can save the time on Resizing, optimizing photos manually for upload. This is just a one tool available for the job, you will find some other tools that does this even better. But... it's choice! :-)

Software Freedom Day 2007 - The Day

2007-09-15T21:07:00.000+05:30

Finally the day came. I was organizing the event at Matara. After a very successful event at University of Ruhuna, came down to Colombo, excel world where there is an event going on right now!!!. Time right now is 9.36pm.

Even though we all were very tired after Matara event, after came to Exell World all the hard feelings went off... I sang a song in the open Karaoke evening too. Since the event is happening right now... I will blog more later... Right now I need to stick with the event!

Enjoy the freedom.! Use FOSS.!

You may already know, may be not till now.

2007-08-25T09:21:00.000+05:30

Please register your self in my private club! Amazing benefits to members!!

In many web sites (specially in public forums) you may have request to enter the email and password (as I've asked above). Many of you (Non IT and IT professionals) give your email and your password, which is the one you use to log in to your email. Am I correct? If your answer is "yes", I'm very sorry to say that the owner of the particular forum or the web site might have access to your email account (cos you have provided the user ID and Password) .

I did a small research regarding this matter using 20 users. (just the people in my office) And I found that 19 out of 20 Internet users were doing this mistake. It's obvious that one tend to enter the email and it's password by the way that it's being asked. So I thought of posting this for the sake of others who still does this mistake. :-)

Social Engineering is a very beautiful art. One can use it for good, one can use it for bad. The above trick is used by some people to get other's personal information. And you will become a victim by being unaware and careless. Your email will be accessible to the out sider, and will be used to spam others, and will do various other bad things "as you do it".

So never ever enter your email password (you may type the email address) in any other web site except your mail box login page. Your email password should be used only with your mail account, any thing other than that, give a different phase as the password. Be aware. Don't be a Cyber victim!

Software Freedom Day 2007

2007-08-23T20:59:00.000+05:30

Sri Lankan FOSS community is organizing the SF Day 2007 in parallel to the global SFD event. This event will happen in three areas in the country, Colombo, Kandy and Matara. This will have awareness programs to the school, university students and to the general public. We wish to hold the event on both 14^th and 15^th September at these three areas.

The general idea of these event is to advocate and promote Free and Open Source software, GNU/Linux, and also to encourage people to use those, etc. I will update my blog about this event time to time.

Feel the Force - Read the Source.

Seven/ Seven/ Seven

2007-07-07T22:35:00.000+05:30

Humm... after a while... today is a very nice day. it's 07/07/07. Some people says it's too bad to have a day like this, ( හතේ හත ), but for me today was a very good day from the morning.

From last week onwards I started to cram for my semester exam. Well, you will be surprise to hear about my academic work, yeh, I know I'm an idiot. I'm doing this degree from year 2003. :-( I'm doing BIT. I had to finish this by year 2006, but, I'm still in my second year, last semester. I paused my academic work due to some idiotic reasons, which are unacceptable and unreasonable. But now I'm back. Have to finish this degree by next year. So even though it's bit difficult to balance the work-family-degree, I'm trying my best to be a graduate!

Humm.. while that in mind, I went to see the movie, Live Free or Die Hard 4.0. Me, Madhu, Suchetha went to the Majestic Cinema, which has a dolby digital sound system. After I reserved the tickets via the eticketing service I was expecting to enter the hall without a hassle. But case was different, even it says "You can save the time and money by reserving the tickets via Internet" in the web site, we had to stay in a cue for about 20 minutes till the ticketing people receive the list of online reservations. Then after a small "rugby battle" I managed to get my three tickets.! Then come the next joke in the Majestic cinema bar, "Beer is not allowed to take in to the theater" F**K!!!, we were supposed to drink the beer at out side and then go to the cinema. humm, by that time, the movie would have reached the end. I find it very hard to understand the importance of existence of that bar inside the cinema. People have no time to drink their beer!!! F**k the beer, we got two Red Bulls, Coke, Cream Soda, Pop corn, Chips and went in. Movie was very good. එල කිරි.

Humm after stretching the brain and ears, came home safely. Have to start the studies again now. So see you later.

Have a nice 07/07/07.

Ubuntu 7.04

2007-04-21T11:29:00.000+05:30

I'm upgrading my Ubuntu 'edgy eft' to 7.04 code named 'feisty fawn'. I've been using Ubuntu for an year and I'm getting more and more into the distro cos it's getting better and better in Computer Desktop world. Recognition of new hardware is excellent. And I love the neat Gnome Desktop. I'm enjoying my sunny Saturday with Ubuntu at home!!

If you are interested in Upgrading to 7.04, just issue the below mentioned command. No need to edit your /etc/apt/sources.list, Update manager will automatically replace the 'edgy' with 'feisty' and will comment the third party repos temporary. Issue the command as a normal user. Not the super user. It will ask for the 'sudo' password when needed. And mind, you need a broad band connection if you use the Internet as the upgrade medium. Follow the on-screen instructions. Please read the released notes too. ;-) Enjoy the Power of Ubuntu Desktop.

$ update-manager -d

P.S. You can only directly update to 7.04 from 6.10. Older version users have to upgrade the distro to 6.10 before you begin.

Answers to comments..

2007-03-12T22:31:00.000+05:30

I saw several comments left for some of my posts. Some are questions. So here are some solutions to those problems.

To Milinda :

In order to pair you phone with the PC you need a passkey. normally it's '1234'. We need to install the relevant packages in our linux box to deal with the keys. Since I'm using ubuntu edgy eft with gnome (of course beryl on top ), I'll stick to the debian way of doing this.

you need to install these two packages. (bluez-pin and bluez-passkey-gnome)

# sudo apt-get install bluez-pin bluez-passkey-gnome

check your /etc/bluetooth/pin file and verify whether you have your passkey in that.

# less /etc/bluetooth/pin

# /etc/init.d/bluetooth restart

After restarting the bluetooth daemon try pairing. It should work. The PC also will show you a notification saying your phone try to connect. Click on the notification and enter the key. That's it!

Good luck.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To chaar~max :

Check your graphic card supports direct rendering.
# glxinfo |grep "direct"

if you get
direct rendering: Yes

your card is supported and you can go ahead with installing beryl.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To genesis:

I see several errors in your installation. (on reading your comment). you have to check your repositories for errors. You are having many broken dependencies. and make sure you have to correct repos for ubuntu edgy eft.

# apt-get upgrade -f

this might help to fix the broken dependencies.

after that try to follow my post again, you might get it work. You should give it a try, beryl is kicking off every thing.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm sorry I will not be able to answer all your questions but I will try to do my best.

Cheers!

Bluetooth Remote Control (BT MOUSE)

2007-03-10T20:58:00.000+05:30

I felt sleepy while reading a book and wanted to try some thing funky. I wanted to try out the remote control feature in my new mobile phone. After 15 minuets of work I manged to get that feature working with my Ubuntu GNU/Linux notebook. And of course, I wanted to share this experience with my pals around the globe. So here I go...

My Phone : Sony Ericsson K510i
My Notebook : Compaq Presario V3000
My OS : Ubuntu edgy-eft (2.6.17-11-386)

You also can try this with your phones if your phone has the bluetooth remote control feature.

Prerequisites

Bluetooth enabled PC and a Phone
Bluez-utils

A simple editing of the /etc/default/bluetooth is all you need!

#vim /etc/default/bluetooth

Find and change HIDD_ENABLED = 1 (initially it is set to 0)

This will let you use your phone as a mouse. And some key board strikes also worked but have to check on that later. But mouse features are working perfectly.

#hcitool scan
This is to get your phone's MAC address

#hidd --connect your:phone:MAC:address

You will see the notification on your phone "enable remote control?"
press "yes" and you are ready to go.

End your connection after you're done.

#hidd --unplug your:phone:MAC:address

Use your phone's joystick to move your mouse pointer and default OK button on the phone to use as click function, other buttons also working for some key board shortcuts and i was really impressed when some of my beryl features also working well with the remote control. You will be able to conduct your Open Office Impress Presentations very effectively with this feature.

Hope you find this post useful. Have fun...

FOSS-ed On Wheel 2007 in Kandy.

2007-03-05T10:10:00.001+05:30

FOSS-ed on wheels is another community service conducted by the Sri Lankan FOSS community. Google, Intel, ICTA, Lanka Software Foundation, The Linux Center, LKLUG (which I'm also is a member in) has backed up the event. This time the organizers was Computer Society, University of Peradeniya. The only different in this event from the other FOSS events is that, We get into a bus and travel across the country to reach people. If any one wish to have an event on your Village, school, University, organize it, inform us bit early, we will do the best to come down to your place.

I joined the event from Kandy on the Saturday the 3rd March 2007, (Day 01). Me, Suchetha, Raj, Mifan, Gayal, Lohitha, Bud, Kanchana, Lasantha, Dr. Nimal and few others (sorry I don't remember the names) were suppose to speak about FOSS and FOSS related topics. And of course many other were there who support in various areas. Crowd was up to the expected level and we had a combination of many categories such as Schools, Universities and general public. I'm happy to say that this was my first speech for FOSS. I was a speaker for Windows and some other proprietary software back at a time.

FOSS-ed on wheels is one of the awareness programs to the public, to educate them that, there are better Free and Open Source Software alternatives to the proprietary software. Which most of Sri Lankans are not aware of. I will come up with a separate blog post regarding that matter. Any way, we did a nice seminar and we are happy. :D
After the event (2nd day evening) on the way back to Colombo we went to Mifan's place at Peradeniya University. It's not that Pera Uni is Mifan's house, his father is a professor in physics, so they are in a quartos in the Uni. Mifan's mom treat us with snacks and a nice tea. Thank You. And you know, guys got crazy on the way back and started singing, shouting,etc in the bus.

After a successful event, we returned home with lot's of fun and of course, with a nice plaque gifted to us by the Computer Society, UoP. Thanks guys.

Second birth of a GNU/Linux Hacker

2007-02-22T21:15:00.000+05:30

There is an old saying that, a Man (Male) has two births. First, from his mother and secondly from his wife. My friend Anuradha born for the second time!. Me, Madhu, Kunchana, Suchetha went to the Ran Mal Hotel around 10:00hrs, where Anuradha's wedding is happening. And I would say, we had the change of participating a highly traditional event.

The latter part of the wedding was quite fun. The going away was arranged in a similar/traditional/fun way. Anuradha wanted to go in a bullock cart. As he planed, Harshani (his wife) and himself got on to the cart and went away with happy smile.

And I would say this event was a blessed chance for our LUGers to get together, and talk geeky things. And Madhu had a very hard time listening to high tech stuff. ;-)

So... I wish all the best and success to my friends Anuradha and Harshani, and hope they love each other truly deeply madly and will remain beloved until end of this life.

Chiran Jayathu

Sanjaya - Anu -Harshani - Anu's Mom
More phot's in my flickr galary.

Ubuntu Edgy and Beryl 1.3

2006-12-18T15:04:00.000+05:30

Last Thursday, afternoon, I got a buzz in my IM from Anuradha. And he said “Anu shall we do a small thing? will take only 10 minits”. I was bit free in the office at that time and I've started off with him. he's telling me to edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf and I'm following the exact steps he's typing in the IM. After a couple of minits (and ofcourse emailing the xorg.conf after edting by Anuradha) I've managed to Install (from Anuradha's repository) and run Beryl window manager with Emerald Themes on my Debain Gnu/Linux (etch) system. And I got pretty impressed with it.

Since I have an Ubuntu Edgy Eft installation on my notebook, I thought of Installing Beryl on Ubuntu too. Wow, very nice and smoothly I've install the Beryl Window Manager and Emerald Themes. I googled to find an ubuntu repository to get the Beryl binaries.

Steps I've followed are below in this post, and it's pretty easy to install Beryl on Ubuntu Edgy. Since Edgy comes with an AiGLX inbuilt xorg, you don't need to edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

My graphic card is Intel Mobile Integrated graphic controller, and the driver is i810.

Take a terminal.

# sudo su -
# vim /etc/apt/sources.list

and put the following line in your list

deb http://ubuntu.beryl-project.org/ edgy main

and you have to get the GPG Key.

# wget http://ubuntu.beryl-project.org/root@lupine.me.uk.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -

# apt-get update

# apt-get install beryl

This will install the Beryl Window Manager, but you need the Emerald Theme Manager to make decorate it. ;-)

# apt-get install emerald-themes

This will install a set of thmes. BTW if you find any error on installing these with apt-get, then use

# aptitude install beryl emerald-themes

This will install all the recommended packages.

Then restart the xserver, just to refresh. ;-)

Then at the run command box, type,

beryl-manager

that's it!

Here I have 2 screen shots of the effets, you will enjoy the cool features on this once you have installed it!

NOTICE

2006-12-05T13:24:00.000+05:30

This is just a quick notice to all the viewers of my blog. I've got few mails from some freinds through the anonymous-comment@blogger.com ;-) . Thanks for the comments and questions you've asked, BUT I can't reply to some of those who hasn't provided me an email address. So in future, if you want to query about a post, or/and if you wish me to reply you, please add your email with your comment.

Cheers!

Perfect Mistake

2006-11-02T12:57:00.000+05:30

I have heard many of my friends who had erased their Hard Disks by mistake, when installing Linux on to Windows installed computer, etc. But I haven't heard of a friend of mine who have formatted his/her Windows partition when he/she supposed to format a pen drive. But my friends listen; I did that mistake just two days ago. Ye..h I know what you thinking. You think I'm a chronic careless boy. 5% correct. Yes I'm careless, sometimes.

My friend at office, Henry gave his USB Pen drive and asked me to format it. This story have 4 steps and two paragraph.

Hooked in the pen drive to my notebook.
Took a root shell (got the great power)
Entered the command mkdosfs -v /dev/sda1
Confirmed (are u sure? y)

After successfully completing the format, I opened the Pen drive to verify. Humm... data is still in the drive. Good, then what I have formatted? Quickly did a #ls /media/sda1 . No data. Thank you very much.

I did this in my new notebook which has a SATA HD. And at that particular time I was bit busy with some other work too. My Win partition was labeled as sda1. Pen drive was sdb1. One letter mistake. Story Ends.

Next day morning I got out of the bed and ran to the Wash room to start my day. Bath room is the place where I get many great ideas. So same as usual, I got this idea of Quit Dual Booting Win / Linux in my notebook. If I have a Mac Book running Mac OSX (I've seen Windows running on Macs too) Will I use dual boot? Will I install any other OS? No. No. I'll use Mac OS in Mac Book and if I want to use other OS, I'll simply get another PC running that particular OS. So why can't I apply that with my notebook. Do you think I'm still in the wash room? No I came out. (he hee). So I didn't install Windows again in my notebook. Kept my flavor of Linux. Since I'm having two more PCs at home running windows + One Desktop and another Laptop (my good old Toshiba Satellite A50p) at office doing dual boot I'll not miss Windows.

Conclusion:

Some BIG mistakes we do will lead us to a great ACHIEVEMENT.
With great power there must also come -- great responsibility!
Bath room is the best place for you to plan your future. (as far as you are alone in there)

See you in a while.

My Phone - GPRS - Bluetooth - Notebook - Internet

2006-10-25T11:43:00.000+05:30

I have a Sony Ericsson Z600 mobile phone. I bought it 3 years ago. I had the GPRS enabled in my Mobitel Connection and used my Phone as a GPRS modem, to browse the Internet via my old notebook (provided from the office) using IR port. I did it in Windows, no worries. But after I installed Linux I couldn't configure my IR port and unable to connect to Internet via GPRS. But with my new notebook, Compaq Presario V3000 (Intel Core Duo) I had bluetooth inbuilt. After installing Ubuntu Dapper I gave it a try to connect via bluetooth. Bingo. Succeeded. After lot of Googling, I should say. So for the sake of people who need to connect to the Internet using their notebooks and Bluetooth phones, I thought of blogging my experience on that. You may find many good how to s related to this scenario though.

This is more adoptable for Ubuntu Dapper, but general configurations are same for other Distros too.

Prerequisites

Latest 2.6 Kernel.

bluez-utils.

ppp.

openbox.

Bluetooth & GPRS enabled phone that can be used as a modem.

Bluetooth enabled PC/notebook. (those who don't have an inbuilt bluetooth port can use a bluetooth doungle instead.)

Install software.

$ apt-get update (just to update the packages in the source list)
$ apt-get install bluez-utils
$ apt-get install openbox
$ apt-get install ppp
Take a Terminal and become root (or sudo). I prefer to keep the root privileges rather than sudo. Turn on both phone's and PC's bluetooth service.

Discover the bluetooth phone from your notebook

$ sudo su -
$ hcitool scan

This is my phone's MAC address. You may copy the MAC address because you gonna need it few more times in this process.

00:0F:D9:BC:EA:C0 Dassa.Z600

Now pair your phone with notebook

$ hcitool cc 00:0F:D9:BC:EA:C0
$ hcitool auth 00:0F:D9:BC:EA:C0

You should put your phone's MAC address here.

Now you have to configure your device{modem (rfcomm)}

Get your channel number for your phone's dial up service

$ sdptool browse 00:0F:D9:BC:EA:C0
Check for “Service Name : Dial-up Networking”. And check and remember the Channel number. Mine it was “Channel : 1”

Now edit the /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf
$ vim /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf

Mine it was like this, you should replace your MAC and Channel No.

# RFCOMM configuration file.
# example:
# rfcomm0 {
# bind yes;
# # Bluetooth address of the device
# device 11:22:33:44:55:66;
# # RFCOMM channel for the connection
# channel 1;
# # Description of the connection
# comment "Example Bluetooth device";
#anuradha edited this.

rfcomm0 {
bind yes;
# Bluetooth address of the device
device 00:0F:D9:BC:EA:C0;
# RFCOMM channel for the connection
channel 1;
# Description of the connection
comment "Bluetooth Dialup";

Save and close frcomm.conf file.

Please note; I always keep the original file and work on a copy of that. Since I'm also a new linux guy, probability of going things wrong is very high.

Now create a peer file. This will create the peer to peer connection with the Notebook and phone.

$ vim /etc/ppp/peers/BluetoothDialup

connect "/usr/sbin/chat -v -f /etc/chatscripts/BluetoothDialup"
/dev/rfcomm0 115200
defaultroute
crtscts
lcp-echo-failure 0
#=======
/dev/rfcomm0 115200
connect '/usr/sbin/chat -v -f /etc/ppp/chat-gprs'
crtscts
modem -detach
noccp
defaultroute
usepeerdns
noauth
ipcp-accept-remote
ipcp-accept-local
noipdefault

This is how my peer file looks like.

Now you need to create a chat script for the connection.

My /etc/chatscripts/BluetoothDialup file look like this.

TIMEOUT 40
ECHO ON
ABORT '\nBUSY\r'
ABORT '\nERROR\r'
ABORT '\nNO ANSWER\r'
ABORT '\nNO CARRIER\r'
ABORT '\nNO DIALTONE\r'
ABORT '\nRINGING\r\n\r\nRINGING\r'
'' \rAT
OK 'AT+CGDCONT=2,"IP","wap"'
OK ATD*99***1 #
CONNECT ""

Note: You have to replace the “wap” with your APN, and ADT number with your service provider's dialing number.

There is another thing to specify here, if you are using a PIN (pass key) to pair bluetooth devices you need to create a file containing the pin. I use a pin and I created that file as below.

$ vim /etc/bluetooth/pin

1111

This is a sample, you have to put your pin number here.
save and close.

Check whether you have a user that have the privileges to use the modem, else create a user that have the privilege.

$ adduser username dialout

Now get connected. Brows the Internet.

$ cd /etc/chatscripts
$ pon BluetoothDialup

Note: Some times you might get an error related to proxy server, if that problem showed up, go to edit – Preferences, under General tab go to Connection Settings... Select Auto Detect Proxy Settings for this Connection. Then give it a try.

After surfing, you have to close the connection.

$ poff BlutoothDialup

It's always good to close the peer connections too.
$ /etc/init.d/bluez-utils stop

Good Luck!

For me this setup was suitable. But what I have experienced is, sometimes one person's settings will not 100% suite for another one. I used several howtos to get my work done. This is the set of settings which worked for me. Can't say this will work for you too.

Hello... How are you?

2006-10-23T15:30:00.000+05:30

After a little bit busy but enjoyable two weeks in AIT, Thailand I returned home on 2nd October. Well... I should say something about AIT. Asian Institute of Technology, is one of leading Institution / campus which mostly provide Master and Ph.Ds. If any one of you wish to follow a master's degree in Engineering or any other field, and if you wish to follow it in a South Asian country, I like to suggest Asian Institute of Technology without a doubt. Even though I'm a GNU/Linux Lover I went through the course without a problem. I played around a lot with Windows Server 2003 two years ago. Actually Win Server 2003 was in beta those days. I have created Intranet/s, Domain Controllers, Web Servers, etc, with Windows. But after I got my self into GNU/Linux I changed my Web Sever OS from Win Serv 2003 to Linux. I'm not going to stick in to one OS or Platform, but I will use Linux and Open Source Solutions at my work as much as possible. Because Linux created a new chapter in my life, and I like the freedom which comes with it.

Humm,.. after my last post again I was silent for a while. Actually I was off line for the last two weeks. I got married. Shocked? don't be. it's a normal step in our life cycle. I also have completed that step. I have realized about human life cycle, a long time ago. Birth, spending the life and death. We say “SPENDING” the life, why we say spending? Think for your self. You spend it, you never get it back. The time you passed is past, we can't drag it back. So we should live this moment joyfully, and harmless to others, and helpful to others and to the society. And not to forget to love your love ones. Life has no UNDO s like computer applications, But life have REDO s. You can repeat the good things you did through out your life.

See you all in a while...

Enter --- >>> Kingdom of Thailand

2006-09-24T21:53:00.000+05:30

It’s being a some time since my last post. My friends calling me and check whether I’m alive after the last post. Because it is against LTTE. But I’m still alive. This post ensure that!. I found my self a chance to visit Thailand. Actually this is a fully sponsored tour from my Faculty where I work at present. Right now I’m in the AIT (Advanced Institute of Technology). I came here to learn about Windows Server 2003. I will be here until the 2nd October.

When I tell everyone I’m going to Thailand, many of my friends told me to beware of prostitutes!!! They talked like as soon as I get down from the plane prostitutes will surround me. But I found this country much different than that. Many people are polite, and honest (to some extend) there might be bad people like every where in the world. And if you want to have sexual pleasure, then you have dedicated places and people for that. It’s not fair that we call this Buddhist country as a country of prostitutes. There are much more you can observe in Kingdom of Thailand.

My self and Pubudu (my friend) came to the AIT around 1430. It was Saturday the 16th. And AIT staff was kind enough to arrange us two nice dormitories for the training period. First thing I did was had some bread we brought from Sri Lanka and crashed on the bed. After couple of hours of sleep, we got up and went to meet some of Sri Lankan students in the campus. So we met several MSc. And PhD. Students, and we were happy to see some of our own people here. Next day morning went to a shopping complex near by the AIT. I was shocked. Electronic items, phones, notebooks, ipods, etc, are much cheeper than SL. So I thought I must by my self a notebook computer from here!. In 18th September we started the course peace and quiet.

That’s it for now. Will put something into this later. More photos will be soon on my flickr galary.

Secure Sri Lanka ?

2006-08-17T17:13:00.000+05:30

I don't know how much knowledge I have to discuss these problems. But I always wanted to express my ideas about some cases, openly. This is also a moment that my mind opened to the outer world. Before you read this any further please keep in mind few things. I'm not against Tamil nation. I have many friends who are tamils from SL and from other countries too. I'm not encouraging people to fight. I hate war. I'm not representing or promoting any political party or any organization. I don't like the polluted politics here in SL. No one told me to blog this, no one except me responsible for this ideas.

Still Reading.... ? Good. :-) Sri Lanka is a beautiful country. I love it. But because of this LTTE rebels this country have become a battle field for the last two decades. Prabakaran is trying to succeed his personal goals by sacrificing innocent Tamil, sinhala, even other nation's lives. First question I asked from my self was, why some tamils here in SL don't understand this and join the LTTE carder? When I move with the time I found that very few people join that rebel force by their desire. Most of them were taken in to their unit by forced and they brain wash those people. We hear from the media of kidnapping young Tamil people by LTTE. Which made me think, "my god.. Few people's (Prabakaran and his friends) war, is dragging by thousands of innocent people. LTTE leaders are not fighting for the democracy of the tamils. They just practicing what they are capable of. Killing. Since they have failed by their own, now they have put others in to the war and watching the show. I personally know tamils are very intelligent. So I hope at least the new people will end this game. All tamils, if you want the democracy, just say "no" to Prabakaran. My parents says, they co-op with tamils peacefully in many terms, before this LTTE born. Think of this, a Tamil person (Non LTTE) comes from Kilinochchi or Trincomallee to Colombo or Gall, the person may go shopping, visit people, etc and person can go back without any problem. But can we (sinhala guy/gal) go to Kilinochchi and return alive? I don't think so. So Tamil's freedom is not violated in Sri Lanka, but Sinhalease freedom....?

Every Tamil person == LTTE member? No. Tamil is not LTTE. LTTE is a collection of Tamils, Sinhaleas, Europeans, etc. Some groups joined with them to do underworld trading. (weapons, drugs, etc). Some are trying to get the ownership of some parts of the country. Some are trying to achieve cheap political goals by promoting LTTE. All I can say is, this is a collection of people who are educated to kill people, have no responsible for what they do, and have no clear goal+ No future.

I will say something I know and you may already know this too. This war could have ended a long time ago, when general Densil Kobbakaduwa was in the battle field. But there was some high class people who wanted to continue this war. So they let the LTTE to raise there power. So this war never ends and those people can survive. Unfortunately there were few people inside the military who needed this war to go on. I feel some of them are still inside. The are like Trojan horse computer viruses. Pretend to be a soldier but a terrorist in real. We can't say "this guy is a terrorist". But they are among us.

But now the time has come. This war should be stopped now. But if we want to live peacefully, LTTE should be eradicate. So now our three forces (Army, Neva, airbrush) are counter attacking to defend and clearing the areas in danger. We all should give our fullest support to them.

There is another thing I always feel upset about. The media culture in SL. The media is being a threat to the National Security. They publish what ever they want without thinking of the bad side of the news they publish. Take an example. If a military person or a Policeman done a great duty, they are highlighted in the news papers and TV, Radio., with all there details (Registration Nums, Full name, etc). Yes it's good to appreciate people on their good work. But you are automatically providing some sensitive information of that person to the terrorist too. How many of you know people in the intelligent forces? I know some of you know them. But is that the way it should be? There are some information that should kept as secrets. Media guys should think that terrorirst also read news papers, they also watch TV, they also have Internet. So I'm begging from you media guys, please don't publish sensitive information of military personals in any term. They will not get upset with you for saving their lives. Be more responsible.

Guys/ Gals we all have to think of this case seriously. We talk about Freedom all the time, even related to software :-), but do we really have a freedom in this country? Can we walk in a town without praying for god to keep us safe? Bomb blasts, Gun shoots, kidnapping, has become a part of the culture.! Hey I suggest you to carry your NIC with you. Always cooperate with the military. Respect them too.

I think if all the political parties and people can come to a plan to stop LTTE, that would create a new chapter in our country. This can't be done with that high class people, they will not allow others to end this. But now the Army, Nevy, Airforce is doing there duty just fine. If nobody from the government or any other authority block there way, they can finish this war soon. They can stop the LTTE.! And there are few organizations and people who try to justify the LTTE. I suggest they better stop it now. Stop feeding the TIGER!

The LTTE might kill me for blogging this too. :-) But I have expressed my idea to the world and I'm happy. Soon or later I will die, only thing is I don't know how I die. I wish I can see a Sri Lanka that all the Tamil, Sinhala, Muslims, etc live like a one family.

This is it. This is only a few things. But I will not say more. May be in future.

So Boring...

2006-08-17T16:38:00.000+05:30

I was little bit busy for the last two months. In the office as well as at home. Any way I think I did some productive work in the last two months.

Today I feel very lazy to type, I don't know why....

Last month, I went Kandy to attend the School Linux Promotion. I joined with Suchetha and Bikku Mettavihari at Swarnamali Girls College and Rahula College. Both teachers and students were there for the training. I taught for teachers for the first time in my life. In the beginning, I felt little uncomfortable when they call me “Sir” (In Sri Lankan Schools “Sir” is referred to Teacher). Because I still feel like a student when I go to my school or when I meet my teachers. Any way, that was a fun filled two days.

I'm sorry i couldn't take my camera with me, so no photos from that event.

LKING CAMP

2006-06-26T11:11:00.000+05:30

I got a fellowship to attend the 2nd LKING (Lanka Internet and Networking Group) camp held at Sarvodaya Head Office Rawathawatta, Moratuwa, Sri Lanka (24 – 25 June). When I go to the location I saw so many familiar faces and also many of my buddies at LKLUG.

In the first day, we had few presentations at the Conference Hall, and Dr. Ashoka, My good old pals Anuradha and Bud delivered some presentations. Anu talked about Scientific Application for the next generation, and Bud talk about Educational fun with computer networks, which mostly related to computer network games. :-). We all had a good discussion sessions and gained some knowledge in areas of networking. And there was participants from Moratuwa University, UCSC, University of Ruhuna, and also from some institutes and business organizations. So we had a representation from several areas in Sri Lanka.

In the middle of a discussion, I heard the words Wifi in Sarvodaya. So Since my Debian installation is not ready to go wifi at that time I tried to hook in with the Windows XP. I was connected!! without any prob! But I was not happy cos this has to be done with Linux. I thought okay, I will get the tools download to the Win and install them later.

But in the afternoon when Anuradha came to the camp, we had a chat and saw my notebook connected and with windows. I asked him to configure the wifi in debian for me and he managed to download packages needed and he did the work for me!! :-) I also felt happy due to two reasons. First is that now I'm in Wifi and the second thing is that I'm still having a working wireless card even after I droped my laptop (Toshiba Satellite A60p) while I'm riding my Bike (Honda Custom CBX 125) at the speed of 80 KMPH. I couldn't connect to the Wifi at Excel world last time so I thought my wireless is broken due to the drop damage. It was not in the laptop case, it was in my office bag and the belt broke out. It felt on the road and thrown towards the road for about 15 meters. That's an old story. Many people knows about it.

Day two in the camp, we discussed about Internet in our native language, Internet security, Video Conferencing, VOIP, etc. Dr. Gihan Dias, Suranga, and a person from Millennium IT did some presentations. Then Chamil from IT Ambalama did a presentation about blogging and other community base Internet stuff. After that fellows gave some speeches about there situation in their Institutes. In the evening the General meeting took place. New members elected, and all went home with certificates obtained for the participation. A happy camp.

FOSS in Paddy Fields

2006-06-20T15:22:00.000+05:30

I went to Ampara to attend to a wedding. I represented the bride's side. The wedding was in Ampara city, but bride's house was in a village called Uhana (8Km away from the city). They had a nice big paddy field. So I wanted to take a photo like this. :-) Please notice that the little brown bottle next to me is not BEER.!!! (Zoom and see the name).

I always talk about taking FOSS to the rural areas. But still couldn't succeed. There are only few people who use FOSS in Ampara at the moment. But I haven't quit promoting FOSS in Ampara, actually my self, Kunchana is the Only active people out there. Kunchana is advocating, and actively promoting Linux and FOSS among friends. He managed to install Linux on few Destops and Laptops which belongs to our friends. Actually we are not in a try to inject (by force) FOSS to the community, because we want only those who are interested and find a value in FOSS to be join with us. But advocating is important.

By the way, I didn't forget to visit my good old buddies (Manju, Kassa, Kunchana). This time we couldn't have a beer out, cos I was little bit busy at the wedding house.

I kept my self silent for a while.

2006-06-09T13:22:00.000+05:30

I was thinking and thinking during the past couple of months, about this world. Of course I did many things apart from 'thinking' as well. Never mind about them. When I look at this fast moving world, I see people loose their human qualities day by day. Many of us may not notice that we also have lost our qualities.

What do you need to have a quality life? If someone questioned from you, what is your answer? If we asked this from ten people, we'll get ten answers. Having a good education background would be one answer. being wealthy is another one, having many girl/boy friends would call people as a quality life. But I think combination of all those would help to have a quality life. Yet there are some other things we should consider as well. We should build a good faith in our heart. We should be honest and transparent. I don't say we should tell all over personal stuff to outer world. We should be the person who truly sees by outsiders.

When we growing old and old, we become more and more selfish. We don't tend to help others, we don't like to see other peoples success and happiness. We don't want want others to pass us! (I don't like when people overtakes me when I'm riding my bike, how ever I try to overtake the other vehicle, he/she tries to overtake me, this creates a street race.). Which is not good.

No need to fill this blog with my boring ideas. But one thing is true. That we all have to leave this world soon or later. At that day, what we all take with us is the goodness and badness we collected during the life span. I'm trying my best to live a balanced life, and also I'm trying my best NOT to become a trouble to other people.

Live a useful life to you and to everyone.! And die leaving a good name among living ones.

Don't use pirated software

2006-03-17T17:23:00.000+06:00

I didn't know I was doing some thing wrong...
I was just sitting infront of a Windows XP computer...
Didn't even touch it...
But suddernly MS agent and Police broke in and grabed me...
And I was under arrest for using a pirated Win XP copy...
Don't use pirated software...

Disclaimer : All these are my ideas and my own activities. And those doesn't have any relationship with any other party.

FOSS-ed

2006-03-17T11:10:00.000+06:00

February 13 – 15 was some action filled three days for me. I was representing The Linux Center at the FOSS-ed conference held in the Excel World Colombo. The conference was held to bring awareness to Free and Open Source to the public. The event went well from the very first day and we all (LK-LUG) had a busy but joyful event.

There were some speeches and some presentation from various key note speakers (local and International) and also from our own LUGers. I had the chance to talk to the Confounder of the world's most popular web server Apache, Mr. Brian Behlendorf. He was a key note speaker in the event. The crowed we aimed was mainly business people, universities and other educational institutes and any other party who wish to come! :-) Well we had a reasonable number of participants.

As a third world country (still developing) we should think about the Free and Open Source Software more and more. We can save more money by using this FOSS alternatively to the Proprietary software. But still in Sri Lanka all the software can be purchased under LKR 150 .00. So still people are like 'crabs in the boiling water'. And due to use of illegal software, we will need more prison chambers for the future Sri Lankan IT Professionals. :-)

Conclusion : Migration to FOSS is need in deed!

FOSS-ed After effects:

Janaka and Suchetha...

Janaka became a 'she male'...

Janaka had a high demand after the event..

A short ride to Ingiriya.

2006-02-20T09:52:00.000+06:00

My uncle, Lesly, is a building contractor. This time he got a contact in a temple, at Ingiriya, a nice village passing Horana. My family (dad, mom, me) were invited to spend a day at the temple. Dad couldn't come due to his duties. It was last Saturday (11-02-2006). I also had some work to take care of before I go. So mom went with my aunt by her van and I went to the office. My cousin sister (Yasi) also wanted to go there, so I took her on my bike (Honda Custom CBX 125) and had a 47KM ride within 45mints. I always love to ride at 100KMph or more when the road is clear!;-)

Ingiriya was a calm and cool village and surrounded with paddy fields and Rubber estates. My cousin brother Stephen (Poriya) also was there working with uncle Lesly. In the evening we went to take a swim in a stream at Nachimaley (few kilo meters away from Ingiriya). The water was so cold and we had a long bath there.

Stayed the night at the temple, watched the moon and stars, and I loved the tropical environment, and the fresh breeze. I relaxed few hors under the stars. It's good that I came out from the busy city for a while and got a bit of relaxing. In the next day morning returned home with a relaxed mind, to start a new week with a big smile in the face. :-)

2006-01-19T13:56:00.000+06:00

Dear moon,

How are you keeping? I'm fine. When are you comming to see me again? I was waiting in the balcony, just to see you once again, and to say good bye, but you went down the sky without looking at me. So I send you this mail to say, "Good bye".

Earth man.

I got few public holidays, thought of visiting my home town (City of Ampara). So I went to Kandy in Thursday (12/01/2006)morning and took a bus to Ampara from there. When I look around for known people, (cos this bus is leading to my home town so, I could find some people I know) I met several guys from Ampara and a special person too. I saw my class teacher- when I was in my year 4 and 5 at Sadhdhathissa College, Ampara - where I schooled up to year 5. It was year 1989. I went to her and spoke, she was really happy to see me after 17 years. You know what, she still remember the naughty little boy! I still respect and love my past teachers.

I reached Ampara in the evening, went to my buddy's place, Kunchana, where I stay. And call over my two pals Kasun and Manju, that day was Kasun's Birth day (13 January - friday the 13th - "wake of evil") So had to have a party. That night we went to Kasun's own restaurant “Rathna Rest” and started to celebrate. You know there is nothing to tell after that, we kept on chatting and had a cool time, and got drunk- no excuse! As I thought in this new year, I took care of a lot of beer. That makes me feel cool.... You know it's very nice to be away for a while from the rush and busy city. And also to meet some people who close to me. We stayed till 1.30am and after my newly wedded buddy Manju received the fifth and final 'warning' phone call from his wife, we split for the day. We don't want any trouble here lady ... ;-)

I proud to say that we four were together for more than 10 years, and still mango friends. Girls friends are coming and going from our lives when they are not satisfied, but true friends never leave until it's end of our lives. I'm so lucky to have such true friends.

After we split Kunchana and me came to his place. Did we sleep? No way, even though we was drunk up to maximum level, we sat in front of the computer and started explore the system-Linux. Yeh, can't stay away from it. After reading several manual pages and some other stuff, we created a blog for Kunchana too. We took some photos, I felt sleepy and crashed on the bed at 4.30am. Didn't have any dreams.

Got up at 8.30am and had a quick breakfast. Then started to visit my relatives, and some of my Suda's relatives that I loved. After all these visits, I packed up my self and started to travel back to Colombo, in the evening bus. Kasun and Kunchana came to say tata to me, and I left my home town. Reached Colombo at 5.30am(Saturday). That was a short but sweet visit.

2006-01-02T12:05:00.000+06:00

I say good bye to...

I say good bye to year 2001,2002,2003,2004,2005.
I say good bye to all my bad feelings.
I say good bye to all my sorrows.
I say good bye to my old PC (AMD K6).
I say good bye to witness of my love “The Full Moon”.
I say good bye to many of my memories.
Finally,
I say good bye to you my Suda.

I say hello to...

I say hello to GNU/Linux.
I say hello to FOSS.
I say hello to beer.
I say hello to the world with computers.

I wish all the best and success for our geeks at Lanka Linux User Group.
I wish a very happy year 2006 for my relations and friends around the world.

Cheers!

house party @ Rivendale Resort

2006-01-02T09:41:00.000+06:00

My buddy Suchetha invited all the LK-LUGers for a party at his place “Rivendal Resort”, a marvelous facility near by the Bolgoda lake. It was 30th December 2005. We sat under the stars with the guitar (Viraj's) and a hand drum (Who's was it?). You know what? we 'managed' to sing few songs, and I managed to 'grab' some chords for songs. Actually, after Suche's mom sat down on the mat, the party really got a kick!

We took care of some beer bottles and fine tuned the event. Some of our guys crashed on the mat, after few hours of singing.

Our gang: Kosala and his wife, Sanjaya, Deependra, Arunan (mango boy), Ruwan, Viraj, Buddhika, Chamil, Changa, Nandalal and his wife, Suchetha's parents and their friends, and also Suchetha's dogs (bow wow). I'm sorry if I miss any names.

I came bit late to the premises and it was already dark and I didn't see Suche's garden well. So in the morning, after a comfortable sleep at Rivendale Resort Mango boy, Chamil, Ruwan, Suche, me went to look around. It was a wonderful environment and I invite every one who missed the party should visit Rivendale Resort before you die!

I like to thank Suche's parents specially his mom who was in the back stage of this party and made it joyful. And the food was excellent! I would like to say that few of us was lucky to have our breakfast from there too. I came home with a fun filled heart and a bag full of DVDs (Suche's Collections).

"No idea of going to own houses?"

"Cathy (spot bow wow), I love you"

2005-11-30T12:06:00.000+06:00

These days, I’m in a training program at University of Colombo School of Computing Sri Lanka. This was a fully sponsored course by JAICA and we are the first batch. I was interested in participating this course because they have a subject part about Open Source Learning Management System, which I’m hoping to implement in my department in near future. We didn’t come to that part yet. So here I am in the training. (to be precise blogging). Course will move till 17th December 2005

In the mean time I went to the Lanka Software Foundation (Sahana Project) to see few LUGers (actually yesterday). I took my official notebook computer to get Debian installed in it. As Pradeeper took the responsibility of doing it, he started, As usual Sarge gave the message “kernel panic” and halted, but he didn’t give up, I had Fedora installed in another partition and Pradeeper had took the kernel of the Fedora and installed the Debian system. Any ways now Debian is up and running in my notebook ;-) I need to upgrade the system (apt-get it.).

2005-11-21T20:31:00.000+06:00

As I said before, you know I never forget my favourit. (the green bottle!) We started the small party around 22.00 hr and went up to 02.00hr. I was pretty well with the guitar by that time and played well. (says me;-)) I have to make this blogging bit shortt, cos I am in an Internet cafe. Cos I'm still on leave and attendig a training program in UCSC. I will be back in the office on 17-12-2005. So I'm offline for that time period.

Ya hooooo.....

2005-11-21T20:17:00.000+06:00

I had a nice electoral holiday.

I got three day duty leave to vote! cos my home town is 375KM away from the city. (City of Ampara). But I didn't go there, cos I thought of utilizing the leave in a better way. So I went to my aunt's place at Kandy (katugasthota) and had a nice time with my brothers there. I can't uploaad all the pics cos some are too much!

My aunt and sister from Katubadda (colombo) also joind with me in this trip.

Ya hooooo.....

2005-11-21T20:12:00.000+06:00

Past Actions...

2005-11-08T12:30:00.000+06:00

I learned the first C lesson from suda :-)
part of it.....

#include "stdio.h"
main()
{
int i;
char j;
printf ("Enter any number...");
scanf ("%d", &i);

switch(i)
{
case 1:
printf("\nEnter any alphabet...");
fflush (stdin);
scanf ("%c", &j);

switch(j)
{
case 'a':
printf("\nIf you love something...");
goto out;
case 'b':
printf("\nSet it free...");
break;
}
break;
case 2:
printf("\nIf it returns, it's yours...");
}
out:
printf("\nElse it was never meant to be.");
}

2005-10-27T11:04:00.000+06:00

Still Suffering ;-(

I was totally down after breaking up with Suda (my love). But my family and friends, even Suda's friends helped me a lot to recover my self. Thanks to them, and thanks to my religion I saved my life without getting in to any foolish decisions. But I'm still stuck with some sad feelings. Lets see what we can do about it!!

Music keeps me alive

Last month, I bought my self a new Box Guitar. (photo's will come soon, cos my digital camera is out of order and I have to buy a new one) I can play Keyboard (Very Well), Thabla (Very Well), Drums (Well), Flute (Little Bit), any instrument can be played after touching it for few days. ;-) So now I can sing and play the guitar for few songs, Like, Sealed with a kiss (J. Donavan), Duka Hadu Dena Raye (Mr.Gunadsa Kapuge) And some of Mr. Clarence Wijewardene's songs. As I have sang in Local Music Bands for several years, singing part is not an issue. ;-) I am organizing a “Paduru party” (a classical music party) in the Faculty, where I work (Department of Anatomy, Faculty of Medical, Sciences, University of Sri Jayewardenepura). This will happen on 31^st December .

I want to learn C

After installing a stable GNU/Linux system in my official notebook, I did some XHTML, PHP etc. After I started my IT career, first thing I thought was, “I will not become a programmer”. But... now I realize that programming is very essential, cos I have to submit a software for my final year project (Degree of BIT). ;-) So I borrowed a C book from my friend (Kunchana) and started coding. I hope I will write some good codes in future. :-)

Promoting the “Revolution OS”

I developed a departmental intranet in the office for students a year back. I ran the web server in Window$ Server 2003, (not a legal copy) and all other machines (including mine) was running under XP. But after I realized the power of GNU/Linux I kept promoting it among my friends and some authorities in the University. Now I'm happy to say that my desktop and some other machines at office are powered by Linux. And some of the higher level staff come to me and getting the Linux OS installed in there machines. But still I'm running my web server in the same way cos, there are few things to be learn before I change the system to a Linux box. But I'll keep up the good work!

2005-10-25T15:17:00.000+06:00

uploaded this photo just for fun, and I will upload my photos later.

I was on (still on) a bad mood ;-( after my most loved Suda left me on July. I think it's all my fault and no blame should go to her. The major error I made was loving her truly, deeply, madly. Other error was I expected her to love me in the same way. But she always say she's happy without me and my love, bla bla... bullshit. So I have a big challenge of healing myself. I still love my Suda and that will last for ever.

Thank you, for being my whole life.. ;-(

2005-09-14T13:52:00.000+06:00

FOSS Week.

I involved in the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) week held in Sri Lanka from 5^th to 11^th September 2005. I'm so happy to take part in this national event. I was in Majestic City Shopping Complex for three days (8^th, 9^th, 10^th)with some of my friends from Lanka Linux User Group, and promoted GNU/Linux. I'm so happy to say that most of the Sri Lankans have realized the importance of FOSS.

Linux and me...

I was using Windows for 7 years. In 1999 my cousin Lashi (Menaka Lashitha Banda- www.lashi.org) sat in front of my computer and said “what is this? throw this windows sh.. away and use Linux”. But those days I was impressed with Windows and refused his word. But when time moves on, and when I started my career in IT field I saw the revolution, and changed my PC OS to Linux. I don't want to criticize Windows, but Linux is my personnel choice now. I can do all the things I did in Windows in Linux, and I'm still exploring the Operating System.

I joined the LKLUG mailing list, actually my friend Anuradha Rathnaweera (www.linux.lk/~anuradha/) added me to the list, and met so many Linux guys and they helped me a lot when I need help in Linux.

Suda and me...

She was a cute little girl who loved dolls a lot. We played together, we grew up together, I was a dear brother to her, she was a dear sister to me, we became lovers, she was one of the most valuble persons I had, we dreamed about our future, we walked a long way together, holding our hands, with happyness and sorrow. But now we are apart. Where is my Suda?

Nothings forgotten; Nothings ever forgotten...

2005-09-12T14:05:00.000+06:00

It started...

After trying many other options, I also thought of blogging. I'll update my blog with more facts soon.