I was using ‘/opt/gnome2′ as install prefix for my Gnome developement on my SuSE Linux 9.3 box. One fine day, the ‘/opt/gnome2′ folder disappeared suddenly. I didn’t know how. I ran YaST update before that. So, I assumed that YaST probably done something with this. Moreover, I never login as root on my machine. Neither I do ‘su’. Intially, I grant all access to my regular username using ‘sudo’. It seems that YaST has sent a mail to the root after purging ‘/opt/gnome2′ directory on which it has no business at all. But since I didn’t login as root for a long time, I was not aware of this. Here is the message.

Hallo SuSE Linux user.

Filesystem hierarchy was significantly changed in SuSE Linux 9.0 and
all GNOME/GTK related programs now reside in /opt/gnome.

Following directories was removed from live system and moved to
/var/adm/backup/GNOME:
/opt/gnome2

Please check if there is anything useful and then remove them.

GNOME themes can be simply moved to /opt/gnome/share/themes, all other
programs must be re-installed.

Your SuSE GNOME team

So, if you have SuSE > 9.0 and your ‘/opt/gnome2′ disappears, don’t get puzzled. You did a YaST update. So, don’t use ‘/opt/gnome2′ prefix on a SuSE box.

If you are interested to play with Evolution and you want to concentrate only on building and running Evolution from the CVS, you need not build the entire Gnome. Here are the steps to follow for building and running Evolution from CVS using ‘jhbuild’.

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After a long search, my house hunt came to an end. I found a house at BTM II stage. The rent of the house is INR. 5,500. Actually the owner said that the rent was INR. 6,000 and I had to negotiate on that. The deposit being INR. 60,000 which the owner doesn’t want to negotiate upon. The house has 2 bedrooms, a hall and a kitchen. The house is very close to a prime location at BTM. I need to walk for 8~10 minutes (800 metre) to catch my office bus. Now I am alone. The guys who will be staying with me are Rajesh, RJ and Arun. Rajesh and RJ are my classmates in college. Arun is my junior in college. Rajesh is working in a call center, RJ is working in Infosys and Arun will be joining Novell with me. The address of the house is

III Floor,
No.36, 16th Main 6th ‘A’ Cross,
BTM II Stage,
Bangalore,
Karnataka,
India – 560 076.

Laziness to type has given birth to a lot of things. Canonical abbreviation was mostly the first among all. When people first start to interact with the community on chat, IRC, mailing list, etc., they are mostly confused with terms like “IMHO”, “HTH”, “RTFM”, etc. I do remeber the first time when I used Yahoo Messenger, I stammered at the question “ASL?” and somehow figured it out without asking what it is. After doing a lot of conversations in the past 6 years, I am somewhat familiar with many of the most widely used acronyms. But there are plenty to keep track of. Sometimes if I don’t know what it is, I would try to guess or I would google for it. But now, I use this page if I don’t get any acronym correctly. This has vast collection of acronyms. I have never come across atleast 75% of the database.

There is a shocking news that Larry McVoy decided to stop giving BitKeeper (distributed software configuration management tool) free for Linux developers. BitKeeper was exhaustively used by the Linux kernel developers. This will have a major impact on the schedules. Linus Torvalds is developing a new tool known as ‘gits’ which would act as a replacement for BitKeeper. But, it would take a long time for it to become as rich as BitKeeper. Best wishes for gits. Read more about this news at Forbes.com

If you are looking for additional RPMs that are not included by default in the distribution, please visit Pascal Bleser‘s page. A lot of essential RPMs are available here.

Here is a Wiki tutorial for C#. Very good one indeed.

One of the forward that I got today! Sounds crazy; but interesting.

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Today when I was trying to use my online banking at ICICI Bank’s website, I have come across an advetisement in thier page stating that “Don’t want us to call? Register here”. They have introduced an online system where you can register your telephone or mobile number to stop getting any telemarketing calls from ICICI Bank. This is a very good move. A lot of people get annonying calls from a lot of Banks about thier Credit Cards, Personal Loans, etc. It is very good to see that private banks started respecting the privacy of the induviduals. ICICI Bank leads by example in this issue. Will other banks also follow this? Why don’t you register your mobile or telephone number with this to avoid any telemarkting calls from ICICI Bank!

For the past one week, I am hunting for a house at Bangalore. The areas that I am considering are BTM Layout, HSR Layout and Koramangala. I would have seen atleast 30 houses so far. I haven’t liked even a single one. Either the place is too nasty or the rent is too high. What I am looking for is a house with 1 bedroom, hall and kitchen and my budget is INR. 5500. I start wondering that for this budget, I can find a very good house in Chennai. I miss Chennai a lot I have to find a house before this weekend. If I am not finding one, I will be going for a PG accomodation. I have no other choice!