Inspirated

(Or: Using Wine where plain-water should have been more than enough.)

Packet Tracer is a network simulator for Cisco devices. Caveat: It runs only on Windoze. Hence, there are three possible solutions for someone in need of using Cisco simulation on Linux:

• Wine: Wine’s setup varies from distribution to distribution. If you’re using Ubuntu, following commands should do the trick:

  [user@host ~]$ sudo apt-get install wine [user@host ~]$ winecfg

  [user@host ~]$ sudo apt-get install wine [user@host ~]$ winecfg

  Alternatively, for Fedora/RHEL/CentOS, use:

  [user@host ~]$ sudo yum install wine [user@host ~]$ winecfg

  [user@host ~]$ sudo yum install wine [user@host ~]$ winecfg

  Followed by:

  [user@host ~]$ wine /path/to/PacketTracerSetup.exe

  [user@host ~]$ wine /path/to/PacketTracerSetup.exe

  Once installed, you end up with:

  
  (Click on the thumbnail for larger version.)

  Pretty much usable. Although, fonts appear hideously ugly on default settings. Fortunately, you can change their sizes by going to Options >> Preferences >> Fonts from the Main Menu.

• GNS3: Setting up this particular piece of software is considerably difficult and definitely an overkill for newbies. This blog attempts to bridge the difficulty by providing video tutorials for installation, but that does not make GNS3 any lesser intimidating for users not already familiar with Cisco terminology or network simulation. For example, you’ll have to scavenge the Internet for IOS images you want to use, something you’d never have to think about in Packet Tracer for its supported devices.
• Pursue Cisco to release Packet Tracer on Linux: I was a bit surprised when I spotted that Packet Tracer is actually based on the cross-platform Qt GUI toolkit which would make porting it to Linux a trivial task for developers. Regrettably, knocking some sense in Cisco execs’ head is likely to be a far more laborious task than either of the solutions before.

“Sparrows who emulate peacocks are likely to break a thigh.” — Burmese Proverb Some geek Buddha annoyed at the trend of software developers relying on emulation for portability

Update: Cisco had after all started providing a native Linux version of Packet Tracer since last summer which I somehow missed because of its lack of appearances in my initial Google search. Here are the download links:

Fedora RPM: Rapidshare Part 1, Rapidshare Part 2
Debian/Ubuntu Installer: Rapidshare Part 1, Rapidshare Part 2
Linux Addons: Rapidshare

“Evolution is God’s way of issuing upgrades.”

It’s a wonderful age to live in as an open-source enthusiast. The warm feeling is especially accentuated in one’s mind after recalling countless hours of hair-pulling trying to make that goddamned VGA monitor work with Red Hat Linux 6. Software for GNU/Linux has improved at an exponential rate. There are still plenty which lack the user-friendliness and all, but technologically the overall rate of improvement has been nothing short of astounding.

Ask any newcomer to the GNU/Linux world about their favorite open-source projects, and there’s a strong likelihood that the answer will be one of the “prominent big-guns”; the likes of Compiz Fusion, Firefox, KDE or Gnome. Ask any veteran the same question and you’re much more likely to get a diverse stock of answers ranging from Vim to Anjuta or probably even some obscure Window Manager like Fluxbox. The opinion about the most “improved” projects would thus be highly polarizing. Still and all, there are few projects which have eased my life substantially with their progress. To compliment the ones that have almost made me kiss virtual bits of code at one point or other, I’ve decided to choose the top five:

5. recordMyDesktop
   The Dark Ages: Recording a video of an X session was nothing less than a nightmare. With sound, all the more so. The popular method was to run a VNC server and then use a tool such as vnc2swf to capture the footage.
   The Messiah: Once you install recordMyDesktop and one of its GUI frontends, recording becomes as easy as launching it and selecting “Record”. Really, you don’t have to use multiple software now for doing something as simple as that.

4. NetworkManager
   The Dark Ages: You went to your workplace, geared up your Linux distribution and tried get some connectivity and to your utter horror, the Wireless network used WPA encryption for passphrase. wpa_supplicant was the command-line utility you could’ve used for connecting to such networks after hours of tinkering around, but it sadly wouldn’t have prevented you from getting fired because the execs weren’t that much amicable with open-source evangelism in the first place.
   The Messiah: Red Hat, for all the criticisms it receives for RHEL, is still the caring patron figure for desperate Linux users crying out for help. Hence, it’s no co-incidence that this project as well as next two on the list were initiated by the same company. NetworkManager makes mobile connectivity as peachy as it could’ve been. You spend a few days with NM on your notebook and it starts choosing the best network for you wherever you go, that too with least possible intrusion in your workflow.

3. SELinux Troubleshooter
   The Dark Ages: In this particular case, the dark ages don’t belong to that much a distant past since the cause of all the mess was also a recent innovation. Security Enhanced Linux, while obstinately preached by Red Hat and enabled by default on its shipped operating systems, was unanimously loathed by all system administrators who had at one point or other given up their hopes and had disabled it completely on their networks. The error messages it churned out on regular bases were not only cryptic, but also critically hampered regular everyday usage of their host operating systems.
   The Messiah: With improved default policies, the situation was somewhat resolved for general user. Nevertheless, irregularities still kept popping up occasionally and hence came SELinux Troubleshooter to the rescue. For every cryptic denial that SELinux now pops up, the Troubleshooter will analyze it and even suggest workarounds for them so that you don’t have to manually mess with policy modules every time something perfectly legitimate starts getting labeled as “unauthorized” access.

2. PulseAudio
   The Dark Ages: The music player was playing a song and you tried having a voice-call or playing another video = epic fail. The audio device was usable by only one application at a time. In fact, sound was the Achilles’ heel for default setups of pretty much every Linux distribution that existed.
   The Messiah: Playing a soundtrack in one application with volume tuned to max and having a video run in another with volume at half is no longer a fantasy. And no, ESD doesn’t even come close to PulseAudio in “seamless” multiplexing of such sounds. If you want more, Pulse can combine multiple soundcards into one and also — hold your breath — redirect audio streams to different hardware on the fly.

1. TrueCrypt
   The Dark Ages: Disk encryption had been an ultra-geek thing for quite a while, especially on Linux. Software that provided such features needed to have modules compiled manually and loaded into the running kernel which opened up a whole plethora of compatibility issues which almost always made newcomers decide against the whole idea per se.
   The Messiah: God bless the developer who had the idea of using FUSE in TrueCrypt for mounting encrypted containers. As a consequence, once a user has installed TrueCrypt, the whole thing doesn’t need to be recompiled again from time to time with updated kernels. Also, thanks to wxWidgets, the GUI has drastically improved too; making it easier for even Linux newbies to utilize disk encryption.

Fortunately, unlike commercial operating systems, GNU/Linux users don’t have to wait for decades before seeing actual new “innovations” in action. Who knows, maybe next year we’ll have LOLPython topping my list. Anything’s probable.

While going through the list of mentoring organizations last night, I realized that there was another software present in them which was dearly loved and efficiently understood by me at the same time. Yup, it’s my favorite distribution — Fedora. I’ve just submitted my application for creating an online reference manual browser which would be able to display info/man pages in hierarchical order of Fedora releases as well as allow its users to perform boolean searches in particular fields.

Summarizing my GSoC attempts so far, I’ve submitted two applications for projects with WordPress and Fedora respectively. The former is essential for my everyday blogging, whereas the latter was once essential for my everyday computing (but even though I use Fedora sparingly these days, I keep myself updated with all of its latest developments and happenings).

Although I can submit 18 more applications before 24th March, I believe in quality being superior to quantity. So this will be all from me for this summer — if neither of my applications get accepted, I’ll just keep improving my skills and try again in the next one.