PC-BSD: Personal Computing served BSD style..!

PC BSD as the name states is a BSD operating system compiled to be used specifically for everyday desktop use.

Today I installed it and wow I should say its wonderful. Why did not I came across it before? Everything, except support for local (read Indian) fonts, works out-of-the-box. Linux seems way behind in this regard, frankly. This is what I call ‘just works’.

Nerd Type

Test v2.0 of Nerdiness: The type of the nerd

My Nerdiness

My Nerdiness level

If you are interested take the test at: http://www.nerdtests.com/ft_nq.php

Kannada Rajyotsava

November 1st is celebrated in Karnataka (a state in India) as Kannada Rajyotsava or Kannada language day. Kannada is the state language of Karnataka. I’m from Karnataka and I really love the language, its culture, the people and probably everything about it. But I’m not fanatical about it. I equally love and respect other languages especially languages of neighbouring states irrespective of the regional politiks.

I’m also a FOSS fan and its my desire to bring both the spirit as well as products of FOSS to Kannada language. I’m also interested in localization project. That is because, I believe the vast treasure of knowledge available on the internet can reach and benifit the people living in the remote corners of the state only if it is available in their local language. Instead of making the whole population learn a foreign language in order to gain from the knowledge revolution the knowledge should be made available readily to them in the language they are most comfortable with. Our brothers in the neighbouring states and elsewhere in India have succeeded to a great degree in this regard. If they can achieve it we too can!

gconf error while trying to open ‘Gnumeric’ spreadsheet.

When I tried to open ‘Gnumeric’ spreadsheet program I used to get error msg as ‘An error occured while loading or saving configuration information for gnumeric. Some of your configuration settings may not work properly.’

Upon clicking the ‘Details’ button I got detailed messages as:
Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/ for information. (Details – 1: IOR file ‘/tmp/gconfd-svzard/lock/ior’ not opened successfully, no gconfd located: Permission denied 2: IOR file ‘/tmp/gconfd-svzard/lock/ior’ not opened successfully, no gconfd located: Permission denied)

This msg repeated several times.

On googling I came across a page for mysql bugs with similar looking error. The person who reported bug also had posted a suggestion that the file was searching gconfd in the tmp folder so he linked the file to his home directory’ gconfd.

Taking the clue I just did ls -la in my /tmp and found that the owner for gconfd-svzard was 500. 500 is default for users in Fedora/Redhat but I had edited it to 1000. So I changed the owner to svzard and the problem got rectified. I still dont understand the details of it. Just a superficial problem-solving. Nevertheless it was a good experience.