Saturday, 31 October, 2009 I set up an offline Fedora 11 mirror in BCREC. I used the fedx makefile for the purpose of syncing the repository from my pocket HDD to the mirror PC ( an HP dual core system with Fedora 10 installed in it). I then setup a dhcpd server in the machine with the help of gdhcpd. I wrote a how to use the service and put it on the Desktop. I also wrote a fedora-local.repo which could be used by the clients to configure their machines to use the service. This should enable newbies without internet connection to get packages and softwares of Fedora 11.

11th October, 2009, I, Kishan and Meejanur started our journey to Malda for the workshop at IMPS College. We boarded the Gour Express from Burdhaman Junction at 00:30 Hrs 12-10-2009. Kushal and Harsh boarded the same train from Sealdah. We reached Malda Town at around 6 AM in the morning. We got together in the station and had some chit-chat amongst ourselves. Kushal was taken to a hotel for his stay and we were taken to the college hostel by the college vehicle ( Maruti Omni).

WORKSHOP Day 1 12/10/2009

After having some rest, we freshened up and had some breakfast. We then went to the college at around 9:15 AM. It was a session for the 4th year IT students of IMPS college. Kushal gave a brief introduction on FOSS and then asked us to give a small introduction on Fedora and about our activities and how we started using Fedora. Then followed a session on Python from the very basics. We assisted Kushal by helping the students solve their doubts in their places. It was only coding using the python shell for the 1st day. Students were asked to solve a few problems. Good performers were given Fedora Badges. The session lasted till 1:00 PM and then there was a break.

After the break, it was time for the session for the 3rd year IT students of the college. Kushal gave an introductory talk on FOSS and Fedora. Then just like the previous session, it was all Python, hisss… They started enjoying python already because of its simplicity, elegance. It was all Python for the day, but only in the interpreter.

WORKSHOP Day 2 13/10/2009

The session started with the 4th year students of IT as the day before. They were introduced to the vi editor, and then some python scripting using the vi editor. Then they were told about various projects they can do within Fedora. Kushal also told them about git. Kushal also demoed them some PyQt and PyGTK applications and some Django. They seemed to like Django among others.

Time for a break.

After the lunch, it was time for the 2nd year students of IT. They have learnt C in the previous semester and were then doing Data Structures. So they were given a very basic introduction to vi editor followed by C with gcc. Then it was followed by a basic session on Python.

WORKSHOP Day 3  14/10/2009

The 3rd day of workshop started with the 3rd year IT students. They continued with Python. They along with some teachers started enjoying python. In the second session, the 2nd year IT students were taught more python. Python is simple, more readable, and after all the codes written in Python are much smaller to those written in C. The students were also told how to start contributing. Some students brought their laptops for installing Fedora. We also made a 1GB mini repository with basic packages and a shell script to automatically install them.

The 3 Day Fedora workshop was indeed a good experience for us. But it will be a success if the students start contributing to the community. For this, the teachers have an important role to play and we hope they will.

Event pics can be found at

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kushaldas/sets/72157622631345996/

I became desperate yesterday night to do some useful things, anything. Had a long offline Puja Holidays. I was struggling to understand “How to write Makefiles”, and yesterday it clicked and I ended up writing a Makefile for the ongoing fedX project. Though the makefile which I wrote is not that great, but I have a start now. Committed the changes to the fedX repository at

http://gitorious.org/~rtnpro/fedx/rtnpros-fedx-clone/

It was around 4:00 AM in the morning already. Made some changes in my gitorious project clones. Apart from that, I was trying to download the rpmfusion repositories for Fedora 11. I was using rsync on multiple screens for the purpose. But again and again, rsync used to stop downloading after working for sometime. Then I tried a Firefox addon “DownThemAll” and was very happy to see it work. All I needed was to browse the repository page listing all the packages, right click and select DownThemAll. And then I just needed to select where I want to save the downloaded files and start it. It downloads multiple files simultaneously and does not halt when one of the files cannot be downloaded, rather it pauses it and moves to others. It also supports resume, and has an option to skip the already downloaded files.

But I could not download the directories with DownThemAll. I guess it works only for files. Need to do some research on it. Any way, you can try to use DownThemAll. I think you will like it.

Finally, I went to sleep at 4:45 AM with my laptop running DownThemAll to download the rpmfusion repository. When I got up today morning, it was running fine.

On 15th September, 2009 the Software Freedom Day was celebrated in

The CSI Auditorium,

Computer Society of India, Kolkata Chapter,

5, Elgin Road, 4th Floor,

Kolkata – 700020

The following talks and discussions were planned for the SFD 2009, Kolkata :

A. Mani to speak on “The Fedora Project”

J. P. Mathews to speak on “Using Linux on PCs with limited resources”

Ratnadeep Debnath(me) to speak on “Fedora-12 Highlights”

Snehashish Chakraborty to speak on “RabbitMQ”

From Durgapur, me, Kishan Goyal, Harsh Verma and Bama Charan Kundu had come to Kolkata on 15th September to attend SFD. We reached the CSI auditorium at around 4:30 PM. There we met with A. Mani. We had a small introductory chat with each other. We were given some SFD goodies like badges, balloons, etc. Then we setup Kishan’s notebook for the purpose of presentation and successfully connected it to the projector.

At around 5:00 PM, J. P. Mathews and some people from DPS Technologies India, and Rohit joined us in the SFD’09. Some students ( engineering) also turned up. There were around 12 people attending the event. A. Mani welcomed everyone to the event and then J. P. Mathews said that Snehashish Chakraborty, unfortunately, could not come to the event. Then he distributed leaflets for the new

Sapienza Home PC coming preloaded with Ubuntu GNU/Linux.

Specifications : Intel ATOM Processor 230 @ 1.6 GHz + Intel original MotherBoard, IGB RAM, 160 GB SATA HDD,

17″ TFT Display with in-built speakers, Keyboard and mouse, Optional DVD drives, etc.

Starting from Rs. 14,900 onwards.

Then A. Mani came up with his talk on the Fedora Project. It was quite informative and introduced the attendees to the features of Fedora, the Fedora Community, foundations of Fedora, Open Source. It was followed by me ( rtnpro) talking on what is new Fedora 12. Topics of the talk were General Introduction to Fedora Project, Fedora Release Cycle, features in Fedora 11, things which couldn’t be implemented in Fedora 11, what’s new in Fedora 12, common Fedora 12 bugs, how to contribute to testing. As an example, I mentioned the various opensource projects that the members of DGPLUG has been involved into. I also highlighted the significance of portable repositories, which is of vital importance when internet connection is a constraint.  Slide used for the presentation can be found at

http://www.slideshare.net/rtnpro/fedora-12-introduction

Then there was a small break for tea. After that, J. P. Mathews gave his talk on Using Lnux on PCs with limited resources. He also discussed about the Sapienza Home PC, which is very affordable, running on Ubuntu GNU/Linux. Then he also mentioned about Linux being used at schools and educational institutions. LTSP is a good technology to be used for the purpose. He also showed interest in the ongoing Bijra Project of DGPLUG ( using LTSP). Idea of having a local flash storage in the LTSP terminals were also discussed. Open Source virtualization tools were also discussed and compared with VMWare. Mr. Mathews also mentioned a functional programming language named Erlang, and Open ERP frameworks.

This was followed by free media distribution of Fedora 11 DVDs and Ubuntu 9 Live CDs.

The event concluded at around 7:15 PM. The discussions held during the event were very interesting and innovative. This marks a long path to travel. The event was a success with people  getting in their head to foster a general understanding of software freedom, and encourage adoption of free software and open standards.

Happy Durga Puja to all.

It has been a long run since I left for Durgapur after the Software Freedom Day,2009 at Kolkata. I reached Howrah station at around 8:15 PM on 15th September 2009. Though I got an  e-ticket for Durgapur in the Danapur Express which was about to leave from Howrah at 9:35 PM, I still didn’t have a hard copy. I thought I could get a print out at the station from the .html file of the e-ticket I was having in my mobile phone. As ill luck would have it, the one cyber cafe that was there in Howrah station was being demolished (might be for repairs … drastic). I had plenty of time though, so I went outside the station to try my luck. With some help from the folks out there, I started my venture to find a place to print my ticket. Couldn’t find any in the proximity. Finally I found one, but the shop’s printer ran out of ink. What the hell! It was 9:15 PM and so I returned and boarded the train. My mobile phone was almost out of charge, and so I transferred the only document of my ticket to my laptop. When the TTE came, I showed him the html file and after some arguments, I was able to convince him. It could have been worse. I didn’t have my Identity Card with me.

I reached Durgapur at 11:30 PM. Then at around 3:00 AM in the morning boarded the JHAJHA-Guwahati Express for AlipurDuar Junction, my father’s home town. Quite uneventful days in AlipurDuar and Coachbehar ( my mother’s home town) except for family reunion. Finally came back to Guwahati on 20th September, 2009.

First thing I did was install linux (omega) in my father’s computer and explained the advantages of it to my father. Next day, my father told his colleagues that in linux, you don’t need to worry about viruses ( in general). I started getting calls from them to install Linux in their systems too. I did two installs of Omega coupled with the other packages installed from the Fedora 11 repository I am carrying in my portable HDD.

Internet connection had been quite unstable here. The BSNL link most of the times is down and since yesterday, the phone line is dead. This week, mbuf made some new plans for fedx and told me to go through Makefile HowTo. He assigned me some tasks. Today I have completed the first one of them … that was to write a makefile rule to check is vsftpd is installed in a system. If not, to install it in the system. Made a commit today in my fedx’s clone at gitorious. Thanks to smartnet, it came as life saver, when BSNL is down.

This week, did lots of fun with my brother. Went for long distance biking, to restaurants, to computer shops to enquire about notebooks for him. Today it was Ashtami, we fasted till noon and offered pushpanjali to Goddess Durga. Then in the evening, me and my BRO went to see the Durga Pujas in Maligaon in the evening.

Tomorrow I plan to go to Accoland with my brother. Looking forward to a great day

Today, on 5th September, 2009, I completed writing the fedX wizard. I didn’t write it from scratch, though. I found the grsync source code, and the GtkAssistant tutorial in http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/articles/Technical/New_GTK_Widgets_GtkAssistant very useful and informative for a newbie like me. I used parts of code from the above mentioned sources. I pushed the wizard.c file today in my gitorious clone of fedX at

http://gitorious.org/~rtnpro/fedx/rtnpros-clone

The code is not full proof, as is expected, but I will be working on refining the code. If bugs come during its usage, I will try to fix them. The fedX wizard asks the user to enter the source (updated repository in the external storage) and destination (repository in the offline mirror) when fedX is ran for the first time. Then using Glib g_key_file functions, we write this information and other default settings under the session name “fedX” in the grsync.ini file and save the settings. These settings can be updated any time from within grsync or by running the fedX wizard again.

Now, I have started working on the fedX launcher, which will be calling grsync with fedX as the default session. Apart from that, fedX also needs to verify the signatures of the packages in the updated repository to see if they are all from proper sources.

It has been a long silence from me since I came back from Kolkata on 10th August 2009. In Kolkata, I and some of my friends were doing internship under Indranil Das Gupta. Back here in Durgapur, having already missed near a month’s regular college classes, we didn’t receive a nice response from our college authorities. I had a lot of pending college assignments and other stuffs to attend to. I had some really boring long days. This month, I shifted to a new mess in Sarat Pally, St, No. 2, Fuljhore with Harsh and Bama. Although we applied for a BSNL broadband connection in our mess, till date, no response from BSNL. Hope to listen from BSNL this week at least.

Last week, I resumed my work on the FedX project and on 30th August, I pushed a small code in my gitorious clone of FedX. I am right now working to create a wizard to configure FedX in a machine when it runs for the first time. The link of my clone of FedX is as follows :

http://gitorious.org/~rtnpro/fedx/rtnpros-clone

On 31st August, 2009, I, Kishan and Meejanur went to Bijra High school to see how things are going on there. Bijra High School had got a new temporary computer teacher. We intended on training him to use Linux and other FOSS tools. He agreed to come down to our mess a few times a week, so that he could prepare himself to handle the computer laboratory at Bijra High School. In the computer room, we found that the LTSP server was not booting up, but was beeping continuously when turned on. We opened the cabinet, opened the RAM chip and reinserted it, and the machine booted up fine.

Re-inserting RAM chip in the server

But during boot up, it gave an error message regarding eth0 :

8139too device eth0 does not seem to be present, delaying initialization

Then we tried switching on the terminals, but they didn’t boot up as the DHCP service was not running in the server due to problem with eth0. The terminals 2 was failing to boot due to some problem with the SMPS. Then there was a power cut, so we had to return. I updated IndraDG and Subhodip Biswas on this matter, and Subhodip Biswas plans to visit Bijra High School to fix the issue soon.

This summer I am working on building a GUI for easy setup of a completely offline Fedora repository as a part of my DGPLUG summer training 2009. This, if successfully implemented, will greatly help us to spread Fedora and FOSS usage in areas where decent internet connections are not available in general.

I am being mentored by mbuf in this project. He gave a COOL name to this project

FedX

The project tree has been created at http://gitorious.org/fedx

Also, the project wiki will be kept updated.

On 14 July, 2009, me ( Ratnadeep Debnath aka rtnpro) and Meejanur Rahaman ( aka meejan) and Kishan Goyal were heading towards Barasat University. Kishan took a bus from Howrah at around 8:30 AM and we started from Ruby Hospital at around 9:30 AM to Barasat. We hoped that we’ll be reaching the university at most by 11:30 AM and will have enough time to work. Our bust took a turn from Daak Bunglow. We told the conductor that we need to go to KaziPara, so the conductor said that he’ll drop us a bit ahead. We got down, enquired about the university, and no one seemed to have heard of it. Then we enquired about KaziPara, and then took a van. Then we were amidst a big traffic congestion. We were taking to Taki Road KaziPara, where we came to know that we came off the path to the university and came to now from the folks that there was another KaziPara at Jasha Road. We took a van again to Jasha Road. When we got down there, we found that this was not also the place we wanted to go. We enquired about the university from the folks out there, they were all dumb about that.

We called Kishan, who had reached the college by 12:00 PM. I told him to start all the download processes running in different screens in the running computer in the server room at WBSU. He followed the instructions over the phone and successfully started the processes. Then we asked him to enquire about the address of the college. He said that we had to get down at KaziPara. In fact, he also said to the Bus conductor of D 81 from colony more that he had to get down at KaziPara . Then on further enquiry from the University folks, Kishan told us that we had to come to KaziBari, not KaziPara.

We again took a van from there, came to the Bus terminal, took a D-81 bus and got down at KaziBari. Then from there, we took a van to the university. Reached the university at around 1:30 PM. It was quite some “Getting lost” experience. A one and a half hour of wondering in Barasat without knowing the place we have to go. But, in return, came to know more about the Barasat locality.

In the server room at the University, I kept monitoring the downloads plus some self study. I started two more rsync processes to pull the rpmfusion-nonfree-releases and rpmfusion-free-updates. Now I saw that the download speed of the computer increased to around 500 KBps. Though we had more bandwidth, the downloads on 13 July 2009, were just taking place at most at 250 KBps. This was mainly because the servers limited the download speed. So when I turned on multiple download processes from different servers, the bandwidth at the university was being properly utilized.

With all the processes running nicely, we left the University at 5:15 PM, took a van to KaziBari, then a overloaded bus to terminal. Finally we found seats in a bus to Ruby Hospital. We reached Ruby Hospital at 7:45 PM. From there, meejan left for our mess, I went to Tonmoy’s house. He’s got a broadband connection. SSH Logged in to the computer at the university. Found some download completed. Started new rsync download of Fedora 11 updates, rpmfusion-nonfree-updates. Left his home at 9:15 PM, ran to my mess. Had dinner and went straight to bed.

What a day!

Today, 13th July, 2009, we ( me , i.e., Ratnadeep Debnath aka rtnpro, Kishan Goyal, Meejanur Rahaman, Harsh Verma, Chandana Boral) led by Indranil Das Gupta and Stephanie Das Gupta, went to West Bengal State University at Barasat, Kolkata. We started at around 10:30 AM from Ruby Hospital, and after a long journey ( changing two buses, then riding on a van, with  a few drizzles  on the way), we finally reached Barasat University at around 12:30 PM.

We were then taken to the server room of Barasat University. Indradg got us introduced to the wiring and connections in the server room,  the big UPS, the batteries being charged by the UPS, the mechanism for providing back up during power cuts, switching between the two ACs periodically and finally the HP Blade Server.

The UPS is a Liebert GXT-MT 6KVA UPS with a OpenComms Web Card. The OpenComms Web Card delivers SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) and Web support to the UPS in which it is installed. Then we were acquainted with the network configuration of the University Network ( wifi + lined connection).

Next job was to download the Fedora 11 repository. We brought in another computer, placed it in place of the server and installed Fedora 10 in it and started working. We were given the required bandwidth and my job was to start the rsync. But it didn’t go well with me. I was confused with how and where to start. I did rsync locally in earlier instances and not over the internet. I started with the man page. Then googled about “rsync”. Found some good documentation at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/Mirroring. It mainly dealt with setting up Fedora mirrors and how to enable rsync in them. But what I needed was just use rsync to pull Fedora 11 repository. It was quite some time, I was still stuck. Got some suggestions on configuring rsyncd.conf file, I was again redirected to the above link. Then we had some lunch and break.

I again sat working on it. Again went through the rsync man page. I found that,

$rsync [options]

gives a directory listing of the source directory. Chose rsync://ftp.riken.jp/fedora as the source. Found its directory structure using

$rsync -auvr rsync://ftp.riken.jp/fedora

I created the directory structure in my current folder ( here it was /home/$USER/f11_repo/). Now I started pulling Fedora 11 i386 release packages in the following way

$rsync -auvr rsync://ftp.riken.jp/linux/fedora/releases/11/Everything/i386/os/ /home/$USER/f11_repo/linux/fedora/releases/11/Everything/i386/os/

and it started syncing the source and destination directories.

Then we also started downloading the rpmfusion_free repositories for Fedora 11 using wget. Indradg wrote a shell script to automate the download of rpmfusion/free repository using wget. We also used screen to run the two processes in different screens so that they can be monitored remotely.

$screen -R [screen name]

In the mean time, others prepared some “Do not disturb, work in progress” labels and put them on the running computer, the server room door, etc. to make sure that no one messes with the running computer.

It was around 5:30 PM that we finally packed up. We got into the University Bus and reached Ruby Hospital at around 7:30 PM.

It was a long long day .