06.01.07
3i-Infotech, Here I come
Well, I’d been to Bangalore to collect my offer letter for a job as Trainee Software Engineer at 3i-Infotech yesterday. Most of the people who had cleared the GD, seemed to have cleared the Personal Interview as well, atleast most of the people who were in my group. The joining formalities was headed by a HR person named, Anupama, and boy was she grouchy! Is she always so? Whatever it maybe, I’m glad she wasn’t the one taking my interview. The whole formalities(submitting certificates, verification etc) took about 2 hours, but was disappointed to know that our postings still haven’t been finalized. Though my offer letter states that my training posting will be in Chennai, Anupama was quick to dismiss that, saying it’s not been finalized, neither has our joining date. So I’m waiting for both, and hoping I won’t be posted in Chennai. That’s about it for now
Cheers!
~sathya~
Oh Kubuntu!
I’ve been a SuSE fan over since I tried out Linux back in well…. April 2000 to be exact(not that I remember, have the CD with me). The one I had tried was of version 6.3, came with CHIP magazine. Being the geek that I am, decided to try it out and was very impressed, though the display was a less-than-convincing 640×480 @ 60Hz, mainly due to my graphics card, the infamous SiS 6326. Having learned the basics of Linux, I reverted back to Windows, as I didn’t have an Internet connection then and my “work” on my computer was mainly playing few ol’ games. Although I didn’t give up on Linux completely, tried out few distros, which couldn’t convince me to shift to Linux.
It was only a year or so ago that I gave SuSE 10.0 a shot, and I began to realize why I’d been a SuSE fan for so long. When openSuSE 10.2 was released, I immediately shifted to it and thought to myself, “hmmm.. Won’t be needing another distro for sure”. Even the much fancied Ubuntu didn’t make much of an impression on me, partly because of GNOME, which I absolutely detest. Recently when Fiesty Fawn was released, I thought I’ll give Kubuntu a shot(hey, ShipIT would send it to me, so why not?). And I’ve to say, “Wow!”(Not the Fista “Wow!”). I couldn’t have been more wrong about my thoughts. I was so impressed, that I actually removed openSuSE and I’ve totally shifted to Kubuntu. In fact, while I’m writing this, Kubuntu installation is going in the background, as the picture shows:
The install took about 45 minutes, which isn’t too bad since my physical RAM amount is less(Just 256MB). After the install I didn’t like the default wallpaper, so changed it another one. Have a look at my desktop after install. Now that’s neat!
Overall not bad. I’ll be using this for a while and see how it goes. Now for the bad points:
1. *buntu(as most other distros, though) doesn’t come with codecs or playing mp3 files or videos due to licensing reason. That’s fine. However when I tried to play a mp3 file under amaroK, it detected that I was about to play a mp3 file and offered to download the codec. This is where the bad part comes, since amaroK hangs up trying to find the codec. I recommend using Adept to get the Ubuntu restricted stuff.
2 . Ubuntu Feisty Fawn comes with a “Restricted Driver Manager” which is a neat tool to get the propreitory drivers such as NVIDIA/ATI drivers which offer 3D acceleration. This is glaringly absent in Kubuntu, and you’ll have to install it manually via Adept. And despite the installation the icon isn’t created, which makes you believe it’s not installed, while it actually is. You’ll have to launch it from Konsole as “sudo restricted-manager” to launch it.
So if you haven’t given Linux a shot yet, I suggest you start off with Ubuntu/Kubuntu. Trust me, you’ll like it!
Cheers!
~sathya~
