Install MS TrueType fonts  – ‘sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts’

Edit Wine’s registry as follows -

a. Save a file with following content

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\X11 Driver]
“ClientSideWithRender”=”N”
b. wine regedit $filename

And finally,modiify your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to add following in”Device” section

Option          “RenderAccel” “0″

Hopefully, above should solve your problems.

Update: The new 96.43.11 driver also fixes the rendering issues along with few more.

Just before I removed Kubuntu, I thought why not try Compiz with Kubuntu. Kwin still has a lot of ground to cover when compared with Compiz. Anyways, I installed Compiz and found window title bar wont show, hence you cant close/min/max/move any window. It took me sometime to figure out that I need Emerald as windows decorator with Compiz. Once emerald was set as main decorator in Compiz Settings, things worked fine (at least for Compiz). Still other issues where too much to hunt and fix.

Anyways, so that was my short encounter with Kubuntu 8.10 and KDE4.2. Looks like with 4.2, KDE took a long jump but still needs more strides to be really usable and become top choice. I hope that they do it sooner and will wait till then.

Reading the reviews/mailing-lists, it seems everyone had very smooth ride while updating, but unfortunately not me. I started with a fresh disk and Kubuntu 8.10.  Install went smooth but immediately after install, adept’s update while trying to fetch packages crashed kded4.  Later while updating to KDE4.2, some package conflicts showed up, which however got installed with manual ‘apt-get -f’. But that pretty much screwed whole KDE.

So, if you faced something similar while upgrading to KDE 4.2, here is what to do -

$ Log from console, cd $HOME
$ cp -a .kde .kde3.bak
$ cp -a .kde4 .kde4.bak

$ /etc/init.d/kdm stop
$ apt-get –purge remove kde* kdm*

Add kubuntu-experimental to your /etc/apt/sources.list

$ apt-get update
$ apt-cache policy kdebase kdm

$ apt-get install kdebase kdebase-workspace kdm

And hopefully, that’ll get your started with KDE 4.2. If this doesnt work then install Kubuntu Jaunty, or switch to Ubuntu/GNOME

- Create the file of appropriate size: dd if=/dev/zero of=filesys count=40960

- Make filesystem out of it: mkfs -t ext3 -q filesys

- Create a mount location: mkdir /tmp/mount

- Mount the filesystem:  mount -o loop filesys /tmp/mount

Tada!! beat the system out of this filesystem.

HZ is number of jiffies per second. So for HZ=100, 1 jiffy = 0.01second (10ms).

For linux, value of HZ can be found at – linux/include/asm-$arch/param.h

Jiffies can be set at for kernel using config file, which will have option similar to CONFIG_HZ=1000.

The motivation behind Bloom Filter is to have a space-efficient probabilistic test to find if an element is a member of the set. It takes less space than self-balancing trees, hash tables, arrays or linked lists, however, its drawback being -
a. it is probabilistic (completely certain about elements that do not exist, but almost certain when tells if an element does exist.)
b. Removing an element from the set is difficult (if not impossible).

Bloom filter uses hash functions and bit arrays to achieve its goal. The hash functions map a value (which is the element) to one of the positions of bit array. So for an array of size ‘m’, give a value – say a string – one of the positions in bit array is mapped and that value in that position will flip to ’1′, irrespective of its previous value. ‘k’ different hash functions are applied to the value and all mapped locations then store ’1′. This is adding a value to the set.

To query if a value exists in the set, again hash it through all hash functions and check if all the mapped locations are set to ’1′. If they are, probability is high that element does exist in the set. However, if any bit is set to ’0′, we know for sure that this element doesn’t exists in the set.

void add(v) {
  for all hash functions {
     p = hash(v)
     bitarray[p] = 1
  }
}

bool query(v) {
  for all hash functions {
     p = hash(v)
     if (bitarray[p] == 0)
        return FALSE
  }
  return TRUE
}

download the fonts

copy the fonts to $HOME/.fonts/

if needed, restart the application and change fonts

if it works {

   thank me

} else {

   blame Ubuntu guys

}

Also, I recently learned about Consolas font. Had to give it a shot, so did the following -

Download PowerPoint 2007 viewer. Extract it and then extract ppviewer.cab, which has the desired font. Happy fonting!

PS: Some more fonts for ubuntu

sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts

sudo apt-get install ttf-dustin

Use ‘sudo fc-cache -f -’ to update font cache.

Recently I installed Hardy Heron on my home desktop, putting it on extra disk which was snorting dust for long, while still keeping Windows on other disk. The whole installation (including setting up Compiz-fusion) took less than two hours! Amazingly simple and smooth. Infact, Hardy has “wubi” through which one can install Ubuntu just like another application, i.e. no partitioning and dual-boots (Ubuntu will run off the CD). Even installing as dual-boot is completely painless. (multiple help sites are available e.g. apcmag).

And how about mounting Windows partition? Samba? fstab tinkerings? Well you could do all that yourself, but for those short of time, use ntfs-config. Easy to install and easier to use.

Installing and setting up compiz-fusion was also very easy but partly because I had Nvidia card. If you are using ATI, probably you are running low on luck (as I found on my work machine). I bet even if grandma uses compiz, she’ll refuse to go back to Windows (or even Mac).

Compared to last time when I did dual-boot (slackware on windows), swtiching over to Linux is not only getting easier, incentives to stay on Linux are also increasing. Interesting times ahead!