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FSLog (5 unread)

Distro Comparison for Organisations

Posted: July 28th, 2008, 4:56am CDT by cnu
Anish (at oz.blogial) is writing a 3 part series of comparisons of Linux distros in the eyes of corporate organisations. In that he is comparing Ubuntu, Gentoo and Fedora. Head over there to know which distro is suitable for your organisation.
1. Ubuntu
2. Gentoo
3. Fedora
Wordpress MU vs MovableType

Posted: July 23rd, 2008, 2:23pm CDT by cnu
For almost one week I have been setting up Blogial Networks and have played around with Wordpress mu. I decided to use WPMU after trying out MovableType. I created a MT blog for FSLog and imported all the contents into it. With just about 350 posts, it created so many files for various views - single post, monthly archive, yearly archive, category view, etc. In total it took about 25 MB for all these files for just one blog.

Here are some of the basic reasons for not choosing MT and using WPMU:
- MT is huge. The zip file costs about 5MB and extracting it gets a 21MB monster out. Whereas WPMU is only 1.5MB - 6MB when extracted.
- Ease of use - during installation and for creating post.
- MovableType needs rebuilding so many files for every update to a single post. Missed out a word there, save it and republish the entire blog. This is unacceptable for a blog network which wants even technologically challenged people to blog. Not many would understand the republishing process (unless they are the old blogger type). I agree that plain html files are blazingly faster than executing more than 30 SQL queries for every request, but wp-cache does a great job in caching the rendered HTML pages in wordpress.
- Lot of plugins written in PHP. I can get my hands dirty with the plugins if I want to as I have seen and understood the Wordpress architecture more than MT’s.
Regarding the last point, I would be running a series of posts about the various plugins that we use here are Blogial and the problems and incompatibilities we faced while installing it in WPMU.
FSLog now a part of Blogial networks

Posted: July 19th, 2008, 2:35pm CDT by cnu
I am happy to announce that FSLog is now part of Blogial networks - a small blog network started by me and Sudarsan. We decided to start this blog network so that we can have a platform where people can cross post across various blogs thus creating good quality content.

If someone comes up and suggests a new idea for a blog - we will be happy to create a blog and make them the owner of it. He should then build the blog and most important of all, build a community around it. Any reader who wishes to contribute to a blog, can register and ask for becoming an author in it. This is all about trying to get more people to post in a single blog and to build the blog more social.

This blog network isn’t about making huge money or to compete with the big players. We are just simple minded people who want to blog about things passionate to us. Of course we would think about monetising and would also love to get donations(paypal:srinivasanr@gmail.com) so that we can sustain running this network.

I have this network running on a Wordpress-mu installation which is very easy to get a blog network up and running in minutes. I have it hosted on NearlyFreeSpeech and tried to bring fslog.com also into that. I know that wpmu supports multiple domain names and I tried using this Multi-Site Manager plugin - but couldn’t get fslog.com work in NFShost. Also for creating a blog in blogial, I should manually create an alias in NFS. This needs to be changed asap and we are looking at moving onto a better host (maybe a VPS). If someone can give us some good offer for a VPS, we are listening to you. Till we can fix this, FSLog is going to be on a seperate Wordpress installation.

I am in the process of setting up the blog, installing plugins and creating blogs. Right now we have 3 blogs under blogial.
- FSLog - This one
- Codelog - about programming owned by Sudarsan (previously ProgrammersLog)
- OZ - about living in Australia owned by Anish
I am open to any other blogs that you may want to be here.

I am also looking at creating some good themes for the blog and also a logo for blogial. If someone can help us in it, we would be very happy.

Since we now have more people to post in this blog, you can be sure to get good, quality content here on the network.
Opensolaris and Ubuntu Dual boot

Posted: July 13th, 2008, 2:50am CDT by cnu
Yesterday I decided to try out the live cd of Opensolaris 2008.05 and decided to install it on my laptop after playing around with it for some time. The install process was painfully slow, but was very easy. If you already had Ubuntu (or any other OS for that matter), then OpenSolaris’s Grub menu would not have autodetected the other OS like Ubuntu does. There would be only one single entry for Open Solaris.

I wanted my Ubuntu back and so searched the web for info regarding this and found one. He has given steps to first install Solaris and then Ubuntu, but this holds true the other way round too.

You would need the desktop live CD of Ubuntu for this, so that you can recover Ubuntu’s grub.
1. After booting to Ubuntu Live system, open up the terminal and type sudo grub.
2. You will get a grub prompt - here type
```
find /boot/grub/stage1
```
3. Use this information to set the root device (this may be different for you)
```
root (hd0,0)
```
4. Then install grub
```
setup (hd0)
```
5. And quit
This would get back the Ubuntu’s old grub, but now you have to make an entry for OpenSolaris.

Edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file and add this new entry at the bottom
```
title	Open Solaris
root	(hd0,1)
chainloader	+1
makeactive
boot
```
This would enable you to boot to Open Solaris too now. There were problems with my Atheros drivers as usual and I have to find a way to install the madwifi drivers as I did on my Ubuntu. If anyone got wifi working on Acer Aspire 5050 with OpenSolaris, please do leave a comment here.
Clean Windows virus from Linux

Posted: July 12th, 2008, 4:03am CDT by cnu
Yesterday we noticed in our windows samba share machine that it was infected with virus. This is the kind of virus which became common 2 years back which created an executable file with the name same as the current directory name. In a windows machine, the icon was set in such a way that it looked exactly like a windows directory. If you double click that file (thinking it is a folder), you are sure be infected.

So, I had to delete the files and the shared directory was having numerous folders. I then wrote a bash one liner (not exactly 1 line) to delete the files.

First I used find to get the list of all the exe files in all folders and stored it in a file (exe_files).

This was the command I then used to delete all the files.
```
cat exe_files | while read line;do l=`ls -lh "${line}"`;size=`echo $l| cut -d' ' -f5`;if [ $size = "604K" ]; then rm "`echo $l| cut -c"47-"`" ;fi; done
```
What it does is reads each line in the file and finds the size of each file and if the size is ‘604K‘ then remove the file.

Deleting based on the filesize was not that good, as we might have lost some original file which was correctly 604K. If you wanted a better solution, you would have to write one more if clause to check if the filename is the same as the folder name - better to create a shell script instead of trying a one liner.

Thanks to linux, we could delete all the ~6000 virus files in a simple command without the fear of infection.