Desktop Linux + Idea Net Setter Wireless Internet = A Good Idea

Idea Cellular provides the lowest tariff for mobile internet access through its Net Setter devices. And it promises of plug-n-play zero-cd installation of the devices. However, in reality when you plugin the device on Windows it autoinstalls the modem (Huawei EG162G) drivers and a dialer application. Idea doesn't provides support for Linux. But you can still access internet through Net Setter with the following few steps.

1. Make sure you have ppp and wvdial installed. If not, install both these applications.
2. Add the following lines to your /etc/wvdial.conf file.

[Dialer Defaults]
Modem=/dev/ttyUSB0
Baud = 115200
Init 1 = AT+CGMM
Init 2 = AT+CMEE=1
Init 3 = ATE0
Init 4 = AT^HS=0,0
Init 5 = AT+CFUN?
Init 6 = AT+CLCK="SC",2
Init 7 = AT+CPIN?
Init 8 = AT+CLCK="SC",2
Modem Type = USB MODEM
Phone=*99#
Username = phone number (in my case it was 9990146746)
Password = last 4 digits of phone number (in my case it was 6746)
New PPPD = yes
Dial Command=ATDT
Stupid Mode=1
ISDN=0

3. After making the above changes in wvdial.conf plugin Idea Net Setter device, wait for a few seconds, and then run wvdial in a terminal.

Bingo! You are done. You will see wvdial establish a ppp connection in a manner shown below.



But there is a show-stopping bug with the USB Idea Net Setter Stick Modem (Huawei EG162G). I am unable to boot/reboot/shutdown the system with this modem pluged in. I have to plugin this device after the system is booted and plugout the device before a shutdown/reboot.

I would solicit any suggestions to fix this bug.

Important Point:
That show-stopping bug is fixed after install experimental 2.6.32 linux kernel.

Linux is Great But How Does Windows Sit on 90% of Desktops?

Try the latest iterations of major Linux distributions you will know the platform Linux has come a long way. There have been immense development in kernel, desktop integration and opensource application software, all of which together make a Linux operating system that we know. But the big question here is "why do many people still love Windows", why is there such an hue and cry when the latest (and greatest, as they say) Windows 7 hits the stores? And why does Windows sit on more than 90% of desktops? Read on to know my interpretation. No rants or fanboyism!

Linux is not that geeky anymore, thanks to Mepis, PCLinuxOS, Mint and a host of other such desktop distributions! Install the latest PCLinuxOS 2009.2, Mepis 8 or Ubuntu 9.10. Most certainly you won't have any problem installing it. The good part is you will get a complete desktop: an office suite (OpenOffice), an Internet bundle (Firefox, Thunderbird plus an FTP Client, IM client & more), a decent multimedia apps set (Totem, Mplayer, VLC and the likes). So, as a home user you will have very less to look for outside your install disc. And all these are free. Whereas in Windows retail copy installation you have to buy an OS disc, device drivers and other application software. But why there is no such buzz when the latest *buntu reached mirrors? And the market is so up for MS Windows 7?

Simple. The Linux community fails to complement users with those MS comparable software that they have been working on for more than a decade. Take OpenOffice as an example. It's a complete office productivity suite by every aspect. On it you can create stunning presentations, draft elegant letters and resumes, work on spreadsheets. Enough to meet your home use. But it's not a replacement in certain enterprise/professional environments. It behaves like a snail while handling big/complex spreadsheets, macro-ridden large documents, and complex database. Feature-complete, but a poor performer!

Of course, there are some proprietary office suites for Linux such as Softmaker, ElOffice and Ashampoo that look/work like Redmond's. They cost very less compared to MS Office. But they are unknown to the Average Joe.

Likewise, there is no scarcity of apps. There are thousands. However, people are looking for a few solid counterparts of their favorite Windows applications. In this regards Firefox is a real heavy-weight that topples other browsers (IE, Safari....& other) down in all possible ways. Also K3B is very versatile as a CD/DVD burning software. Even it feels and works better than the proprietary NeroLINUX. There is no such case for OpenOffice.

Let's hope OO.org makes performance and polish its primary goal.

Speed Up Debian Linux KDE Desktop

I still remember those days when RedHat 9 used to take almost two minutes to boot on my PIII PC. It was way too slow compared to Windows XP (that took roughly 40 sec) of that time. Thank God, these days Mepis 8 takes just 50 sec on my notebook. And the new OpenOffice.org 3 is a lot better than what it used to be 8 years back.

You too can achieve that speed by doing some easy tweaks.

Speed Up Booting

Boot directly from hard drive, make boot chooser timeout value to 0, and start parallel booting.

Default BIOS setting of modern PC has been set to seek Optical Discs and USB drives first, followed by hard drive and network. You can change it to seek hard drive first save some time. Besides you can set timeout value to 0 in your /boot/grub/menu.lst file so that Linux boot directly instead of waiting few seconds for you to choose a boot option. If yours is a multi-core processor you can still reduce boot time by setting parallel boot. Just edit your /etc/init.d/rc and change CONCURRENCY=none to CONCURRENCY=startpar.

Optimize Memory

Swapping is an important factor in system responsiveness. One important factor improve performance is to swap less and use RAM more. In case of a home desktop, you won't have to use swap if you have more than 1 GB of RAM. But for safety reasons you should have swap partition/file and change default swappiness value. In my system I have edited sysctl.conf file appending a line "vm.swappiness=10" (without quotes) to it.

Optimize KDE

Using auto-login and disabling some KDE eye-candy and services (disabling bootsplash (or splashy), ksplash, gui-effects and system startup check and using less items in Autostart) will further improve your desktop performance. Also you can change KDE options to start with an empty session. It will reduce the KDE-startup time.

Improve Filesystem Performance

Using "noatime" mount option and "data=writeback" mode will speedup your Linux desktop to a great extent.

Use "noatime" option. In my case it is:

# Pluggable devices are handled by uDev, they are not in fstab
/dev/sda1 / ext3 defaults,noatime 1 1
/dev/sda2 swap swap sw,pri=1 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0622 0 0
/dev/sda3 /home auto defaults,noatime 1 2
# Dynamic entries below
/dev/cdrom /media/cdrom udf,iso9660 noauto,users,exec,ro 0 0
/dev/hda /media/cdrom udf,iso9660 noauto,users,exec,ro 0 0

Use data=writeback.

In a root terminal issue:

tune2fs -o journal_data_writeback /dev/hda1 (substitute hda1 with your partition name)

Disable IPv6

World will move towards IPv6. But not now. Most of the home desktops still access internet using IPv4. So you can disable IPv6 system-wide to save time (processing) that goes to translate between IPv4 and IPv6. Edit /etc/environment as root and append "KDE_NO_IPV6=True" to it. Also remove the ipv6 settings from sysctl.conf. You should also consider disabling IPv6 settings in Firefox. Open about:config in Firefox and change value of "network.dns.disableIPv6" to true.

Change Host Setting

Simply edit /etc/hosts files and change it something like

127.0.0.1 localhost
mepis 127.0.0.1 mepis

(change "mepis" with your hostname)

Optimise TCP Settings

As root user edit /etc/sysctl.conf add the following lines to it:

net.ipv4.tcp_timestamps = 0
net.ipv4.tcp_sack = 1
net.ipv4.tcp_no_metrics_save = 1

It will reduce packet transfer overhead and improve your internet speed.

Speedup Firefox

Create a new integer value "content.notify.backoffcount" in about:config and set its value to 5. Also create an integer "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and set its value to zero. Similarly create another New Integer, name it Network.dnsCacheExpiration and give its value as 3600. Create another integer ui.submenuDelay and then set its value to zero. Change the network.http.pipelining and network.http.proxy.pipelining values to "true".

Remove Java

You should also consider removing Java runtime and allied packages from your Linux desktop and uncheck "java" from OpenOffice.org and Firefox options. It will speed up loadtime of both the applications.

Home Users Don't Need to Update their Linux Frequently

There are certain Linux distributions, those so called rolling distros, generally don't break after you update regularly. But some bleeding edge distributions (like Fedora) break or behave badly. Good thing is, if you are running Linux on a home desktop, you don't need to update it frequently.

You can update Linux same way as you did on Windows. Either you choose regular updates, or you pull in the bulk updates following the said distro's systematic instructions for update. But very often the later is recommended for desktops. Regular update (those related to security bug fixes, performance enhancements) is a must if you are running some critical applications on server.

Suppose, you installed PCLinuxOS 2009.2 which detected and configured all your hardware devices. You did a full update plus pulled in all the necessary apps of your choice. Period. You don't need to regularly upgrade it. Frequent updates don't bring about great improvements. They only kill bandwidth, your time, some extra power and memory. You don't need to keep that "Fetch Updates" (or something similar) apps running in your system tray. It just consumes some extra CPU and RAM. If your system works don't break it - don't pull in unnecessary upgrades!

Stick to your distro of choice and make a clean install when a mega release shows up.

Sify Broadband Annoyance on Linux

Some Internet Service Providers don't grow with time. Needless to say they fall apart. Sify Broadband (in India) is one such ISP. Even it lags behind MTNL in terms of technological awareness. Please read on if you are interested in further rant about Sify.

Due to some compulsion I had to subscribe Sify Broadband. And I contacted the local Sify Internet Agency (Annoyance No.1: this ISP does not provide internet direct to the consumer, there is always an agent who takes a good amount of service charge every month, alas!). The Sify agent of my locality is a total noob. He had no idea about IP configuration on Linux. Well, I configured it as per his given details.

I got connected to Sify LAN. But could I browse the web? No. (Annoyance No.2: You have to install a certain Sify Connect app). Instead, every page were redirected to a Sify server page that prompted me to install a Sify dialer. I chose to download the linux dialer (from something like http://210.18.11.199:81/bbandclient/...1.3-bin.tar.gz). Extracted the tarball and ran an install.sh file. The dialer was installed successfully. But did that run? No. (Annoyance No.3: On running that dialer it prompted that libssl.so.4 was missing). Bullshit! It displayed some error message stating libssl.so.4 and libcrypto.so.4 were missing, whereas both were present though their version numbers were different. Not a big deal, I made symlinks to those required files from the versions that existed in my /usr/lib.

su
cd /usr/lib
ln -s libssl.so.0.9.8 libssl.so.4
ln -s libcrypto.so.0.9.8 libcrypto.so.4

After the above dirty commands I ran sifyconnect as a non-privileged user. It did not work. (Annoyance No. 4: you've to be root user in order to run that sifyconnect dialer). Then I again issued "su" followed by sifyconnect. It worked. Sify Sucks Big! Phie on the Sify Broadband dialer developers who think it is necessary to have admin/root privileges to run that BS TCP/IP sifyconnect dialer. Well, no relief thereafter. I never saw persistent connectivy in Sify. There have been frequent "invalid sessions" and "autologout". I had to login every now and then.

The last and biggest annoyance is that Sify charges much more than that of Airtel or MTNL for comparable bandwidth. No wonder, it has always been the last resort for consumers. Grow up Sify competition is getting stronger!

Anyways, I am switching to MTNL.

How to Play Real Media Files on Mplayer - Mepis 8

Kmplayer Playing Monster.rmvb

I have never been a fan of Real Player, but it was there in my every installation of Windows or Linux. Reason? Some of my old audio and video collections.

Before MP3 and XviD stuff became the mainstay of Web and standalone Players, there was Real Media. I still have have some ra, rm audio, and rm, rmvb video that I can't find in any other format. Nor can I convert them to today's popular formats, because they are already very much compressed and lossy.

Well, I used to play them in the Linux port of RealPlayer. But the latest debian package of RealPlayer couldn't play it on one of my beloved Mepis 8 installation. Don't know why. They somebody told me that you can play them on Mplayer (one of very popular native media players on linux) with alsa-oss and w32codecs. And Lo, it worked.

So, those of you who would like to play Real Media files, need not have to install RealPlayer, you can play them quite well on Mplayer (KMPlayer, SMPlayer & GMPlayer) with alsa-oss and w32codecs installed. Of Course, you can't stream audio and video from Real Networks.

It works for me on Mepis 8. Hope, it will work on your Linux Flavor too.

Linux Kernel vs. Desktop Performance

If you have been using Linux for a decade, you must have come across many news stories/blogs/forums/release notes stating "the latest kernel version promising some performance enhancements".

I have read news of performance improvement at every new kernel release - starting from kernel 2.2 to this date (kernel 2.6.31). These days some blog posts state that the latest 2.6.31 kernel will improve desktop performance greatly (40%). But I have never really experienced performance improvement with new kernels. For example, the boringly stable Centos 4 with 2.6.8 kernel is way too fast on my aging PIV HP system than the later Fedora or PCLOS, or anything. Besides, on my cheap Compaq C702 Notebook PCLinuxOS 2008 (MiniMe) with Kernel 2.6.22 is faster than PCLinuxOS 2009.2 with Kernel 2.6.26. There are hundreds of such examples.

So, drawing from 8 years of my Linux computing, I have seen the skinny Linux growing fatter and fatter, keeping in pace with the upcoming devices and demands. Sorry, if I am too dumb, but I always try a lower version of kernel if it supports my hardware, and I have seen it works better.

For me, it really pays a lot if you install a kernel that’s contemporary of your hardware. Any big time difference forward or backward affects performance, very often, badly.

Well, let’s see, if Kernel 2.6.31 can defy my view.

Mepis 8.0.10 perfects KDE 3.5.10

KDE 4.3 is Great but I would suggest all newbies to try the last, KDE 3.5.10 release of Mepis 8 (8.0.10) before it moves into KDE 4 world (cos i don't know what will happen then).

KDE 3.5.10 is still the most stable and feature-complete desktop environment, and Mepis 8.0.10 does KDE 3.5.10 the best. I have been keeping track of Mepis 8 - from Beta 1 to the latest 8.0.10. Every time it came with more polish. And the last 8.0.10 is the best distro with kde 3.5.10, because Mepis is also moving to KDE 4 zone.

After installing Mepis 8 I've tampered it every possible way. Did every possible work. And I bet say, it performs consistently on the everyday rigors of computing. No problems. It brims with all the commercial polish and user-centric approach. Yet, it's a free to download.

If you want a pain-free and stable KDE 3.5 desktop for everyday task, go for Mepis 8.0.10. It's rock solid as Linux and it understands users better than Microsoft.

Pain-Free Way to Delete Cell Contents in OpenOffice Calc

Microsoft has come to fame making computing no-brainer for everyone at home and office. For example, its office suite (earlier than Office 2007) is so contextual and easy that it's ported to Mac. And many people prefer it to iWorks.

Its biggest opensource counterpart, Openoffice.org has come a long way, and its 3.1 iteration is a big leap forward. However, it still has some big annoyances. Sometimes OO.o people consider users too dumb. Here is one such instance related to OpenOffice Calc.

For last one week I had to edit many official spreadsheets. It involved deleted several cells, rows and columns across various sheets. Every time I selected certain cells/rows/columns and pressed delete button, OpenOffice Calc popped up a dialog box (see the screenshot below).



It's good to provide cautionary dialog boxes for some important tasks. But it's definitely an annoyance to every time interfere with the user in such mundane tasks as deleting a cell. Because, even if a user deletes certain cells, rows or columns, he/she can always Undo it.

I was really scared with this behavior of oocalc and looked for alternatives to Delete. Fortunately, OpenOffice has not binded this annoying dialog box with Backspare key. So all of you who use openoffice calc and are scared of this delete dialog box can use Backspare instead of Delete to clear contents of a spreadsheets. And don't panic, there is always the venerable Undo button in case you wrongly deleted something.

KDE4 - Hype & Reality

It feels good to see KDE 4.3 mature. Again it feels good to see some of the major but conservative Linux distributions turning up to KDE 4. PCLinuxOS has set a complete KDE 4.3 repository ready for those interested in this new and much-hyped desktop environment. Slackware 13 is loaded with KDE 4.2. However, it feels very bad that KDE4 doesn't deliver the stuff hyped much earlier. Read on to know what I exactly mean by "hyped stuff" but don't start kde4-fanboyism.

The worst hype about KDE4 is that it's more responsive than KDE3. It's a complete false statement. I have tried OpenSuse, PCLinuxOS, Mepis, and sadly, Fedora, on top of KDE4 and 3. Sorry friends, I could not see any major difference in performance. On the contrary I have seen lack of performance while using KDE4. "KDE4 uses around 40% less resource than KDE3" is another biggest hype that moved across various OSS forums. It's again a false statement. True, KDE4 manages memory more intelligently, but not 40% less.

I am sure, KDE 4.3.1 is way more polished and advanced than KDE 3.5.10. It looks stunning. It's enviable to all - KDE 3.5.10, Windows 7 and Mac OS X Snow Leopard. But it is not as tightly integrated.

Good news is that Linux Kernel 2.6.31 has much possibility in terms of desktop performance improvement. And it seems, KDE 4 will stood up to its hype when it couples with this nice kernel. Till then I am sticking to KDE 3.5.10 on PCLinuxOS MiniMe.