Paying Airtel bill online

The Vidya Balan, Madhavan ad which regularly comes on t.v., would make on think that paying bills is now as easy as it can be. Maybe it is. but, not for me. I boast of an AB credit card which has not worked once for billing online. Necessity , the mother of invention thus enlightened me. VBV or verified by visa is a credit card service which needs to be enabled by requesting for the same to the respective bank for activation of online services for certain cards. AB is one of the chosen few. Having done the needful, I wait for intimation now, hoping it will work soon.

mounting windows partitions on linux

/sbin/fdisk -l in the bash prompt. if it does not work for the current user, try su type the root password and then try the command.

this will show the ids of the drives against the drives.
eg.
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 892 7164958+ b W95 FAT32
/dev/sda2 * 893 2850 15727635 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 9146 9729 4690980 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sda4 2851 9145 50564587+ 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 2851 4808 15727603+ b W95 FAT32
/dev/sda6 6898 9145 18057028+ b W95 FAT32
/dev/sda7 4809 5828 8193118+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda8 5829 6083 2048256 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda9 6084 6897 6538423+ 83 Linux


next, run:
make a directory : mkdir /win1
mount:
mount /dev/sda1 /win1

does this for all.

edit in fstab for automount at boot.

disable the bugging packagekit update applet fc9

In fedora core 9, the update software kit starts and works on its own and annoyingly refuses to stop. Hence, if not required here is a way to remove the update kit.

from here

1. Click System
2. Click Preferences
3. Click Personal
4. Click Sessions
5. This launches the Sessions Preferences window. On the Startup Programs tab scroll down the list to find PackageKit Update Applet.
6. Remove the checkbox next to it to disable PackageKit Update Applet.
7. Click Close.

helps stop it from bugging users from using yum or installing anything.

flash in fc9 x86_64 using nspluginwrapper in 64 bit firefox

to have flash working in linux, firefox 32 bit had to be installed. But, nspluginwrapper solves this problem by mapping 32-bit drivers to 64-bit ones. here is a way to install flash for fedora core 9:



# rpm -ivh http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm
# rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-adobe-linux
# mkdir -p /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins
# yum install nspluginwrapper.{i386,x86_64} pulseaudio-lib.i386
# yum install flash-plugin
# mozilla-plugin-config -i -g -v

credit to : www.linuxforums.org

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/redhat-fedora-linux-help/121767-solved-fedora-9-flash-plugin-wont-install-4.html

Installing Stage

Stage multiple robot simulator
Stage simulates a population of mobile robots moving in and sensing a two-dimensional bitmapped environment. Various sensor models are provided, including sonar, scanning laser rangefinder, pan-tilt-zoom camera with color blob detection and odometry.

Stage devices present a standard Player interface so few or no changes are required to move between simulation and hardware. Many controllers designed in Stage have been demonstrated to work on real robots

from : http://playerstage.sourceforge.net/

Below is what worked for me to install stage.

export CMAKE_INCLUDE_PATH=/opt/local/include
export CMAKE_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/local/lib

and check this : pkg-config --modversion playercore

if the output is not a version number,try this

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/

now, it should show a version number with the pkg-config --modversion playercore
cakewalk from here:
1. cmake .
2. make
3. make install

cheers!

issues configuring Player on FC9(gcc 4.3)

errors during installation (on make install):

‘close’ was not declared in this scope
‘exit’ was not declared in this scope
and lots of other similar errors.

Reason : the gcc compiler in fc9 has changed a lot. Further info here

Solution(Atleast worked for me):

- Added #include cstring to client_libs/libplayerc++/playerc++.h
- Added #include iostream to server/drivers/laser/lms400_cola.h
- Added #include iostream to server/drivers/mixed/mricp/src/geometry2D.cpp
- Added #include iostream to server/drivers/mixed/mricp/src/map.cpp
- Added #include algorithm to examples/libplayerc++/example3.cc
- Added #include algorithm to server/drivers/mixed/mricp/src/map.cpp

add all with "<" and ">" between each arg.

"
found most of the above in the bug list at Source Forge.

Octave

Matlab's free linux brother is quite a life saver. Although it has not turned to be as fast as Matlab for me somehow.

I run a modified code borrowed originally from Tim Baileys' website for running an EKF-SLAM simulation on robot whose motion model is differential.

Mainly intended for Fedora Core users

The easiest way for installing octave would be

yum -y install octave*

although octave-forge would suffice for most common purposes.

For those who are interested in the source kindly download from here

I have had quite a number of hiccups in working with octave. GNUPlot does not live up to the front end of Matlab. Moreover, the code itself without the GUI runs much slower on octave.

However, I found that using ATLAS libraries will quicken the code. I have however not delved into the intricacies of why and how. Installing ATLAS libraries and making octave use them from yum did not work. However, downloading the source and configuring using this works for me. (this is borrowed from another site btw)

./configure --enable-shared --enable-dl --disable-static LDFLAGS="-L/usr/lib64/atlas"

where the "/usr/lib64/atlas" is the path of the installed ATLAS libraries.