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How To: Pine on Fedora 8

vidurgupta — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 23:50:47 +0000

I am sure half the world knows this but I having been using pine at work on the servers. I recently moved from Windows to Fedora 8 as my work-station OS and wanted pine. This is when I came to know that I am supposed to use alpine instead of pine now

These are instructions to install alpine:

alpine: if you read your e-mail with pine (the latest GNU-friendly version is now called alpine) on your machine, there is good news in Fedora 8. alpine, because of its new GNU licensing, is now available through the normal fedora repository. so, simply:

$ yum -y install alpine

This is the source of the info.

Posted in office, tech

How To: Copy to/from VNC Viewer

vidurgupta — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 16:28:56 +0000

I use VNC regularly and for quite a while I struggled with the fact that I could copy from my VNC window to my PC. Finally, I had a breakthrough couple of weeks ago. This is what should work:
- logon to your VNC session
- open a terminal window (like Xterm)
- type ‘vncconfig &’ which should result in a small window with 3 options.
- enable all the options, put this little window somewhere in the corner and forget about it.

This should do the trick

Posted in tech, work

Chrome got my PC!

vidurgupta — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 16:40:19 +0000

After reading a few blogs and praises of Chrome I decided to give it a try. The one reason was that Firefox, my current browser, seems to take ever increasing amount of memory as the day progress and makes my notebook sluggish. This is my experience with Chrome on a Windows XP notebook.

I downloaded Chrome from the official website and followed the instructions for installation. The first glitch was that it hanged while trying to retrieve Firefox passwords and bookmarks, at least that’s what the installer said it was doing. The CPU utilization was upwards of 97% and the memory usage was 16,828k. I decided to kill the process after 10 minutes. Chrome was installed but it failed to get the Firefox user data.

Next, I went to Chrome settings and tried to import the bookmarks and passwords. It did get them but the support for passwords seemed to be a bit patchy. It worked for some sites and didn’t for others. This is some data I collected: -

	Firefox	Chrome
Start Time (seconds)	1.60	0.90
Memory Usage (K)	42,940	28,448
Shutdown Time (seconds)	1.80	0.70
Memory Usage after a minute(K)	43,928	28,836

I liked the fact that each instance of Chrome ran as a separate process, the memory footprint in smaller and seems to be faster. But, not much data to go by

This is when Chrome got my PC, I think it was my visit to cricinfo.com (no malice intended, just a fact) when all the trouble started. It could have been some other site but these were the same sites I visit with Firefox. My notebook was infected by both Ad-ware and multiple viruses. This caused a 3 day downtime, not very convenient as works piles on.

In the end, I have decided to go back to Firefox. The good thing which came out of this is that I used my home notebook w/ Linux in office and decided to get a linux desktop for work. I am a new user of Linux as my base OS but have been working on Free BSD based OS (JUNOS) for a few years and use Linux servers for development, so lets see how it goes.

Posted in google, virus, work