Frequent inhibitors to migrating to Ubuntu are what if something goes wrong, where will my windows go, what if I don't get everything working and topmost is I have only one partition what to do now don't wish to risk any partition magicians. A quick fix to all this rests in using Windows-based Ubuntu Installer (Wubi). If something goes wrong you don't lose windows, hard disk space and top of all your patience with Linux-derivatives. All it takes is the following simple steps 1. Go to the Ubuntu Windows Installer Link 2. Let the 1.4 MB or so file to download and then install click. 3. Then let the application take charge while it asks for minimal information like username and password. 4. Boom after a couple of restarts and long download (700+ MB)you will have a copy of Ubuntu lying alongside windows harmless. 5. If you encounter some hiccups then its best to go to the windows and ask around google and then apply the fixes. This is the fun part that such hiccups no l...

Browsing through the Internet its extremely difficult to find  the subversion(svn) commands in an instance and be productive immediately. So here is the step by step list of instructions which can be followed to accomplish the most common tasks of svn. We would use the project on Sourceforge named Dr. Java as an example. If the project is already there and you wish to CHECKOUT some code to view here is the command. $svn co https://drjava.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/drjava drjava Now if you wish to add new file to the svn repository the command is very simple. For example if you wish to add the text file readme. $svn add README_TEXT The above command will not add it to the server but add it to the schedule. If you wish to view current status of additions, deletions that are scheduled you could use the command $svn status And finally if you are satisfied simple do the following and the commit will be done meaning all the changes will now be part of the repository and a new ver...

Looking for MySQL's administration tool is a task. Installing and configuring PHPMyAdmin would take Apache, php and then successful configuration. Then what to do to look at the tables, databases in the fastest possible way to look at tables and execute queries. $ mysql -u username -p the command will prompt for a password mysql> Show databases; mysql> show tables;  The above two commands are extremely useful when one wants to look at the databases installed and tables in individual databases. For example to look at users tables in database drupal the following commands will suffice. mysql> use  drupal6; mysql> select * from users; These commands can be used in both Linux and Windows and are very handy and dont require much to do.

The character of operating system programming has remained more or less constant over the years. That is a polite way of saying that it is still as scary as ever. Why it is so? Complex system requires complex programming methods and this goes against the spirit of the dictum "Good programs are easier to understand and develop". So can we conclude that system programming being done is bad programming. Or the programmers are not following best practices and all the elaborate methods created to ease programming. Or they are still dealing with a lot of legacy code. Looking at the output "they" are the best talent. Probably its the fact that they are good that they create something so brilliant that nobody can fathom or appreciate. The reality needs to be explored. System Programming So what exactly is operating system programming. Is it really something different from regular programming or its just a subset of programming. System Programming in contras...

Software development was never easy. Software design became extremely difficult with the explosive growth of computers and Internet. Let me accept that I was never a fan of UML. I always believed that software development is an art and the design process is more of an inspiration than a mechanical process of finding nouns and verbs. Patterns, well I thought they were probably the worst creativity-repellents possible. So I was always lousy with UML until I realized that this aversion was compounded due to using MS Visio. Visio probably is the worst place to go to develop UML diagrams. My faith in Visio was developed while using the minimal project management tools  (during undergraduate studies) so when it came to doing UML I simply went ahead and used Visio for Software Design. Not until 2007 did I come out of the dark ages when I used umbrello for the first time. Then i came to realize that the true worth of a UML Drawing tool. The way in which all the diagrams were integrated g...

PLEASE NOTE THAT IF YOU ARE USING DIRECT CONNECTION TO THE INTERNET THEN THE FOLLOWING POST DOES NOT APPLY. TRYING TO SET THE SETTINGS MAY LEAD TO DISRUPTIONS / DISCONNECTION FROM THE INTERNET. How and where should I change proxy settings in Linux? This is a most frequent question posed by newbie (and not so new) Linux users ? This mountain can be scaled in three steps. Step 1 Using proxy to get simply connected to the internet Just change proxy setting in Firefox and/ or browser of your choice and start using internet. Ignore the rest of urges of Linux to get updates etc and life will be cool and simple. Of course life cannot continue to be so simple. One has to after all install programs etc. Step 2 Adding proxy for system-wide settings Now the next step is to setup proxy for "system-wide" setting. If using GNOME got to the System-> Preferences -> Network Proxy. Typical settings could be ip address/ host name of the proxy server and port name (t...

In the early nineties Linux was a hobby, which in the words of Linus Torvalds might never be professional like GNU. It took off and shook the foundations of empires aspiring to bleed every penny by selling server operating system. The contributions of open source community have caused severe headache for software companies. Apache Foundation is one such name. How much does it cost to setup a web server? Around the cost of a LAMP, compare this with the cost of aptly named vamp or is it WAMP?  What jinn did the lamp raise? What changes did it trigger? A very simple question is how come Ethernet and Networks were around in the seventies but it took just a couple of years after Linux for Internet to raise it head? The answers to all these questions is there was no LAMP earlier. LAMP stands for Linux Apache MySQL PHP (Python / Perl).  This is open source combination which gives a head start to web development environment. LAMPs have been around for not very long but the LAMP was...

LISP never introduced until very late in school and that too in the form of ONE slide (yes true) one slide. So what is it in LISP that deserves so little concern. Looking at MIT OCW lectures it seems to be THE language of choice. So whats lisp infact? LISP (LISt Processing) is a language where the primary data structure is list and modus operandi is list operations. Step 1:  Installation Installation of lisp on aptitude based package manager (like Debian/ Ubuntu) can be achieved by the following command.  $ sudo apt-get  install clisp Alongside this its recommended to install the HTML version of the book  Common Lisp the language, 2nd Edition by Guy L. Steele Jr. $ sudo apt-get install cltl The book is installed in the /usr/share/doc/cltl/clm/index.html. Step 2: Testing LISP functionality Soon after installation clisp can be tested for functionality. The following sequence of commands test the lisp environment.  To start clisp $ clisp Try out the lisp-...

Why hibernating Linux might be a great idea? What supports the idea? There are basically two reasons that support this idea. One Linux has traditionally lived up to the billing as premium server class operating system.  Secondly it might strange but Windows has performed much better on Laptop using hibernate option than desktops. The former is a direct evidence support the convention while latter is circumstantial evidence. Since Windows is performing better in spite of it’s not so glorious record otherwise. So Linux can be expected to perform better than Windows because of its better history. The conjecture that server’s better performance can be attributed to the lesser frequent restarts needs to be further investigated but for now we could assume it to be true. Therefore its important to start setting up the hibernate option in the Operating System (be it Windows or Linux on laptop or a desktop). Its very good for the battery life too. Steps for initiating hibernate inUbuntu L...

The availability of huge number of Linux distributions is amazing. The primordial soup developed by  Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson named UNIX had in it genesis the most amazing OS Multics. The primordial soup gave birth to a phenomenon which resulted in evolution of one beautiful species after another. The rise of Lisa led to Mac. Even the great evil empire acknowledged its superiority by first trying to develop Xenix and when it failed in its attempt to usurp started slowly building in features into its own Windows. A mutation took place in 1991 when Linux Travolds gave birth to Linux. This led to the never ending stream of species. Each and every species had its strengths and weaknesses but every species showed the brilliance and resilience that was present in its initial genes. The Linux of today cannot be compared directly to the MULTICS or even the first UNIX but the design is same providing solid and unbeatable performance. Not only is Linux and FreeBSD holding on to the se...

Latex is another brilliant Linux / Unix specialty hidden behind the geek facade.  Interesting introduction here {warning PDF file} talks in detail about why and how document processing improves with increase in document complexity. In the words of the author "It is very hard to write unstructured and disorganized documents" . I like the approach but feel that this might attract power users but for newbies its more of the same old school of Linux is for geeks. The purpose is not to criticize the authors. He / she did a great job and deserves credit for this article as well. Now the primary question is how and where to start, following tutorials almost always leads to temporary use. Even students writing thesis in latex only a few would later use it for submitting assignments or other work. The problem is two fold one the students or users are not introduced to latex in a friendly manner rather they use it as if trying to live up to the 'lofty standards' setup by ad...

Getting Started Level 0 Every Linux newbie hears about power of grep sooner or later. But no sooner does newbie try to use the grep command the experiment ends badly. The reason grep almost never yields anything productive is because of a couple of issues. The basic problem is lack of knowledge of regular expressions and secondly knowledge of switches of grep. This realization should not deter a new user from using grep. A very nice detailed tutorial of regular expression (regex) is available here . The migrating user having used dir and similar commands in DOS and using windows search box almost never expects (nor can fathom) the power provided by grep. Firstly grep means "global regular expression print". Now this means that knowledge of regex is required to be able to use grep effectively . Now what should a newbie do? Wait till user's regex knowledge improves? NO NOT AT ALL. That would scare away the user and never to use grep. Here is the first simple command that ...

A popular method of connecting to Linux Machine is via SSH (Secure Shell). This protocol of exchanging data over secure channel [1]. The beauty of this channel is that it could easily be extended to provide other facilities like SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol) or SCP (Secure Copy). One could get hold to a host of small applications from www.ssh.com [2]. Another method to use is VNC (Virtual Network Computing) [3]. Its a desktop sharing method and uses remote frame buffer protocol. The VNC alternative to using Linux over Windows can be used to enjoy Linux while still using Windows distribution. The only constraint is that one has to use an extra machine for Linux but the fact that we don't need to use any monitor, keyboard or mouse with it helps in both ease of use as well as house keeping (tuck away the Linux box under any table in your office and no one will know it exists).  The key to this idea are two simple commands on the two operating systems. Linux Box Step 1: Run ...

  ⚠️ Update (2026) This article was originally written several years ago and uses older 32-bit Linux assembly methods. While the concepts are still useful for learning, modern Linux systems now use 64-bit architecture by default, and some commands shown below may no longer work as expected.  ✅ Recommended Modern Approach * Use **64-bit assembly (`elf64`)** * Use **`syscall` instead of `int 0x80`**I * Use registers like `rax`, `rdi`, `rsi`, `rdx` 🔧 Quick Working Example (64-bit) ``` section .data     msg db "Hello, world!", 10     len equ $ - msg section .text     global _start _start:     mov rax, 1     mov rdi, 1     mov rsi, msg     mov rdx, len     syscall     mov rax, 60     xor rdi, rdi     syscall ``` 🛠 Compile & Run ``` nasm -f elf64 hello.asm -o hello.o ld hello.o -o hello ./hello ``` --- 📌 Note The original content below is kept unchanged for reference ...

Installing FreeBSD on top of XP via VMware Player. The experience is pretty nice until now. Installation steps were pretty simple. 1. Downloaded FreeBSD ISO from the website (http://www.freebsd.org/where.html) 2. Then installed the ISO via VMware Player The first reboot led me to a prompt $ and ability to run various commands. The next step is to install KDE. Started off installing KDE by executing the following command (make install clean) on the command line in the directory (/usr/ports/x11/kde4/). this led to downloading the kde from internet. Then since no proxy was setup therefore an error was encountered. This was solved by setenv http_proxy http://myproxyaddress:8080 . The command line came up easily the only problem was that KDE failed to install and gave the error "undefined reference to vtable projectbuildermakefilegenerator". Trying to figure out what to do with this error. Tried to google, rebuild ports, reload ports and lets see what happens. But overall...