Sharma Family Journal

I wrote this paper around 5 years ago hoping to publish it at some conference. But this has been sitting around in my home directory for far too long without ever being indexed. So here it goes:

Abstract: Operating system support for multiple page sizes in the Linux kernel is not considered a high priority because of the complexity it adds to the VFS and VM layers and the perception that relatively few applications really need it and a majority of the users don’t need to pay to pay costs associated with the complexity. In this paper, we present an alternative method to support an ABI requiring a page size smaller than the default page size for the architecture on a kernel that doesn’t support multiple page sizes.

Due to a server side misconfiguration, outgoing mails were bouncing for sometime. I identified the culprit to be:

/etc/hosts:

::1			localhost localhost.my.domain

After I fixed it, there was more collateral damage. A large number of subscribers were marked as “nomail” (i.e. delivery disabled due to excessive bounces). I didn’t see an easy way of mass enabling the delivery. So I wrote this little script.

#! /usr/local/bin/python2.6
#
# Copyright (C) 2009 Arun Sharma 
#
# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
# modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
# as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
# of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
# GNU General Public License for more details.
#
# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
# along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
# Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.

""" Flip the nomail bit for all members of a list. """

import sys
import paths
from Mailman import MailList
from Mailman import Errors
from Mailman import MemberAdaptor

def main():
    listname = sys.argv[1].lower().strip()

    try:
        mlist = MailList.MailList(listname, lock=True)
    except Errors.MMListError, e:
        print >> sys.stderr, _('No such list: %(listname)s')
        sys.exit(1)

    # Get the lowercased member addresses
    rmembers = mlist.getRegularMemberKeys()
    for addr in rmembers:
        status = mlist.getDeliveryStatus(addr)
        if status <> MemberAdaptor.ENABLED:
            mlist.setDeliveryStatus(addr, MemberAdaptor.ENABLED)
            print >> sys.stderr, 'Enabled delivery for: %s' % (addr)
    mlist.Save()
    mlist.Unlock()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

Enjoy.

My WD passport drive boots from the USB port nearest to the SD card reader. Try booting from any of the other USB ports – things don’t work. Totally undocumented weirdness. HP folks: would you care documenting this next time please?

Just got it installed on my external USB disk. The installer totally rocks. Things I noticed (especially relative to Fedora 11):

• Timezone picker widget is 100 times more usable
• Does a much better job of detecting other OSes

Looks like the larger installed base of Ubuntu is clearly showing. The strength of Fedora is really that a lot of the Linux development still happens there. It’s just that Ubuntu looks a lot more polished at this point in time.

Downloaded a copy today. The install instructions ask you to dd the iso into a USB stick. That’s not so nice – for people with other data (eg: images, music) on the flash drive. I tried using unetbootin – but didn’t work out of the box. Here’s the trick:

1. Assumes you’ve already run unetbootin once on your USB key. Backup syslinux.cfg if necessary.
2. mount the image and then extract vmlinuz0, initrd0.img and splash.jpg onto the USB stick.
3. Copy isolinux.cfg as syslinux.cfg
4. Edit root=/dev/sdb1 rootfstype=vfat in syslinux.cfg. Replace sdb1 with the device name or label for your setup.

Reboot.

Overall impressions: Looks like a slick interface. As an end user I wish projects like maemo, moblin and android cooperated and produced one polished product.

Getting X right with various chipsets continues to be a challenge to open source challengers to the desktop crown. Installed Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex this morning. Everything goes fine – except for graphics.

The bug seems to have been reported for both Fedora and Ubuntu

The workaround that worked for me:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Option "DRI" "false"
EndSection


I had to use the following in my /etc/X11/xorg.conf to get acceptable performance on a old PC with Ubuntu 8.04 installed.

Section "Device"
	Identifier	"Configured Video Device"
	Option          "AccelMethod" "EXA"
	Option          "AGPMode" "4"
	Option          "ColorTiling" "1"
EndSection

AP article:

There are several examples like that, that we have to address without worrying about the fundamentalism in some of the open-source community,” he said. “One can be an open-source advocate without being an open-source fundamentalist.

– John Negroponte, Founder, OLPC project

Not many people know the origin of the term “gentoo” or how it is related to India. I was messing around with a linux distro called Gentoo Linux and bumped into a description on wikipedia.

There are many descriptions of the word on the internet (such as the term used by the portuguese to describe Telugu speaking people). But this one coming from what looks like a Hindu nationalist website, looks interesting:

An Arab geographical term “Hindu” was mutated by the British into a fictional religious category “Gentoo”. The tribals — the Kols, the Bhils, the Hos, the Nagas, the Mizos — had all disappeared. The Sikhs, the Buddhists, the Jains, the Zorastrians had all disappeared. The British had fought against and displaced the Muslim rulers — so they recognized the Muslim category — the rest of Indian diversity was lumped into one unreliable category of “Gentoo”, and a fiction of a “Code of Gentoo laws” was created in a land in which religion arose from Dharma, not texts and written laws.

Although the name Gentoo Linux comes from the penguins , its connection to India is fascinating. I suspect many Indians wouldn’t be flattered by the above description.

Hmm, the above wikipedia page blames the French for the derogatory term first used to describe Egyptians.

While Mocking MIT’s $100 laptop project, Bill Gates said

Hardware is a small part of the cost” of providing computing capabilities, he said, adding that the big costs come from network connectivity, applications and support.

Someone at MS seems to be feeding him misinformation about BRIC. Here are some stats from India:

Whether the commodity OS is a Linux/BSD or pirated Windows depends on the seller and the buyer.