Tweaking Linux To meet User Needs

Till recently I was using Fedora 15 - "Lovelock" as my alternate OS, which usually is always a Linux flavor. Now, at present I am using Ubuntu 11.10 - "Oneiric Ocelot" on my system. One thing one must realize, is that Linux distributions run in a very different manner from Windows. They do not (yet) support executable facility, so the installation of many a software is not as easy or automatic as in windows. Also, a general OS install of Linux distributions is very general. It does not do much more than install the kernel and other must haves in order to run a system. They do, however provide repositories for the easy installation of many open source softwares that are popular, or open source alternatives to commercial softwares.

Fedora 15: 























Ubuntu 11.10:

In this post, I will entail the different softwares that I feel one MUST have in their system, and how to go about installing them - in fedora 15 and in ubuntu 11.10. Please note, that this is simply a comparitive study.

31 Useful Ubuntu 11.10 Unity Keyboard/Mouse Shortcuts

In my opinion, the overall Ubuntu 11.04 / 11.10 experience is so much better and involving if you know some essential Ubuntu Unity keyboard and Mouse shortcuts. So here are a bunch of very basic yet useful Ubuntu 11.04 / 11.10 (Unity) keyboard shortcuts. Thanks to askubuntu for the list.

Aptitude Answers 3

Here are the answers to the last week's aptitude questions. Read more for the answers. Refer here for the corresponding questions!!!

QT - An introduction

Qt is a cross-platform application framework that is widely used for developing application software with a graphical user interface (GUI) (in which cases Qt is classified as a widget toolkit), and also used for developing non-GUI programs such as command-line tools and consoles for servers. It is produced by Nokia.

Qt is most notably used in Autodesk Maya, Adobe Photoshop Elements, OPIE, Skype, VLC media player, VirtualBox, and Mathematica, and by the European Space Agency, DreamWorks, Google, HP, KDE, Lucasfilm, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Siemens, Volvo, and Walt Disney Animation Studios.

Aptitude Questions 3

Aptitude questions to sharpen your minds... every week. Enjoy this week's questions. Answers coming friday!

Aptitude answers 2

Here are the answers to the last week's aptitude questions. Read more for the answers. Refer here for the corresponding questions!!!

Aptitude Questions 2

Aptitude questions to sharpen your minds... every week. Enjoy this week's questions. Answers coming friday!

Aptitude Answers 1

Here are the answers to the last week's aptitude questions. Read more for the answers. Refer here for the corresponding questions!!!

Keyboard Shortcuts

Here's an attempt at listing out all the keyboard shortcuts that are available for different applications over various platforms. Feel free to comment in the ones I've missed out.:

Aptitude Questions 1

Aptitude questions to sharpen your minds... every week. Enjoy this week's questions. Answers coming friday!

Validation in windows application in C#

Whenever we create an application, some forms need specific entries. For example, phone numbers must be all numeric, whilst email ID must have a @ symbol followed somewhere by a . symbol. For these purposes, no automatic validators are provided for windows applications. Hence, we must manually give validations to these fields.

There are many logical routes to valication. The following is the validation code that I follow. Hope it helps you too. In case of any doubts or suggestions, kindly feel free to comment or mail me at nardz07@gmail.com.

Ten Important Tips For Java Users

There are some protocols that when followed differentiate a good program from a mediocre program. Here are some tips that will help you become good Java programmers:

how to ensure ranking in sql

Whilst using mysql, I was inspired by our faculty to figure out how to assign ranks to the entries. A little bit of internet browsing, a lot of head scratching, and some innovatively redundant use of table manipulation later, I succeeded.

Point to be noted, we MUST not use the 'rank' structure of transact-sql. Instead we use and manipulate simple sql queries.

Here is the tutorial, please contact me at nardz07@gmail.com

Add a Splash Screen to Your C# Windows Application Project

How to create a splash screen in C#

Tutorial: How to create a splash screen in C#

Time: 5 minutes

Experience needed: Basic understanding of Threads and the flow of applications

In this tutorial you will learn how to create an application that displays a splash form for x seconds.

The benefits for this are: if you have a form that takes a while to load up (for insastance one that does a lot of Database interaction) the user will sit there wondering why your app is not open yet.

With a splash screen you can give the user something pretty to look at to keep them happy.

Steve's Job Gets Over :(

Steve Jobs, co-founder and the former CEO of the world reputed computer firm Apple (AAPL) bids a good bye to his followers at the age of 56. The mastermind behind Apple's iPhone, iPad, iPod, iMac and iTunes, has died in California after a lifely battle against his pancreatic cancer. 

Broadcom wireless 802.11 Installing Wi-fi Broadcom 802.11 driver for fedora 15

As mentioned earlier, I recently installed fedora 15 on my system. Unfortunately, the packages did not include the drivers to my Wireless LAN card. Hence I was unable to use the newly introduced wi-fi feature of fedora. Many of my friends, I presume must have faced the same problem, so here is a little trick I used to get my wi-fi on!

Please mail me at nardz07@gmail.com with any suggestions or doubts.

Windows 8 Developer Pack Preview - The Very First Look

The next generation of Microsoft Windows - Windows 8 is here. Here is a preview of what it holds for the users. Mail me at jeanparker1207@gmail.com with your suggestions for more technological postings. :)

Connecting a Database II

In the last edition I showed how to define a connection string. i.e. How to tell the application the type and location of said database. Here I shall detail how to use said string in the coding. Please feel free to comment on my posts with your doubts and suggestions or mail me at nardz07@gmail.com.

Grub manipulation

Recently, I installed Fedora 15 on my laptop alongside Windows 7. The Grub screen was as provided by fedora, and I wanted to make some changes to it to suit my needs and pleasure.

Here I have discussed how I went about it.

It should be noted that my methods work in fedora, but should work on other linux distibutions as well with a few minor changes. In case of any doubts or suggestions, please contact me at nardz07@gmail.com.

Connecting a database I

Any application that needs to store or retrieve data, needs to use databases. Since we developers make the application layer, it is for us to connect the application to the database and to provide the queries to affect the data.

Here is what little insight i can provide into the databases and their connecting schema. For any suggestions or doubts, please contact me at nardz07@gmail.com.

First and foremost, databases may be operating system dependent, like MS ACCESS and SQL SERVER, or independent like ORACLE or MYSQL.


In this post, let us simply look at these databases and how to define a generic database connection using the MS Visual Studio tools.

Uploading a picture at runtime

I was trying an addressbook application, and then it struck me... wouldn't it be awesome, if we could add pictures to each entry, so one can also look at a contact? The following is the coding for uploading a picture into a PictureBox using open file dialog control. For any doubts, or suggestions, please mail me at nardz07@gmail.com.

Here's the basic cs code - explained :

Calculator

Hi guys. This is the first full fledged application i made using c# on MS visual studio 2008.

This is also the first application on which i tried setup and deployment. If you have any doubts on the logic in the coding, please mail me at nardz07@gmail.com.

Here's the basic cs code for you: