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Windows Shell Replacement

I spend half of my time with Windows and the other half with Ubuntu. However when I last use Ubuntu and switch back to Windows I just can’t bear the windows shell’s unstability and other related issues. So transforming desktop into completely replaced with a new interface, reffered to as shell replacement and can be a very good idea if you are still using windows shell.

For first timers using a shell manager like shellon which would let you choose which shell to use when starting up makes your work easier.

Apparently Cairo shell another Windows shell alternative appears to be the most used shell to replace the windows UI. Cairo is really easy to install, anyone with no eperience in shell replacement can replace using the cairo desktop. Other downloads like the Cairo desktop, start bar, desktop concept, desktop switching and revolution wallpaper.

Another good and easy to install shell is the Talisman. Helps to keep your desktop more organised.

Black box is a window manager for the X Window System shell with lot of development activity currently going.It is fairly simple to make it look really cool using premade skins from the forum, though it isn’t basically to look cool. It has a dedicated forum to dicuss problems, bugs and to find modifications and cool plugins for the shell.

If you want to make your desktop 3D, with physics enabled. You can try the recently released simple to use Bumptop shell. A boon for microsofts surface. It makes your desktop easy to organise if you prefer to keep a lot of files for easy access there. Still I could not adjust with it due to its first release and lot of  lack of some essential features. But it is really worth a try, nothing to loose.

Aston shell-It replaces the standard Windows Desktop

and provides you with a host of new features, such as Sidebars, clock, weather monitor, animated buttons, transparency effects and much more. Several other partial shell replacements like aston menu and panels are available at the Aston’s website. Aston shell with panels make the dektop look really cool.

Shells like Flyakite(Mac OS X transformation pack), Vista transformation pack and 7 transformation pack are more or less self explainatory.

Previously discussed sharpE now SharpEnviro shell is another good to use shell.

Lastly, FYI it is also possible to transform your Windows environment to KDE or Gnome shell (Linked to the tutorials) with limited usability. Not recommended for non experienced.

Now pause Windows 7 Beta Download

Here is a Windows 7 beta download link, for the ones who have a slow internet connection and cannot download 2.4GB of data at a time. I don’t host these files. I found these links which were worth sharing.

Download links:

Windows 7 beta 32bit

Windows 7 beta 64bit

Activation

Tokens dat

The downloads are at high speeds I’ve tried- Enjoy!

Musical Similarity

Recently while listening to Mamamia by ABBA I recalled the song

“mil gaya humko saathi mil gaya” and “Tere liye zamana tere liye….”

Compiled a list of such tunes.

The hindi song director would say that this was a coincidence or a song inspired by…. Here is a small list of native tunes I found similar to some other better known tunes.

1. Lawaris-  Tumne jo kaha    ~     Aqua- Barbie girl

2. Hum kissi se kam nahi- Mil gaya       ~      ABBA- Mama mia

3. Maine Pyaar Kiya- Mere rang mein      ~       Europe- The Final Countdown

4. Aflatoon- We love Rocky        ~       Five- We Will Rock You

5. Yadon Ki Baraat- Churaliya hai tumne         ~         Walter Scharf- If Its Tuesday

6. Akele Hum Akele Tum- Aisa Zakhm Diya       ~      Deep Purple- Sweet Child In Time

7. Black eyed peas- Don’t Funk With My Heart        ~        Old Don theme

8. Buddha Bar III- Night at Lenasia      ~        Krrish theme

9. Sean Paul- Temperature beats       ~          new Golmaal- Golmaal

10. Bryan Adams- Have you ever really loved a woman         ~          Pyaar to hona hi tha- Jab kissi ko

These are just some of similar songs, remember any please send to

Anupum Pant, MANIT Bhopal

indigoanalysis@gmail.com or leave comment

Swine Flu

I’m a bit insulated from what is going on with politics and news (other than tech news). Swine flu is somethig I came across yesterday, although it is something running across news channels since a week i think. It was only before yesterday I knew nothing about Swine flu. After watching the news I did some research. These are the things I learnt new.

1. Swine is for Pigs and Flu stands for influenza. Now explained how it spreads to humans.

2. Symptomps: fever, sore throat, muscle pains (I have right now), severe headache, coughing, weakness (I have right now) and general discomfort (I have right now, due to slow internet though).

3. Highly contagious.

4. CDC stands for Center of disease control and google trends is ahead of it in tracking disease outbreak. (:P)

5. Google maps show flu mapped across the world. link

6. The plague of 1918-19, which took 500,000 American lives and 20 million worldwide.

7. Avoid it by taking a lot of vitamin-C, get plenty of exercise because exercise helps build your immune system and Eat right! Make sure you get your daily dose of fruits and veggies.

This post is not a google sponsored or afillated to google.

author: Anupum pant – indigoanalysis@gmail.com, MANIT Bhopal

9 Jaunty Jackalope adventures + LVPM

Completed my Ubuntu 9.04 copy download early in the morning, took a huge 6 hrs to complete due to no indian mirror. My DVD drive stopped working. Other than virtual disk (Daemon tools ) I had no other way to install it through WUBI. First new thing i noticed was the new loading bar with animated grungy texture stripes. Then the new login screen.

As everyone knows Windows rots with time and it was time to discard my copy now. The part I was worried about was loss of Ubuntu installation, since I installed it using Wubi inside windows. It was then I stumbled (literally) over a way to upgrade the virtual wubi installation to a true ext3 independent partition.

“The Loopmounted Virtual Partition Manager allows users to upgrade their existing Wubi or Lubi installation to a standard Ubuntu system by transferring all data, settings, and applications from the original install to a dedicated partition. The advantages of upgrading using LVPM are better disk performance and reliability, and the ability to replace the original operating system with Ubuntu.” I couldn’t resist trying.

step1: Installed the pre boot partion tool for linux.

step2: restarted, selected partion tool from the boot menu, and resized an NTFS partion by cutting out a 10Gb ext3 partition.

step3: restarted to wubi installation of Ubuntu, downloaded and installed LVPM

step4: Started LVPM and selected trnsfer>>SDA(number) of your ext3 partition.

step5: Watch the show, reboot

the tutorial is well explained here

You do it all right and get an error17 or error15 during the boot. I guess they forgot to mention the menu.lst changing part.

EDITING MENU.LST

to change it go to Wubi installation again. Now perform a test by downloading this script to desktop and copy paste this code to the terminal:

sudo bash ~/Desktop/boot_info_script*.sh

this will produce results.txt in the desktop, now suppose you installed in SDA9 then note down the bold code from results.txt like this:

/dev/sda9: UUID=”09b8370d-d20e-45c1-8951-dfb906bb0e4a” TYPE=”ext3″

now to open the menu.lst and grant permission to change do this

sudo mkdir /media/sda9
sudo mount /dev/sda9 /media/sda9
gksudo gedit /media/sda9/boot/grub/menu.lst

now Change
# groot=()/ubuntu/disks
to
# groot=the number you noted in the above step
change all three occurrences of
root ()/ubuntu/disks
to
uuid the number you noted in the above step
Save the file and reboot.  Hopefully you will now be able to boot into Ubuntu.

This post isn’t copied (people may doubt the pro look of the post), it was painstakingly compiled from different forums and ultimately I could boot into the independent Ubuntu. the various sources of information are linked in the post to give due respect to the place where knowledge originated from.

Purpose of  writing down this experiment was- for my personal future reference and to help ubuntu newbs (like me) to find information at one place regarding transfer of Wubi installation to a ext3 independent partition.

Indian epic Ramayana beautifully animated

“Sita is a goddess separated from her beloved Lord and husband Rama. Nina is an animator whose husband moves to India, then dumps her by email. Three hilarious shadow puppets narrate both ancient tragedy and modern comedy in this beautifully animated interpretation of the Indian epic Ramayana. Set to the 1920′s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw, Sita Sings the Blues earns its tagline as the Greatest Break-Up Story Ever Told.”

source – Internet archive (The wayback machine)

the movie is available to download here

the 1080p uncompressed version worth 195Gb is available to download , I’m going for the 720p version (2.4Gb).

Get this great epic reanimated wonderfull work by a genius.

Counter Strike an Map making

It is common to see that people who play counter strike are either totally into the playing part or totally not.  I dont have a circle of friends who fall out of this category. Map making was’t the topic when it came to counterstrike. I never ever had an idea that normal people could create maps in counter strike. It was recently when I was playing a clan match in the hostel, I had an idea that my college mates would love to see a map of the hostel we live in. The idea of making a hostel map got stronger when our hostel witnessed a riot followed by a cold war sitiuation.

I gained control over my computer only late night on 26th. Till when my game crazy bro could not resist playing GRID at highest graphics settings. Idea of learning to make a basic counterstrike map got revived. I searched for “counter strike map maker” in google and the first link I got was the best tutorial for newbs. The tutorial was right for me, who knew nothing about map making, still I could learn quickly as I have experience working in 3D with 3D studio max. The link to the tutorial and software stuff I found was this:

Learn to make counter strike map

The tutorial was really easy to follow and I could complete my first map in 2 hrs. then it got addictive and I couldn’t stop working on the hostel map till it was 400hrs of 27th. I made a floor of the hostel where we have 2 wings and 2 bathrooms at the end of the wings. CT and T start from each of the bathrooms. Not a good map to play but I love my first work. Here is a link to download it.

First map (nice one)

Hostel map

contact indigoanalysis@gmail.com for queries

Rajneeti in Bhopal

Atleast its not a murdered spelling as I was expecting (like Yuvvraaj) could be Raajneitie or something like that. ‘Rajneeti’ movie’s shooting is in progress near MANIT campus, ppl going gaga over the voices coming from that side.

1.A helicopter was seen hovering still for a long time over the place, perhaps recording video or its there in a scene. From sources I came to know that there is a hypothetical political party and the political parties president is a widow in the movie. I’ll keep updating any more leaks.

2. We heard the Director screaming instructions.

3. Rumors are that Katrina Kaif will arrive to the shoot on 12th Feb.

we are not alowed out easily in the first year so going there is a big problem

IMDB link: Rajneeti

@ MANIT

MANIT or MACT or NIT-B is the college I study in. I’m doing my Btech in metallurgy and material sciences. The world’s best persuaders rein our class. Be it Monday or saturday these creatures are amazingly accurate in successfully persuading scholars out of the class for a mass bunk (called GT here). Academics is like the least bothered thing here- by student/teachers.

Its is almost impossible to find a student doing Btech in computers who knows what does Ubuntu or a blog means here. A big reson why such students get admitted here is the luring  job assurity and those big bucks after four years, parents don’t realize what his son/daughter reall needs to study in order to pursue his/her intrest. This results in lack of people who are geniunely passionate about what they are studiying. Students who come here are the ones who had force-filled their minds with archived knowledge.

This was a kind of  retaliation(action taken in return for an injury or offense) from my side, since I was genuinely enthusiastic to pursue computers as my field, I was forced not to. Everyone accepts- I deserved it.

Step 1 to improve the grim sitiuation: Follow the written Indian constitution which says equality. Are we still going to reserve seats for sects. Isn’t this an act of inequality.