some 3G love from airtel

i used to think myself as a loyal airtel customer. i am using present connection since december, 2005. prior to that, i was using an airtel +MTV connection for few years.
in 2014, i joined +Sikkim Manipal Institute of Medical Sciences as an assistant professor. i tried to continue using my airtel sim in gangtok. however, quality of connection was not only poor but most of the times, it was non-existent. i was very unhappy. however, being a loyal customer, could not leave the connection behind in spite of higher call charges and poor coverage.
after several failed attempt to the +Airtel India  customer care through social media (twitter, facebook), i decided to resign from SMIMS and returned to west bengal in 2015. finally, +airtel India  has decided to share some love. it is now offering 3G speed to 2G net connections. i received this offer few days back. under this offer, i was asked to enable 3G connection in my mobile network and enjoy 3G speed for 2G net connections.

some of my twitter interactions with airtel cc are as follows:-

@TelecomTalk dont go by @airtelindia ads!m here in #gangtok 4 last 7 months & couldnt access airtel #3G!only god knows what hpng in #lachen!

— Dr Soumalya Ray (@docbkp) February 10, 2015

went2 @VodafoneIN store in #barrackpore 2day 4porting my @airtelindia sim of 10yrs.cant talk2 ny1 evn aftr waiting4 30mins.#prepaid2postpaid

— Dr Soumalya Ray (@docbkp) October 3, 2015

planning to write a small review on the net connection as well in near future.

finally installed debian 8 stable

it's a long time since i have posted anything in this blog. my last post was more than a year back, 12th July, 2014. since then for various reasons, i was not able to give any time to this blog. finally had some free time available in this Puja.

during the Puja, decided to install Debian 8 stable in my small +ASUS  notebook. i bought this one from +Flipkart  one year back but i was not using this very much. recently though, i have started using this one a lot. i was using ubuntu 12.04; planned to change it to something recent. for various reasons, i was always interested in +Debian ; however, never had the courage to try this distro. during this Puja,decided to give it a try. keeping in mind about the low level hardware support, i planned to install debian with +LXDE.

downloaded the torrent file from debian.org. before this, i have always used unetbootin for writing the ISO image in a USB. Debian, though, actively discouraged this in the FAQ section. followed the guideline and used the cp method (cp <file> <device>) to copy the ISO file to USB. however, the first time i tried that, faced some problems. the USB drive was not bootable. tried again and was successful in the second attempt.

inserted the USB and booted the laptop while repeatedly pressing the escape button. this lead me to a screen asking me to decide where to boot from. selected the USB and booted form it. here also, i faced something unique. until now, whichever distro i have tried, they usually offer an option of running a live environment. however, debian did not offer me any such option. while going through the FAQ section again, i found that live distro is offered separately. anyway, selected the graphical install option form the options provided.
overall the installation process is quite simple. the guidance was given in a well described fashion. the only thing i decided to do manually was selecting the drive in which i want to install it. everything else was managed automatically by pressing the "continue" button. one other thing, i choose to install both LXDE and XFCE.
after the installation was finished, i booted the machine. i found few things-

1. no firefox; only iceweasel (however it was known to me)
2. mousepad not working
3. keyboard layout for bengali unavailable.
4. if we install only LXDE, network manager is unavailable. it comes with wicd. faced some problems with wicd. so installed network manager and removed wicd. 
5. changing notification from top right to bottom right. i am using the lower panel; so notification at the top-right corner looks odd.  

regarding browser, i installed "+Opera  next" in spite of the fact that it is lacking a few interesting feature. planning to install vivaldi as well; but that's for future.

upgraded iceweasel to version 41 (compared to version 38 in Debian 8). transferred my backups to the .mozilla folder using rsync and iceweasel was ready to do its job.   +Mozilla Firefox  backport ppa really helped to update the browser.

the main difficulty was to make the mousepad working. it was not responding to the clicks. +Google  came to help me. after a detailed search, entered the following command in the the root terminal:

mousepad edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/synaptics.conf

then edited the text file. text file looked like this after editing

Section "InputClass"
Identifier "Touchpad"
MatchIsTouchpad "yes"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "MinSpeed" "0.5"
Option "MaxSpeed" "1."
Option "AccelFactor" "0.075"
Option "TapButton1" "1"
Option "TapButton2" "3"
Option "TapButton3" "2"
Option "VertTwoFingerScroll" "1"
Option "HorizTwoFingerScroll" "1"
Option "VertEdgeScroll" "1"
Option "CoastingSpeed" "8"
Option "CornerCoasting" "1"
Option "CircularScrolling" "1"
Option "CircScrollTrigger" "7"
Option "EdgeMotionUseAlways" "1"
Option "LBCornerButton" "8"
Option "RBCornerButton" "9"
Option "TapAndDragGesture" "1"
EndSection

the next job was to update the keyboard configuration file. this is necessary to be able to write Bengali. so, used the following command and changed the keyboard configuration file as follows:-

mousepad /etc/default/keyboard

 KEYBOARD CONFIGURATION FILE

# Consult the keyboard(5) manual page.
XKBMODEL="pc105"
XKBLAYOUT="us,in"
XKBVARIANT=",ben_probhat"
XKBOPTIONS="grp:alt_shift_toggle"

BACKSPACE="guess"


next, changed the notification location from top right corner to bottom right corner using the following command

xfce4-notifdy- config

 
and choosing the proper option from the GUI. 

 

and now the notification is appearing in the bottom right corner. 

so, that's how my +ASUS  notebook is looking in this dussera/dassai/ dashami.

upgraded kernel to 3.16.0-25

yesterday upgraded kernel of my xubuntu 14.04 to 3.16 series from 3.13 series. no visible change so far. let's see how does it work.

updating R with installed packages

found this very good instruction. keeping for future references-

"First, we need a location to install all our packages from now on. This can be any directory, and location of this directory should be indicated in ~/.Renviron file. Let's create that directory now:

mkdir ~/Rlibs

We created Rlibs directory in our home directory. Now, create the .Renviron file in your home directory and enter the following line and save the .Renviron file:

 R_LIBS=~/Rlibs

We can now start R and install any library. The libraries will be installed to ~/Rlibs, and when we update R, R will still look for libraries in ~/Rlibs directory so we don't need to re-install the libraries. However, we will need to update the libraries in ~/Rlibs directory to their most recent versions. All we need to do is to run update.packages() in R console, and the libraries will be updated."

finally orkut is going to go

orkut is a social networking site, launched in 2004. i still remember it was the first social networking site i have participated. it is going to be discarded by google, just like google reader, google buzz etc. when google reader was thrown away by +Google , felt very sad and cursed google for continuing orkut but discarding google reader. apparently, the curse affected orkut; not feeling very good really.

opera 24 developer version available for ubuntu

+Opera next is released for linux; though only for debian based distros at present. opera returned to linux after a gap of almost one year!

tried it in +Xubuntu 14.04 and my main problem with it is not solved! it still could not show bengali properly. more importantly, it does not allow me to write bengali in the browser anymore. bengali could be written in firefox and chromium just by changing the keyboard layout to bengali (settings>Keyboard> layout). but with opera 24 developer version, even after changing the keyboard layout i am unable to write bengali. bengali could be written in mousepad/gedit and copy-pasted into the browser but could not be written inside the browser directly!!!

opera is coming with 7 speed dials and option to add more. opera buttion is showing different options. personally, i like the option to control zoom from these options!

final term, antivirus encryption in linux

distrowatch of 2nd June, 2014 is a feature rich publication. out of various interesting posts, i liked most the writing about final term, a feature rich terminal emulator.  it is at present in the developing stage; but the screenshot posted in their github page is quite interesting.

free flow of text in linux, completion of commands are some of the interesting additions. will have to keep my eyes open for the stable release of this one.



the other interesting post was about viral attack and encryption in linux. quite an interesting read.

excerpts::

"......There are a number of reasons for this general lack of malware on Linux-based desktop systems. For one, the GNU/Linux desktop community is relatively small when compared next to the Android smart phone community or the Microsoft Windows desktop market.....

......This makes desktop Linux a small, heterogeneous target that quickly guards against new, known vulnerabilities.....

.....Linux typically does not try to run executable files it finds on CDs or USB thumb drives, at least not automatically........

......Perhaps one of the most popular anti-virus programs available for Linux users is ClamAV.......

.........In short, anti-virus software protects against malware which might be accidentally run on your computer, a firewall guards against remote intrusions and encryption keeps your data private in the case someone gains physical access to your computer. None of these is fool-proof, but each tool offers protection against a specific threat.........."