Recently, I received a free 128MB chunk (That’s what they call a VPS) with 3GB storage and 35GB bandwidth per month for free. They says that its free for lifetime, if put into some use. My plan is to use it for delivering this site, which runs on wordpress, along with few other stuffs.

128MB RAM is very limited and there is no extra burst memory available. But, being a XEN VPS, I hope to get a satisfactory performance. The first thing I did was to measure the performance using UnixBench benchmark suite and the report is as follows.

My laptop, HP NC6220 is confirmed dead. Its issue with display repeats after 3 days of servicing and the service engineers couldn’t rectify it permanently. So, they agreed to give a refund and I am forced to buy a Laptop. Thanks to the financial support by parents, I bought a Lenovo Thinkpad Edge E430 (3254 AM4) yesterday. Special thanks to my cousin Prakash for arranging it at the lowest rate possible.

I also bought a Lenovo G580 7036 for my friend Deepak and spent most of the time, yesterday configuring it. Will post a review of that asap.

So, I have used the thinkpad for just few hours and here goes my experience with it.

The basic configuration of the system is:

Intel Core I3 2330M – 2.20GHz
2GB DDR3 RAM
500GB HDD (7000 RPM)
14″ HD Antiglare Screen
DVD Writer
720p Webcam
Card Reader
Finger Print Reader
4 USB ports (2 with USB 3 support)

We @ DayScholars finally managed to arrange a good PC to setup as a centralized server for our code and databases. The server is running a customized Debian Squeeze distribution with MySQL Version 5.1. So the next requirement is to allow MySQL access for all of us. This is how we managed it. You must login as root user or must have root privilege to do this.

Edit the MySQL configuration file, located at /etc/mysql/my.cnf.

We prefer using vim. You can use any others like nano or even gedit.

Just found out the time line for the next Long Term Support(LTS) version of Ubuntu. Thought it will be worth sharing.

I wasn’t blogging for a long time as I was busy with few works and MESTECH, the annual technical fest at MESCE. Due to the recent situations at college, the event was postponed indefinitely. Let those happenings be another post 🙂

Ubuntu 10.04 Timeline

Four of us from MESCE, went to participate in the annual techno-management festival at NIT Calicut; Tathva 08. It was raining heavily from the morning and when we reached Calicut, the roads were all flooded.

After reaching NITC, we all went to confirm our registration. We all were surprised to hear about the registration fee of RS200. I thought of a nominal fee, but this was really high and was not mentioned in the site. After registration, we went for the first event; “Tux of War”, related to Linux commands. We were able to answer only a few questions and there was no hope to pass the prelims. The next event which we participated was the “C debugging”, named “Koder Kombat”. There was a ray of hope to pass the prelims. We visited few of the stalls, including “Transporter”, “Wheels”,etc but the rain wasted lot of the time. I planned to stay there, but later changed my plan due to the climate as all my dress were wet.

We returned back home after 4.30PM. The train journey from Calicut to Kuttippuram in the Chennai mail was a different experience. The train was overcrowded due to rush of Diwali. The results of prelims of “Koder Kombat” were not in favor of us, even though I wasn’t interested in going back.

It was a new experience as it was the first time I participated in such an event. We all returned with a lot of new ideas about new technologies and how to organize an event like this. It might be helpful to organize “MESTECH” next year if its going to happen.