Gaveen's Blog - Archive (2005 - 2017)

More than a year ago I wrote about my story of switching (completely) to Vim as my primary editor. If you have worked in a Unix/Linux system seriously then you know why your editor (whatever it maybe) is a big deal. If you don't, let's just say as a SysAdmin and a budding DevOps type guy, my editor is a serious thing to me. So here's my Take Two. Why? If you are asking why I would want to write about a boring topic again, then this post of obviously not for you. This post is for anyone who's interested in using the mighty and great Vim editor and it's variations (Eg: vim, gvim, etc.) properly. What has changed? I had pushed my Vim configuration to a GitHub repo named gavim and had been using it for a while. And couple of people even forked the repo. Despite how proud I was about my editor configuration, ;) there were some obvious problems. First, a few things were broken (Eg: proper snippet usage) and some plugins weren't working any-more (Eg: Fuzzy_...

Edit: There's no need to compile Docky from source on F14 any more. The packages have landed on the official repos. If you still want to build from source, you are welcome to use this post. For everyone else, just fire a terminal and type: $ su -c "yum install docky" If you already had installed it from source, see the Step 0 below to uninstall it. About five months ago I posted a blogpost named " Howto Install Docky on Fedora ". Little did I know that people will be using my guide as much as they have being doing. A few things have changed since the original post which assumed that the Fedora version running is 13 (please see the comments on the original post) and also Fedora 14 has come out. Therefore, I though of writing a wee bit more up-to-date post eventhough any of this isn't anything remotely serious. This is just to avoid answering question on the original post, as much as for the sake of everyone. Also the official install guide from Docky wik...

If you know me personally, then you know that I'm a big fan of GNOME Do . As a keyboard savvy person I use Do extensively. Do is an application launcher similar to the Mac app Quicksilver. However the GNOME Do team has been putting a lot of research and development into it from the initiation. Result: probably the best application launcher out there for any platform. Some months ago, Do included an interesting theme called Docky which made the launcher acts as a dock (a la Mac, Avant, Cairo Dock, etc.). With the integration of GNOME Do, there's no need to say that Docky was super cool. And it started gaining features in a high speed. Ultimately Docky was getting so developed that it became a separate project. Installing GNOME Do on a Fedora system is as easy as: $ sudo yum install gnome-do There are some packages with the names starting from gnome-do-plugins*. With the addition of these GNOME Do can truly enhance your desktop experience. Give it a fair try, I'm pretty...

My Editors I have used many text editors. Some for specific tasks such as LaTeX editing (Eg: Texmaker ), coding (Eg: gedit with plugins ) and the others for more generic text editing. As a system administrator I have been using Vi / Vim all along for editing configuration files and the likes. It was always convenient as almost every Unix system has vi/vim. For me the first Unix editor I used was Emacs . I felt more at home with Emacs key combinations than a hard to fathom Vim modes. Time passed and after a little while, I got used to basic Vi concepts. Since then all of my editing in command line was done in vi/vim. As I've said recently, I have been transforming myself from a sysadmin to a sysadmin/developer kind of person. For coding purposes I used gedit. Some people might think of gedit as the notepad.exe of Linux, but that's so not correct. In fact gedit is a powerful text editor with a lot of plugins to extend it's capabilities. For example there there are plugins f...

I know I have been away from this blog for quite a long time. It's been just over 6 months since I've blogged. There are reasons and other stories. But apart from all of those, I'm glad I am writing here again. I don't know how often I'll be writing again, certainly not once a day (like I ever did that). However I'm hoping now I'll have freedom to write whenever I feel like. But the best way to keep in touch with me is to follow me on Twitter . Here's a brief account of how my life's been during the past few months which saw me transform significantly. Microblogging First thing which slowed down my blogging is microbloggin. Yes, I got in to Twitter early last year and since then never look back. I'm an avid Tweeter and it has become a part of my daily routine. One cool thing I like about Twitter is it's no nonsense and does just one thing, and one thing properly. It lets me keep in touch with like minded people and share information as a side...

A couple of days ago I had a bit of a crisis when my Notebook running Fedora 7 refused to boot in the morning. It just hanged up after the line with 'Red Hat nash starting', after a package update. The update however, wasn't anything related to kernel, headers, nash or anything related. It was just a few regular package updates. The Fedora 7 crash was quite a disappointment as I was very impressed with how far Fedora 7 has come since FC3/4. I was using Fedora as my primary working distro, that was until the following incident. Problem: So I was stuck with a crashed computer with all my e mails, svn check outs, bookmarks and so on. I tried with modified grub parameters (and various other things) without any success, before deciding to do a fresh installation. The real horror was there. My Fedora 7 DVD refused to boot into the installer and hanged at Running /sbin/loader. Every time I tried to do an installation it just hanged the same way. By this point I wasn't even sur...