India has shortage of bandwidth, demand more  and provider less . So in a small city like here ,it almost impossible to ask for good connections , My so called ISP is actually airtel broadband given via local cable operators .Thep provide good download speeds and this is where the problem starts .

you pay 900/- bucks for BSNL to get a 256Kbps unlimited and here 820/- to get 256Kbps upload limited connection .No support for Linux , they wont come to your home if it not a windows machine .

Orkut is the most happening thing in India I guess.You go on anything beyond orkut and you are blocked . My GSoC requires svn to work with and to my great fortune svn is blocked . Result = searching for externel shells and currently working on my mentors machine via ssh .

status : Eagerly waiting for BSNL to arrive .

Well , my proposal for openstreetmap has been accepted by Google as a part of summer of code this year .Its in here

Thanks to Mikel for let our interest grow for the community  and my mentor Raphael Mack for his willingness to mentor .

Never expected a hot summer be so cool .

And a link to Trevino’s Tumblelog (in italian), I found out he has found my gsoc application innovative/interesting.

Cool !

pros:

I crossed yet another year .

cons:

I lost one more year from my life .

Welcome future .

Well most students are gearing up for summer training after the end of this semester , at least thats what the present scene in here .

Training schools , even big companies are gearing up to catch the crowd by offering some mouth watering discounts .

Well , we at dgplug have also entered the field to do some real training stuffs except that we are offering 100% discount . I bet no one can give that

details about the training can be found here .

Hurry ! Seats are limited !!

Yesterday (On 29th March ) Bengal College of Engineering and Technology organized a seminar cum Workshop  at  their college campus .

GFL for Linux is the name of their college lug . Since its an official one so this seminar was a part of official inauguration of the  LUG.

Speaker of the event was Tuhin Sinha.Since most listeners are not even familiar with linux so the level was very basic. Tuhin Sinha during his speech concentrated mostly “why use linux leaving windows” which seems to have attracted people. More over his slide related to jobs in linux attracted maximum questions .

Among audience was Debayan and his group from NIT Durgapur and Us (me and Arindam) .We tried to help the audiences which also created a buzz.

The speech was short one and good one . Need more kinda this stuff in colleges .

One more point BCET maintains a very strong rules and regulation for LUG . They have serious commitees  and all to maintain .So its for of a linux club as compared to a LUG.

Their group can be found here :

I cant wait to see raghu dixit project hitting top of the  charts.The songs are so cool . But its not available here in Durgapur [:(].

My favorites are

When i am in mumbai , gudugudiya, no man like i do .

Thanks to  kushal for pointing this out

Debashree is a very good artist . Since she does not have a blog yet so I am posting one of her work.

Today I suppose is a good day in dgplug’s history . We were scheduled to visit NIT@DGP and BCET today. Naturally we started off a little late but managed to reach NIT in time.

NIT@DGP had organized a seminar cum discussion session,with mostly students from 3rd year and 2nd year our primary concern is to get upstream contributers. Since many of them are already familier with Linux. With a brief introduction of dgplug’s way of work and bijra high school project we directly jumped into describing various way of upstream contribution that ranges from documentaion to graphics to os development.Introduction to Linuxchix for girl contributers( we have lot of girls present ) . Some open source activities like Google Summer of Code and all .We even had Pradeepto, Kartik Mistry and Runa on our big screen ,it was fun cause Runa had her ice cream melted . Our session lasted for two and a half hours.After that we all had lunch @vatika ,a local food court.

Second half of the day didn’t go as we planned, We tried to had a short session at BCET but eventually landed in very formal seminar planned by BCET-LUG and BCET authorities . So kushal had to give again a long one and half hour talk . Since most students here are new to the linux world so we mainly had to concentrate on how and whats of Linux rather than what we did in NIT@DGP.

After a long talk session finally home.I had to wait some time to digest all that in ate today

The positive part is NIT has a good infrastructure so they can kick some good stuffs with help of that . For BCET as its mainly a authority initiative so we expect some help when need but being its very tight and formal structure there will be restrictions.But at least their college is talking some initiatives.

This time install fest went really good. The day before we asked the student that since no college labs are available so whatever we will be doing will be concentrated to laptops only ,so those who have should bring their laptops . And students brought not only theirs some even borrowed from their friend and came in. We had total of 9 laptops and 36 students .So we started off with dvd’s burnt on previous day.

As most are branded ones Dell XPS 1530 and Lenovo’s had a smooth install ,Though their were some issues with nvidia drivers with the dell machine.

HP machine with single partitions had some issues which were also solved.

Most valuable thing this time is we had our local repos so no issue in doing a yum update after installation.

So after a day of successful install fest ,peace in mind.Tomorrow we will again be sitting with those laptops resolving issues and teaching basic stuffs.

In other news: Some teacher in our college wanted to set up remote destop system in order to have a better administration in our linux and networking lab. They wanted to do that with us.There are some capable machines we sorted out but with very less amout of RAM . See my previous post regarding this. So looking forward to this .

So finally we managed to conduct our lug meeting.but before that some more important news.

Bengal college of Engineering abd Technology has planned to open a lug as well . Though Its strictly formal and will be run by college authorities( a good point atleast).They called us for a meeting at their college. Where they talked about their lug structure , future meets and asked help from us . As far I understood finally dgplug can now step out of bcrec campus.

Now back to dgplug meet : Debashree did some serious kickass images using inkscape.she’s a superb artist.her blog isnt ready yet so she has to wait another week to publish it.

This time we got very good response from 1st and 2nd year students.So instead of the general fedora usage we talked about specific application like graphics,documentaion,translation and all . Its nice to see that dgplug is expanding.

On our way to Kolkata from New Delhi , we got a GPS device to try and map the train route. Though it was uncomfortable to keep the GPS unit adjacent to windows using hand. Eventually succeeded in doing so . the GPS unit recorded 908 km out of 1500 km of journey . that was because of unavailability of signal for long time.
On arrival to freemap.in workshop we discovered that the Card failed to record data and we had only 250km of track thats in being recorded in the units 8MB memory.

Anyways at least we tried.

The Workshop then started ( may be missed some part beacuse we arrived a little late) with people and their GPS unit roaming around saltlake . Again me , Susmit , Arindam recorded some more tracks.

some pics .

Our major advantage was we met Mikel and Schuyler at Delhi. so able to discuss over a lot of possibilities .

more details regarding this can be found here.

At last I am back from freed.in organized by ilugd . Though I am a little bit late to post regarding this as most posts are already being done.

Being a first timer to travel , I went there as vanilla delegate.

Day 1 I spent mostly talking with people i know only irc . Some of talks are great like sankarshan’s Communities is an oft ‘mis’used word . There were great deal of audience involvement in Samiah’s talk ‘ All work and no play’.

After lunch I was in conclave where discussion was between dissemination of knowledge . I spoke of Bijra High School Project . It actually created some interest in people.

Day 2 : I was mostly with Bong group ( it consist of Pradeepto , Sankarshan , Runa B , Me , Arindam ) . Talks on this day were great but some talks i liked the most are Open street map and tuxmaniac’s( Aanjhan R’s ) ‘FOSS for electronics enthusiasts’ Rene ’s OpenNet , and Runab’s ‘Setting up a translation community’. Stayed at JNU campus and finally failed to go home ,so stayed back in GNU’s guest House.

Day3 : Sayamindu was finally in delhi so one member in bong group . Out of many talks Pradeepto’s ‘back to School ‘ and Sayamindu’s cute little OLPC related talk are really great .

In the evening after closing ceremony , Mikel Maron came up and gave us a GPS unit to try and map the train route from New Delhi to Kolkata .

So thats from freed.in this year . As I am a first timer its has a great learning process for me .

I have my motherboard back . So i can now resume my work .

On the other news , i am going to Delhi to attend freed.in

This year i made a jerky start. and had a series of events happening .
Lost my motherboard ,so no computer . result a pending project.

Learnt cooking . result now i can really cook some ( i dont know what )

Got placed in TCS and Satyam .

Lost my Scooter . ( I cant figure out who has a fantasy over a 26yr old scooter) .

Going for Freed.in/2008

I tested LTSP 5 in fedora 8 using vmware server 1.0.4 build-56528.

There are certain thing that is needed to be taken care off .

By default a bridging in configured between your ethernet card and vmware which is known as virbr0 . Now as most internet connection are served over dhcp, so there are chances of both dhcp server getiing mixed and result is this error

No root path received
no option root-path specified in your dhcpd.conf file
may be multiple dhcp server configured


A solution to this problem is to create a host only network configuration . This is same as configuring a network on a server with two NIC’s. On for internet and other for serving dhcp to clients.

in order to do so run vmware-config.pl as root


#vmware-config.pl


Now i am just adding the portion needed to configure a host only networking

configured manually


Do you want networking for your virtual machines? (yes/no/help) yes

Would you prefer to modify your existing networking configuration using the
wizard or the editor? (wizard/editor/help) wizard


Do you want to be able to use NAT networking in your virtual machines? (yes/no)
[yes] no


Do you want to be able to use host-only networking in your virtual machines?
[no] yes



Configuring a host-only network for vmnet1.


Do you want this program to probe for an unused private subnet? (yes/no/help)
[yes] no

What will be the IP address of your host on the private
network? 10.82.6.1



What will be the netmask of your private network? 255.255.255.0



The following host-only networks have been defined:


. vmnet1 is a host-only network on private subnet 10.82.6.0.


Do you wish to configure another host-only network? (yes/no) no