Thanks for your time to read this post and see you on my new blog.

Enough with my rant about .Net. Lets come to the point.

Today, I was trying to create virtual directories using Nant in IIS. My environment details are as follows:

• Windows Vista Business Edition
• IIS 7 installed with default options.

Now with above environment, when I fire the command which creates virtual directories. I got following console output:


E:\Blah>tools\nant\NAnt.exe -buildfile:Blah.build makeVDir
NAnt 0.85 (Build 0.85.2344.0; rc4; 02/06/2006)
Copyright (C) 2001-2006 Gerry Shaw

Total time: 0.8 seconds.


I googled for it and didn’t found anything useful. I saw posts here and here with no information or solutions. Fortunately, I got this working and thought to make a post about it.

I tried following things and I am listing them all.

1. My machine was referring to localhost as “::1″ which is a IPv6 address. I went ahead and commented that in %windows%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts and kept localhost pointing to “127.0.0.1″.
2. I also forcefully edited the “Default” website binding in IIS Manager to 127.0.0.1 which was previously to “All Unassigned”.
3. Last thing I tried was (and this made my installation really work) was installing additional IIS Features. By default IIS in windows vista installs features which doesn’t allow Nant to register webservices or create virtual directories. So I went ahead and installed all the features under IIS installation in windows vista. The screenshot is attached below.

I think even the Nant message is little misleading. I got this thing working by just trial and error. I am still investigating exactly what is going wrong behind the scenes. If anybody already know please update the comments or I will post them when I find root cause.

The idea of the tournament is to select winner across three categories of games. The three categories are arcade (Need for Speed), strategy (Age of Empires) and action (Counter Strike). Based on the nature of games, the teams or individuals will compete against each other to get the winning spot. If you feel you’re ready for burning some rubber, conquering territories or saving hostages please do drop by the official site and register yourself.

For any questions or queries, you can contact me at “sachin” at thoughtworks dot com

What I wanted to achieve?

I wanted to integrate support for voice chat using Pidgin for Google talk users.

What we did?

We started with analysis of libjingle which is xmpp based communication library from Google code. We faced lots of problems in integrating that as a plugin with Pidgin. I could see that there is already a feature request logged with Pidgin for this support. I tried to work with Ubuntu (Gutsy Gibbon). There were many problems for libraries which are either very old or sometimes difficult to maintain.

There are many issues with the library dependencies of libjingle as well, viz. linphone, gstreamer etc. Each of them require different version which is sometimes quite old than the current stable version.

I will be working on this more to achieve the goal. There seems to be quite few huddles before I could reach there though. I don’t know what is current state of this post. I am hoping this will start working soon. Till then, I’m there to see how I can add the talk plugin to pidgin.

After lots of efforts I couldn’t get it working and finally I gave up. I think, Gutsy is just not ready yet. So far, I couldn’t get the multiple monitors working. Somebody has already started a thread here. (Sorry… no replies yet )

I just hope that this feature will be better supported in main release or at least in a patch, as early as possible.

For now, I guess at least with beta this kind of humour still stands true.

I downloaded beta of Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon yesterday. Wow! That’s the only word comes to my mind after having a look at latest version. This version is much changed from the 7.04 (although I wasn’t expecting much from this release). This release has few very good features, to start a few:

• Installation wizard has provision to migrate existing users data. This feature is just brilliant! Now, I don’t need to rush through my installation and create a backup before I want to try next version of my favourite operating system!
• Display configuration comes now in very user friendly screen. I always faced problems with connecting and extending the second screen to the display configuration. I used to screw up something every time (… I know I’m dumb but isn’t why the operating systems are there in the first place). This screen will allow us to change the display configuration in predictive way and easily.
• Restricted driver support for the nVidia, ATI and other devices. For the first time, I installed these restricted drivers as another package! To make my joy multi fold, Ubuntu by itself detected the driver and a nice pop-up comes near the clock informing about the restricted drivers. Very user friendly.
• Faster boot and response time. The memory footprint is also very less (~200 MB on my laptop with 1 GB RAM).
• GNOME 2.2 is just better than previous versions. My early impressions are very nice about this. No crashes so far. Seems to be stable and neat! I hope this impression continues for longer time.
• Network configuration just became simpler. For my needs to switch between wireless networks, office, VPN and home networks was seamless. For the first time I was prompted to enter the necessary authentication and later on it’s doing on its own! This has reduced my all pain to pay attention to my network connections. Kudos to Ubuntu team and developers, job well done!
• Not the last but for eye-candy lovers (including me) Compiz fusion is just superb. The default set of effects implemented are very nice and lightweight. All the effect options are available in user friendly screen and you can very easily turn them on and off.

… and one more important thing. I could manage to install Lotus notes on my Ubuntu. Now the last reason why I was dependent on Windows is also gone and I can happily keep only one operating system in laptop (not to mention that will be ubuntu)!

Finally another version is on the verge of a release and I’m quite sure that, this release must be better than ever. Ubuntu 7.10 is declared and its code name is ‘Gutsy Gibbon’. For the developers and geeks who can’t wait for couple of weeks, there is a beta version download available which can be upgraded later on. Those can’t wait another second on the post please proceed here for download.

So what’s new in this release? (Features I liked the most are listed here)

• GNOME 2.20
  GNOME is coming reloaded with lots of features. A detailed description of all the features which will be improved / introduced can be found here.

• Dynamic screen configuration for nVidia, ATI etc. chipsets. This was one of the features where Linux lacks a lot than Windows. I hate to compare Linux features with Windows yard-stick but sometimes it becomes necessary.

• Automatic printer configuration! I remember spending about an hour in just getting one printout on Kubuntu. This seems to be pretty nice if this works as expected.

Apart from the tiny list mentioned above there are loads of features available in GNOME new release. Go checkout all of them and start writing your precious reviews about the improvements or bugs in the system. I would be hunting blogosphere for reviews related to gutsy.

Thank you very much Ubuntu team for the hard work and prompt releases. Please keep the good work going as you always did!

That was a funny incident but, we really experienced value coming out of avoiding using word ‘Yesterday’. This helped us to achieve sharing of context of the story and not just yesterday’s work.

I occasionally travel by train. Most of the times, I take benefit of online ticket booking services from IRCTC. I was surprised by the fresh look of the site. I wasn’t knowing that enlightenment was about to end after I logged in the portal. I couldn’t see the reservation form at all! I thought, something is wrong in the server or network and somehow page is not loaded completely. I investigated a little bit and came to know that, the portal is not designed to work with non-IE browsers. I had to reboot machine to Windows and book the ticket but that was very disappointing exercise in all.

This happened because they designed site for only IE browsers. This is the problem I always wanted to hightlight through my previous posts like this and this.

I have already dropped a letter to concerned officials requesting Non-IE compatible website and waiting for response. Government and Public services portals should be designed very carefully considering there might be consumers of those services from every corner of the country. Everybody might be using different software to access those services and it is not impossible to cater all of them. Just follow Standards (…and stick to them)!

Why this question is here?

Linux has been part of my technical life since 2001. I have seen Red Hat Linux 6.x early releases and fall of Red Hat Linux. Rise of Fedora and birth of Ubuntu. This whole journey is very interesting and enjoying in its own way. Linux is today having a position which is not dominating but surely challenging! Linux is not having aim to replace every desktop in the world (… some might say it just can’t!) but surely its putting a smile on people’s faces who have used it for a while. You can’t just put Linux out of the door and wait to disappear, the small tiny tux is now having a great foot tapping parade of people and organizations which will do whatever they need to make this tux growing!

I have been asked a question many times by my friends and colleagues who are new to Linux or just want to learn Linux. They started the question with, “Sachin, I have a stupid question…” this was always one of questions which I answered very religiously. The only reason I never made any nonsense while answering this question was, they were new to Linux and slight wrong answer might put a wrong foundation about Linux Information in their minds. My friend Ashish suggested me to write a blog post about the same so that, people can get right information.

The question is not at all stupid! In fact, most of people don’t know the answer and they hesitate to ask this. I would request you to read the whole post and if you have any suggestion or question feel free to post a comment about it.

In technical terms, Linux is simply a ~2 MB sized binary file which has all (…almost all) the stuff necessary to manage file systems, networks, processes etc. Usually Mandrake, SuSE, Fedora, RHEL and all other popular Linux flavors contain this ~2MB binary acting as heart and soul of their distribution. Remember the italicized word in last sentence; we are going to come back to that word shortly. You can obtain Linux in pure form from Kernel distribution site. That’s most pure and raw form of Linux. If you follow all the instructions and put lots of efforts (although targeted audience is not supposed to do that) you might get a text based console at the max!

Remember the word we italicized? Distribution, yes that is a very important term in this world! Since, Linux started way back in 90s and it was free, people started experimenting with it. People wrote tons of applications which could be run on this robust and naive platform. Most of the applications were coming out of university students, startups, research laboratories and programmers who are dying to try new things! This created a huge sea of application, system, utility software which was unmanageable. Clearly, an effort to make Linux easily adoptable was necessary. This problem lead to a solution called as Distribution. The idea was great because of its simplicity. People started delivering Linux along with few must have software nicely wrapped around with a GUI and installer. This contained system, utility, programming, internet and other software categories. A beginner had all things nicely wrapped which were needed a beginner. Soon, the distribution size exploded from few hundred megabytes to 4-5 gigabytes and the size was growing day by day. Tons of software was coming as part of default bundle which was not at all needed by a normal user. To address this chaos and make Linux more targeted to audience, people started creating their own customized distributions! This lead to Live CD, business, small and large sized distributions! Each distribution was targeted for an audience with considering their need of software and applications. Nothing got changed; still a nice GUI and rock solid base functionality was supported. Each distribution (a.k.a. distro) was addressing a very specific problem. There are around 1000+ distributions available to date at the time of writing this post, refer to (distrowatch).

Actual answer begins here…

Linux was really easy to configure and creating a distribution was real fun, which lead to “Problem of Many”. There were unlimited options and unlimited configurations! This created a great amount of chaos and making impossible for new comers to figure out which one of these 1000+ distributions they can use for day-to-day use or what they should use to install a Linux server. When, any organization was supposed to install a Linux powered web server, a ‘Super’ developer used to spend around a week to either create a really custom version of Linux. This used to be based upon some out-of-box distribution which matches close to their criteria. If this doesn’t work out well, organization will pay hefty amount of money to purchase Enterprise Linux from vendors like Red Hat or SuSE. Commercial software vendor were giving 24×7 supports and other business terms which were comforting to organization which were new to Linux. Today or another day this was supposed to happen. (Let’s leave the topic here as this might be a good discussion over Slashdot)

In simple terms, Linux is a simple binary. Distributions are nothing but customized suite of application, system software which is solving some business, personal computing problem for most of the cases in ‘out-of-box’ fashion. Server and Desktop versions of distributions are nothing but different set of software packaged together. Yes, that simple it is! Just another distribution might be called Server Linux and others might be called different names as well.

Ubuntu, Kubuntu are today’s most popular Desktop versions of Linux distributions (from my perspective). Ubuntu as well releases a server distribution with same quality of bundling and support.

What can I expect from a Desktop distribution?

You can expect all the functions (perhaps much more than that) supported by a Installed and Configured Standard Windows box from a Linux Desktop distribution. This includes E-mail client, Internet Browser (Mozilla Firefox etc.), Media Player, Media Browser, Games (basic), Network support, Office and Productivity suite etc. There are tons of other features coming which you just need to explore.

What can I expect from a Server distribution?

If you are planning to host a web server which can run database applications written in PHP or Ruby then perhaps this is the distribution you are looking for. This includes Telnet, SSH, FTP, Web and other remote servers. This includes few server applications which are normally needed by web administrators. In all normal cases you don’t need this distribution as you don’t need most of the applications in your day-to-day basis unless you are geek.

I am still confused, which one is right for me today? Will I miss something if I choose a wrong distribution today?

Hell No! There is no such phrase called as ‘can’t happen’ in Linux world! If you choose a desktop or server or for that matter any distribution, you will be able to install any application which can run on Linux. Let us take example of standard desktop distribution of Ubuntu. If you installed the standard 1-CD installation and then want to host a web server, please go ahead. You can always find very nice and friendly applications like ‘Apt’ and ‘Package Manager’ which will help you to install web servers, database server, FTP or SSH servers without typing a single command! You can just click the mouse, make sure you are connected to internet and choose any software from repository of ~25000 applications available for Ubuntu! Doesn’t it sound simple and great? So there is no problem in beginning with any distribution of your choice. There might be few distributions which may not support ‘Apt’ but they might be having some parallel application which does the same job. SuSE have ‘yum’, Red Hat has ‘up2date’ and others have similar tools. You just need to find tool which runs in your distribution.

Thank you for reading a lengthy post. Please help me if there is anything which needs rectification.