Nirmal Jayasinghe

Thanks for all the helpful comments. Nice to see there’s a community out there. I did it last night. This screenshot from my diary says it all. What I basically did was edit /ect/fstab to introduce hda1 and define a mount point by saying sudo mkdir /mnt/hda1. Then double click the disk icon in Computer folder and I have full write permitted access.

Thanks alot again.

Totem playing ‘Sometimes’- Britney Spears!! [.ogg version, of course]

I’m writing this proudly on OpenOffice from my brand-spanking new Edubuntu installation. Edubuntu is one of the greatest Linux distributions I’ve experienced so far. More closer to Ubuntu with it’s GNOME desktop environment, Edubuntu offers the very best in free software for education. It can work as a classroom server as well as standalone workstation, of which pleasures I’m going through right now.

Since my first-year second-semester in IT undergrad school I had dual boot Windows-Linux. So far I had Red Hat 9, which was damn old but as Linux did a damn good job. It had almost all stuff I needed in it’s installation media, so no prob even if it didn’t detect my modem meaning virtually I had no Internet. The biggest prob was it didn’t speak USB, which was a headache when transferring files. Almost all the software were old versions, like I was using OpenOffice 1.1.3 or something well even after the 2.0 was released.

Edubuntu walks very well around these problems What I had was [after my latest computer overhaul] was a Windows XP computer, with it’s hard disk divided into two partitions, one 15 GB with XP and the rest as another partition. I generously deleted it, freeing some 20+ GB for Linux. It’s better since I generally do all my computing on Linux and with the new installation, well, huh, I wonder why I paid even SLR 100 for XP. This is that great. You’ve got to try it.

The installation is fairly straightforward, and I’ll record it down here before I forget. I free the space, pop in the CD, and reboot. You need a bootable CD drive and I had to change my BIOS CMOS settings. Then it asks about basic language, keyboard layout and location questions, detects devices and lands on the disk partitioning. You’re asked to set network parameters but that step can be skipped. In the disk partitioning setup, there’s a direct option for free space. Since I had done this, well smooth sailing. Confirmation asked for, then almost autopilot. It took a bit of time to install the base system and other software. Guess it’s more time than Ubuntu or Kubuntu cause there are some edu-related software. Actually I originally opted for Ubuntu and then for Ubuntu, but since I had only 128MB RAM [I think] I couldn’t boot the latest versions with success. But I have no regrets: I’ve found my one true love [in computer operating systems, of course:-)].

The only probs so far are I still can’t mount my Windows partition [ughh..] and the screen flickers at 1024×768/75Hz. I tried reducing it to 70Hz which seemed to work, but I have defaulted for the moment to 824×632/75Hz something. It works.

So let me retire into the first night with my new love. I wonder whether either of us would get much sleep tonight..

What I can simply simply say is, these new desktop solution range Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Edubuntu is nothing but great.

Try it. You’ll love it. Get your free CD now from http://shipit.edubuntu.org

This astonishing piece of military hardware can fly to Mach 2.7 or nearly three times the speed of sound, and climb to 87,000 feet (27km). Flying it to that altitude is as close as one can come in to space without leaving the atmosphere. At that height, the sky is pitch black in daytime, and one can clearly see the curvature of the earth. The MiG-25 was designed to try to catch the US SR-71 spy plane, but according to official records it never did.[FirstAfricanInSpace]

Caught this amazing photo of one of my all-time favorite military jets in the history of history on FirstAfricanInSpace website. The venerable Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-25 Foxbat, a name which is reputed to have sent shivers down many spines (if there were any at all, just kidding) at the Pentagon during the height of the cold war.

The jet was undoubtedly one of the fastest aircraft in the world, probably after the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird and the North American XB-70 Valkyrie. It had a maximum speed of 3.2 Mach, albeit debatable, and had a service limit of 2.8 Mach (one was once observed over Sinai over Mach 3, but later was confirmed to have wrecked its engines in the process). Wing loading was around an amazing 135 lb/sq.ft., whereas takeoff and landing rolls were around 2km with T/O speeds around 200mph. The thing was actually designed to catch the B-70, but even when the bomber was canceled, the Soviets went ahead with the interceptor.

The engines were legendary Tumanskii R-31 turbojets, each rated at a thrust of 27010 lb with max. afterburner. They were fed from variable 2D inlets, into which a water-methanol mixture was injected at high speeds. Fuel capacity was 3830 Imperial Gallons [almost 15k kg of high density fuel], with a combat radius of 500-700 miles varying with the version. The radar was the mighty Smerch A, with a range of 31miles and a power of an amazing 600watts, which it used to ‘burn through’ hostile jamming. It was reputed to be able to kill rabbits near runways [at 200m], and it was a military offense to use it at low altitude.

The aircraft was said to be of rugged simple construction as almost all Soviet designs were reputed to be. The electronics were mainly old-age vacuum tube, which were easy to maintain and didn’t need alot of refrigeration in avionics bays. The airframe was hand-welded nickel steel, which made the jet weigh around 19000kg even when empty. It had an impressive ceiling of 80000 ft, which is almost space. It had set the world absolute altitude record at 36km and another, a zoom to 123523ft, is said to remain unbroken. A lot of information about Foxbat was revealed when a MiG-25 pilot defected to Japan in 1976 in a brand-new jet, which was subsequently dismantled at the Foreign Tech Division at the USAF Wright Patterson Air Force Base.

The jet is now almost outof service, with limited service (I think) in Russia and India [Sqn 102/photo-recce MiG-25RB/RUs]. It was even operated by the Iraqi Air Force at one time, and also by Syria and Algeria. It was not your average dogfighter given the wing loading, but was a stand-off robot-fighter killer armed with huge radar-guided beyond-visual-range missiles, sometimes the AA-6s.

Current operators of the MiG-25 in bright red and former operators in dark red (Wikipedia)

Wikipedia has more photos, news and stories.

References:

- Gunston, 1992

-Spick, 2002

Last Monday was the busiest day, trying to collect up a research proposal together in a hurry. To help it all, all institution labs were closed for online examinations and the only lab available didn’t have Linux. Pity, cause I only had LaTeX knowhow in that environment with the teTeX package. And then, Vishva dug up this LaTeX implementation for Windows in the form of MiKTeX. We couldn’t install it there so we had to undergo the insult of giving off the report in Word, but I got it onto my flash disk and brought home. And it was just cool.

Now I can whip up LaTeX formatted docs in Windows in a flash. I’ve got this wonderful text editor SciTE which can direct link up to the compiler for a particular language and compile on the go, and it works just cool for LaTeX. Type the LaTeX source in SciTE, and just press F7. It links up seamlessly with MikTeX implementation and drops a shiny new PDF on the source folder.

Fuckin’ awesome.