No Synaptic Package Manager for Ubuntu 11.10

This news may come as a shock for the users of Ubuntu that the advanced system packaging tool ‘Synaptic Package Manager’ has been dropped from the latest builds of Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot.

The removal of Synaptic Package Manager is not unexpected, having been planned since the inception of the Ubuntu Software Center. Since Software Center provides the same features along with allowing users to install debian packages(.deb files) and listing the softwares categorically in a very nice GUI. Many of the advanced features Synaptic currently provides are ear-marked for inclusion in the Ubuntu Software Centre.

Synaptic will still remain easily installable from the Ubuntu Software Center as a Utility.

Due to the development nature of Ubuntu 11.10 decisions and actions are subject to evaluation and change.

Google Launches Instant Pages, Goggles, Voice and Image Search

Today Google announced the launch of its new features that will change the way people search over the Internet. With these new features available, with an un-matching speed of Google, there is nothing that could not be searched over the Internet.

1)Google Goggles

This cool feature enables you to take a snap(picture) of whatever is written in front of you and it takes it in as a input, matches the characters with different Languages and gives back the translated result. Moreover, it can detect 3 different items at the same time like text, logo, barcode, product etc...
Click here to see an overview.

2)Voice Search

For Desktops and Mobiles.

All those users of Chrome Browser who have Chrome 11 onwards, will see a new icon of Microphone in the right corner of www.google.com search box. On clicking on it, you can speak into your microphone yosearch, June 14, 2011, press release, goggles, mobile search, instant pages, mobile sur query. The voice recognition system scans this voice uses the Chrome's speech technology for processing the input. As of now, it coves only the ENGLISH users and is hence only available for www.google.com. To make this possible, Google fed in 230 Billion words of just English language with various accents and combinations into their systems to learn the patterns.
The added feature is the fact that just because of the presence of android on your Mobile device, the other applications also become voice enabled without any explicit coding. An hence, voice search can be used by them easily.

3)Image Search

Even this feature was only available exclusively for the Android users. Now Google has taken a leap ahead and launched this service for the Desktop users today. Using the Chrome toolbar, users can now drag and drop images into the Search Box to find out the matching results. Google will take up the image and perform the search on publicly available images over Internet to display the results.
The code is available as Open Source and hence this feature can be included in other browsers like firefox via addons in near future.

4)Instant Pages

The Instant search got even faster. Instant Pages can get the top search result ready in the background while you’re choosing which link to click, saving you yet another two to five seconds on typical searches. As you scan the results deciding which one to choose, Google is already pre-rendering the top search result for you. That way when you click, the page loads instantly.
The Instant pages work with a super fast speed to give back not only the the Web results but also the image results associated with any text query made at the search box. The speed with which the image and web results are fetched back to the user is simply outstanding.

5)Mobile Search

Google Launched a new interface for the Mobile searches with a better auto-completion designed to help you perform a search and more easily understand the results. Google introduced mobile local search to Google.com, an improved local result experience, auto-complete improvements, and Russian language OCR in Google Goggles.

6)Local Search

This feature has been introduced to Google Mobile to give the results that are more relevant to the users and their present geographic location based on the IP of the user.

7)New Version of Auto Complete

This new version of Auto-complete is better in terms of easy and speed from its successors. This is bound to improve the user experience and change the way people search on Google and its various products and platforms.




Google focuses on Accuracy and Ubiquity in their searches to make user experience pleasant. The focus is to take the Phone features that are only available to Android users can be taken to the Desktop environment so that they can be used widely even by non-android users. As far as the Privacy issues are concerned, Google has made it clear that all the queries fed into the system for search will be treated same as the other text queries. Even the images will be treated as the pattern of pixels and no face-recognition algorithm will be applied on them to maintain the anonymity. All these features are being rolled out and will be available Globally within next 1 week and will have full support of all features in the next version on Chrome which is due for release in next few days.

Geek Meetup on 11Jun

Yesterday i happen to attend the Geek Meetup in the JNU campus jointly organized by JNU's LUG, Python NCR and the IITD-LUG thanks to some great planning, efforts and teamwork of the core members.
The general idea was like the other meet-ups, to start off the discussion with the Agenda as agreed upon on the IITD-LUG wiki.

The meet started with the introduction of students who have been selected this year for the GSoC. There were 6 students from all over the India who are working on their projects this year. It was a great experience to have a direct interaction with the students who have made it all the way to international level.

Then there was a discussion with all the members, to promote FOSS and organize regular Meet-up in North India, to make the community more active and powerful.

Then, there was a open talk session, where the coders working on HTML5, Python and other open technologies presented their work.
There was a demo of a HTML5 based game using java-script. Then Narendra Sir, presented a part of his Project EDUVID slidecasting on which i have been working under his supervision.

The meeting concluded with a general discussion of all the members on what FOSS is all about. What Freedom is all about, when it comes to Computers. The freedom in the world of computers must be the same as we enjoy in the real world with real objects(just like a Table or a Fan). The Freedom has been defined into four levels by Richard Stallman.
1) The freedom to use (the software code).
2) To know the operating mechanism for the research program, and modify it according to the needs of the user without anyone's approval.
3) Redistribute copies so that others can share free software and use it.
4) To improve the process, in order to benefit others and distributed it free.

Since, The meeting was attended by many users of closed source technologies who up-till now, loved to use the Cracked versions of their favorite softwares and didn't mind being called as Pirates, but were interested in exploring this fascinating world of Free and Open-Source. This was the time, when they shared their open views and their fears of switching to something like Ubuntu/Fedora or other Distros. But it turned out that their views about Linux were more of ignorance of facts. The discussion unfolded a series of Myths and Misconceptions about the Linux distros, main being the support and free and very easy availability of softwares for different purposes. Narendra Sir also showed a video where young minds (8-14 year old) gave their feedbacks,learnings and views after 10 hours of training session.
Discussion went into more technical terms that involved the ICANN and the influence of US and other Giants. Privacy issues with Google and Facebook were an eye-opener for the most of us.(more on that later)

Overall, it was yet another awesome experience at Geek-Meetup. Learning while having Fun...

Restore Panels back to Default Configuration in Gnome..

Many times due to some mis-click or other reasons, we find that some essential Applet has gone missing from our Desktop panel. Once removed, it is hard to place them back as we don't know where to find them. So, here is an easy method to get the panel back with DEFAULT SETTINGS.
Be careful, because it will remove all the settings you have made to the panel in order to customize it and bring it to default. You will have to reconfigure it according to your needs.
Open the Terminal window and enter the following command at the prompt:

gconftool-2 --shutdown

(Note: There should be no spaces between the two dashes before shutdown.)

gconftool-2 -recursive-unset /apps/panel


Then enter the next command:

rm -rf ~/.gconf/apps/panel

And enter one more command:

pkill gnome-panel

That's it!

Both top and bottom panels will appear (if missing) with their default settings. Now you can customize them to your preference and get on with using Ubuntu.

Startup Guide for Web Development.

This post is focused on explaining the basic terms and ways that are frequently used for web Development. If you are a newbie and wondering about how to start designing your own website or a blog, then read on.

The basic pre-requisite softwares for any web development are
1) PHP ( A programming language for webpages)
2) Apache ( Webserver )
3) MySql ( SQL database to store data )
4) content management system CMS (Optional)

Firstly, you need to install PHP Apache and MySql on your machine wherever you want to host your website. Php is a programming language for the websites. Apache is a webserver that allows a service to run on your machine to parse Http requests. MySql is a database that is used to make databases/tables for your website. It is important that before going onto a live server, some practice is done on local machine to make sure if everything works fine. With Apache service running on your computer, you can run the web pages using
http://localhost/mytestwebsite in your web browser. where mytestwebsite is a folder containing your webpages, placed under /var/www/ directory in Linux systems and C:/inetpub/wwwroot in Windows.
The combination of Apache, MySql and PHP on a Linux machine is also referred as LAMP(Linux Apache MySql PHP), and WAMP (Windows Apache MySql PHP) for Windows machines.

Now, you need to decide what kind of website are you planning to make. the most common possibilites are:
1) you want to make something really fast. The design Doesn't matter. Predefined Templates can be used since there are no commercial or copyright issues involved.
2) You are planning to custom make a website in a particular language i.e Html, PHP, Flash to serve a specific purpose that can otherwise not be achieved using predefined templates.
3) you need to make a website ready as soon as possible and then you may want to include some custom pages later that may have Php or the Html and Javascript. CMS has many plugins available that enable this feature.

A Content Manager sometimes also known as CMS (content management system), allows the simple use of predefined templates where content needs to be put in simple text format in a very easy interactive interface that itself runs inside the browser, just like email composer. The most famous CMS available are WordPress, Drupal and Joomla. They automatically embed the input text inside the PHP/HTML pages. These CMS also take care of all the security loopholes making your website less prone to hacks. But they have a drawback. Inserting a custom PHP or HTML code is difficult for the starters. But the biggest advantage is that anyone can make a website with no prior knowledge of any Web based programming language.
Many tutorials can be found on www.youtube.com that will give a clear demo of how to install a CMS and use its features.


Almost all of the website hostings on severs come with a cPanel hosting where a user has access to a control panel to perform the administrative tasks for the website, like creating databases, managing user accounts, web page upload/updation etc... This must not be confused with a CMS. A cPanel is a set of tools that let you perform the administrative tasks for your whole of website. It deals with global variables of your website, while a CMS only maintains the CONTENT of your webpages. A CMS like Wordpress or Joomla can be installed on the server to be used, with the help of cPanel options.

If you want to make the website from scratch using the basla, CMS, cPanel, ic programming language, the webpages can be made and stored in the web dictory as told above. When the pages are ready on your local machine, they can simply be sent onto the server via FTP to make website accessible to everyone.