Cheese fails to load

Hello,

Today on my linux box i tried shooting Cheese app after many days. Apparently to my surprise it failed to load couple of times. Immediately launching the same app via Terminal shows me that it cant load shared library libcogl.

The error shows like below:

libcogl.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

On googling, i came to know i need to re-compile x11-libs/xm package. Which i was unsure of why i should :O

To my surprise the solution is very simple and yet i failed to rectify it myself. Below is the solution:

1. Log in as root (via command line also no problem)
2. Run below commands:

ln /usr/lib/libffi.so /usr/lib/libffi.so.5
ln /usr/lib/libcogl.so /usr/lib/libcogl.so.5

Thanks,

Zen

Zenwalk 7.2 is a bliss

Dear Reader,

Today i am very happy to write about the upgrade i did on my laptop last night. As always, upgrading my boxes to the new version is an exciting thing to me. Not just because its super easy, it’s because the new things i am going to experience about it and the post tweaking stuffs i am supposed to do. It’s always brings excitation on the table. I must say, i am proud zenwalk user since past 4-5 years, and ever since it always kept me happy and made me proud user of it.

Anyways, zenwalk 7.2 released after almost 7 months or so. So i previously had 7.0 which had xfce 4.8 on it. XFCE 4.8 infact had very good interface and good application as well. It was fast, slick and snappy . But hey common, who doesn’t need a new version every now and then? But for me it was never a mandatory to look for an updates. I was very happy with the performance of XFCE, Zenwalk, Kernel 2.6 and its total performance.

So downloaded the new ISO file (700MB), this is one of those reason i love about zenwalk. That is, its philosophy: “One App per Task”. However, in the new 7.2 Live version this has been ruled out, hence live version is available only on DVD style. Anyhow, once downloaded, backed up all my tweaking settings and even had to brainstorm a bit to remember what ever else changes done. Once all done, off to installation.

Installation is pretty much the same old style (CLI) since zenwalk 6 or earlier, but amigo, do not make a weird face reading this line. Though you might think WTF about this, but still its very easy to install and very simple. I again applaud for this great job done by the zenwalk folks. One such screen shot is below:

Courtesy: http://www.linuxbsdos.com/2011/04/13/zenwalk-7-review/

The new version installation is done almost within 20 minutes or so (didn’t calculate accurately though). Once installation is done and remaining configuration is done, the system restarts within 21 secs approx till login screen on my i7, 4 GB laptop. That’s a pretty much surprise and happy news. I never estimated it with 7.0 earlier, but with 7.2 its definitely better, faster and i am happy about it.

The redesigned login screen was pretty much a surprising thing to me as soon as first reboot was done. And i am happy to share the screen with you. I am sure you shall love it

Once logged in, did couple of tweaking as per my needs. Next step was to wander around and see whats working and whats not in the new version. The first thing i noticed was the new revamped interface design of XFCE 4.10. The design, theme and icons, etc. are really awesome. I just wandered around it for a while. I must say great job folks.

Next impressive change is network app. Both wireless and wired interfaces were configured automatically and loaded by the network manager. Immediately i noticed that in 7.2, zenwalk team has chosen network manager applet for managing networks and i must say its way better than WICD used in the 7.0 and earlier. WICD did give me some pain in the ass moments when i was in 7.0.

Zenwalk 7.2 comes out with Firefox 15 and immediately i upgraded to 16 from the repos. So its pretty good to see a support for the latest version of my favorite browser. Next few things i wander around and noticed was my graphics chip recognized and working good compared to 7.0. So by default zenwalk 7.2 supports nouveau driver, but i still preferred official nvidia driver and hence installed it because it provides a configuration app for me to do some tweakings.

Next step was to see if sound is identified and voila, it’s there and working kool. So immediately i see if music app provided or upgraded is good? Yep there it was Gmusicbrowser, I must admit that i never used it before though i remember it being supported in the older versions, so i always preferred exaile so far. But this one seem to provide same kind of features and the whole UI is highly customizable, so its kool. My touchpad is now officially recognized by the kernel and appropriate driver is loaded as well as XFCE provides more mouse/touchpad options for it, hence again its kool .

Last but not least, one problem i found is that my bluetooth isn’t working OOTB (Out of the box). I have reported to the zenwalk team and hopefully i shall get a solution soon, but it’s not a show stopper issue. So i am not left disappointed.

There is a lot to say, but at this moment i am still exploring. So far i could see a lot improvements in terms of applications, artwork, performance, memory, etc.. Almost all apps i came across so far is upgraded to the new versions and they have their own improvements in terms of usability and bugs fixes.

Hence all in all, i am very much impressed and again happy. All hail to teams of kernel, zenwalk, xfce and other apps. Kudos to all of them for their great hard work.

Thanks & Happy Linux-ing,
Zen

Related articles

• Zenwalk Live 7.2 Has Linux Kernel 3.2.5 (news.softpedia.com)
• Distribution Release: Zenwalk Linux 7.2 “Live” (distrowatch.com)
• Distribution Release: Zenwalk Linux 7.2 (distrowatch.com)
• Zenwalk Linux 7.2 aims for “100% Slackware compatibility” (h-online.com)
• Zenwalk Linux 7.2 Wants to Be a Really Fast OS (news.softpedia.com)

Know your IP packets path to destination

Dear Reader,

Today i learned some thing kool which unfortunately i did not know. How bad? Yea after all these years of my geek life, i never cared to know about this much. So today i managed to get much information and began searching about it. So thankfully there is a linux command which deals with this.

Its called traceroute. This command has alot of options associated with for ones choice. As usual my first action is to check its man pages. After that i wanted to checked what route does my packet takes to reach the destination. And to my surprise i learned the route to my USA servers. It was nice to see how many hops it has to stop by

So here is the sample for ya, do play with it, you like it

$ traceroute to stackexchange.com (64.34.119.12), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
 5  59.163.206.173.static.chennai.vsnl.net.in (59.163.206.173)  237.415 ms  269.427 ms  271.285 ms
 7  if-0-100.tcore1.MLV-Mumbai.as6453.net (180.87.38.5)  105.208 ms  198.141 ms  243.709 ms
 8  if-2-2.tcore2.MLV-Mumbai.as6453.net (180.87.38.2)  333.940 ms  337.023 ms  339.478 ms
 9  if-6-2.tcore1.L78-London.as6453.net (80.231.130.5)  342.224 ms  345.845 ms  346.605 ms
10  if-2-2.tcore2.L78-London.as6453.net (80.231.131.1)  348.317 ms
11  if-2-2.tcore2.L78-London.as6453.net (80.231.131.1)  363.263 ms
12  if-20-2.tcore2.NYY-NewYork.as6453.net (216.6.99.13)  453.472 ms  321.450 ms  325.879 ms
13  if-15-0-0-20.mcore4.NYY-NewYork.as6453.net (209.58.60.133)  322.720 ms
14  ix-5-0-1.mcore4.NYY-NewYork.as6453.net (66.110.8.58)  279.575 ms * *
15  gwny01.stackoverflow.com (64.34.41.58)  294.522 ms * *
16  gwny01.stackoverflow.com (64.34.41.58)  295.224 ms  303.355 ms *

As you can see from the above traceroute command output for stackexchange.com website, i could found out that this site/server resides in USA. What is surprising for me is that my packets travels all the way to chennai -> Mumbai -> London -> Newyork. Quite a long travel you know.

Since then, i have been playing with every web site i keep visiting to know the route. Its fun to see such a complex travel path. Wow internet is one amazing spaghetti place

You can find much more detailed information from here

Happy geeking

Cleaning broken symlinks in Linux

Dear Reader,

Its been very long since i looked around in my hard drive for broken files/links to files. Trust me, i almost clean up by hard drive (defragment) partitions on Linux unlike windows. But any ways this post is not for ranting windows. So its been more than 2 year since i looked actually into all my drives (especially root drive) for broken links for files which reside.

So today i started to see some slow down in the machine, i still do not know if it was for 2 many broken symlink file residing in my / partition or some thing else. As usual my favorite job popped up: launching terminal

Yes most of the time i deal with terminals. Its almost impossible to remember all the commands in Linux with my style of interaction/tweaking done to my zenwalk install. But still i love using it and i love fiddling with it. Its fun you know once you love what you do with it.

I searched for a couple of minutes, basically looking for matching commands patterns via Tab key search pattern in terminal for clean, free, etc. words which weirdly popped up in my mind. Finally i stuck on cleanlinks command.

Immediately i did one of my other favorite thing: launching man pages. Yes its fun to read them. So man cleanlinks gave me all the information i needed. Just launched it and it listed like 1000 lines of broken files in my root drive. It almost took around 2-3 mins to complete this cleaning job and reported me several files which were broken.

After this, i started measuring the system performance via htop command. I felt it did increase in negligible difference. But the whole point was that i learned myself some thing which i am happy to share it with you . Below is the sample output if you are interested.

./.icedove is a dangling symlink, removing
./.mozilla/firefox/096nlt1k.default/lock is a dangling symlink, removing
Removing empty directories ...
./.libreoffice/3/user/extensions/bundled/registry/
com.sun.star.comp.deployment.sfwk.PackageRegistryBackend
./.libreoffice/3/user/extensions/shared/registry/
com.sun.star.comp.deployment.component.PackageRegistryBackend
./.libreoffice/3/user/extensions/shared/registry/
com.sun.star.comp.deployment.sfwk.PackageRegistryBackend

That’s all my friend,hope you liked it. Thanks and Happy using Linux

Delegates similarity in Ruby and csharp

Dear Reader,

It’s quite amazing to me today that when i was reading Delegates concept in Ruby. The Syntax, and working(execution style) is almost similar i can say. I guess this is one of those situations you might say for yourself AHA!

I am very well versed and used many times delegates in C# and so when i started the topic of similar in Ruby today i was quite amazed to learn that it almost looks similar and if your like me, will surely fall in love with ruby as you did with C#.

Of course this post is not about C# vs Ruby. It’s about those similarities which benefits and surprises developers like me who wish to earn different languages all together.

So just to give you the big picture, here is the below code:

prc = lambda {puts 'Hello'}
# method call invokes the block
prc.call

As you can see above, this almost looks the same as the C# equivalent of anonymous delegates which is as shown below:

Action myDel = () => Console.WriteLine("Hello");
myDel();

That’s all my friend, i just wanted to share my AHA surprise moments with you. Hope you liked it.
As always, your valuable comments are much appreciated and helpful for my learning.

Thanks,
Happy Coding