interview(s), job(s) and offer(s)

I had been rigorously interviewed by some of the most high profile software developing firms in India including GE India, Slide Share, Oracle and Amazon.
Here are the stats
Slide share : interviewed by tech expert, tech lead India, India Head, CTO. Finally Not selected!!
Amazon.com : cleared 3 rounds. Finally Not selected!!
GE India : cleared all 5 rounds. Finally In.
Oracle India : cleared all 6 rounds. HR asked to wait for final approval, which is happened to be in US. Finally got the offer letter.
Had I not been selected by two companies, I would have appeared for SlideShare with much more sincerity and would have cracked it too.. probably :)
All in all I didn't let down myself. I'm kinda happy with the result. I was able to clear all the coding and aptitude rounds and was able to convince almost all of my interviewers. Details about the interviews and questions they asked will be covered in subsequent posts :)
Ok finally I settled down in GE India, which has great work culture, people and also the work. I like it more because I have bad experience from my old employer.

Linux Experience

Hi, I am writing after a long time and of course my life has changed big time. During the last post I was in college and now it's been around 7 months or so since I have been working in an IT company, however the main thing that I am gonna discuss here, is the change of the machine I posses. I had AMD Athlon and now its Dell i5. I wanted it to be Open Source so I installed Fedora. I started with Fedora 8 then 9 and 11 until I had settled with 12.

Previous versions were not compatible with the machine given the latest hardware I had. The distro seemed nice and complete but I was unable to listen to music since media players do not have codecs sufficient enough to play media. Finally I found mplayer that was perfect and since then I had been using it without a problem. It's been playing all the extensions and all the types of media. However it was a command line player and didn't come up with a GUI. Ultimately I got smplayer which was a wrapper over the mplayer. It was just a GUI and used mplayer to play the media behind the scene.
I did many experiments with it but thats for subsequent posts.
Happy Gnuing