HOW TO: Install Nvidia Graphics Card Driver on Ubuntu Intrepid

I’ve seen many methods on how to install the driver for Nvidia graphics card.
Here’s a method that is almost foolproof, involves no conf file editing, and can be done purely using apt-get package manager.

In case you are wondering, this method installs the “177″ driver (the one that is supposed to be “recommended”).

So here goes:

1. “sudo apt-get install nvidia-177-kernel-source nvidia-glx-177 nvidia-kernel-common nvidia-settings xserver-xorg-video-nv”
2. Open System > Administration > Hardware Drivers
3. Select the driver that says “Nvidia accelerated graphics driver 177 [recommended]“
4. Click the Activate button (at the bottom of the window).
5. You’re done!

After it completes successfully, you will need to restart your computer. And viola! Your graphics card is ready to use!

HOW TO: Guest OS Networking in VirtualBox

I am an ubuntu user and I am a web developer. So what do I do when I need to test web applications on IE6 or IE7? I don’t go to some other computer running windows. I run windows in a virtual machine using Virtualbox.

The only hurdle is: how to reach the host OS network from the guest OS network? I scoured the internet for solutions, and I found one that did it in the first go: so here it is.

Now my life is easier. I don’t trouble my friends by asking them to lend me some of their time. I don’t need to interrupt their counter strike or WoW game. I do it on Virtualbox!

BTW, there is this project called ies4linux – a software to install ie 5, 6 and 7 on linux using wine. I tried it, but it somehow didn’t hit the sweet spot. For those of you who want to try, find it here.

Where are man pages installed in ubuntu?

I’ve searched the title of this post on google in countless variations like “where are man pages present”, “where are man pages installed”, “man pages”+directory-”how to” etc., but I never got what I wanted to see.

So here goes: man pages are installed in the directory “/usr/local/man”.

In this directory, there are several more directories called man1, man2, man3 and so on upto man8.

Quoting the manual page for man, here’s what each of them stores:

1   Executable programs or shell commands
2   System calls (functions provided by the kernel)
3   Library calls (functions within program libraries)
4   Special files (usually found in /dev)
5   File formats and conventions eg /etc/passwd
6   Games
7   Miscellaneous (including macro  packages  and  convenâ
tions), e.g. man(7), groff(7)
8   System administration commands (usually only for root)
9   Kernel routines [Non standard]

To install most of the required man pages on ubuntu, just execute this command:

sudo apt-get install manpages manpages-dev manpages-posix manpages-posix-dev

In case you want to install STL library man pages too, type

sudo apt-get install libstdc++6-4.2-doc

Now to see documentation about vector, just type

man std::vector

NOTE: Its not “man vector”!

That’s all folks!

Free Software – Are You In?

“We have managed to increase our lifespan in a world that is not fit to live in” (from “The Man from Earth”).

This is rather an absurd beginning to an article, but imagine if I were to be sued for quoting from a movie – how completely insane! It would be like being punished for sharing my class notes with a friend (or even worse).

But the state of the software world right now is much like this. Closed source software have managed to grab a popularity for which no reason seems to exist. Such software (non-free) restricts the freedom of the user, and is extremely annoying at times.

So I take this opportunity to encourage all my readers to adopt Free Software instead of non-free ones. For only free software can build a free computing society.

I shall be making a presentation on this topic in my college tomorrow, under the auspices of the Sun Academic Initiative. The presentation itself shall be available here tomorrow.

Until then, stay free.

PS: Coming up next – how to load remote javascripts at “runtime” from the server!

How to Make Amarok Work with MySQL

I promised earlier to show you how to make amarok work with MySQL. So here’s how.

1. Install Amarok: This step is pretty simple. Just “sudo apt-get install amarok“. If you are using GNOME, then kde libraries will also be installed automatically. So it may take a bit longer.
2. Install MySQL Server: This is easy too: “sudo apt-get install msyql-server“. During the installation, you will be asked for a “root password”. This is different from from your Ubuntu’s “root” account: this is a mysql user called root.
3. Create a amarok user in Mysql:
   • Log into mysql as root: Type one the terminal “mysql -u root -p“. The “-u root” tells mysql that you want to log in as root, and “-p” says that you have a password that you want to supply. So you will be prompted with a password. Enter the one you supplied during mysql installation.
   • Create an amarok database: Once you have logged into mysql, you will have a mysql prompt (“mysql >”). To create the database, simply type “create database amarok;“. Yes, you need to terminate the command with a semi-colon. This creates a database named “amarok” (No prizes for guessing that).
   • Create amarok user: Now to create the user, type “grant all privileges to ‘amarok-user’@'localhost’ on amarok.* identified by ‘amarok-password’ with grant option;” This command will create a user in mysql with username “amarok-user” and password “amarok-password”.
4. Tell Amarok how to talk to mysql: You can do this at two places -
   • In the First-Run wizard: Here, you will be asked to select the directories to include in “The Collection”, and how to store the collection. In the How, select “MySQL”. Fill out the “host” as ‘localhost’, port as ‘3306′ (this should be correct in 99.99% cases). Fill in database = amarok, username = amarok-user, and password = amarok-password. Note that these paramaters are the ones that you supplied in step 3.
   • Later on: Go to Settings > Configure Amarok > Collection tab. Set the folder(s) you want to monitor first. Then select the “database” as “MySQL”. In the configuration, enter host = localhost, port = 3306, database = amarok, username = amarok-user and password = amarok-password.

Ta-da! Its done!! Now Amarok will take some time to build your collection, and then you’ll be ready to rock and roll!