After a long time, the latest version of Debian detected the USB modem in my LG G1600 phone. Querying is success, but I haven’t yet tried connecting net. I am always misfortunate, because by the time my system recognized the USB modem, Airtel, the service provider which I use for the GPRS connection has reduced the validity of RS 274 GPRS recharge from 30 days to 15. Now, I should try with Idea, which provide GPRS at the rate of RS 9 per day.

I was also successful in configuring the permissions of the fat32 file systems accessible through Linux. Now, I could give write permissions to individual users by editing the “etc/fstab” file. This is much needed for me as by brothers are also using my computer and I don’t want them to accidently delete any files in the fat32 partitions.

The exams till now, was somewhat easier compared to the first exam, M1. Four exams are over by now and there are five more left.

As decided yesterday, I reinstalled Lenny as a fresh installation. It was really time consuming as the DVD drive is not in good working condition, showing read errors. Not only the drive, each and every part of the system is facing problems. I hope I could carry on with it for two more years. When calculating, the system is 3 year, 1 month and 10 days old and only the hard disk has the warranty left.

Taking the case of Lenny, it has changed much from etch. Its visual effects has improved, file permission settings are working better, renders Malayalam better and has GNOME with 80% interface localized to Malayalam. My next step is to try a distro with KDE. I have left out a 7GB for trying out new distros.

First university exam was over today. Engineering Mathematics I was tough and many are in the doubt that whether they will pass. Hope it won’t be the same with others.

MESTECH was amazing, especially the bike stunts. Many has taken videos and photos of the event and I’ll be uploading some soon. The exhibition of bikes were also good. Bikes which costs more than 20 lakhs were present in the exhibition.

I also attended a class by Kiranchand on Web Hosting. It helped me to know beyond what I could study with the free hosting services, like the admin panel of CPanel, etc.

There were many competitions which I could participate, like quiz, debugging, web designing, etc. It was really a loss for me.

Today, from Shyam, I got the testing version of Debian Lenny DVD. I upgraded etch to Lenny. It looks nice and is working, but still there are a few compatibility problems with the softwares. So, most probably, I’ll be reinstalling it tomorrow.

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Photos are added later, taken by Najeeb in his Nokia N70

Today was the official launch of Mozilla Firefox 3, the revolutionary open source web browser. Its aiming to setup a new world record of the most downloaded software in a day. Though my Beta 5 version of Firefox 3 upgraded automatically to Firefox 3 a week ago, I also became a part of the Guinness World record by downloading Firefox 3 from the college lab as a part of the download party organized at college by GNULab. Here is the screenshot of the certificate I got.

Mozilla Firefox 3 - Download Certificate

The only special thing that happened in these few days was that my mother’s sister and family came home from Chennai for vacation. With these days at hostel and home, I noticed that I could study more when I am with my friends than I am alone.

MESTECH, the annual technical festival of MES College of Engineering is scheduled tomorrow and day after tomorrow. It will be a great miss for S1S2 students and especially me as I will miss a few seminars and contests.

Opera mini for  mobiles is really an amazing piece of software for java supported mobiles. I installed it in MotoRAZR V3 and was able to browse almost every websites as if in a computer. What we need is a java supporting mobile and a GPRS connection. It works with the help of an intermediate server between the mobile and internet. With it, I was able to check orkut, scrap to friends, check my mails and many more. It has bookmarking facility, key shortcuts, etc. What I felt it lack was download support. Opera mini can be downloaded for free from www.opera.com from computers or mobiles. Opera also provides a full featured mobile browser with much more features.

I also tried IM softwares like gotalkmobile and e-buddy. They also works nicely. These and many other softwares for mobiles can be downloaded from www.getjar.com.