cenv: create your own environments

     Everytime I start coding for GTG, I have to start terminal, nautilus and a browser(in case of bugs ;) ). For a lazy person like me, this is a very boring task. Hence i just came up with an easy solution : environment creator which takes a set of your tasks and turns them into a linux command.
     With all the tasks done in just one go, I can consider it to be a productivity enhancing tool (though it's primary purpose was to help lazy bums like me :P ). All sorts of work environments can be created with this tool. You can have one called "work" which like mine, starts terminal with vim/gedit, nautilus and browser. You can keep one for home which could maybe contain nautilus with your songs folder opened up, a music player, a todo list manager if you have one etc.
     Another added advantage for this tool, is that you can create macros for yourself. Say you have a habit of backing up your files to your external device regularly, you can just create an environment called "backup" with all the copy commands. Heck, you can even add one environment inside another environment because these all are actually turned into linux commands only!
     Right now I have features like "new", "remove" , "rename", "edit" etc. but further more features will come up in a week of 2. The very basic version is ready and I plan to launch the version 0.1 by next Saturday.
     Here is the link to the homepage of the launchpad project: https://launchpad.net/cenv
     I'll let others contribute to the code after the launch of version 0.1
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Linux Cron Jobs

  I have always envied Iron man for Jarvis and all other cool toys that he has. I used to envy all those people who had some or the other type of automation in their life.
  Even I wanted some automation through my computer. First I had thought of making a twitter bot that would tweet the news of the day from Wikipedia. I had also a php script to scrap the necessary data . But, then I got bored of the idea and hence dropped it in middle (nothing new for me).
  I come to my room everyday at 12:20 from my college. So, I thought, how about getting my media player ready by the time I reach my room? (Cool Idea huh!)
  I already knew that I had to simply create a cron-job for this. The question was "how?". Well, what is Google for? A simple Google search told me that I just had to enter the command
     crontab -e
  It will ask you for your favorite editor. Select the one of your choice. It opens a user cron file. Now, for people who don't know what cron file is, well in simple words, you enter the time and command and then your computer runs that command on that time. The format of a cron file is:


   m h dom mon dow command
   m-minute
   h-hour
  dom-date of month
  mon-month
  dow- date of week
  command - command to be run

  you can enter * at any field (except command ofcourse!) to run that command every minute,hour etc.
  you can also input range in the form [1-5]
  also, you can give an interval like */2 i.e occur every 2 minutes etc.
  Enter the proper value in each field and enter the correct command. And then save the file. Thats it! You have now a command that will run automatically!
  One thing though, the output of the command will not be shown on the screen but will be mailed to you.
   Also, an important thing: If you are starting any GUI application you need to give command in this format:
   env DISPLAY=:0 command
   e.g env DISPLAY=:0 firefox

   Now, who is going to keep his/her morning alarm using a cron-job? :)


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TT (newer version of timetable)

  Last year I had created a shell script which showed me my academic timetable for the day. I was a newbie in shell scripting at that time and hence the script was not so good. Hence, here is tt or I should say timetable2.0 ?
  This time I have stored my timetable in a timetable.txt file so that whenever I need to modify the timetable, I don't need to modify the script. Also, the code is much shorter this time with not so many if statements. Here is the new code:

#!/bin/bash
days=( Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday )

if [ "$#" == 0 ]
then
  echo -e "\nToday's Timetable:"
  set `date +%u`
else
  echo -e "\n"${days[$1-1]}"'s timetable:"
fi
  sed -n $1p < timetable.txt
  echo -e "\n\n"

  Still to be added: Feature to change the timetable. But that's all for now. The new modification will come when I feel the mood of it :)

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Installing Linux (Ubuntu 11.10) on Virtual Box

   Hey all! Here's a post on how to install Linux on a virtual box. I will be giving the demo on a Window 7 machine, using Virtual Box version 4.0.10 and will be installing Ubuntu 11.10 on it. So, let's start!

First step: Getting Virtual Box
You can download it from here: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads It is a  simple exe, just run it and you have your virtual box ready!

Next: Get Ubuntu

The direct download link is this: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/download .  Make sure you select 32bit version for your 32 bit computer and 64bit version for you 64 bit computer.

Next:Installation
Start your virtual box and click on  new Machine icon.

                                     
It will open up a "Create new Virtual Machine" Wizard.
Click next and then it will ask you to give name to the machine. I entered Ubuntu and it automatically set the Operating System to Linux and version to Ubuntu. You can set them manually as well.
                         

Click on next and it will ask you to give base memory. I gave 1GB but it is upto you. For Linux 512MB to 1GB is good enough. Click Next.
Now you are at "create a boot hard disk". As this is your first installation, you do not need to make any changes and just click on next.



Now it will open up a "Create New Virtual Disk" wizard. Click next.
Here you have an option to create dynamically expanding storage or Fixed size storage. It is best to use dynamically increasing storage. Moving on,
It will ask a location to store your new virtual disk. Select the location of your choice. Then in the size part, select the disk size of your choice. The default 8 GB will be enough if you do not want to install much of applications on your Ubuntu otherwise, select 4 or so GB extra.Click Next
Click on Finish and it will give you a summary of your new machine. Click on Finish or go back to make necessary changes.
                                            
Now the installation part is half complete.

Next: Configuration
Just a little time over here.
                                         
Select the new machine you created, go to settings. Now go to Storage and click on IDE controller. Now in the attributes section, click on the small disk icon. Select the copy of Ubuntu that you downloaded and click on OK. That is all the configuration you will need.


Now click on the start Machine Icon.
At the first run, Virtual Machine may ask a few configuration questions. Just read them and take necessary steps. It is very easy to do so!
Once Ubuntu is booted, it will ask whether you want to install or just try Ubuntu. It is your choice what to do. Though, if you do not install Ubuntu, all the work you do on the machine, will be lost, the next time you boot it. Hence, it is better to install it.

Again, installation will ask you some questions, and again, they are very simple It will ask you whether to install updates with installation or after it and so on. Installation will take some time. After that, you are all set to play with your Virtual Machine!
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Linux deserves more?

  Okay we have all heard that the Linux has a lot of cool features but still the Linux distributions have a small share in the OS market. Why is it so?
   The main reason is the marketing skills of Microsoft. Microsoft through it's great marketing skills has reduced the share of all other OSs to a minimal amount. Apple has retained the share of Mac OS through its high class products. On the other end we rarely see anyone marketing Sabaoyon or Ubuntu.
    Also, same is the case for the famous computer games. A few games have now come on the MAC OS but has anyone played Halo in Ubuntu! ? We only get to play the games developed by the OS development team,  which are no ways as glamorous as the games designed for Windows. This leaves out all the potential and hard-core gamers from the Linux users community.
    Coming to the user experience factor, though we can make many configurations in Linux, many of them are useless for the average users.As a result they underachieve.Also  the user interface of the Linux distributions is of lower grade(considering the beauty) compared to Windows counterparts of the same time period. Linux allows us to customize as much as possible but the fact is that we are now so lazy that we dont even bother to look into all those features. Again, Linux is underutilized.
    One of the reasons that Linux users community is limited to developers and geeks is the confusion " which distro is good for me?". All Linux distros have some or other good and bad points. I personally find Sabayon to be the best as it has a beautiful interface plus the only Linux distro which has the most entertaining game of all. Also it has many more interesting features. It does at the cost of storage space(Sabayon 5: 4.38 GB  when installed on my virtual machine).
  In the end I can say that Linux is an under-utilized OS and should be certainly tried out,if not installed then at least on a virtual machine. If u get any interest, here are some links for downloading some Linux distros:

UBUNTU
SABAYON
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