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vijay's weblog

Ahead of iPAD

The Touch Book seems to be way ahead of iPAD. It is based on open standards, gives more choices and freedom to the user. The Touch Book comes with an optimized home-made Linux-based OS. With a simple finger press at startup, the Touch Book will run either its own AI OS, Ubuntu, or Android. Mer, Gentoo have also been adapted to the Touch Book. Google Chrome OS and Maemo are on their way! The Touch Book uses an innovative ARM processor from Texas Instruments. Like a cellphone, it is always-on, so there is no need to reboot each time. It also promises a completey silent operation. It has a detachable keyboard and a 3D touch screen interface. 

 

The Practice of Parallel Programming

A free book on parallel programming.To quote from the site:

This book provides an advanced guide to the issues of the parallel and multithreaded programming. It goes beyond the high-level design of the applications, into the details that are often overlooked but vital to make the programs work. The contents is oriented towards the programming of the operating systems and of the business applications, as opposed to the scientific calculations. The reader is expected to already know the basics of multithreading.

Teaching Factor

In this blog post,  Dr. Dominikus Herzberg of Heilbronn University shares his experience with Factor. His students were able to complete a real-world project in just 5 (8hr) days, and that included learning the language! His conclusion is that concatenative programming excels in problem solving and Factor is a masterpiece of software engineering. The concatenative paradigm definitely deserves to be widely adopted.

Slax replaces Cygwin

On my Windows machine, I have replaced Cygwin with Slax, running in VirtualBox.  Slax is a small but full-featured Linux distribution,  ideal for running a complete Linux development environment in Windows.  The default installation is aimed for normal desktop users.  It is possible to build your own Slax ISO by following the easy steps given here.   Slax has a great module system.  New application modules can be activated on the fly.  All development tools - compilers, editors and various language interpreters are available as Slax modules. 

Follow these steps to get Slax working in VirtualBox (assuming that you already have some experience installing Linux):

1. Create a new generic Linux Virtual Machine with 256MB RAM and an 8GB (less will do) dynamically expanding hard drive.
2. Boot from the default Slax ISO, and go to a shell.
3. Create a new partition (say /dev/hda1) using fdisk by using the entire HDD.  Make this partition bootable.
4. Format the partition to FAT32:   mkdosfs -F 32 /dev/hda1
5. Mount this partition to /mnt/hda1:  mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1
6. Copy the /boot and /slax folders from the CD to /mnt/hda1:  

           cp -R /mnt/hdc/boot /mnt/hda1
           cp -R /mnt/hdc/slax /mnt/hda1

7. Configure Slax to boot from the HDD:

           cd /mnt/hda1/boot
           ./bootinst.sh
           ./liloinst.sh

Optional:

8. Create some swap space on the HDD (here we make it 200MB):

          mkfileswap /mnt/hda1/swapfile 200
          mkswap /mnt/hda1/swapfile
     swapon /mnt/hda1/swapfile
9. Go to the modules page and download or activate the applications you need. (also see the note below)
10. Set the root password using passwd command. (the default root password is 'toor').
11. Create a new user for normal use with the adduser command.
12. If you need a lightweight window manager, you can configure to use FluxBox, instead of KDE.
     For this, open the file /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc in a text editor and change the last line to startfluxbox.
     (The default entry will be startkde)
13 Reboot the system. 

Note: The modules activated from the browser will be lost once you reboot the system.  If you download the modules to /mnt/hda1/slax/modules, they will be automatically activated on system start-up.  You can also use the activate and deactivate commands to dynamically add and remove applications from your system.