Monday, October 25, 2010

Biophysics-02 and Biodiversity

Biological live agents has the capacity to duplicate themselves either by sexual or asexual means. In mathematical sense this is easy to comprehend but what goes behind the scene is very complex.
Man is very good at converting and producing by products from animal material and it is emerging there are over 184 pig products in the market.
This is same for cow too but cell division and its organization into about 600 to 1000 cell derivatives has taken billions of years of duplications and organizations. That is where the biophysics operate and man can never duplicate that sequence however much he tries.
Biophysics unlike simple physics and chemistry works at a rigid thermal atmosphere since bio-molecules especially proteins cannot stand high temperature.
High temperature and curing that include tanning make these biological materials commercially useful. Gelatin and fibrin are two of them used for making texture of food attractive but have no food value at all.
This short article highlight some of the mathematical concepts involved in biophysics and not their modifications in the commercial world.
It is binary mathematics of duplication somewhat similar to binary computer mathematics. How 256 characters and 0 and 1 are used for modules in computing, in the biological world about 2500 to 25.000 large biological molecules (not-nanoparticles) give the diversity around biological structure.
It is said that genetic code doubles itself every 3 to 5 million year cycles and this event why it happens we do not know but heralds new species on this planet.
For example the change that occurred from chimpanzee to human occurred when this cycle of duplication occurred last time on this planet.
In about 65 million years ago we so dinosaurs disappeared but the cockroaches who remained would have told us the story in detail if they had computerized brains in their possession.
But we have to surmise what went on and what went wrong then.
This is written in the same conceptual framework what we know is little what we do not is enormous.
What will become of this planet we do not know in way the biodiversity is changing in every nick and corner of this planet from deep sea to mount Everest.
Coming back to my mathematics 2 is the base.
The other base is 10 the log base and log normal.
In biology there is a tendency for log normal behaviour in time scale.
Put these figures together I derive 20..
The figure 20 is my figure for looking at the available species and make some deductions.
For example take a plant (an animal) from a site (area should be defined) and see whether there are 20 similar pants not interbreeding (definition of species difference) at the same site.
If we see a site with that number it is a biological hotspot.
I wonder whether we have any to fit this description or anybody has done this calculation before. (we can argue about the veracity of the number 20 till the cows come home with a pipe and arm chair critics) in an observational manner but the point I am arriving at is that we look at a whole country and say (for example Sri-Lanka) we a re bio-rich is a total misconception.
I have arrive at a figure by simple observation of my neighbourhood for every three plants I see in my garden we have lost another 17 in the last 100 years or so.
It is said that the anaconda (Ana conda is a Sri-Lankan name) type of snake had been sited in Sri-lanka by foreign invaders about 200 years ago.
Where are they now?
The corollary to my argument is that if we can collect 20 similar species in an environment that environment is conducive for biodiversity.
I can give two examples of my childhood.
We could have identified at least 10 varieties of tortoises and 100 varieties of butterflies less than 50 years ago.
Bizarre use of insecticides in agriculture and DDT in particular (thanks to WHO - Sinhalen who) by ill conceived pundits in the health sector has done irrevocable damage to our biodiversity.
Final nail will come when the two Coal Power plants are operational.
Problem in my argument is that there are no true scientist left in this country to take my argument forward with observational data in spite of 40 years of free education in mother tongue.
We have not produced a single biological scientist that we can say were nominated for Nobel Prize in 40 years of free education,.leave alone winning it.
By producing private universities this cannot be remedied since they are profit oriented.
We lack Think Tanks in power and also in opposition..
Think tanks are there when they are in opposition!
We have thin tanks how to get to power and remain there for ever.
We need to produce outstanding thinkers.
We are sadly lacking in that endeavour.!

Thursday, October 21, 2010

WiFiWay-2-01-110

Very beautiful KDE 3.5 Linux distribution that comes from Spain is cute, functional and fast boot up.
I am not sure it has English version but with or without English it an amazing Little distribution.
The server connection broke at least 10 times and i had to download many a times without a success but the wait and my perseverance was worth the trouble.

I hope English version should come sooner than late.
Good one!.
Thanks guys and girls at WiFIWay.

ZeveonOS-Neptune-Final-109

21-102010
New generation new concept with science students (with Eclipse) in mind is a USB stick installed and persistent Linux distribution to carry as a Pendrive.
 ZevenOS

Web site: zevenos.com
Origin: Germany
Category: Desktop
Desktop environment: Xfce
Architecture: x86
Based on: Xubuntu
Wikipedia:
Media: Live DVD
The last version | Released: 6 | January 1, 2015
Zobacz po polsku Zobacz po polsku: ZevenOS

ZevenOS – an Ubuntu based Linux distribution with BeOS like user interface, and targeted to old computers.

ZevenOS includes a large set of popular open-source applications for different task and full support for popular multimedia formats. It also includes a home made tool for managing the system, called MAGI.
The system uses a customized Xfce desktop environment, which reminds the BeOS system’s desktop.

ZevenOS is available as a 32 bit iso image only.
The system developer is Leszek Lesner.
It has brand new KDE and very attractive front face. ZevenOS and Neptune OS are KDE based.
 
Zeven OS is defunct but a has given way to Neptune OS.

This is something we should give Sri-Lankan students who carry a lorry load of books in their back. It has multimedia capability and In proper hand carry all the science books in e-format.

Even though, I talk much about Linux, Pendrive Linux is my future and in retirement.
I do not carry much to my grave apart from few Flash drives with some information for grave diggers to identify me.
I could not get it to install in the hard rive but that is a miner matter.
It comes from Germany with English as a second language.
I hope this will spawn a new wave of Pendrive Linux.
That is my ultimate dream.
In 10 years time I may not be able to buy a computer from the paltry subsistence I will have.
I hope by then the Flash drive will have some music capability with Radio stations live too with ear phones attached since I may need hearing aids too if I live that long.

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Another Trick Exposed!

Richard Stallman is right, moment the market forces are introduced to Linux distributions, there is hardly any difference from Microsoft, Apple or Oracle and for that mater XandroS, Freespire, Mandriva, SuSe or ArtistX.


After many days of downloading what is said to be free distribution I am unable to keep a copy of Mandriva, Suse or ArtistX in my USB hard disk for safe keeping.

Thank god I did not bother to download DVDs in the first instance.

I was happy with CDs,

I have no intention of selling them.


I am interested in testing them and saying something good about them generally and expose some of their weaknesses as I see from a customer perspective so that next version can avoid minor irritations.

Customer is the best judge and Linux guys are not trained to be good salesmen any way.

That is why the Linux guys with commercial interest fail.

That is true for Mandriva and SuSe.

The have hidden tricks up their sleeves.

They do not let you keep a copy for reference.

This scenario can be overcome by following methods.

1. Burn several copies of the CD and do not bother about the Iso Image like me.


2. Use K3B and make a image without burning a CD /DVD. K3B makes a temporary Image in tmp and rename it. That is what I did with ArtistX. And then copy it to a CD/DVD or to a USB hard drive (but remember its temporary name).

3. Forget about using that distribution and select one out of the 100 and one distributions I have listed in this blogsopt.

4. Once you are comfortable with Linux avoid all commercial Linux.

5. Best solution is to have couple of Live CDs that have the applications you need.



When you try to copy, in the final few seconds they disrupt the coping process with a little script at the end that says it cannot be copied.

If they say it should not be copied it is a different matter.

Even if I sell a few copies I cannot become a millionaire.

This is absurd in the true spirit of FOSS.

They are no better.
Wolves in sheep clothing.
Take hard working Developers for granted.


Mandriva has the way of disrupting the last few MiB which does not tally with total MiB so that the would be newbie has to go and buy a copy.

If you are lazy it is far better to buy rather than download a Iso with missing files.

Like a good salesmen one must state the facts but not like an insurance agents or dealers who have hidden clause/s.

A clever customer can catch you and detect the faults unlike the gullible guy with lot of money and spare wallets.

It is like a bad dream or joke!

Partitioning with Magic Tools in Linux

 It is a commercial version now!
Gone are the days when I had to install Win98 and then Partition Magic and then partitioning which took ages and then install Redhat or Mandriva or Debian with dual booting and in spite of Linux installed Nero was my writing tool.

Suffice is to say Nero had done enough damage to my CD/DVD ROMs and Graphic Cards.

Then there was no K3B.

Beauty of K3B is it diagnoses the defective CD / DVD and reject them after examination without damaging the RAM or the CD/DVD ROMs.

Next stage is Live CDs starting with PCLinux-2007.

The transmigration and single booting with multiple Linux distributions in my computer network and liberation from proprietary components has given me opportunity to investigate partition tools in Linux.

My favorite partition tool is and was Partition tool in SuSe which is excellent and gave me lot of freedom and opportunities.

But then again I have to have SuSe installed to get full use of the partition tool.
Now SuSe Studio has spawned a KDE Partition Magic it is rightful I should mention about the others for newbies.

1. R.I.P (Recovery Is Possible) is one of my favorite Live CD which I use for partitioning.

2. Damn Small Linux and gparted is the first of my choices those days.

3. Gparted live CD.

4. Partition Magic CD in zip format only a Linux distribution can decipher is the latest of my utilities.

5. PC Linux, Mandriva were my old friends but PCLinux has dropped dos partitions (which I keep for spare storage) which is a bit of pain.

My only grouse now is most of the partition tools including SuSe limits partitions to 15 which is absurd with hard disks over 500 GB are on the market and guys like me who want to have several Linux distributions in one box.
If one distribution has failed in a trick I mount another and do the job.
For example SuSe gives limited space for Thrash and it cannot delete a large (for example an image of 4GB) file.

Then I mount PCLinux and do the job of deleting the large file with its help.

Do not get fixed to one Linux distribution (especially Ububtu) since there are hundreds of out there with many utilities like blender, gamabse, audio video (Media Box) and many more to have fun with.
To have fun and have many distributions you need a partitioning tool and one has to master partitioning.
It is as chicken feed now unlike the days I was struggling to get everything right at least once a year in December before i recess for some holiday and relaxing.

Fortunately because my 100 Linux adventure (111 now) I can have a long holiday well before December.

Enjoy all partitioning tools they do not hurt the hard disks unlike Microsoft utilities.

Priorities? Whats Gone Wrong?

Have we got our priorities right?

Is hygiene a matter for concern?

Is home science taught to children especially girls?

Is dengue the biggest problem?

Can pure politicians decide on health issues?

Are our doctors trained sufficiently in Public Health?

Are our hospitals (both Public and Private) disease factories?

I can answer the last question easily.
Yes our hospitals are disease factories, there is no doubt about it.
If a patient is taken to a hospital he invariably acquires a new disease if he stays more than 48 hours.
That is why our mothers are discharged as soon as possible after child birth.

I am not going to get involved in any political arguments except saying that 30.000 (may be 40 thousand) children die every day due to poor hygiene and improper education worldwide.
One of the first lessons we have to teach undergraduates is hand hygiene when they enter university. But within 4 weeks they go back to bad habits and the cycle perpetuates itself
Majority of them have studied in tutories and not in school and the tutors never teach hygiene in their cramped up classes.

Below is some relevant samples and I have no editorial control over them or any connections.

Science Daily (Mar. 24, 2010)
A new study suggests that hand sanitizers containing ethanol are much more effective at removing rhinovirus from hands than washing with soap and water. Sanitizers containing both ethanol and organic acids significantly reduced recovery of the virus from hands and rhinovirus infection up to 4 hours following application.
The researchers from the University of Virginia School of Medicine, Charlottesville and Dial Corporation, Scottsdale, Arizona detail their findings in the March 2010 issue of the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.
Rhinovirus is the known cause of approximately 30 to 35% of common cold cases in adults. Hand-to-hand contact is one of the main avenues of transmission contributing to the spread of rhinovirus infections. In the study researchers compared the effects of hand washing with soap and water and an ethanol-based hand sanitizer by contaminating the fingers of healthy volunteers with rhinovirus and then randomly grouping them and administering one of six hand treatments.
The experiments ranged from a control group who had no treatment, several groups who washed their hands for differing amounts of time (some with soap, some without), and several who used varying amounts of hand sanitizer. Results showed that the ethanol hand sanitizer removed approximately 80% of detectable rhinovirus from hands and was much more effective than no treatment, water alone, or soap and water. Soap and water removed rhinovirus from 31% of hands.

Science Daily (July 10, 2008)
Washing hands with soap and water before delivering a newborn infant is associated with a lower rate of neonatal deaths in developing countries, according to a report in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.
"Although major achievements have been made in reducing mortality in children younger than 5 years, less progress has been made in reducing neonatal mortality," according to background information in the article. It is estimated that there are approximately 4 million neonatal (newborn) deaths each year, with more than 99 percent occurring in low- and middle-income countries. "About half of these deaths occur at home where mothers receive little or no perinatal care. These neonatal deaths are attributable primarily to infections, prematurity and birth asphyxia [suffocation]."
Victor Rhee, M.H.S., of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, and colleagues obtained data in an observational study of 23,662 newborns through 28 days of life in rural southern Nepal from 2002 to 2006. Mothers of the infants were given questionnaires the day after delivery and two weeks later to identify maternal and birth attendant hand-washing practices.
More than 90 percent of births occurred at home or outdoors while the mother was being transported to a facility. Birth attendants washed their hands before the delivery of 59.2 percent of live births, while only 14.8 percent of mothers washed their hands with soap and water or antiseptic before handling their newborn. The overall mortality rate was 32.1 per 1,000 live births.

Science Daily (May 29, 2005)
The most accurate estimates of the causes of child deaths to date, published in the March 26, 2005 of THE LANCET, reveal that worldwide more than 70% of the 10.6 million child deaths that occur annually are attributable to six causes: pneumonia (19%), diarrhoea (18%), malaria (8%), neonatal sepsis or pneumonia (10%), preterm delivery (10%), and asphyxia at birth (8%).

Robert Black (Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, USA) and colleagues in an independent group on child health epidemiology, along with those from the World Health Organisation (WHO), analysed available data from publications and ongoing studies in 2000 to 2003 to obtain new estimates for mortality by cause in children younger than age 5 years. They found the four communicable disease categories account more than half (54%) of all child deaths. Infection of the blood or pneumonia in newborn babies and pneumonia in older children constitute 29% of all deaths. Undernutrition is an underlying cause of 53% of all deaths in children aged younger than 5 years. The investigators also calculated the total numbers and proportional distributions of deaths in children younger than age 5 years by cause for the six WHO-defined regions. Among deaths in children, 42% occur in the WHO Africa region, and an additional 29% occur in the south-east Asia region.

For many years, Chief physician Birger Forsberg has been working with international health issues, and has a particular interest in diarrhoea diseases children in low and middle-income countries. Although diarrhoea-related death amongst children has declined in the past thirty years, diarrhoea is still thought to be the cause of several million child deaths every year.
"Research shows that around 1.5 million children suffering from diarrhoea can be saved every year with the right treatment," says Dr Forsberg.
Back in the 1980s the WHO started a special programme to reduce diarrhoea-related child mortality. The organisation estimated that about two thirds of all deaths from diarrhoeal diseases were attributable to violent, watery diarrhoea and acute dehydration. It therefore promoted the greater use of rehydration solutions with sugar and salt additives and increased fluid intake. The recommendations were incorporated in most countries' national health programmes and active information campaigns were run through the WHO, UNICEF and national authorities. The use of the recommended treatments (rehydration or increased fluid intake) has increased but not as much as desired.

The review, led by Regina Ejemot of the University of Caliber, in Nigeria, shows that teaching people about hand washing can reduce the incidence of diarrhea by up to 30 percent and might have as great an affect as providing access to clean water.
“Our review specifically assessed the effects of interventions to promote hand washing and not the effectiveness of improving sanitation,” Ejemot said. “However, common sense would suggest that there has to be water for hand washing to happen, regardless of community awareness of benefits or willingness to wash hands.”

WHO estimates that diarrhea is responsible for over 2.2 million deaths annually, especially in children under the age of five. It is an important cause of malnutrition in resource-poor countries and, if persistent, can contribute to decreased resistance to infection and hamper children’s growth and development.

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

PartitionManager-108

It is a commercial version now.

First Class!
SuSe Studio has spawned many of its community derivatives and many of them are heavy to boot up but this one has caught my eye by accident.
YAST is one of the best graphic utility and its partition manger is the best graphic partiton tool.
YAST-Yet Another Setup Tool but I call it Yet Another Teaching Tool Linux Guru can use for teaching newbies.
It is a live CD that can be installed.
Only 366 MiB.
Excellent approach moving away from heavily Loaed Linux.
This a classic example where one can assemble the utilities with purpose.
Then one can download the other packages.
Connection to internet is slow but I love this derivative.
This is not for newbie.
One should have some understanding how suSe operates.
I will write about other partition tools which Linux offer later.
Good one.

Monday, October 11, 2010

Linux100-Mandrake-Update

After 4 days and bit of time I manged to download Mandrake (free) DVD and booted it to see its features and unfortunately it is install only.

Why they cannot include a live script in the 4.3 MiB of DVD puzzles me enough!

Similarly 2 MiB of Gentoo Live DVD did not have an install script!

These simple exclusions put me off and lot many of newbies too.

With Mandriva I went up to the partition tool and up to that point it has all the impressive graphic protocols which I really loved in the past.

Well, now I have installed Mandriva Free in a second hand spare computer (dissembled in Singapore) I bought to upgrade the systems to Sata hard and CD/ DVD ROMs in case IDE Hard disks and ROM Sri-Lankan market.
It has two ports for SATA and I may be able to fix my IDEs there if any one of my old computers pack up.

Sure will not as long as I use Linux.

As I have already stated elsewhere cutting edge utilities are carefully excluded and it took nearly one hour to update the installed packages.
My wife and daughter were using there computers and and I know they were not downloading anything serious.
So my judgement, about Mandriva has not changed significantly even after installing,

Installation went ahead without a hitch.

So go ahead and buy from them instead of downloading the free DVD.has not changed.

No wine, no blender, no food for thought.

If I make a mistake and delete everything in my hard disk while testing live CDs or my system breaks down (it never happens) or over loaded with array of different images and come to a stop one day, I will run it through all the way to full install.

Till then you have to do it yourself and feel its impressive collection of utilities.

Saturday, October 9, 2010

Sir-Lankan English

This is what I heard through a S.M.S. (Subbe Manasgatha Settum) in the Buddhist tradition of Venerable Ananda..

I only relate without any distortion or without Atuwa Tika for the enlightenment of the Subbe Satta (Bavanthu Suki Thatha-Except ex-Army Generals) of Sr-Lanka.

It is common practice now for some to go abroad frequently at the drop of a hat like an annual pilgrimage to Mecca and unlike us who cannot afford it now remain restrained due to common curtsies and upbringing (When I first went to England one way ticket was only three thousand nine hundred odd Rupees).

But they carry all the trademarks of Sir-Lanka when on travel abroad and sometime demand the other passengers to change the booked ticket on wish and fancies of political stalwarts.

But this story is not about the ones who went to USA but one who was left behind.

He was left behind deliberately due to request from our one and only Mr. Bun Ki Moon (Munn Bath Kawada Bun is his nick name).

When retinue arrived home he was waiting enraged for an audience with the tour leader.

The tour leader was a veteran politician and who felt the pulse of his close associate if not the pulse of the nation knew something was amiss.

He approached the role master and asked Malli Kohomada Dan (How are you my comrade)?

He did not give a reply and instead put a big Kheels Meat ball in his mouth and pretended that his mouth was full and could not speak (By the way, this is the tactic our foreign Minister applies when he is abroad and is asked a difficult question).

Tour leader in turn put a finger in one of the big meat balls and crushed it with a fine twist and put the tip of the finger in his mouth and sucked a bit and said Mal Wedi Wage Sarayi ne Malli (Hot and Spicy like fire works).

Then went onto say this foreign fellows do not know how to prepare spicy foods and they only add salt and pepper in their food and nothing else.

In the same breath and tone continued in his utterance and said that he received an invitation for a party with foreign delegates from EU.

Malli Oyata Yanne Barida Ekata / Brother can you attend it on my behalf?

So he gave the re-delegated invitation protocol to this national hero with antics.

The day came this guy went there half an hour before the schedule and when the French chef was arranging the tables and giving the final touches.

The chef identified the our guy and asked him Are you a vegetarian?

The guy had a grin in his face and said, I am a Mustarian, you know.

The French chef was poor in his English and thought Mustarian is an English word but could be moucheron (a type of fly that swarm near water or mouton (sheepskin).

He went to the kitchen ordered his colleague to take a sheepskin ans pickle it and turned round to see a sheepskin swamped by house flies in the bin.

He wanted to be sure and impressive and told his friend to pickle it with Sri-Lankan house flies in the dish.

His colleague of course marinated it and made the first Sri-Lankan lightly made Mouton-Moucheron with French wine and served our distinguished guest.

This fellow did not realize that there were flies in his meal since he was very high with the French wine.

He had Chinese food for his lunch with Ajina Moto and the combination French Wine, house flies and sheep skin (in any case he is a wolf under the sheep skin anyway) caused a little aberration in his thinking capacity and asking us to not to eat American flour.

Little he remember the last time they banned bread the left was swept away.

I hope that there could be a second innings or a repetition of the scenario in this god forsaken country.
Evam Mesuthum!

Friday, October 8, 2010

Black Panther-107

Beautiful distribution coming from Hungary with support for English and German.
It is pretty good even though it took a little more time to boot up.
Anyway all KDE distributions have this tendancy.
Onece booted it runs fast and connects to internet quikly.
It is well past midnight.
That is the reason for the shortness of the content.
Good one.
Thanks Guys and Girls in Hungary.

Thursday, October 7, 2010

SuSe-Update

After over 7 days and nights of downloading, finally I manged to download 4GB of SuSe.
Fist time it broke at 3.3 and the second time it was O.K.
It took three days of downloading.

The day time downloading is at snail pace and I a trying to beat the pulse impulse of the computer (mind you we are experts in feeling the pulse of even a dead man or a imprisoned man-but not the pulse of the people-even Obama is failing in that), I am trying various methods to keep servers in Sr-Lanka not to go to sleep at night.

In true fact what I have done is buying a switch that stay alert and goes into sleep mode when power line or the server fails.The switch does a yeomen service of not closing the file but stay put having gone into sleep mode.

This has prevented me of interrupted sleep.

When power fails I have to get up and switch off multitudes of gadgets which are in different rooms.
My son also does a good job when power fails on a longer duration which is very common in Kandy and Gampola.

SuSe has KDE and Genome and LXDE and xfce and few more X-windows.

That is a good thing.

I did not bother to go ahead and test it since I am much happy with Live KDeE which I have in my system after my PCLinuxOS was infected with a scripts a few months ago which prevented me getting even to authorized sites. I have downloaded Gnome and both 32 bits and 64 bits versions of SuSe all of which are doing great.

This is where SuSe a nose ahead of PCLinux-2010 which also has a problem with non-English speaking audience.

Suse in that neck and a half ahead of PCLinux-2010.

In view of shorter time of downloading I still prefer CDs.

I love my sleep and I can even sleep standing (traveling by Public and Private buses when the need is there and getting up in the night to swith off is not a welcome practice in any normal household.

If you need everything go ahead and download the DVD.

I am now downloading Mandriva and hopefully I'll be with you in five or six days.

XO-Pup-106

After an year old development thread XO-pup is available for download for One Lap Top Per Child (O.L.P.S) platform.

It in tar.gz format only a Linux box can expand and extract it to a fat partition or U.S.B.
Thanks Guys and Girls.

I will soon be downloading it.

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Quelitu-105

Another fantastic effect light weight based on Lubuntu.
It is in English. French and Garcian (hope I got the spelling right).
I give special points to light weight and multilingual capability.
Well done.
Good one.

MiniNo-104

Debian based distributions that would help one to use an old computer (new computers too) without dumping into attic or waste.
The idea is eco-friendly use of computers as long as the hardware are functioning.
One can second, third or 4th computer at home or office doing some useful function.
I have many at home networked only my laptop is brand new,

All of them are secondhand some (including a server) were thought to useless by secondhand vendor but doing useful work at home and my office.

The eco-friendly idea is catching fast in the West very soon we may not be able get secondhand computers for the price we paying now but that is beside the point. We must not waste of our resources.
Linux unlike Microsoft is helping the masses (
comparatively poor but not intellectually).

This is a goo one.

I think developers are listening to some of my comments the idea of 100 Linux distributions should be in everybody's mind.
I never thought the response will be this good.
Imagine we have over 100 Live Cds to choose.
It is a wonderful feeling.

Fantastic Guys and Girls!

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Puppy Studio-103

Even though I used PCLinux as my gold standard (it has some problem with its new partition tool-not recognizing some partition types) for live CDs for its versatility and the availability of many versions at disposal, the record for most number of CDs downloaded goes unquestionably to Puppy Linux (I have, more than 20).
Puppy Linux Studio is the latest I downloaded.
It has lite version which is 288MiBs.
The full version is 376 MiB.

It is pretty good and has taken most of the useful packages from TeenPup and LeagcyPup.

Both over 650MiBs.

Puppy less than 200 is always in my front pocket even when I travel abroad. Even though I carry a flash drive (pen drive) I rarely use it for any problem solving.
Puppy is enough and it is amazing in doing simple and complex things.
Why carry a laptop when one can avoid it.

Before I buy something I load Puppy and see whether everything works before paying in foreign currency.
If Puppy fails I do not buy that fir sure however much the market hype.

As far as I am concerned I categorize (like any other Live) Live CDs based on Puppy MiBs.
Is it less than 200 MiB?
I love the ones below 200.

NimbleX is one of them. NimbleX has bcome bit fatter recently but still less than 500.

The next category is 200 to 500 MiB (little less or more).
CRUX, Peppermint and many more out there now.
What annoys me is why try to compress into 700 which is impossible unless one use compression used by Knoppix.

If it goes beyond 700 MiB might as well double 500 to 1000 and go for a decent DVD like Mint rather than no man's land.
There is another problem with trying to compress into 700MiB.
Unless one has 1GB RAM, live session is slow and painful.
Many people do not have more than 512 RAM or DVD.
Many of the old machines can be revitalized with 500MiB input.
I am glad to see some are catering for these machines.

Having said that with or without your own machine all Puppies are adorable.

I will be with you on Pendrive Linux soon.

Monday, October 4, 2010

New Wave of Linux-Multibooting Capability and its Culpability

Most of the Linux distributions are making a culpable offense by not recognizing other Linux that come from various backgrounds.

In the beginning the LiLo had problems with booting other Linux distributions.
Then came GRUB it solved most of the booting problems by booting from any partition unlike windows which have to start from the first sector.

Linux guys have not put this weakness of Microsoft to light.

Now is the time to highlight why we give priority to Microsoft.

It is unfair in legal sense and open market economy.

It also should learn how to boot from any sector of choice other than Master Boot Record.

Nobody should give the copyright inheritance of the first sector to any Linux or Microsoft distribution.

It should be with the customer or the user.

It is a monopoly.

Why computer wizard did not expose this weakness to light is my grouse.

They only aggravate the situ by only recognizing windows and dos sometimes and invariably gave Microsoft the first place.

This is a culpable mistake Linux developers perpetuate by its taking the starting block.

Why give the head start to Microsoft?

I have found only three distributions doing it right
They are PCLinux (the new distributions now have a problem not including other format options - other types of disk formatting including DOS), Mephis, Debian, Suse, Mandriva, Redhat and Fedora.

Redhat had the best GRUB including RAIDs..

Still SuSe has the best partition tool, even though it restrict itself to 15 partitions.

Why I do not know?

All the other Live and installable CDs I checked had problem recognizing other Linux distributions.

But they invariable recognized Microsoft by default or is it fear induced by Microsoft by its global propaganda or is it both.

Why not recognize its sisters and brothers breathing over the neck to have a good start.

Most pertinent question is why Microsoft cannot see with their eyes open wide Linux or other partitions.

They are totally blind to independence an market forces.

Where is universal the brotherhood?

Where is universal the comradeship?

There are two reasons.

1. One is boot loader they use is LiLo.

2. The other is that they do not write a script (copy of the booting sequence in the header files of the root partition.

They all write on the M.B.R while giving priority to Microsoft almost by default or deceit.

Ubuntu do this, all Ubuntu derivatives including attractive Mint do this culpable offense.

It is time to wake up and put this right.

Suse recognizes only 15 partitions.

There used to be over 60 partitions those days before the RAID and volumes came into existence.

I used to have at least 8 (2 windows) distributions bootable on my hard disk barely 80 GB.

Those days Linux were not fat and heavy and some of them could stay on 2 GiB partition.

I used to modify boot sector by various means to get all running without a problem with GRUB as the boot loader.

Now the hard disks are over 300GB or 500GB we must go back to all traditions and have at least 30 partitions recognizable.

Then I can boot Microsoft, Apple Mac and Open Free BSD as part-timers with Linux preferably my own assembly called God Bless You All (G.B.Y.A) (thanks to all the guys including Puppy Linux) and I will throw a party even the all mighty God has directed me to the grave for rest after the party.

Recovery Is Possible or Impossible and cohabitation is a must in the coffin for all of us at the end.