Vinayak Hegde

Bergen was founded by a Viking King (love the alliteration there) almost 1000 years ago. It was also a Hanseatic trading town in the middle ages but nowadays it is known as the gateway to the beautiful fjords of Norway. It is also Norway’s second largest town and a big university town.

Bryggen is the Bergen’s Quayside with old wooden houses. They are a distinctive landmark of Bergen and can be found on every travel brochure in Norway. Bryggen is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This part of Bergen has been gutted by fires many time in the past and has been reconstructed many times – the most recent being in 1955.

Bergen is also one of Norway’s rainiest cities and receives precipitation about 280 days out of 365 days a year. I was lucky that I did not encounter much rain during my stay there. The city is beautifully lit during the night and it is fantastic to take a walk around the city at night. It is also very safe and has a vibrant nightlife. I did not stay for much time in Bergen as it was just a stopover for going to the majestic fjords in the West. After a nap during the day, I ventured out in the evening and at night to take some photos of this beautiful city.

I had bought a Asus EeePC (model 1005HA) sometime back. I use it to take notes and as portable browsing and storage device whenever I travel. It came pre-installed with Windows and a crippled version of Office. So when Ubuntu 10.04 – Lucid Lynx came out last week, I decided to install Ubuntu – netbook edition on it as I had heard good reviews of it. This would also help me to do any casual programming on the go. Ubuntu 10.04 is also a long term support (LTS) release. I have written a small howto as installing linux on a netbook is slightly more involved than popping a CD and clicking next (as most Netbooks do not have a CDROM drive).

Step-by-Step guide to install Lucid Lynx Ubuntu 10.04 on a Asus EeePC 1005HA netbook.
1. Go to the Lucid Lynx release page and download the netbook ISO. I suggest you get the torrent and download using a bittorrent client. It is faster and you save some bandwidth (for the mirrors) for the less tech-savvy.

2a. If on Windows, download the USB disk creator, choose the downloaded ISO image and the amount of read-write space you want and follow instructions to create the disk.

2b. If you are on Linux, you can burn the ISO image to a disk and boot from it (by selecting the CDROM drive as the primary drive). Once you are logged in go to System => Administration and select Startup Disk creator. Select the ISO image and the drive to use and click next. You are done in a few minutes.

3. Next reboot the Asus EeePC and press F2 to go to the boot setting screen. Select Boot => Boot Device Priority. Set Removable Device as the 1st boot Device and disable “Boot Booster”. “Boot Booster” feature does some caching to enable fast booting. Since we are changing the boot sequence we need to disable this.

4. Once the BIOS setting are done, plug in the USB drive with the image and boot from it. It will give you an option to install to disk. From there on it is a normal Ubuntu Install.

5. Wireless did not work out of the box. Run the following commands to
get it working.
$ sudo apt-cache search linux-backports

See the output of the above command and install the wireless x86 packages.

But before that, check if the wireless is switched on in the BIOS. I wasted a lot of time realising that it had been switched off in BIOS and the keyboard function keys wouldn’t work.

Posting this on an ASUS EeePC on Lucid Lynx with wireless working
For more info look here.

Several years back, I was appalled by the quality of reporting in mainstream news papers. Most of the articles either smelled of sponsorships (paid articles thinly veiled as editorial coverage) or political bias (favouring the left, right and/or the party in power) or total inaneness. Slowly, I shifted to TV for much of my news. There were still a few channels which had a good coverage of the days news. Gradually there was a degeneration in the TV news as well as one half became more and more opinionated and the other half covered covered completely inane non-news sensationalising it (Aaj Tak Sansani, India TV). Compare this with the News coverage in the British Media – all the different newspapers have slant (even the BBC if you observe carefully) but atleast they are somewhat upfront and consistent about it but with the Indian news media, it is difficult to differentiate what is an advertisement and what is actually news. The news media has largely moved from reporting news to creating news and trying to actively shaping opinions. News anchors have meanwhile moved from reading news to shouting on TV. Rajdeep Sardesai and Sagarika Ghose are in the top pecking order in this high -decibel world. We live in a Dystopian world.

I have stopped reading newspapers about 5 years back and stopped watching the news on TV about 2 years back. In fact, I have disconnected my cable connection and view less than 1 hour of TV per week – most of it at lunchtime in office. I guess I am not missing much. Most of my news comes via either social networks such as Twitter and Facebook or by talking to friends and colleagues. The danger with this approach however is that you tend to get marginalised in your thought process and tend to lose touch with your immediate surroundings. It is possible that I might be aware about what is happening in Kazakhistan but unaware of the riots in Bangalore. The upside of this approach though has been, I have been able to concentrate on what I am interested in and become extremely productive. I am watching myself to see how this experiment goes.