S. P. T. Krishnan's take on things…

I know all of you are just recovering from the iPhone launch and desperately waiting for the iPhone to be available near you. For me, I waiting when it will be available in Asia in general and Singapore in particular….

I have started using Mac OS X Tiger recently as a second system and I am mesmerized with the graphics, stability and user friendliness. Now, I wish for something more in OS XI and I have a reasoning why it might be possible as well. Let us first recall some history

1. OS X moved away from a proprieratory kernel to FreeBSD 5.0.
2. iPod entered and revolutionised the then crowded mp3 player market.
3. Apple recently moved its MacBook line from IBM processors to Intel processors.

Now, what could be a ultimate marriage of technologies… and this is my wish as well.

Will apple fork or move its Mac OS to a linux kernel ? and if it does, think about it… the power of the lastest greatest software and the most beautiful and intuitive user interface even built. Now the question is, why didn’t apple choose linux kernel in the first place when they choose FreeBSD5 as their base ?

Could it be GPL ? I don’t think so since apple is currently publishing the modified version of BSD used in Mac OSX as garwin.

So, what is the probability that Apple will do this ? They certainly are capable of doing so as they have demostrated recently through their hardware, software switch in Macbook. I lay my wish here.

What do you think ? do drop some comments below

Update (Jan 4 2009): this post is outdated in 2 ways… the latest version of ubuntu is 8.10 and the latest version of libjingle is 0.40 . I am no longer using libjingle as well

Here is my experience building libjingle** in my Ubuntu Linux 5.10. I spent nearly a day building it (including many u-turns). I am writing this how-to in the hope you will spend much less time. YMMV.

Contents:

1. Hardware tried on
2. Installation
   1. Download
   2. Installing dependencies using
      1. Synaptic package manager
      2. Direct compilation
3. Installing lilbjingle
4. Future Goodies

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Now you can ! … read on

I have always had the problem of losing my data in one of my operating systems’ partitions. If you are like me, you know the problem. Simply-stated, I dual-boot [Windows/Linux] every computer I lay my hands on…well, except my servers where there is only Linux always !

I know of atleast two methods to access the linux filesystem data in windows, each with its own pros and cons. If you guys know more ways with superset of features compared to those being offered by these marvellous pieces of code, simple post a comment.

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I was searching for a way to generate assemly codes from C codes for one of my projects.

I was looking for a tool which would create assembly codes from binary codes that were created using a compiler like gcc.

Looks like Life is much simpler. I made the discovery that there is a switch to gcc which directly created assembly codes from C codes.

The switch is -S.
syntax gcc -S program .c and you will get program.s in assembly

I tried the same with arm-linux-gcc, the cross-compiler for arm-architecture and it works there too!

Long live gcc