At last, the allotment results were published today morning, relieving the tensions of many students. As I hoped, I got a seat in MES Engineering Collage, Kuttippuram for Computer Science Engineering. My best friend Krishnaraj has also got a seat there for the same course. Some other students from our school has also got seats there. The collage is just 40mts journey by bus from my home and another plus point is that I know many of the students studying there.

Today, in the shop, Reliance broadband connection was fully configured. The service person said that we could start using it from tomorrow or day after tomorrow. The connection is so easy that plugging a wire to the LAN port, we can access net. The connection is similar to a prepaid mobile as we must recharge it using recharge cards. Also, a phone was provided with it, for free from which all calls to the Reliance broadband users in our area are free and there will be incoming facility until the broadband connection is in use.

Another crazy thing that happened today was that I got some server error from Google. Their popular services including Search, GMail, Orkut, Adsense, etc were not accessible today evening. Its the first time I came before such an error from Google.

Today was a great day for me. I configured my internal modem in linux at last. My modem chipset is from “Conexant” ans is a HSF softmodem. I got a free driver of it from Linuxant. The free driver provides only 14kbps but, still its good. Thanks for the support from all my friends who gave me the instructions.

What I did was that I downloaded the latest version of ScanModemtool from limodems.org and used it to get the details of my modem. It generated some files and by reading them, I got the idea of where to get a free driver. I went to Linuxant and downloaded a debian package of my free driver(about 1.3MB) and installed it using the package manager. During the installation, I was asked to provide some paths and I did so and it worked…

Also, today installed the Lalitha keymap for Malayalam developed by the Swathanthra Malayalam Computing group. Its nice, similar to the keyman in windows and working perfectly.

Today, I got the chance to install two new OS’s. One is the 3.0 version of IT@School GNU/Linux(2007) and the other, proprietary OS, Microsoft Vista. As, I decided to shift completely to Linux, Vista was not installed in my system, but for a customer of my relative’s computer shop. Also, I was happy to get it cracked. The crack works by resetting the timer which count down the activation time and every time it will be the same as 30 days. More details regarding it can be found here:

The IT@School GNU/Linux uses the Linux kernel – 2.6.18-4-686. Even after installing about 930 packages, including all the default packages like OpenOffice, Gimp, etc it took only about 2.9GB, which is about quarter of the space used by Vista OS basic home edition itself, without any extra softwares. Linux has developed much as the installation is much faster, the boot up time is about 40 seconds only, mounts partitions automatically – including FAT32 partitions and has much more tools.

Even though its better than Windows, I do have some problems in it. I am unable to configure my modem properly. I have been to configure it for about two years, since I first installed Linux. Only Linspire was able to automatically detect and configure my internal dial up modem. Another problem I face is that only root has got the permissions to edit the files in FAT32 partitions. I tried many ways, still I couldn’t make other users too to do so. May be some day near, I can fix these…

I also got three DVDs, full of Debian softwares (I think I don’t have that much Windows softwares with me). Thanks for Shyam for giving them to me.