Happy new Decade !

It's last few minutes of another year, not just an year it's a decade. WE are going to set foot on the second decade of this millennium.

The new year starts for us in the best way, with exams starting on 11th January :P.
I hope to blog more in the coming year.

May all your wishes come true in new decade!

Convert linux package files one to another easily

This is a familiar problem for most of the people who are using Linux. Software for Linux are available in many formats. Most popular package managers are rpm on RedHat related distributions(Fedora, CentOS, SUSELinux...) and deb on debian related dists( Debian, ubuntu, Mint...). If they are distributed as .deb or .rpm it's relative easy to install with a single command line.
Sometimes it's very difficult to find deb for an rpm only (or vice versa).
I spent some time searching for a tool to convert .deb to .rpm(still google chrome is ditributed as .deb only).
So I found this tool written in Perl very useful. It's Alien, a script which can convert between .rpm, .deb, .slp and tar.gz(.tgz)
Download it from here .
Unzip it and makesure your system has perl installed and perl version is 5.004 or greater .If not install the latest version by

$sudo apt-get install perl (on Debian distributions)

go into the folder from terminal and type to start installing.
$ perl Makefile.PL
$ make
sudo make install

and it will be installed, and check its man pages for more details.
Its very easy to convert a foriegn package format to the native packaging format of your distribution.
Like
to convert an rpm to .deb on Ubuntu

sudo alien -d file_name.rpm

file_name.deb will be generated.
But converting vice versa is a different story, such as converting a .deb to an .rpm on Ubuntu will give dependency problems. :(
Using verbose option as an command line argument, you can see what alien is doing behind the scenes.


So, no more problems of searching for rpms for deb only softwares :-)

May, Google be with you :P

Chrome on Ubuntu

Google Chrome is my favorite browser on Windows due to its speed and simplicity. Still Google has not released a stable build for Linux and Mac. But recently it released Unstable versions for Linux and Mac through dev channel. It was easy to install on Ubuntu because there is a .deb version.
Google advices not to download it.
But, really, when has a simple warning stopped you from downloading an incomplete alpha?
You can download it from here .
Still Linux version doesn't support flash or Unicode,and didn't work the task manager also.
Here is the list of the issues with the browser.

Will it be the last few days for Vista to be on my laptop?

I'm going to say BYE to genuine(but I cal it malicious:-P) Vista!
I'll briefly explain my Vista experience.

When I was going to buy a laptop I searched for laptops with XP or no OS because I've seen Vista is very much slow.(Some said there will be problems in future for pirated OS.But I don't believe them.) I found only Acer without pre-installed Windows. Because of the rumours that ACERs are very much heating, my option was HP(I havn't had money to buy DELL :-P). So I bought HP DV5-1104tx with Vista Home premium installed.
But it's heating very much,So I call it lipa:-P

First of all I installed my favourite Ubuntu8.04. But I had to rely on Vista to use my E220 HSPA modem. (Used betavine on ubuntu,but it gave problems.) But after Ubuntu8.10 launch every thing changed, I rarely used Vista only to play games. If I boot in Windows for playing I cant wait until ring stops rotating. And it doesn't have most of the tools thst I had on XP like msconfig on Home premium edition. On thursday ubuntu9.04 is scheduled to be launched, So I'm gonna completely remove Vista and upgrade to Ubuntu9.04 and install Fedora11. If I feel still I want Windows to play,hope to install Windows7.
Isn't it a simple plan?

After more than an year I found my blog is working and thought of post something to it. Today we got our new year vacation :). I found an innovative desktop design on http://bumptop.com/. I couldn't test it yet, because I'm working on ubuntu.I have to reboot to windows after a long time to test it. I'll post about it after testing.
These days I'm reading a book about linux programming and playing with linux. The vacation is going to be busy with algore project and these things. I hope to post what I find interesting on the web.