My old enemy.....NVIDIA driver installation!

Note: I am a newbie in this field

Last time when I met you(NVIDIA graphics driver) in a battlefield(RHEL6), you messed up my display and effects.I looked up in google and found out that you didn't spare others too from your ill fate. We fought a long battle of installation,configuration and removal of packages and you held your ground and refused to budge.Finally after some configuring I was able to correct my display but graphical effects were subdued.I did not look further into getting things back up. The experience was hair pulling.Maybe that is why I lost so much hair.

Now again yesterday we met again on a new battlefield(Ubuntu 13.04) with I equipped with better knowledge and more zeal than last time.This battle began with my need to learn parallel programming and CUDA was a good choice for which I needed to install you.Following a blog post I installed the binary drivers from the main site but then you started showing your true colours.When I rebooted, the resolution got small (600x400) and unity disappeared.No launcher no dash.I followed some more blogs and forums. I tried blacklisting noveau drivers,updating kernels,configuring xorg,using nvidia-xconfig,installed ccsm,reinstalled glx,mesa and what all not. I got tired and fed up.But I did not give up.After a day and a half of frustuated struggling I restored my settings back. Here is a short summary of how I got back my settings.I hope this helps others from wasting their time on getting their displays back up.


STEPS:

1. Use Alt+Ctrl+F1 to go into text mode and login.

2. Stop the Xdisplay manager

sudo  /etc/init.d/lightdm stop

3. Restore the backup of xorg.conf

sudo mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf.backup /etc/X11/xorg.conf

4. Remove all nvidia drivers if you installed using apt-get

sudo apt-get --purge remove nvidia*

or

Run the following code to  uninstall the nvidia drivers

sudo ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_x64-319.49.run --uninstall

5. start the X server

startx

6.  Use Alt+Ctrl +T to open terminal and run ccsm (Compizconfig Settings Manager) and enable unity plugin

7.

Reboot

The Incredible Plan

Onam vacation begins. Razaq lies on his bed after a hectic journey from college, enthusiastic about the free time ahead. For the last few years onam vacation has been going dry. He wasted the precious 10 days of his life and on the final day he regretted all the time he wasted by playing games or watching movies or reading nonsense .

But this time?  No.

This time he has a plan.A plan so clever that the even the wedding planners will cry.  The motions in his intriguing brain are set.He sees a very productive vacation ahead. A vacation where he zooms through the 24-hour limit of day reading,learning,doing and also save the world once or twice.

But then,he realizes that this is what he did last year. Plan. Only Plan. Not only last year but also the year before. AND the year before.In the end whatever he planned, it was all the same.

With this sudden understanding he covers himself with a blanket and goes to sleep.

An Interesting Python Experience

Last week I saw a mail from Noufal Ibrahim, a computer science enthusiast, that he was planning to conduct an online session to teach python programming for a small group and asked for a suitable date.After attending his workshop on "Programming as Engineering" in my college I thought it would be great to attend the session as the workshop was very informative and fun.So I registered in a form prepared by him and suggested 15/9/13 to be a good date.Eventually the session was planned to be conducted on that date using talky.io, a video based web chat for groups.But it didnt turn out well and finally we turned to the good old text based group chat using Freenode.

The session started with a few students from other colleges as well and we were to learn python by writing a program that will get the photo of the day from Nat Geo's page and change our desktop background to that photo. Cool right? Thank Allah it wasn't just a hello world type session. He began with a quick intro to python and went on with the material prepared by him.

It was a very good experience. I got to learn some very interesting things about python and also created a cool program. The web chat experience was also new. Hope to attend such sessions in future.

Hello World!

                   After days and days of procrastination I have finally created my own blog and as a young man with background in computers I titled my post as Hello World .This blog is mainly to improve my writing skills.

                 So let me introduce myself. My name is Syed Suhail Ahmed and I am 20 years old at the time I am writing this post. I hail from Palakkad, a town in Kerala,India and belong to an Urdu speaking community.Urdu in Kerala? Strange eh? Well It's a long story better left for another post.I am a final year Computer Engineering student at MES College of Engineering Kuttippuram.

                 I was a Muslim by birth but now I am a Muslim by choice.Islam has been a great guiding light in the few years that I have got to know it deeply. I like technology and especially the knowledge of building new things even though I have not built much using this knowledge.The concept that you can implement what you learn has enhanced my interest in Computer Engineering.

I will be mostly bragging about my thoughts and post some technical content.To be frank I have no idea what I will be posting.So stay tuned.Good Night.