A happy rant

I have been using Ubuntu for a long time on my personal laptop, and I was okay with using Unity in the beginning. But over the course of time, I was losing interest, given the boot-up and response time issues. I liked the HUD concept, and the dock. But I was never a fan of the dash. And the lenses, no way.

I experimented using multiple other desktops, including Ubuntu Gnome, Mate and Elementary. I was not very happy with the Gnome3 anyway. I went back to XFCE, but did not settle. One of the problems I faced was with the input methods for Malayalam. I guess Elementary seriously has the potential to be next big thing in the desktops. Especially Geary and Midori. They've got great sense of design and usability. But even then, I wouldn't want to switch back to gnome world for now.

That's when I gave KDE a try, and it's been my primary desktop from this year. Back in early 2000's KDE was my primary desktop. Although I preferred that old school non-plasma KDE, I was fine with my own customized version of KDE SC4 without much of bells and whistles. Of late, attempted KDE Plasma 5 which actually has superb response time. But I decided to wait for a lot more stable version, before trying again. Both Elementary Pantheon and KDE Plasma 5 looked really promising in their own ways. But I did not want to go for either of them.

It was in this context, that I looked for an alternative. This is one thing that I should boast of being a GNU/Linux user. The plethora of choices and variety of solutions!!

I was looking for something that's focussed on usability at the same time customizable to a good extend. Clearly, I did not want to go back to Gnome 3, or XFCE. I wanted quick response, light weight desktop. Minimal, but with some options to be decorative at times. So that's how I went about. Landed on razor-qt first, and then to LxQt. When it comes to building GUI application development, I think Qt should be the way to go, rather than Gtk. Object oriented design is cleaner, and better. Less code, less hassles.

LxQt is my primary desktop currently, with openbox as the window manager. By the way, KWin also works pretty well. But I preferred openbox this time, given the simplicity. One thing I miss is tiling. KDE will stay here, as a  standby.

I will continue to watch the LxQt space for next releases.

Export the mobile contacts to excel sheet

Here's just another tech tip, in case you are of my type, someone who enjoys the freedom of using Gnu/Linux to get your personal work done. If you want to transfer the contact details from your phone to the computer, and probably upload to google docs - here is a simple way. I use Wammu to connect the mobile phone usually over bluetooth, and to create a backup of the contacts. I used a script which is available at this link:
http://blog.cone.be/2010/01/06/convert-a-wammu-backup-file-to-a-csv/.
So, here are my steps:
1. Create a backup of your phone contacts using Wammu, let's call the file Wammu.backup. This file is a binary file, but can be viewed in any standard text editor like vim/emacs.
2. Open the file using an editor which supports saving text in ASCII or unicode UTF-8. I use Gedit. Save the file as ascii or utf-8, as Wammu.txt.
3. Run the flip tool to get into text format which can show work with tools like grep. Make sure 'grep Name Wammu.txt' gives you  some result.
4. Rename the file into ConvertMe.txt.
mv Wammu.txt ConvertMe.txt
5. Run the tool convert.pl to generate the csv file of your contacts
./convert..pl >  mydata.csv
6. Customize the csv file as you need it. I use a dirty awk one liner.
cat mydata.csv | awk -F'"' {' print "\""$2"\"""," "\""$4"\"""," "\""$6"\"""," "\""$8"\""","  '} > mydata_updated.csv
This basically provides you a much simpler Name, number format.
7. Open the mydata_updated.csv file in open office spreadsheet, and if required convert to excel format.
8. If you like it, import to google docs.
Well that's it for now.

BSNL EVDO on Ubuntu-9.04 made easy!

It is time to knock off all your skepticism about using GNU/Linux; it is equally (if not better) equipped to meet most of the general purpose computing requirements for an average user. Believe me, I have been using Ubuntu-9.04 on my laptop, and till now I have not come across a situation which forces me to have another OS, say MS Windows.

Here is one more reason to reinforce my belief.

Recently I had to connect to the internet while away from home. I was looking for a internet connection for temporary use, and soon landed onto a BSNL EVDO device borrowed from a friend.

The next question was how to get the EVDO USB device (ZTE make) work with my laptop running Ubuntu-9.04. Google search results took me towards lengthy articles detailing how to probe for our USB device, configure wvdial.conf etc. But NO! Time to be updated, all those steps are not required any more.

Here is how I configured the ZTE EV-DO device, that took not even a minute!

1. Right click on the NetworkManager tray icon.
2. Click "Edit Connections" on the menu and choose the "Mobile Broadband" tab.
3. Select "Auto Mobile Broadband (CDMA) connection" & click "Edit"
4. Type-in the details - Number : #777, Username and Password and click "Apply" button.
5. Left click on the NetworkManager tray icon again and click "Auto Mobile Broadband (CDMA) connection".
6. Yes, done! You will find the connection notification on the right corner soon. You could disconnect any time using the "Disconnect" from the menu when you left click on the NetworkManager tray icon.

Happy web browsing!

I found this EV-DO connection fast enough for normal requirements. On 2wire speed meter it showed ~100Kbps at BTM Layout, where as at Koramangala speed touched ~384 Kbps. The speed is not found to be consistent like a wired connection, and may not be suitable if you have specific bandwidth requirements.

Before doing the above steps you could check the /var/log/ to make sure that the ZTE device is detected by Ubuntu.
$sudo tail -f /var/log/messages

Update:

Saw these steps on this forum too.