Author: Nayar

Published on by Nayar

Linux enthusiast detained by Cyber Crime Unit of Mauritius

Dunno the reason. It is Saturday night. I’m made aware of my friend Ish is currently being detained by Cyber Crime Unit of Mauritus. Why did they detain him at this hour?

Recently, Ian Murdock, founder of Debian was arrested by police and reports say he was brutalised too. He committed himself to fight against police brutality. He was later found dead. There was no “official” reason announced for the cause of his death.

Ish too is a Free and Open Source advocate, well loved by the Linux community of Mauritius. I do not want history to repeat itself. I hope Ish is being questioned by his lawyers by his side and the Policemen are polite and professional. Brutality, physical or mental torture will not be appreciated at all.

Be strong Ish.

Published on by Nayar

Arch Linux with KDE

It was a long time dream to set up Arch Linux. After 5 years of using Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Debian Servers that I managed to learn enough to be able to try Arch Linux. As the rumours say, the latter is not for the faint heart. Just copy pasting Arch Linux beginner’s installation guide won’t make it happen.

The beginner’s installation guide

Arch has a beginner’s guide which I tried to follow. It all seemed to work perfectly until I rebooted the laptop. The UEFI bootloader was loaded but Arch was not starting.

I retried but this time following a YouTube tutorial. And it worked with some minor modifications. As I said, you need to understand what you’re doing. Following any guide blindly will not guarantee success.

WiFi

I was very much surprised at how easy it was to connect the Live Distro from USB to WiFi.

# wifi-menu

wifi-menu

And just followed the dialogue box. Entered the WiFi password and there you go! But once you installed the OS on your drive, you gotta install
“dialog” and “wpa_supplicant” package. To do so, I live booted with the Arch USB. Once the command prompt opened

# wifi-menu // Connect to wifi
# mount /dev/sda2 /mnt
# arch-chroot /mnt /bin/bash
# pacman -S dialog wpa_supplicant
# exit
# reboot

When you reboot, you’ll be able to run wifi-menu locally. What I did above was use the Live USB as OS, connect to WiFi then make it believe that the filesystem it is currently working on has changed to /mnt which is pointing to /dev/sda2. Might seem confusing at first but with experience, it’ll become natural 😉

 

Pacman

pacman is the package manager. On Ubuntu and Debian, we know the famous apt-get and openSUSE’s zypper.

# apt-get install package
# pacman -S package

# apt-get remove package
# pacman -R package

# apt-get autoremove package
# pacman -Rs package

# apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade
# pacman -Syu

apt-get is much easier and verbose for the newcomers.

GUI

By default, you get only a command prompt when installed. I forgot which commands I ran to get KDE up and running.

Screenshot_20160114_080535

# pacman -S xorg sddm plasma

That’s it for this blog post. Do try Arch in a VM or a test laptop ONLY if you’re beginner like me. Partitioning is done in CLI and can result is screwing your whole Hard Drive.

Happy learning 😀

Published on by Nayar

My Car: Volkswagen Polo Mk3 (6N)

I present to you my new “old” car. Here you go:

Exterior

The Front

IMG_20151205_144245

The back

Volkswagen Polo Mk3

The Rims

I must say it is one of the ugliest rims ever designed. No money to put alloy wheels for now :(.
IMG_20151205_144253

 

Interior

The Steering Wheel

image

No Power Steering in this car. Such a pain to get out from home or to park it back. For my driving test, I learned to park using Power Steering and passed the test using Power Steering. Now I gotta learn how to park all over again and get laughed at for making lots of to and fro movements as compared to other drivers (including ladies ones) 🙁

But once the car is moving, the steering wheel is responsive and smooth like butter. No vibrations whatsoever. The height can also be adjusted which is a plus.

The Turn Signals

Since it’s a german car, It’s found on the left side of the steering wheel. Why can’t they put it on the right side? Cost issues? You are supposedly be selling “luxury” cars for premium a price but you can’t switch the signal levers for left-hand drive countries? I bet Japanese car do invert theirs.

I accidentally switched on my windshield wipers few times when I was supposed to put my full bean or signal my actions. But with habit it’ll be fine i guess.

IMG_20151205_121746

Manual Transmission

I wanted a manual transmission to really understand the car I was driving. To learn how to drive. To be economic. To have greater control. What could be better than that? It got a 5 speed gearbox.

Yesterday I went to PORLWI by Light festival and got stuck in a huge traffic jam through Caudan.

But I managed to survive it, park the car (took like 10 mins), walk around then return home happily 😀

IMG_20151205_121832

Side mirrors

The side mirrors position are controlled electrically. However it doesn’t fold in and out automatically.

IMG_20151205_122850

Light controls

Japanese cars usually have the controls on the turn signal levers. In this car, we have a rotary switch to activate the light beam. For full beam, just pull the turn signal lever.

 

IMG_20151205_122902

Accessories

 

IMG_20151205_121824

Radio

It got a Pioneer AM/FM radio, CD player installed. No fucking AUX port. Such a disappointment for me for not being able to play my own MP3. Can’t even read a CD-RW that I bought yesterday. Thinking of

  1. replacing the whole radio set with a new one with Bluetooth enabled
    • Rs 4500 – Rs 5000 locally
    • Rs 800 – 2000 from eBay after 2/5 weeks
  2. Buying an FM transmitter
    • Rs ~700 locally
    • Rs ~300 on eBay after 2/5 weeks

Any advice?

Other

Engine

It’s a 1043 cc. Just enough to get moving and not get speeding tickets 😉

Automobile layout

It’s a Front-Wheel Drive (FWD) car. Don’t expect to do “drifts” with this car.

Comfort

The driver’s and front passenger seats are very comfortable even on crappy roads. The shock absorbers seem to be doing their job perfectly. Didn’t have the opportunity to sit at the back while someone is driving. Sister says it’s not that bad.

It’s a relatively quiet ride too. The engine noise don’t infiltrate the cabin too much.

Pride of ownership

You’d always want to buy a car from someone who treats his car well. The car still had the owners manual in the glovebox which is an excellent sign of a responsible owner. The car was very clean in and out.

12274387_10206953480468488_6089029988762381246_n

Even the original Volkswagen key ring holder was still their as well as the second key.

Summary

Fully functional car. Almost everything is manual and unassisted. Can’t really complain for lack of AC,power steering, central lock, power windows for the price (Rs 70 – 80k) and age (MR 96).

Great car 😀

Think my next car will be a Volkswagen Polo MK4 (9N3) or later or a KIA Rio. But that’ll take a while 😛

Published on by Nayar

Stupid MacOS. Can’t fucking compile NodeJS libraries without XCode

In your package.json

{
  "name": "macsucks",
  "version": "0.0.0",
  "description": "",
  "main": "index.js",
  "scripts": {
    "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1"
  },
  "author": "",
  "license": "ISC",
  "dependencies": {
    "node-curl": "^0.3.3"
  }
}

$ npm install

Damn that thing swears at me.

> node-curl@0.3.3 install /Users/nayar/Codes/untitled folder/node_modules/node-curl
> sh src/generate_curl_options_list.sh && (node-gyp rebuild || node-waf configure build)

extract constants from /usr/include/curl/curl.h
generate src/integer_options.h
generate src/string_options.h
generate src/integer_infos.h
generate src/string_infos.h
generate src/double_infos.h
xcode-select: error: tool 'xcodebuild' requires Xcode, but active developer directory '/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools' is a command line tools instance

xcode-select: error: tool 'xcodebuild' requires Xcode, but active developer directory '/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools' is a command line tools instance

Let me try to download that fucking XCode. I open the app store. Create my account. It won’t fucking let me finish the procedure without me adding my credit card details :@

Screen Shot 2015-11-07 at 11.21.24 AM

WTH Apple?

UPDATE: I’m being able to download the XCode .dmg from this url: https://developer.apple.com/downloads/