Getting Linux back after Windows reinstallation

Many of us have dual-boot system which have Linux and Windows( or any other, say, Mac OSX etc… ) both installed. We have a operating-system-choice screen just after BIOS gets checked, by which we can choose, which OS to load in a session.
This is the Boot Loader (usually GRUB or LiLo). It has some commands (editable) by which it just gets the control from Master Boot Record (MBR) and chainloads the volume boot record (VBR) of the active (primary) partition where the bootable system image resides.

During Linux installation, we have GRUB installed in our system, so it can directly detects the other already installed operating systems in the HDD. Thus it produces the OS-Choice screen at the startup and we can choose which OS to load.

But the problem arises, if we have to reinstall/repair the previous OS in the same partition it was before.
i.e : s’ppose, windows was in C:\ and we’re trying to reinstall windows again on same partition C:\

During installation, every OS overwrites the MBR and keeps it’s fresh copy. So, if you have previously installed the Bootloader (e.g : GRUB ), then it’ll dessapear and you’ll not be able to boot into Linux. After startup, system will directly boot into Windows.

Now, get one point clear that the Linux OS is still intact. you just have lost the pointer how and from where to load it. Because, it was the job of your bootloader installed in MBR and you’ve overwritten the MBR, your bootloader is now history! :P

Clearly, the solution is to install the bootloader once again so that it can detect both ( even more than 2 ) the OS and give you the sweet OS-Choice screen once again! :D

Here’s how to do it :
step 1) put your Linux CD/DVD and boot from it in restore mode. After that, if all goes right, it’ll give you a command console.
step 2) type
chroot /mnt/sysimage
it loads the system image and present the root console.

step 3) reinstall GRUB into your MBR by typing
/sbin/grub-install /dev/hda (for ATA hard drive )
or
/sbin/grub-install /dev/sda (for SATA harddrives )

After this reboot the system and you’re done! :D

NOTE : I have a complication regarding the correct partition of the system images of Linux. I solved it by correcting the GRUB command. Here’s how I did it. :)

I went into edit command. there I saw 3 commands. The first command was for selecting the proper partition, the second was for lading the system image, and the third was initrd command.

The first command looked like,
root (hd0,1)
I just edited it to
root (hd0,2)
and everything fell perfectly into place. :)

One more thing… The above mentioned procedure will not work if you install windows in any other partitions other than the previous partition in which it originally was. in that case, GRUB will not be able to detect that. :P

Hope you’ll find this tutorial useful. Wishing you people a smooth sail.

Be wise, Use Linux

Counter Strike in Linux… :)

Hey all you Counter Strike 1.6 fR3/\ks out there… :)
Good news! You don’t have to depend on Windows anymore for playing your favourite game, “Counter Strike 1.6″. :p It’s right here in our very own, Linux! :D

Yes, CS 1.6 is duly available for Linux also.
I’ll now guide you through the procedure to install official “Steam” in your Linux Box.

Firstly, we’ll start by creating a directory ( in your home folder, preferably ) called hlds.

mkdir hlds

Now we’ll go to the directory created (cd hlds) and there we’ll download a file named, hldsupdatetool.bin

wget http://www.cstrike-planet.com/dls/hldsupdatetool.bin

after downloading, we’ll change it’s permission to executable by,

chmod +x hldsupdatetool.bin

and then run hldsupdatetool.bin

./hldsupdatetool.bin

After agreeing the conditions :P by hitting yes, if all goes well, you’ll have a file named “steam” in that folder. If you get any error message ( Like me :p ) like
'uncompress: command not found'
take heart… don’t get frustrated mann…
just uncompress it by

ln -s /bin/gunzip /bin/uncompress

after you finally got the file named steam, you again change the permission of it to executable by,

chmod +x steam

and run it by

./steam -command update -game cstrike -dir .

Yay, you’re done….

now just sit back for a considerable amount of time leaving it all for the installer to download and install CS 1.6 for you.
A word of caution though : This process will take about 11/2 – 2 Hrs. So, just make sure, you have enough time for it… :)

Best of luck at the Arena…

And, do tell me how this helped you if we meet somewhere… be it Dust 2, Train, Cbble, inferno or Nuke… ;)
I’ll be as /i/ VooDoo Child ~ozh in there… :)

Best of luck, Happy Hunting dudes… :)

Writing in Bengali in Fedora 9…! ফেডোরা ৯ লিনাক্সে বাংলা লেখা।

Yes buddies, I know that this is a pretty cliche topic and there are maybe many sites explaining the same. I also took help from specilaly অঙ্কুর বাংলা Website and some more sites which I forgot to bookmark :( . Specially, Project has many activities which ranges from Localisation to creating a fantastic বাংলা বানান নিরিক্ষক অভিধান for Firefox.

Well, I’m telling you *My* Procedure! It’s simple like hell.

I went into ” System > Preferences > Hardware > Keyboard “

Then, I selected, Layouts in there. After that, I clicked “Add” and found out বাংলাদেশ প্রভাত and  ইন্ডিয়া বাংলা keyboard layouts. I added them and set the USA Layout to the defaults. There are other layouts for other Indic languages also. You can Try out that if you know them!

Now I right clicked into my gnome panel and selected, “Keyboard Layout Indicator” such that I can switch to any desired keyboard Layout when I want to.

Whoa, I’m done. Now Selecting the indic layouts, I can write in bengali in anywhere… :)

But now, one problem arised. I wasn’t being able to write composite letters in bengali. that is যুক্তাক্ষর . Fortunately, Kushal da was online ( who is also in অঙ্কুর বাংলা Project among his many activities and busy schedulle ) and I mailed him my problem. The response was instant, to-the-point and a complete breeze. He just said, ” use ‘/’  ” … That is, k / t = ক্ট ! :D

More support about the layout and writing যুক্তাক্ষর can be found in here.

Whoa. I’m done fianly and chatted for almost 4 hours with her in bengali… :D

Hope, This will be a little help to all those, who still stumbles writing in Indic font. This’s also a reason among a thousand, why one should switch into Linux… and trash Windoze :P

Everything is sooo cool in this OS. I just Love it… :D

Trouble with “/etc/X11/xorg.conf”

Heya… It’s been a long long time since my last post in here. I’m sorry, I went totally haywire from the Linux world… Only Academics and all that Master’s Degree plans… :P

Well, Since 2 weeks, I’m back with my Linux box tweaks. Tonight, At very early hours, I was trying to install the new nVidia Driver into my machine. They have closed the rpm repository so the installation is a complex procedure now… You’ve to configure the xorg.conf file, then close the X server, and then, another problem may arise if you don’t have any precompiled kernel but only the binary image of it. I had, unfortunately nVidia installation software stopped me right there and as it was very late, I was gearing up for bed, then the bolt came from the blue.

I tried to restore my X server back by [ALT+F7] and it failed, giving a quick and scrolled error message. What I guessed that, It has something to do with what I’ve changed.

/etc/X11/xorg.conf

I just checked, what was wrong with that, ( I had my command line shell :) )and I found I’ve left the server name in

Section “Device”
Identifier  “Videocard0″
Driver      “nvidia”
EndSection ,

The root of the problem was the word, nvidia. Which I recalled, earlier was, nv. Actually what happened, HAL didn’t find any device named nvidia… that’s it so X server failed.

I changed that. and restarted.

Everything worked fine, until the login screen. I was shocked to see that my keyboard is not working! :(

I logged into my root accnt by help of on-screen keyboard and again oened the xorg.conf file. There I found,

# keyboard added by rhpxl
Identifier  “Keyboard0″
Driver      “nvidia”
Option        “XkbModel” “pc105″
Option        “XkbLayout” “us”
EndSection

How silly of me… :( I’ve mistakenly put the keyboard driver also as nvidia which was earlier, intuitively, “kbd”

I changed that and restarted again.. and Whoa… Life is peaceful once again.. ! :D

Motto of the text : Always have a backup file while tweaking with system files !

Hope this experience will someday be a help to you… :) Signing off… Need a sleep seriously… :D … Good Night… or rather, mornin’.. :)

Love you sweetheart… :)

Grid Computing and LHC… :)

Today’s a memorable day in the history of science. Be the massive experiment at CERN turns out satisfactory or not, it’ll be a milestone in human scientific and engineering history. All the Works, efforts and the vastness of this project is really mind boggling. The Main LHC team, Building blocks, The Superconductor specialists team, the Indian electronic sensor team, the Cryogenics team handling 170 tonnes of liquified Helium; and lastly but not the least… but more importantly, The Computing Team there at CERN tracking every single piece of data ( alltogether, it’s handling some 15 PetaBytes of data! ) for doing the actual findings.

Cleverly, the system introduced Grid Computing. What is grid computing can be found here. The pictures canbe found here.

The mission of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (LCG) project is to build and maintain a data storage and analysis infrastructure for the entire high energy physics community that will use the LHC.

The data from the LHC experiments will be distributed around the globe, according to a four-tiered model. A primary backup will be recorded on tape at CERN, the “Tier-0” centre of LCG. After initial processing, this data will be distributed to a series of Tier-1 centres, large computer centres with sufficient storage capacity and with round-the-clock support for the Grid.

The Tier-1 centres will make data available to Tier-2 centres, each consisting of one or several collaborating computing facilities, which can store sufficient data and provide adequate computing power for specific analysis tasks.

Individual scientists will access these facilities through Tier-3 computing resources, which can consist of local clusters in a University Department or even individual PCs, and which may be allocated to LCG on a regular basis.

For this, a specially designed SunCluster has been appointed (!) and it’s currantly working full fleged at CERN. By the way… :D  CERN scientists are using VmWare Fusion to share Linux-based computer code on Fusion “virtual machines” running on Macs. The software links the computers to the LHC Computing Grid — a network of about 40,000 CPUs. So.. Linux Linux everywhere… :D

A note to make : CERN actually invented the World Wide Web alongside with Tim Berners Lee for this type of large data sharing over wide spread areas. :D What an Idea, Sirji… :D

India Shining With Lord of The Rings…

Scientists here hope to crash sub-atomic particles, whirring around at the speed of light. By monitoring the debris of these tiny crashes, they will work out the relationship between matter and energy and possibly learn more about how matter came into existence.

In this largely European experiment, India has provided about 40 million dollars worth of resources, including all the arms the particle accelerator sits on. 

Dr V C Sahni, Director, Raja Ramanna Centre For Advanced Technology, Indore, says: “It is one of the large magnets, 15 meters long whose magnetic field testing was done by the Indian team. The objects that are sitting here they are essentially built by the Electronics Corporation of India Limited.” 

The entire Large Hadron Collider or LHC will be sitting on India made jacks, these objects weigh 32 tonnes and have to be located to the precision of a few tens of micron. 

Indian scientists are highly regarded here, as are their contributions. 

Prof Sukalyan Chattopadhyay, scientist, Saha Institute Of Nuclear Physics, adds: “This is an Indian detector as you see part of the di-muon spectrometer of Alice. It is fully made in India and on the detectors you see are the significant contributions from the Indian collaboration, which are these chips which are called MANAS chips and these chips are being utilized not only by the Indian scientists but also by scientists from France, Germany,Italy and Russia.” 

To remind the world of India’s deep philosophical understanding of the universe, India donated CERN a giant bronze statue of Natraja — Shiva performing his dance of cosmic creation and destruction. 

Indians have provided more than a 100-man years of contribution to this exercise, and fabricated and shipped precision equipment giving the Indian tricolour a new pride of place. 

John Ellis, physicist, European Organisation For Nuclear Research (CERN), Geneva, says: “We are very happy with the Indian participation in the LHC project. Indian physicists and engineers have made important contribution to the accelerator making magnets and testing the magnets.

The biggest Physics Experiment ever…

Three decades after it was conceived, the world’s most powerful physics experiment has begun.

Engineers and Physicists at CERN ( Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire ) will attempt to circulate a beam of particles (Hadrons) preferably Protons or Lead ions around the 27km-long underground tunnel which houses the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The £5bn machine is designed to smash particles together with cataclysmic force, revealing signs of new physics in the wreckage.

This will re-create conditions in the Universe moments after the Big Bang.

The vast circular tunnel – the “ring” – which runs under the French-Swiss border contains more than 1,000 cylindrical magnets arranged end-to-end.

The magnets are there to steer the beam – made up of particles called protons – around this 27km-long ring.

Eventually, two proton beams will be steered in opposite directions around the LHC at close to the speed of light, completing about 11,000 laps each second.

At allotted points around the tunnel, the beams will cross paths, smashing together near four massive “detectors” that monitor the collisions for interesting events.

Scientists from all over the world are hoping that new sub-atomic particles will emerge, revealing fundamental insights into the nature of the cosmos.A number of them are hoping to see the recreation of a very small scale Big Bang though all the rumours of creating microscopic black holes were cleared by CERN. The entire thing is going to happen under very controlled environment.

Let’s witness a new era in particle Physics… Cheers for CERN. :)

IBM Certification… DB2 !

Today was the last day of our entire course in IBM Corp. The Exam time… :P I was delving into SQL queries, and stored procedure and DB2 commands and was trying hard to get a hold at Database System Administration… The IBM way! Hmph.. Me studying DBMS.. finally.

I was in a bit tension today, woke up 6 am in the morning. Then the 3 Hour hike all the way to Kolkata, IBM center. To my surprise, the exam went in a breeze, and way before the time limit, I realised that I actually have answered all of my questions, with a doubt at 2 occasions though!

Then we wnt to City Center in Salt Lake, Kolkata. Chilled out with girls.. ;) had some food, and returned back to home to finish up my unfinished codings.. :)

Hope, the results will also be a chocolate box..:D Yummy…

sorta fairytale




sorta fairytale

Originally uploaded by Disco ♥ Tetris

This snap was originally taken by Disco Tetris. One of my flickr friends. It reminded me of one of my poems I wrote 2 years back. I was totally confused and frustrated for a day or two and this snap brought a dreamy, fairytale candlelight over my gloomy days. Thanks, Tetris.. :)

Randomization…

After a hectic few days, and some unnecessary forks, I’m back on track again. Anyway’s, I’ve been thinking on some Randomization Techniques ( Links 1, 2, 3…) and recently read some text about them ( Not exactly, “Monte Carlo” by Fisher). There are a number of methods by which one can generate Random Numbers from a Digital Machine, Like 1) Entropy in the Physical Memory, 2) Heat Variations in the Various parts of CPU, HDD, 3) Voltage variations in clock pulses, etc. But most of them are trackable. and after you know which Algorithm is using which techniques, the Random Numbers generated by that algorithm will not be so Random!

Patterns everywhere. Mathematics show that, there’s a certain pattern in everything we can feel, i.e : Matter, energy. But that’s an issue of level of intractability. Like, it depends on the processing power of human minds. Something like NP-hard problems. It’s solvable (“It’s just a problem… ” -Richard Feynman!) yet, it’s far beyond present human intelligence (or may be lack of information).

So the point is, what we can make, is to think up something which is not trackable upto some extent. We may take this level as a vector and maximize it with some human parameters. Sounds AI? yeah. that can be done by some specified mathemetics/geometry, which is not as straightforward as Euclidian Maths/Geometry model. A good help of Fuzzy Logic is also needed, becuse, a level of nondeterministic acceptance wil be there.

This text is a tangled mess! I just got some foolish thoughts and coughed up in here. Maybe someday, if things go right, we’ll come up with a new approach to Randomization and, maybe, Clever decision making capabilities by Machine Intelligence!