Happy Birthday to Apple (Macintosh)

On Jan. 24 Apple Macintosh will turns 30 years old.

Over the years, the popular computer has been molded into many shapes and sizes, constantly in redesign mode. Championed by the revolutionary Steve Jobs, Mac computers have risen to the top of the food chain, one of Apple’s many landmark achievements. These days, most Mac computers are sleek and slender, sporting a crisp display and a variety of different size options.

Let`s see the remarkable evolution of the personal computer.

1. Lisa – In 1983, Apple debuted its first model, the Apple Lisa. The computer took more than three years to make, and around $50 million to develop. Named after Steve Jobs’ daughter, the computer was quite pricey, clicking in at nearly $10,000 (about $25,000 by today’s standards). The high price tag repelled most consumers, and the computer sold poorly.
Though not technically a Mac, the Lisa nonetheless influenced the first Macintosh, which Jobs debuted on Jan. 24, 1984.
2. Macintosh XL – In order to ramp up Lisa sales, Apple redesigned the model in 1985, renamed it the Macintosh XL and lowered the price to $3,495.

3. Macintosh 128K - Introduced in 1984, the 128 model was the first true Macintosh personal computer, and retailed for about $2,495. With its 9-inch screen, 128K of RAM and “easy to use” accessibility, the Mac was off to a robust start.

4. Macintosh 512K - Released right after the 128, the 512 was virtually the same, but had four times more memory.

5. Macintosh Plus - Enter 1986, when the Macintosh Plus emerges into the market. It had 1MB of RAM and cost about $2,599. It also came with an SCSI port, which meant users could install external hard drives.

6. Macintosh Portable - The first battery-powered Mac creation entered the arena in 1989. It was considered fast for its time, operating at 16 MHz. Though it was quick, the Portable sold poorly and weighed nearly 16 pounds.

7. Powerbook – The Powerbook came out a few years later, in 1991, and was Apple’s first true portable computer, thanks to its lightness. The floppy disk drive was a separate, external entity. The line had staying power, continuing until 2006.

8. iMac – The iMac debuted in 1998 and was one of Apple’s first big projects after anointing Steve Jobs its CEO. Translucent and brightly colored, the iMac was a stylish step above its predecessors, and did away with floppy disk drives, opting instead for USB ports.

9. iMac G4 - The iMac G4 marveled tech lovers with its flexibility and flattened shape. Because of its thin neck, the screen could be pulled forward and swiveled around. The 2002 creation literally had audiences gasping during Steve Jobs’ keynote.

10. MacBook - Apple trotted out the new MacBook in 2006, noted for its built in “iSight” webcam, crisp and glossy LCD screen and integrated keyboard.

11. MacBook Air - The holy grail of modern day MacBooks, the Air is Apple’s sleekest invention, touted as the world’s thinnest notebook (due in part to the removal of the CD/DVD drive). Jobs unveiled it in 2008, and the line has continued to pump out redesigned and updated models. The original had an 80GB hard drive and bright LED backlighting.

12. iMac today - Thinner and larger than past models, the modern iMac features a slender screen and a detached keyboard and mouse. The most recent 27-inch version sports a lighting-fast Intel processor and Fusion Drive data storage, which combines a traditional hard drive with Flash storage.

Source: http://mashable.com/

Check the Current Location of Indian Trains on Google Map

The Indian Railways has just launched RailRadar, a useful website that shows the current geographical location of any train on a Google Map.

To get started, you can zoom-in to any location /city on the map to see all the trains which are arriving at the station or have just departed. Or you can use expand the left sidebar to search trains by name, by train number or by the station name.

If you click a particular train, the map will also show the exact route of the train including all the stops and the current location of the train. The train markers highlighted in blue indicate trains that are running on time while the red markers indicate trains that are delayed or behind schedule.

Send SMS From Gmail For Free In India And Internationally

Chat feature in Gmail is capable of doing more than instant messaging or text chat. You probably know about video conferencing and voice calls from Gmail but now it went one step ahead and brought Free SMS in Gmail. You can send message in SMS via Gmail to your contacts from any country even when they are offline.

SMS in Gmail isn’t exactly new feature. I mean some of you may have already enabled it from Labs but used to get an error that mobile carriers is not supported. But now, Gmail welcomes you with “Free SMS in Gmail” pop up giving the list of mobile networks supported in India and 50 other countries.

In India, it supports Aircel, IDEA, Loop Mobile, MTS, Reliance, Tata DoCoMo, Tata Indicom, Vodafone (Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Gujarat, A.P, Bihar, W.B. & A & N, Assam, N.E. circles only). I am still wondering why the giants like Airtel and BSNL aren’t in the list.

How To Send SMS From Gmail

There are two ways to send SMS from Gmail:

1. Enter the phone number in the text box which reads “Search, chat..” and Gmail offers an option to send SMS to that number. You may have to assign a contact to that number before sending.
   
2. If phone number is already associated with any contact. This is generally seen in the Google accounts associated with Android phones where contacts have phone numbers. In this case, open the chat window and click on More on upper-right corner of chat box and click “Send SMS”.
   

1. 50 SMS Credits or 50 SMS are free initially in every account. After that, you will have to buy credits.
2. If you send a reply message, your SMS credit is increased by five.
3. Each account has unique phone number.
4. If you receive SMS from someone, you can reply to that number and person will receive that message in conversation.
5. Person from any country can send Free SMS to any country from Gmail. (check the supported mobile operators)
6. If you receive an unwanted SMS message from Gmail Chat, you can block future messages from the sender. Just reply to the message with the word ‘BLOCK’.

SMS From Gmail on Phone

This is how it appears when you receive SMS from Gmail contact. Phone number is different (not related with the user). Email ID of the contact is shown in email followed by the message sent.

As you can notice, the number from which SMS is received is a general/regular number not premium one. So, sending reply to this one will charge normally.

That is indeed a nice move by Gmail but I am waiting for the day when Gmail will introduce Email alerts via SMS. That is more important because Data connection may not be available all the time and some people check mails often.

Top 6 Open Source Disk Cloning and Imaging Softwares

Disk cloning is nothing but the process of copying the contents of one hard disk (or partition) to another disk or to an "image" file. I make backup regularly using rsnapshot tool, but I also clone my hard disk once or twice a month. This option allows me to restore my OS and installed software quickly. Linux comes with various utilities for performing disk cloning. In this post, I'm going to list my favourite open source disk cloning softwares that has saved my butt multiple times.

#1: Old good dd command

The dd command allows you to make the low-level copying and conversion of data in raw format. It copies the standard input to the standard output. It can also be used for backing up the boot sector (MBR) of a hard drive or destroy data using /dev/zero or /dev/random.

Examples

To clone /dev/sdb3 partition to another partition called /dev/sdc3, enter:
# dd if=/dev/sdb3 of=/dev/sdc3 bs=4096 conv=noerror

You can clone a hard disk /dev/sdc to /dev/sdd:
# dd if=/dev/sdc of=/dev/sdd bs=1M conv=noerror

You can duplicate a disk partition called /dev/sda1 as a disk image file called backup.sda1.mm.dd.yy.img file:
# dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/path/to/safe/location/backup.sda1.07.28.12.img bs=4096 conv=noerror

OR
# dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/nfs/backup/images/backup.sda1.07.28.12.img bs=1M conv=noerror

To restore an image, run:
# dd if=/nfs/backup/images/backup.sda1.07.28.12.img of=/dev/sda1 bs=1M conv=noerror

The dd command can make backup of any partition regardless of an operating system. You can use it with FreeBSD / OpenBSD / Mac OS X / MS-Windows and so on:


(Video.01: dd clone hard disk demo)
Say hello to ddrescue

The ddrescue command copies data from one file or block device to another, trying hard to rescue data in case of read errors. The dd command will fail but ddrescue will continue:
# ddrescue /dev/sda /dev/sdb

#2 partimage - Backup partitions into a compressed image file

The partimage command backs up disk partitions into image files and restores them (much like Ghost). You can use the apt-get command under Debian / Ubuntu Linux to install the same:
# apt-get install partimage

If you are using RHEL / Fedora / SL / Red Hat / CentOS Linux, turn on EPEL repo and type the following yum command:
# yum install partimage

Type partimage as follows to see various options:
# partimage

Sample outputs:


Fig.01: partimage in action
You can now follow on screen instructions to backup or restore images.

Examples

Create an image of /dev/sda2 (make sure /dev/sda2 is not mounted):
# partimage -z1 -o -d save /dev/sda2 /nfs/backup/laptop.wks01.sda1.home_07_08_2012.gz

You can restore it as follows:
# partimage restore /dev/sda2 /nfs/backup/laptop.wks01.sda1.home_07_08_2012.gz.000

See how to use this fast software to backup and restore images:


(Video.02: partimage command demo)
Please note that partimage will only copy data from the used portions of the partition. This is done for speed and efficiency, free blocks are not written to the image file. Since the partition is processed on a sequential sector basis disk transfer time is maximized and seek time is minimized.

A note about server software

Partitions can be saved across the network using the partimage network support, or using Samba / NFS (Network File Systems). This provides the ability to perform an hard disk partition recovery after a disk crash. You need to install partimage-server package which provides server daemon for remote imaging, much like Ghost. See documentation for more info.

#3: Clonezilla

If you are looking to replace Norton Ghost Corporate Edition, try Clonezilla. It provides the following features:

Disaster recovery
Disk cloning
Disk imaging
Deployment solution
Free and Open source
This software allows you to do bare metal backup and recovery. Clonezilla works in any one of the following mode:

Clonezilla live - Use this at home or for single machine backup and restore.
Clonezilla server edition - Use this at office or data center for massive deployment, it can clone many (40 plus!) computers simultaneously. Clonezilla saves and restores only used blocks in the harddisk. This increases the clone efficiency.

Fig.02: Clonezilla in action
=> Download clonezilla software.

#4 Mondo rescue

Another good free disaster recovery software that I use frequently. It works with Linux /FreeBSD and supports clone tapes, disks, USB devices, network and CD/DVD as backup media, multiple filesystems, LVM, software and hardware RAID. Restoration may be done from a physical media including OBDR tape support, or CD/DVD/USB media, or from the network through PXE.

This software used by Lockheed-Martin, Nortel Networks, Siemens, HP, IBM, NASA's JPL, the US Dept of Agriculture, dozens of smaller companies, and tens of thousands of users around the world.


Fig.03: Mondo Rescue in action
=> Download Mondo Rescue software.

#5 Redo backup and recovery

Redo backup and recovery is a free backup and disaster recovery software. It runs from a bootable Linux CD image, features a GUI, and is capable of bare-metal backup and recovery of disk partitions. It can use external hard drives and network shares. It is the simplest point and click open source backup and recovery solution available. You can store images on an external drive or network shares such as nfs based shared folders.


Fig.04. Redo backup and recovery software in action
=> Download redo backup and recovery software.

#6 Trinity Rescue Kit

Trinity Rescue Kit or TRK is a free live Linux distribution that aims specifically at recovery and repair operations on MS-Windows systems, but is equally usable for Linux recovery issues such as as rescue, repair, password resets and disk cloning. Some features:

Reset windows passwords with the improved winpass tool.
5 different virusscan products integrated in a single uniform commandline with online update capability.
Full ntfs write support thanks to ntfs-3g
Winclean, a utility that cleans up all sorts of unnecessary temporary files on your computer.
Clone computers over the network via multicast.
Contributed backup utility called "pi", to automate local machine backups
Easy script to find and mount all local filesystems
Recovery and undeletion of files with utilities and procedures
Recovery of lost partitions
Evacuation of dying disks
2 rootkit detection uitilities
And much more

Fig.05Trinity Rescue Kit in action
=> Download trinity rescue kit software.

My favorite software

For bare metal restore I prefer dd command (gziped images) as it includes copy of the boot sector, boot partition and the root partition. The dd command works well for small setup or home users. But, for a large setup and data center, I prefer to use either clonezilla or mondo rescue softwaee due to ease of use and reliability.

Have a favorite open source disk cloning and disaster recovery software? Got an alternative? Let us know your preferred app in the comments below.

You should follow me on twitter here or grab rss feed to keep track of new changes.



{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
6r00k14n August 25, 2012
I have used the Clonezilla Live disc, which is fantastic, but if you are not so certain about what you are doing, try PartedMagic (trust me, you do not want to pick the disc you want to copy as the target).

It is a bootable Linux CD, that includes several disc tools, including Clonezilla, in a terminal window (so that you can use other tools to validate your decisions).

REPLY

FX August 26, 2012
Ha, dd is still the best for quick and easy cloning :)
Once, I even piped dd to netcat to remotely clone a partition, best hack I ever did, and it just took a few seconds!

REPLY

Bubba August 26, 2012
For the longest time, we used PING (http://ping.windowsdream.com/) as a very capable replacement for Symantec Ghost. We even went as far as building a custom boot/recovery CD for use by our remote users to restore a default image from a hidden partition on the hard drive. It worked very well.

REPLY

deepak August 26, 2012
target disk should be equal or more size in clonezilla, this is the drawback i have seen, eg. i have 10G data on 50G disk to clone my target disk should be equal or more that 50G

REPLY

Flo August 26, 2012
Very good article (as usual…)

For more complex network backup, there is also Bacula :
http://www.bacula.org/fr/

Otherwise, I always use Clonezilla / DRBL (http://drbl.sourceforge.net/) since several years without any problem.

REPLY

ilion1250 August 26, 2012
Partimage is my choose, easy, secure and reliable, I have been used it; to clone the system partitions of my PC and laptop and I never had any issue.
To backup the /home partitions I prefer rsync.

REPLY

DontForget August 27, 2012
SystemIMager? http://sourceforge.net/projects/systemimager/ Has a bunch of different features, like torrenting, and “updating” installed images.

REPLY

PNA Prasanna August 27, 2012
I used to run dd command for creating junk files for checking user quota.

But these are very good stuff.

REPLY

Esteban August 27, 2012
I use FOG, is a free, open source computer cloning solution

REPLY

m.ardito August 28, 2012
filesystemarchiver is also a useful tool, as it saves one or more partitions at the filesystem level, in compressed archives. it can then restore them also on smaller disks, if the case. i find it useful, too.

REPLY

Vivek Gite August 28, 2012
Hey all,

Thanks for sharing additional tools :)

REPLY

xandry August 28, 2012
> Fig.01: partimag in action

“partimage”, not “partimag”

> from the used portions

“partition”, not “portion”

> Redobackup in action

Keep space sympols

Virtual Labs by IIT

Virtual Labs Project Launched

 

The  Union Minister for Human Resource Development, Government of India todaylaunched Virtual Labs — a collection of ninety-one virtual laboratories containing hundreds of experiments in nine disciplines of science and engineering. As part of Ministry of Human Resource Development(MHRD)’s National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (NMEICT), Virtual Labs is part of a comprehensive undertaking to provide easily accessible and high quality education throughout India.

 

Virtual Labs’ primary focus is to provide graduate and undergraduate college and university students with the ability to perform their required laboratory experiments using only the World Wide Web, a standard computer, and an Internet connection. Virtual Labs allow students to practice and better learn the science and engineering behind the experiments that they are required to perform. Virtual Labs also allows the sharing of costly equipment across the country, and in very rural areas, students will be able to perform experiments that they would not otherwise be able to access.

 

Nearly 300 department heads, faculty, and staff representing 152 institutions have been trained across India. Over 20 Nodal Centres have been created, institutions who have expressed their interest to champion Virtual Labs in their organisations and geographical areas.

 

The Pilot Phase of the Virtual Labs project started in April 2009.  During this phase, approximately twenty labs were developed as proof of concept.  The Main Phase began inApril 2010.  So far, over 80 Virtual Labs have been developed, and are undergoing field trials in various parts of the country.

 

Two types of virtual labs have been developed under this project. In the Simulation Based Virtual Labs the experiments are modeled using mathematical equations.  The simulations are carried out remotely at a high-end server, and the results are communicated to the student over the internet.  Simulation based Virtual Labs are scalable and can cater to a large number of simultaneous users.

 

Using the Remote Triggered Virtual Labs the actual experiments are triggered remotely.  The output of the experiment (being conducted remotely) is communicated back to the student over the internet.  This class of Virtual Labs gives the student the output of real-time experiments.  Typically, time-slots are booked before conducting such experiments.

 

All Virtual Labs can be accessed through a common website: www.vlab.co.in. At the user end, a PC and broadband connectivity enables the user to access Virtual Labs.

 

These Virtual Labs will be very useful for Engineering College Students who do not have access to good lab-facilities, High-school students, whose inquisitiveness will be triggered, possibly motivating them to take up higher-studies, Researchers in different institutes who can collaborate / share equipment and engineering colleges, who can benefit from the content and related teaching resources.

Currently 85 Virtual Labs have been developed comprising of 769 experiments. Trainings and workshops have been held all over India to disseminate knowledge of these Virtual Labs. Future efforts will involve development of virtual labs in different subjects and wide dissemination of this knowledge.

 

A Collaborative Platform for Development of Virtual Labs has been created that assists the faculty with authoring and maintaining Virtual Labs. The platform hosts over 825 experiments developed by many of the partner institutions. The Collaborative Platform provides the server side architecture for ensuring that virtual labs run securely, can effectively serve thousands of students simultaneously, and reserve time slots for experiments that require scheduling. The Collaborative Platform also provides tools to help teachers monitor their students’ progress and make changes to the instructional material.

 

Student interest in Virtual Labs has also been enthusiastic. The Virtual Labs site (vlab.co.in) has had 233,570 site visits and 1,034,443 page visits in just the last 6 months. There are over 4500 registered users from 134 countries and handles around 100GB of traffic per month with visitors from India, United States, Malaysia, Philippines, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Germany, Pakistan and so on.

 

With the launch of Virtual Labs Indian students will have easy access to an encyclopedia of science and engineering knowledge presented in a way that is engaging, immersive, and enjoyable. Virtual Labs will allow students to explore, discover, and learn wherever they are and at their convenience.

http://www.vlab.co.in/

View Full Universe

http://htwins.net/scale2/scale2.swf?bordercolor=white

32-bit and 64-bit explained

Will this 32-bit software run on my 64-bit operating system? or

Will this 64-bit software run on my computer?

If you've asked these questions then this tutorial should help you to understand the concepts of 32-bit and 64-bit computing. We'll look at your computer system as three parts: the hardware, the operating system and the application programs. At the end we'll look at some of the common questions people have.

32-bit versus 64-bit

As the number of bits increases there are two important benefits.

• More bits means that data can be processed in larger chunks which also means more accurately.
• More bits means our system can point to or address a larger number of locations in physical memory.

32-bit systems were once desired because they could address (point to) 4 Gigabytes (GB) of memory in one go. Some modern applications require more than 4 GB of memory to complete their tasks so 64-bit systems are now becoming more attractive because they can potentially address up to 4 billion times that many locations.

Since 1995, when Windows 95 was introduced with support for 32-bit applications, most of the software and operating system code has been 32-bit compatible.

Here is the problem, while most of the software available today is 32-bit, the processors we buy are almost all 64-bit.

So how long will the transition from 32-bit to 64-bit systems take?

The main issue is that your computer works from the hardware such as the processor (or CPU, as it is called), through the operating system (OS), to the highest level which is your applications. So the computer hardware is designed first, the matching operating systems are developed, and finally the applications appear.

We can look back at the transition from 16-bit to 32-bit Windows on 32-bit processors. It took 10 years (from 1985 to 1995) to get a 32-bit operating system and even now, more than 15 years later, there are many people still using 16-bit Windows applications on older versions of Windows.

The hardware and software vendors learnt from the previous transition, so the new operating systems have been released at the same time as the new processors. The problem this time is that there haven't been enough 64-bit applications. Ten years after the PC's first 64-bit processors, installs of 64-bit Windows are only now exceeding those of 32-bit Windows. Further evidence of this inertia is that you are probably reading this tutorial because you are looking to install your first 64-bit software.

Your computer system in three parts

Now we'll look at those three components of your system. In simple terms they are three layers with the processor or CPU as the central or lowest layer and the application as the outermost or highest layer as shown below:

To run a 64-bit application you need support from all lower levels: the 64-bit OS and the 64-bit CPU.

To run a 64-bit operating system you need support from the lower level: the 64-bit CPU.

This simplification will be enough for us to look what happens when we mix the 32-bit and 64-bit parts. But if you want to understand the issue more deeply then you will also need to consider the hardware that supports the CPU and the device drivers that allow the OS and the applications to interface with the system hardware.

What 32-bit and 64-bit combinations are compatible and will work together?

This is where we get to the practicalities and can start answering common questions.

The general rule is that 32-bit will run on a lower level 64-bit component but 64-bit does not run on a lower level 32-bit component:

• A 32-bit OS will run on a 32-bit or 64-bit processor without any problem.
• A 32-bit application will run on any combination of OS and processor
• But 64-bit application will only run on a 64-bit OS and a 64-bit OS will only run on a 64-bit processor.

This table illustrates the same rule:

Table 1: What is compatible between 32-bit and 64-bit parts of the system

	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Application Program	32-bit	64-bit	32/64-bit	32-bit	32-bit	64-bit
Operating System (OS)	32-bit	32-bit	64-bit	32-bit	64-bit	64-bit
Processor (CPU)	32-bit	32-bit	32-bit	64-bit	64-bit	64-bit

The main reason that 32-bit will always run on 64-bit is that the 64-bit components have been designed to work that way. So the newer 64-bit systems are backward-compatible with the 32-bit systems (which is the main reason most of us haven't moved to 64-bit software).

An example of backward compatibility is Windows 64-bit. It has software called WOW64 that provides compatibility by emulating a 32-bit system. See the article How Windows 7 / Vista 64 Support 32-bit Applications if you want to know more. One important point that is made in that article is that it is not possible to install a 32-bit device driver on a 64-bit operating system. This is because device drivers run in parallel to the operating system. The emulation is done at the operating system level so it is available to the higher layer, the application, but it is not available to the device driver which runs on the same level.

Hardware virtualization is the exception to the rule

Another question many people have is whether a 32-bit system can run 64-bit software. As more people are looking to use 64-bit Windows they are wanting to try it out on their existing systems. So we are getting more questions about whether they can run it on their 32-bit processor or under their 32-bit OS.

Following the general rule, we would expect that you cannot run 64-bit software on a 32-bit system. Except that there is one exception called virtualization.

Virtualization creates a virtual system within the actual system. Virtualization can be achieved in hardware or software but it works best if the virtual machine is created in the system hardware. The guest operating system is not aware that there is a host operating system already running. This is the way that a 64-bit operating system can think that it is running on 64-bit hardware without being aware that there is a 32-bit operating system in the mix.

The table below illustrates the result. Provided that the virtual machine can actually be created and isolated by the host operating system then the host OS is effectively removed from the equation so I've grayed it out. We can now apply the general rules for a non-virtualized system to the three remaining layers.

Table 2: What is compatible between different parts of a virtualized system

	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Application Program	32-bit	64-bit	32/64-bit	32-bit	32-bit	64-bit
Guest Operating System	32-bit	32-bit	64-bit	32-bit	64-bit	64-bit
Host Operating System	32-bit	32-bit	32-bit	32/64-bit	32/64-bit	32/64-bit
Processor (CPU)	32-bit	32-bit	32-bit	64-bit	64-bit	64-bit

Before you hurry away to try running 64-bit in a virtual machine, you must check that your computer BIOS supports hardware virtualization. If it does not then hardware virtualization will not work even if the CPU does support it.