Coder Girl

I accidentally found this video in Fake Steve Jobs blog. Interesting video if you are into coding.

Installing Asterisk in "Jaunty Jacklope"

Last week I was trying to install Asterisk in "Jaunty Jacklope" Ubuntu 9.04, but turns out be not a straightforward task, I had to spend several hours Googling and experimenting before getting it up and running.
Actually the problem is not with Asterisk, but with the Zaptel driver, which comes from Jim Dixon's open computer telephony project (Zapata Telephony) named after Mexican revolutionary Emilinao Zapata. Asterisk uses zaptel was various reasons. Such as timing source for various operations, mixing conferences, for zaptel interface cards etc. Now digium develop zaptel driver. If you also want to Install asterisk in Jaunty Jacklope follow this steps, this should also work for any Linux distribution with kernel version 2.6.28. Before installing Asterisk its important to have Linux kernel source installed in /usr/src

Installing Asterisk is straightforward. Download the latest asterisk version from official web site. Or latest code can be checkout from SVN sever. If you choose to do that this how to do it
#cd /usr/src # svn checkout http://svn.digium.com/svn/asterisk/trunk asterisk # svn checkout http://svn.digium.com/svn/dahdi/linux/trunk dahdi-linux # svn checkout http://svn.digium.com/svn/dahdi/tools/trunk dahdi-tools # svn checkout http://svn.digium.com/svn/libpri/branches/1.4 libpri

for information available in asterisk website

--$tar xvzf asterisk.xx.xx.tar.gz (only if you download tar ball)
--$cd asterisk
--$./configure
--$make
--$sudo make install
You can also install samples, which can also be helpful
--$sudo make samples

Installing zaptel driver.

But due some reason that I really don’t know. It turns out that latest stable version cannot with be compile against 2.6.28 kernel. After Googling few ours I found out that downloading latest SVN snapshot form Digium web site rather than installing the stable version might work, and it worked out for me.
Here is how I did it.
You might need these packages if you have not already installed them
apt-get install subversion
apt-get install build-essential libnewt-dev libusb-dev

$cd /usr/src
$sudo su
#svn co --revision 4636 http://svn.digium.com/svn/zaptel/branches/1.4
#mv 1.4 zaptel
#cd zpatel
#./install_prereq test
#./install_prereq install
#./configure
#make
#make install
#make config
#modprobe zaptel
#modprobe wctdm24xxp

Here is a good video about Asterisk and how configure it.

After 16 months

It has been close to one and half years, since last post which is about Richard Stallman's event at SLIIT. Looking back at the time, I couldn't realize why didn't I post after that, mmm..... may be I was too lazy, may be not, there are some unpublished posts. One about installing Linux on my old Acer laptop which is not working now, and about Fedora Sinhala, one about transforming Linux look-n-feel to OS X. but they never saw daylight. And I also started writing another blog in Wordpress which I completely dedicated to FOSS GIS related things. Managing two blogs hard, and project that I worked is finished, so I might not completely focus on FOSS GIS stuff which I did for last 18 months. I have interest in learning mobile and ubiquitous computing. Therefore I thought it's better to restart this blog, and merge wordpress blog to this. Anyway I conclude hoping that this time I would be able to pull my self back to blogging. Adios!

Richard Stallman event in SLIIT

Last week was very busy week organizing Richard Stallman event @ SLIIT. I never thought we could have Colombo's main event @ SLIIT, but many thanks to Dr. Shahani and Himira for giving us the event. We had to change the dates of the event due another event @ SLIIT on 17th, but finally it look like we pulled this off quit well. It was a massive crowed. I think largest crowed ever, for a FOSS event in Sri Lanka. It was a house full event. There was about more than 800 people in the auditorium few of them standing behind.


RMS came around 11.00, and our chairman Prof. Sam Karunaratne, Dr.Faiz Marikkar, other lectures and, some lectures from other universities waiting to welcome him.


His speech was one of best speeches I ever heard, even though I couldn't here it completely. Full with humours, widoms, and inspiration. He explains about, free software and, why it is important for the better society. Then he did St. IGNUcius (from church of EMACS) show. crowed loved it. He said "I Bless your computer my child". :-). RMS gave away some stickers to the audience @ the end of the event. He also gave, five batches for the organizing committee.
I got one as well. Ven. Metthavihari and Chamath managed to clear the ubuntu CD from the custom's which Canonical had couriered. They came before RMS finishes his speech. There were about 600 cds, but there were vanished within few seconds.

After his speech seems like most of our students who didn't admire Free Software, started admiring it. Funny things happen to me as well. I lost my phone, and found it. It was on the podium under the bag of RMS. Finally Many thanks to every one who helped to organize the event.

In the evening Me, Niroshan, Nidika and Udara event to UoC for the geekout, but came early since RMS had to leave early.

So......, it happens

Yeah, Richard Stallman came to SLIIT. we had a great event. and in the evening went to UCSC for the geek out ,but RMS has to go quickly. So we came early. I just came home from UCSC bit tired. I 'll promise you to put a blog entry on the event very soon.

Richard Stallman will be @ SLIIT

Richard Stallman one of the most influential person in the recent history, great philosopher and a hacker is now in Sri Lanka. He came to Sri Lanka yesterday(14th). And he will be coming to SLIIT( Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology) 18th of January. Here is you chance to see him live. and listen to him.
Come to Lalith Athulathmudali Auditorium, SLIIT Malabe on 18th January 10.00 AM.

Okey. Who is RMS ?

He is the founder of the Free Software Foundation. Founder of the GNU project . The author of the GNU Emacs text editor, gcc compliers, and GNU General Public License.

To find about more about RMS go to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman

To Find out more about event go to; http://www.foss.lk

Free Software foundation web site : http://www.fsf.org/

Gnu Project : http://www.gnu.org

Above photo is taken from Wikipedia Website.

My First Blog

I was thinking for sometimes about witting a blog. But i didn't happen until today. Any way today was a horrible day. Bomb blast in Nugegoda and I was just there @ The Linux Centre. I feel i am still in a kind of a shock. 16 were dead and 36 were injured, that what I heard from the news. Ok i don't want to write about bomb blast in my first blog.

Lets Talk about some techno stuff.

I downloaded and try netbeans 6.0 Release Candidate2. Netbeans have improved lot since its last release 5.5.1. It's new ruby support is great. As well as improved Java support. You can really bring down your development time using these tools. They let developer to develop application on-the-fly. Using netbeans modules to build my applications is one of the cool features of Netbeans. It is there with the earlier version as well but it 6.0 it has new features.
http://www.netbeans.org/download/flash/netbeans_60/jl_preso_vislib/player.html
Check this video tute it'll give you good introduction to these features.

I am waiting until the final release. This might be the only IDE I need.