Fedora 20 review: Can the Heisenbug be eaten by the salamander

Frankly speaking, the bug can be swallowed by the salamander. but please soldier on to know why.

Fedora 20 is the latest release of fedoraproject which is sponsored by Redhat. it offers the most cutting edge technology with the latest packages available at disposal. This directly translates into more potential for bugs to be discovered which is ironic because Fedora is codenamed Heisen'bug'. yet for enthusiasts who can forgo a bit of hair on their foreheads to find out what is the latest in the field of linux development, this is the best place to start with.

the default offering comes with a now maturing gnome 3.10 which i feel is the most beautiful stock environment to look at. when most other distros are shunning away from adopting the gnome environment, Fedora has soldiered on to provided a pure, undiluted gnome experience.

firstly the visible changes from gnome 3.8 to 3.10.

the first thing you will notice is that the icons on the top have been grouped together to form an integrated system of indicators. here is how it looks

immediately there seems to be a problem. i have downloaded a gnome extension called netspeed and it does not seem to blend in with the stock extension. the stock extension is narrowly spaced whereas the downloaded ones are broadly seperated. it seems that the engineers at gnome did not use any extension that they forgot that they exist.

they also seem to have believed that an ordinary user would restart the system rather than logout and login again for changes to appear. that explains why there is no logout button.

not all things they did were bad. there is a very controversial addition which i think will pay off as comforting. that is to integrate the title bar with some buttons. here is how it looks.

 given the amount of screen real estate gnome occupies, we could use a bit of integration to save some space. this idea seems an elegant way to address the issue that windows has created by putting a separate title bar which all the others have sticked to. Of course unity is an exception with its global menu bar.

another comforting thing is that finally this feature lead to the feature of a close button option on the nautilus. till now, users had to sort to some confusion and resort for Alt+F4 or settings and quit or click on files and then quit. here is how this looks.

this feature seems to have paid off at least for me. gnome is now a less irritating experience.

coming to a more upside or more of a downside experience is the software center.

although at first glimpse it seems to be a very bright addition, it has an achilles heel. it is so newbie oriented that there do not seem to be the inclusion of any technical package. for instance, java (more specifically jre) is inbuilt in fedora. but search for java in it, it shows no results found.

on the bright side though, it is not lagging like the ubuntu software center which starts slowly or shows force quit half of the time.

there are some bugs. for instance samba would not work (file sharing compatible with windows systems). it probably is some problem with selinux or firewall. apart from that all is well aboard fedora.

my verdict is that the gnome version launched is the most successful list of changes done on an aggregate to humanize gnome which is now an almost mature environment. the features of ubuntu software center should have been included in the software app. gnome in its own way is a good environment for users.

my suggestion is that fedora takes a step to non-geekify the environment by providing repositories or a package similar to ubuntu-restricted-extras. because newbies want something easy to use like ubuntu which seems the most automated of the lot. the more geeky users would like to have arch linux for the best customization. so, it would be best if fedora aimed for any of the two categories.

Homemade cpu cooler for hot laptops

Hello everyone. I had my brother's Acer Aspire 5733 with 1st generation core i3 in it for a while. We all know how the 1st gen laptops overheat. My problem was that I use laptop for real portability and cannot carry a cooling pad all the time. and after an extended period of continuous usage, say 3 hours, the heat would accumulate near the processor and the laptop would run the fan at very high speeds. yet, the local temperatures would cause it to trip off. so toasted thighs and trip off made me frustrated for answers. I tried to search for a bios unlock tool to make the fan rotate at high speed all the time not allowing the heat to accumulate.With all my efforts in vain, I finally decided that it was time for a hardware hacking. Here is what I did.

1.First I opened the laptop.
To open the laptop, first remove the power cables and the battery. Then unscrew the bottom. after that, open the lid and remove the keyboard (it will be tricky. I suggest you look for a YouTube video on how to open a laptop). After the keyboard is out, remove all the connections that are accessible. Spare a minute or two to re-check whether all the connections are undone. Then you can pull out the touchpad area easily. Now you can see the motherboard. Depending on the model and make of the laptop, your processor could be facing the keyboard (most unlikely though) or downwards.

What I saw was something like this

2. Now i removed all the connections to free the motherboard from the laptop.

this is the other side of the motherboard.

As you can see, the copper pipe is the heat transfer medium. one end is connected to the fins near the fan and the other end attached is the heat transfer seat over the processor. the processor is below the seat. Please do not remove the screws anxious to see the processor because there is a thermal paste between them. if this thermal paste is erased, you have to wipe all the paste and reapply paste. It is not a tedious task but why waste the original paste.

3. I had an old pentium 1 pc lying nearby useless. so i went there and hijacked the heat sink and cooler fan on the processor. you can alternately look for a thin client heat sink or a desktop gpu heat sink. i have compressed it a bit to make it thin. i took a pair of pliers and compressed each fin manually.

BEFORE

 AFTER

 
3. It was still bulky to fit in the space between the base of my laptop and the processor. I did not want to tamper the original cooling system of my laptop. so, I cut it into small piece to fit in the recess of my cooling seat. I applied some thermal paste and sticked it in the recess. the good news was that the thermal paste formed a bonding layer between the seat and the heat sink due to the lack of air bubbles between them. the final product looked like this.

after this step, i fitted the laptop and started it to find that the heat sink was working so impeccably good that all the heat was directly coming through the heat sink. since the heat sink faced downwards, my thighs were being toasted and the laptop got from bad to worse. so i had to think of a way to blow the heat off the heat sink. I could simply use a cooling pad here but i really use laptop for portability and so cannot carry a cooling pad always with me. so i came up with a solution.

4. i had the fan of the old pentium which luckily was very thin to fit inside my laptop. so i cut it one end to blow air sidewards instead of the upward position and squeezed it in the free space. since it was only 0.12A, 5V dc fan with only two terminals, i had no trouble finding the power source. I used the USB port connections to the fan.

5.time to make extra air vents for fan. i used a soldering gun to melt the plastics and used a steel ruler as a guide. i longitudinally made some slots just like the original ones though the homemade ones looked ugly. some of them were below the fan for air inlet and the others were to the side of the laptop for outlet.

5. time to pack up everything in the reverse order of removal. Since i have opened the laptop, i also cleaned the fins of the original cooling system. additionally i used a tyre tube between the heat sink and base to isolate any heat from coming down.

Conclusion: Now, my laptop does not irritate me with frying my laps. it just blows hot air through the sides.

cellphone hacks i did

i want to tell you today my list of my exhaustive hacks on my android cellphone that work wonders in boosting my battery life. to do all these, we first need to root the device. guys who don't know about rooting, rooting is the process of getting administrative rights on your cellphone which allows us to modify the whole cellphone as we like. for this, popular applications like z4root ( worked for me always everywhere ), and others and for samsung smartphone users, there is another way of entering into recovery mode and doing it. relax , it is easy and it mostly never goes wrong. if anything goes wrong, remove the battery and replace it and restart it. if anything has really gone wrong and is not rectified, go to the service center and tell them that the phone switched off when receiving an update on the net. he will do that free of cost for you(if in warranty ). after rooting, install a root file explorer like "root explorer" or "es file explorer". the list of tweaks are
1. go to root directory i.e / and into the /system directory and then into the app directory making it /system/app. now start renaming the following things into a new extension starting from ("anything that has sns in it, wiper.apk, Vpnservices.apk, stk.apk, setupwizard.apk, networklocation.apk, htmlviewer.apk, drmprovider, certinstaller.apk ") for example, vpnservices.apk should become vpnservices.apk.bak
2. then go back to the root directory i.e the / and then into /data and then into /data/dalvik-cache and delete the whole contents of the directory. now poweroff your cellphone and turn it back on. it will take longer than usual for the first time, but this is ok and it happens. then you turn it off and then turn it back on. you should now see a difference in your boot times. congratulations, we just cleared off some junk services that eat up the battery and the processor. you can further dig deep and try renaming other applications but it is risky and you alone will be responsible for that act if anything goes wrong.
3. if anything actually goes wrong, just try renaming them back one by one to original forms and restart the phone to check whether the problem is corrected or not. if nothing is visible or any other thing, then connect yoour phone to a laptop and download adb tools it is about 10mb and connect your phone, download pdanet android drivers and connect your phone. it will be discoverd and you can undo things in the command prompt.
4. then, there is a build.prop in the /system which is to be edited in a text editor and add the following lines one by one and not in a continous way anywhere
persist.sys.purgeable_assets=1
pm.sleep_mode=1
ro.ril.disable.power.collapse=1
ro.com.google.networklocation=0
you can also add ro.media.enc.jpeg.quality=100 for good photos but this drains battery like hell when camera is turned on.
also google build.prop tweaks to get more but i feel these are enough to make you feel proud if your phone .the last, install setcpu or some other application which allows your cpu eat less power. it worked wonders on my micromax android phone to save battery.
feel free to contact me if any doubts at aveemashfaq@gmail.com

Hey people. I had a two year old tablet running on WM8505 and it was fine until yesterday. I took it and dropped it on the floor which made the screen crack. The touchscreen is not working and it will never work. I know that it has a pretty small 133mhz processor coupled with 128mb ram, yet out of curiosity i want t o know how far i can pull it to be useful. i obviously wanted to boot Linux and use it with a mouse. ( of course, even android supports a mouse, yet Linux is so powerful, yet lightweight and most customizable ) so i thought of giving it a try. i came across many tutorials on similarly made Chinese netbooks running Debian and so thought why not give it a try. so, i followed the same thing but somehow the script would not show itself on my tablet. so i decided that i would give myself my very own version of porting it i.e right from the scratch. i am still a rookie and turned to Linux only a month ago. before i was a lazy gamer:)
     i am telling you all i did because these are the unsuccessful ways and so don't waste your time trying them.

1. i tried putting the working version of Linux in a folder "script" ( as my tablet firmware is upgraded by putting all OS files in folder script in SD card and booted). the first thing was that a working Linux has hardware links which is not writable on any partition except ext2 and only fat32 is read by my android. at least at boot.
2. so i digged in and replaced the android file-system with Linux ones and simply wrote them on my nand. but it was stuck at boot screen probably because my boot loader might have expected another file-system or initialization script but another one has showed up. 
3. now, i realized that android uses init.rc placed in / which issues initialization commands. so i simply removed it all and explored out that /etc/inittab is initalized in linux. so tried writing simple lines of code to mount sdcard as root and invoke inittab to start booting. i still am rookie so i wrote simple commands but it did not boot. 
4. if there were any sort of dmesg, it would be spectacular but i think i should go the hard way. i meanwhile discovered that wload and uboot are used. so currently studying them and sorting out how to boot.

the process is not dead so you ( if you are curious to know more or already know more) may feel free to write it down and send it to me at aveemashfaq@gmail.com