Remasterme PCLinuxOS I A Gem Tool for Home Users

PCLinuxOS offers a small but nice package called "mklivecd" that will make an identical , and exact clone of your system if ran properly.

This tool will let you make a clean ISO of your custom made PCLinuxOS which you can write to a CD/DVD depending upon the size of the ISO that was generated from your running system.


A simple command "mklivecd new.iso" as root in shell will do the job for you promptly and without much haste. I have tried it many times and my copies of remastered PCLinuxOS are perfectly out of the box on my system in case I ever need to do a fresh install .

PCLinuxOS 2008 Minime comes with a GUI for mklivecd or remaster. It works fine too but the choice of adding extra options in adding advanced configuration of your remaster copy is little confusing and I did not find any documentations for it either. Besides it also failed on me many times while I was trying to make a remaster copy so I quit using it . But I guess it might work for others as Texstar and his team has spent lots of efforts in making this tools with GUI so it has to work or else they won`t include it in PCLinuxOS 2008 Minime.

I urge all home users to try using this nice tool to have a back up of their systems. There are few important points to be borne in mind before you plan to make a remaster of your system.

1: It is better to make a remaster of custom built functional system which worked for you flawlessly.
2. Remove all cache by ~apt-get clean command before you make your remaster as this will clean all unwanted data and lessen the size of your ISO .
3. Remove all data from your home directory because it will be copied into your ISO automatically increasing the size of your ISO.
4. Once you have successfully generated the ISO, do its md5sums and write it down so that you can later compare the md5sums of your burned CD/DVD and your remastered ISO.
5. Use CDRW/DVDRW for burning your remastered ISO as you would be making more and more ISOs later and you can always write them to same media.

I hope these small notes will help a lot of people to benefit from this amazing package that PCLinuxOS offers. I am sure it works for everybody as it does for me.

Eye Candy of Cairo-Dock for Home Users

I often repeat that GNU/Linux Home Users strive for stability ,user friendliness and beauty for their desired and chosen distributions.

Cairo-dock is an animated and very beautiful application launch bar displayed on the desktop comparable to Mac OS X's Dock but offers more options in it.

It is themable , re sizable and can be easily ran and exited at any time. It is compatible with Beryl ,Compiz-fusion and KDE through Kwin .

The Cairo-dock Home Page is offering further details about this light eye-candy tool for any GNU/Linux desktop.

The project page for Cairo-dock is found at BerliOS where the latest binaries are available for download and you can submit your bugs or feature requests.

I installed Cairo-dock on my Pardus 2007.3 desktop through "Pisi" package manager and it works seamlessly.

PCLinuxOS 2008 doesn`t offer Cairo-dock package and I wish that Texstar and his team should not keep us deprived from this beautiful tool when we have almost everything available on PCLinuxOS repositories.

I have also put a request for Cairo-dock Granular Package at the forum of Granular Linux . Lets hope Anurag and Chrisz considers making these packages for Granular 1.0 Final which is to be released sooner I guess.

" my cybershot ventures" I Artististic expressions of a Medical Doctor

I have friends, we all have friends. But then some friends are more than friends, they are life time happening with us.

Samir Rana is a Medical Doctor and a health care administrator but he rarely introduces himself as a doctor ( even his blog page

doesn`t say he is a doctor). He is an artistic mind with artisitc talents and a life time fanaticism and craving for expression of arts.

He is running "my cybershot ventures" blog where he is expressing his artistic talents through the eye of digital photography. He captures the scenes of common happenings around us which we often ignore and brings the beauty that lies hidden in those trivial scenes into our vision.

His artistic potentials were always there, he kept looking for an outlet, a source of expression of his inner world. This took him along a long path of sitting on shrines, practicing "Malang" life and reincarnating as Sidharta Gautama.

It looks like he has found a real canvas of "blogging" this time where he is all ready to paint every single color of his inner artistic turmoil wildly and in a care free manner.

I am sure this will let his mercurial soul calm down a bit and let the whole world know what he always wanted to tell them.