Nikhil Dev

I always wanted to start working on Linux hearing to the image build up that people have put up. So one fine day about 4 months back, I downloaded the image, burnt it onto a CD and took it home to install that on my computer. The flavour that I downloaded was Ubuntu 5.10. I made some extra space on my newly bought SATA hard drive and the initial stages went pretty good. The problem arose when after the installation I rebooted and I got this message called “Failed to start X system(your Graphical User Interface)”. I tried Red Hat linux as well that I had obtained from one of my friend and even that installed gave me the same problem. I was absolutely new to Linux and did not know any head or tail of it. I did not know any shell commands. I just wanted to start using it expecting that it would not pose any problem, but then I hit this wall.

So this is what I am doing today. I downloaded the copy of Microsoft Virtual PC that Microsoft has made free now and and I am trying to use the Live CD provided by Ubuntu on that. If this works, then I believe that virtual pc is providing Ubuntu with the generic video drives and that should be a problem. I am not yet done with the booting. If this works, the the workaround for people who are on Windows with AMD machines on MSI boards can now take advantage of Linux this way.

Right now I am still wwaiting for the damn Live CD to boot my virtual machine fully and passing time by blogging. Will record the results later.

I was so sick of using firefox all this while that I went out in search for a really fast browser that satisfies my need. Test something called L-meleon which is another browser on the Gecko engine but found it to be the same. Have been trying Flock for sometime as I was impressed with the features and again found that the startup time was pretty too much. So what I had to do now was to search on Windows browser comparision. And found that the best browser of all would be Opera in all minimum requirements off a browser. The present release stable version is 9. I was surprised with the startup time which was less than a second. Firefox takes me close to 5 seconds for the same. Also the level of customizability is quite equeal. But I like the way Opera handles the tabs and the address bar. On the whole I would give Opera 9 a 9/10.

With a lot of effort I finally managed to have my domain crawled on Google. Just gave in a site search try and was really surprised to have about 27 pages crawled on the first go. So the take aways here are
1. If you see that your site is not crawled at all, possibilities are that your site was penalized for some reason. Go through the webmaste guidelines and ensure that your site abides by all of them.
2. If still there are no changes, try having Google sitemaps installed on your domain and submit a reinclusion request stating that you suspect that your domain was penalized and the reason why you think that your site should be shown.

I will write more on this topic in detail later.

There have abeen a lot of people who are afraid to install Ubuntu cos they have never done that before and would not like to screw things up for the Windows system that they are running now. I researched some on this and found this video that shows you the dual boot installation in detail and practical.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6104490811311898236

I was going through one of these articles on Webmaster world and there is something new that I came across. As for now nobody must have imagined that the amount of time a user spends on the page also affects the way Google ranks its URLs. It is said that if a user navigates from a particular page in 5 seconds, Google will consider your pages to be rubbish. To me this seems logical in two aspects. 1 is that for people looking for actual textual content, the tactic would be good and not the pages that are spamming. 2 is that for people who are looking for only the links on the page to navigate to another page, this would fail. Now how can you understand this concept in detail?

We all know that there is something called Google amalytics that helps you track your page hits and statistics. Now this is something that plays a major role in raking the page this way cos when the analytics code is executed on your page, thats when Google starts timing the user on the page. If you look at the intructions on Google analytics that are given on the site, it asks you to place the analytics code at the end of the page. But I would recommend you to have it immediately after the starting of the BODY tag. cos even if the page is not read completely, the analytics timer will start ticking once the user sees something from the BODY section of the page. That way, you get him to hold on for some more time.