by on 17 Mar 2013 Leave a Comment

My top posts of 2012

20130317-highlights

I started blogging in March 2004 and, like a lot of bloggers, I blog a bit less now.

Here are a few of my highlights from 2012:

Feel free to revive the posts, comment on them and share them on social networks too.

Enjoy!

Filed Under: Business, Education, Linux, Mauritius, Movies, Music, News, Photography, Politics, Programming, Sports, Technology, Travel, Web
by on 09 Jan 2013 7 Comments

Open source DJing with Mixxx

20130109-mixxx

On 31 December, my mission was to make people dance from 22:00 to 03:00 in the morning. Fortunately, I could rely on Mixxx, a fantastic and powerful DJing software available for free for all platforms (Linux, Mac OS X and Windows).

Mixxx performed admirably during the five hours.

On Linux, Mixxx supports MP3 out of the box but as I had quite a lot of AAC (i.e. M4A) files, I had to compile it from source. Here are the commands I used on my Ubuntu Linux 12.04 LTS box:

sudo aptitude install scons qt3-dev-tools libqt4-dev g++ bzr libportmidi-dev libsndfile1-dev libtag1-dev libmad0-dev libid3tag0-dev libmp4v2-dev libfaad-dev portaudio19-dev

scons -j2 faad=1 shoutcast=0 tuned=1

sudo scons prefix=/usr/local install

The first line is to install all the required dependencies, the second is to compile Mixxx with AAC support (faad=1) and specifically for the processor I was using (tuned=1). The third line is to install it in /usr/local

Have fun DJing with Mixxx :-)

Filed Under: Linux, LUGM, Music, News, Technology
by on 29 Jul 2012 3 Comments

Enabling Nvidia Optimus on CentOS Linux 6

I have just bought a new Dell Inspiron laptop, a N5110, and it has two graphics chipsets: one Nvidia GPU and an integrated Intel GPU. The Nvidia GPU is powerful and power-hungry. The Intel GPU is not that powerful (so forget about games) but requires much less power and, consequently, is much better to use on a laptop when not playing games (which I personally never do on this laptop). In theory, Nvidia Optimus technology allows the laptop to change from the Intel to the Nvidia GPU and vice-versa seamlessly… but this does not work out of the box on CentOS Linux 6 which is my preferred Linux distribution for serious work.

Here is how I made Nvidia Optimus work well enough on my laptop running CentOS Linux 6 64-bits (x86_64):

Enable the ELRepo repositories:

  • wget http://elrepo.org/linux/elrepo/el6/x86_64/RPMS/elrepo-release-6-4.el6.elrepo.noarch.rpm
  • yum localinstall elrepo-release-6-4.el6.elrepo.noarch.rpm

Install VirtualGL to allow full 3D acceleration in Linux:

  • wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/virtualgl/files/VirtualGL/2.3.1/VirtualGL-2.3.1.x86_64.rpm/download
  • yum localinstall VirtualGL-2.3.1.x86_64.rpm

Install Bumblebee to add support for Nvidia Optimus in Linux:

  • groupadd bumblebee
  • yum –enablerepo=elrepo-testing install bumblebee kmod-bbswitch
  • chkconfig bumlebeed on
  • service bumlebeed start

Once this is done, the laptop will start using the Intel GPU. The optirun command can then be used to switch to the Nvidia GPU on a ad-hoc basis (e.g. optirun glxgears -info)

Now I need to make my Synaptics trackpad work!

Filed Under: Linux, LUGM, Technology
by on 10 Dec 2011 Leave a Comment

Announcing AndroidMauritius and Knowledge Seven forum

This is an article I published on the Knowledge Seven blog and which I would like to republish here on my personal blog:

Knowledge Seven is proud to announce the launching of a new Android portal at androidmauritius.com. During the past 18 months, Android use has exploded around the world and in Mauritius to become the world’s most widely-used operating system for smartphones and tablets. Google has just announced that people have downloaded Android applications more than 10 billion times hence showing how dynamic the Android ecosystem is.

AndroidMauritius provides the latest news concerning Android, reviews Android smartphones and tablets available in Mauritius, and gives tips and tricks.

Remaining faithful to Knowledge Seven’s motto ‘Sharing Expertise’, we are also glad to announce the launching of our new forum at knowledge7.com/forum. Open-source enthusiasts and IT professionnals will be able to discuss and share their knowledge on the various open-source software and technologies they use on a daily basis such as Linux, PHP/MySQL, Java. Android, etc.

We hope that you will find both AndroidMauritius and the Knowledge Seven forum useful. Feel free to share with your friends and colleagues.

Filed Under: Education, Knowledge7, Linux, Mauritius, News, Technology, Web
by on 04 Nov 2011 15 Comments

Terminator and Xournal

 

A brief post to tell you that I stumbled upon two great open source software yesterday:

Terminator can be used to open multiple Gnome terminals in a grid as shown above. As it also works in full-screen mode, Terminator is great when you have to, say, administer multiple servers at the same time using SSH.

Xournal is, according to its author, a note taking application. But, and this is a wonderful side-effect, it is also a quite formidable PDF annotation tool!

Both can be installed on Fedora using yum and I suppose they are also available in the Ubuntu repositories (even though I’ve not checked) and can be installed with apt-get or aptitude.

Filed Under: Linux, LUGM, Technology
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