Droid/Tux/Web

A close friend of mine bought an android phone.However much of her excitement went down the drain when she was unable to connect to the internet using her ad hoc sharing of Ethernet.

if you are in a similar situation and use linux/fedora and wanted to connect to the internet, here is a small way of doing so. If you use windows 7+ however, you can use an application called connectify. :

Step 1.

$sudo yum install hostapd

Step 2.
Configure hostapd with few lines, there are many options feel free to explore

interface=wlan0
hw_mode=g
channel=6
ssid=Yourssidhere

macaddr_acl=0
auth_algs=1
ignore_broadcast_ssid=0
wpa=3
wpa_passphrase=yourssidpasshere
wpa_key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
wpa_pairwise=TKIP
rsn_pairwise=CCMP

Step 3.
Stop the hostapd service if it is running:

$sudo service hostapd stop

or

$sudo systemctl stop hostapd.service

Step 4.
Go to your network manager, wireless and turn on the hotspot.
Step 5.
Restart the hosapd service

$sudo service hostapd start

or

$sudo systemctl start hostapd.service

Done

There is a better way of doing this with bridge-utils, dnsmasq, and hostapd, I will blog about that later.

Fedora Activity Day@BCREC by dgplug

So finally the Fedora Activity Day which was supposed to be held during Horizon’09 in April was held over two in 14th and 15th May,2009. The reason was that horizon got canceled due to some reason.

Here is a complete jot down of the whole two day experience

Day 1 :

We started a little late.At around 12 noon because of the projector was not working laptops.With  audience size was around 30 we started.

Arindam started by introducing the fedora project to the students. he introduced the Four F’s of the fedora project along with the community as well. He in fact introduce all  bits of the project.

Next was Kishan and Me , we tried to bust most of the misconceptions about linux/fedora in general.

Next we decided to actually give the students a demo of what the busted few minutes ago. Debashree, Amrita, Arpita showed them inkscape and gimp. Rangeen, me and arindam showed them video and music in Fedora.Along with Rangeen showing them KDE 4.2 and it attracted attention. Every machine in the Lab was running FEL live cd since there was no persmission to install Fedora in those machines[:(].

Whole of this continued till 2:10 and we decided to take a break.

After break we continued, this time 15 more students from electronics and communication branch came and joined us.

We introduced IRC to students and gave them a brief demo of it.

Then Rangeen started with FEL. He introduced GNUSim8085 and Ktechlabs which attracted most interest. There was power cut and outside was cloudy, so it was dark. but somehow even with UPS ans trailing machines rangeen continued.After the UPS gave up. We formed small groups of 8-9 and used out 5 laptops to demonstrated FEL. The session went along over 2 hours.It was a comprehensive demonstration and was a good one.

Due to lack of power, we decided to call it a day and gained permission to continued over the next day.

Day 2 :

We started day 2 with Some basic commands by Harsh Verma (a new fedora ambassador from dgplug). He showed them efficiently. Even showed the use of man and info pages. Me and Arindam  helped Harsh with this session. We showed them chmod , file permissions and a word of caution”not to login as root in GUI”.

The next session was vi by Dibyanshu. He gave a very good session on vi and showed most of the cool stuffs. I, personally liked the session very much.This guy is very new to dgplug but is showing great enthusiasm.

We took a break of 20 min and returned . Ratnadeep started with his GCC session. We decided to take on small assignments and started doing them using GCC. Ratnadeep did gave a comphensive demo of GCC and did well. Arindam decided to help them using Anjuta IDE and the same assignments were done using that.

This went till almost 5pm, power went out again. But I took my java session in my laptop. Showed them openjdk, the difference between openjdk and sun jdk. And how to install sun jdk in fedora using alternatives. This went on till 5:45pm and decided to call it a day.

The feedback was good. event though number of audince was less but it showed enthusiasm. Hope to get good contributors from this pack. There will be a post FAD session after the semester exams to keep nurturing this enthusiasm.

Over and all the session was successful and a good one.

With this session we  gained permission to install fedora in a machine. And me and Arindam decided to use this as a local mirror for the labs and students. Need to sort out some techical difficulties though. It currently behaves like a mirror in a box.More on this soon.

My cam’s battery gave up in mid ways so didnt clicked much , anyways pics are here :

Past few days (including mukti09)

Last few days were hectic to me as there was lot of things that was happening around me .

6th Feb : It was Mukti 09 day ,  a national level tech fest on opensource at NIT Durgapur . Me and Arindam had to do a talk cum workshop there .Our Pre Mukti talk was canceled due to bandh and got 3 hr slot , It was scheduled at 5:00 PM .

However we decided to go a little earlier because we along with Indranil Das Gupta and Yu Yu Din were suppose to go and visit Bijra High School .It was at around  12:30 PM when we reached there ,met with Indranil Das Gupta and Yu Yu Din and started for Bijra ,but before we left the campus we called Pradeepto and took him too .At around 1:51 PM Debayan called us up  for setup at fedora stall as they are lacking volunteers but we were already on our way to Bijra .

In Bijra , there were lots of stuff that were happening , Bijra school is getting lot of aids from different section of society and they are utlizing it for a good cause .Both Yu Yu and Pradeepto liked it very much . and lot more things were discussed .

We returned to NIT campus at around 4:30 PM and headed toward IT department where our ” A day with fedora ” were suppose to be done .We started a 30 min  late at around 5:35 PM .Satya came along but she was too tired as she just finished a talk .

There were some 50+ DVD’s that were distributed along with registration kits , I asked Debayan for 15 more DVD’s to distribute in the event just as we were on the start , Nevertheless we started with Arindam’s introductory talk on “Introduction to Fedora” , He had some cool slides where  he showed ” Freedom | Friends | Features | First ” of fedora project .He also showed some cool videos like ‘Truth Happens ‘ , A video showing new features of F10 ,starring stickster and gergdek .Next was my turn , I gave talk on “Myths about Linux ,Busted with fedora ” where i showed basic misconceptions on usage of Linux . A video on ” Why fedora ” by gregdek is shown along with the talk .

Finally we conducted a small workshop on ” How to create bootable live usb for easy use ”  . The local mirror of NIT was b0rked and Debayan mailed us regarding that a day before , anyways we continued with as much we can , and finally got 8 machine getting all that we need . Arindam hosted his local FTP server so that people find it easier to download .The workshop went alone and was quite successful .We faced a lot of questions , a guy from NIT agartala said the workshop was useful as  he can now got a solution to their connectivity problems . Finally we ended with the “Choice” video .

We had dinner there and finally returned home at around midnight .

7th Feb : Me along with Arindam ,Indranil Das Gupta and Yu Yu Din boarded the 6:14 AM train and went to Kolkata where IDG had to give talk . We went to IDG’s office and waited and finally went to Science City where talks were held . M Arulraj gave a talk on Open GIS . IDG gave his talk , I don’t remember the tittle of talk though . and one talk was on FOSS in bio informatics by Mr. Sudip Kundu .

Finally we all went to kafuluk at china town and had our lunch cum dinner there ./me and Arindam went to my house at sontosepur .

8th Feb : Woke up early and came back to Durgapur by taking 7:30 AM bus . It was “brigade cholo ” day , the bus we took was the last bus available as most buses were hijacked to bring in people . Reached Durgapur at around 10:30 AM and went back to NIT Durgapur at around 12 noon , On way to IDG’s talk ,we went where stalls were hosted , apart from Dominos and CCD rest were empty .IDG’s talk on “Indian FOSS Community was superb ” and at it was the last talk of mukti 09 .

NIT Lug guys did a superb organizational effort to bring up such a event and overall it was awesome to see so much participation .

Fedora Event pics are here .

Random Scriblings

Theres quite lot to  say :

1. Gave one more talk on OSM at mukti 09

2. Visited Kolkata Book Fair and help folks at IOTA stall .It was awesome .Detailed blog coming up

3. Fedora talk at mukti 09 on 6th .Event page up (need suggestions)

4.Visited bijra today and had lot of feedback (complaints) from them .

5. Got a lit of petrol almost decades after recent price cut for RS 50.

6. Harman Baweja still cant act .

7. Sign of twitter becoming mainstream in India .Read here.

Finally cambridge is here : WOAH

So finally its is here,f10 cambridge ,

Scheduled my download already ,

read release notes here

download it here

Fedora on mac ..rocks

It has been two months since i bought my macbook .I mostly use my desktop for daily work and mac OSX was serving me well . However due to need i started setting fedora on my mac . Arindam did that previously and his fedora installation was fine .

After installation , i found that apart from common issues like wifi and touchpad , sound was missing as well .

So decided on a google search ,which reaveled some post from forums . I tried them and everythings is working good .

Here is a small compilation of those methods .

1. Wifi and sound

these four are needed

kmod-ndiswrapper-1.52-30.lvn9.i686.rpm
kmod-ndiswrapper-2.6.25-14.fc9.i686-1.52-30.lvn9.i686.rpm
ndiswrapper-1.52-1.lvn9.i386.rpm
R151517.EXE

P.S : Well , rpmfusion.org is finally here and all these packages are transferred to rpmfusion.org . Please use

yum install rpmfusion-free-release rpmfusion-nonfree-release

and search for above packages . Plus with rpmfusion its better for updating .

Thanks to Thorsten for pointing me out .

now

mkdir wifidriver
unzip -a R151517.EXE -d wifidriver/
cd wifidriver/DRIVER/
su
# install ndiswrapper and the wifi driver
rpm -Uhv *ndiswrapper*rpm && rm -i *ndiswrapper*rpm
/sbin/modprobe ndiswrapper
ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf && rm -rf wifidriver && rm -i R151517.EXE
echo "options snd_hda_intel model=mbp3" >> /etc/modprobe.d/soundcard
echo "blacklist bcm43xx" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
echo "blacklist ssb" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
echo "blacklist b43" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
# ndiswrapper is used for wlan0
echo "modprobe ndiswrapper" >> /etc/rc.d/rc.local
echo "alias wlan0 ndiswrapper" >> /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper
/sbin/service NetworkManager restart

and reboot the mac .

Pommed helps in  controling the LED and keyboard backlight, soundcard, infrared remote and more. :

wget http://downloads.diffingo.com/diffingo-repo/diffingo.repo -O \
/etc/yum.repos.d/diffingo.repo
yum install pommed

pommed starts as a startup service .

For touchpad its synaptic that comes to the rescue .

The xorg.conf as of my machine is here :xorgconf




However after an update to 2.6.26-6 kernel , and subsequent update of ndiswrapper , even though wireless was working ,my sound got muted in kde  which was fixed soon .
And on KDE4, a red light appears from the headphone jack . It indicates that digital audio got enabled instead of analog .This happens if IEC958 module gets enabled . So sometimes it ignores a headphone plugged it . 
It can be switched off by :

 volume control > switches > IEC958 (dechecked ) . 

or It can be reset with a toothpick though if it remains on even while using mac osx ,better to do a google search for this or post in a mac forum 
Enjoying my mac :p 

Back from Axis 08

Axis 08 is a tech fest organised by NIT Nagpur . We (me ,Susmit, Arindam ) went there and conducted seminar cum workshop . (our scheduled of 3.5 hrs were genoursly extended to above 8 hours over three days .) Now i am back home and have a nice time with Fever . I am down and not in a postion to write detailed blog post . However susmit is writing one .you can see it here .All photos that were taken by me and arindam were being uploaded by arindam . you can see them  here

I want to get well before the puja’s i dont want to miss it anyway.

Sending a Freemedia DVD.

I am a part of Freemedia team for Fedora . and this is the first time I am actually sending a DVD outside apart from my local requests .The request i accepted is from Dewanhat , Cooch Behar , West Bengal .

I burned the DVD, put it into a Floppy/CD Mailer Envelope and went to a post office .

Me : I want to do a speed post of this .

me hands over the envelope .

The person was a lady and she took it , but just she was about to dump it , she noticed the CD/Floppy Mailer tag on the envelope .

P.O : Sorry , we dont mail CD’s in this way , you have to put it in a wooden box and then mail it .

[reaction] wtf.

Me : From where can i get that box ?

P.O: You have to built one .

[again reaction] WTF.

P.O: You better take a courier service.

Me : ok

and i took the DVD to a courier office .

Me : I want to send this .

C.O: ok .

C.O : But its written a village , we dont have service to village .

Me : ok

takes back the DVD ,

[Current status] : DVD still with me .

Any ideas on how to send this will be helpful .

call for good administrators……is it ??

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 .

dgplug@NIT-DGP and @BCET

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.

Dgplug install fest

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 .

Vmware server and LTSP 5

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


Ltsp 5 in fedora 8

I have made a pdf file that contain a little bit more detail description of making LTSP 5 running in fedora 8 (i386) .

This contain detail about configuring configuration files as well .

Hope this will help .

You can find the file here

p.s . :

This file contains details about /etc/exports , /etc/host.allow , /etc/dhcpd.conf , because for LTSP 5 need these to wriiten manually as compared to LTSP 4.2 .

LTSP 5 and fedora 8 … a hard way

This is a follow up to my previous post regarding LTSP 5 and Fedora 8 .

The installation part is pretty simple and is same as told before . But need some tweaks to make things work . I am detailing them here ..hope it will help .

————————————————————————————————————-

One most important point is ,

xinetd service must be enabled and running in order to have a xsession running in thin clients .

In order to do so there are some points to take care of: –
As this a ubuntu version running so there are certain changes than a normal fedora version.
a) Ubuntu uses inetd instead of xinetd so take care of that . Also from this version NBD is used and is fired over NFS. This is taken care of by installing nbd.rpm which can be found here.
b )Ubuntu has /etc/X11/Xsession but fedora has /etc/X11/xinit/Xsession , so it is important to create link between them in order to have a xsession firing up.
This can be done by

# ln -s /etc/X11/xinit/Xsession /etc/X11/Xsession


Now that most configurations are ready . Fire up the thin client . At this point actually
ubuntu bits are executed .if every things all right you will be getting a ubuntu login screen.

At this point it is necessary that a ssh authentication do takes place otherwise no login allowed .
If you run ltsp-update-sshkeys for the first time in Fedora you will get the following error

ltsp-update-sshkeys: line 6: tempfile: command not found

Now it can be solved by downloading an installing tempfile rpm from here .
Another problem encountered is

/var/log/syslog: No such file or directory.

This can be easily overcomed by either creating a blank file as /var/log/syslog .
Now execute the command

#ltsp-update-sshkeys

The output will be something like the following.

Setting up ssh_known_hosts in:
/opt/ltsp/i386

One important point , you may face problem while logging in . It is better to enable passward authentication for ssh . In order to enable this
#vi /etc/ssh/ssh_config
and remove comment from line 25 which states

password authentication yes

Now run the command after you are sure of all changes .
#ltsp-update-kernels

you will get a output like the one below.

Updating /tftpboot directories for chroot: /opt/ltsp/i386

Now Configurations are ready and you should be getting a fedora desktop fired up . a pic is here showing a fedora 8 desktop

LTSP 5 and fedora 8

Since my involvement with Bijra High school project and working with ltsp , I am simply loving this thing . So i started playing with it . This is my first post .. more to come gradually .

Installation .

Ltsp 5 has still not being integrated to fedora. I downloaded the tarball of LTSP 5 from here .{http://ltsp.mirrors.tds.net/pub/ltsp/ltsp-5.0/ltsp_ubuntu_6.10_i386-2.tar.bz2}

This made primarily for ubuntu 6.10 but it works with fedora.

In order to install

1) TFTP, DHCP, NFS and SSH server are needed

2) ltsp-update -kernels package is needed . it is found here .{http://ltsp.mirrors.tds.net/pub/ltsp/ltsp-5.0/ltsp-update-kernels-2.tar.bz2}
This will copy the kernels from the ltsp tree to a place where your TFTP server can get them.

3) ltsp-update-sshkeys package is needed . It is found here
{ http://ltsp.mirrors.tds.net/pub/ltsp/ltsp-5.0/ltsp-update-sshkeys-2.tar.bz2}

This simply sets up the ssh_known_hosts file to know about the server.

4) The compresses archive is needed to be unpacked in directory (/opt here ) .

5) unpack the other two packages and run the scripts.

6) NFS and DHCP are configured .

7) Things to take care of :-

a) making sure of /etc/exports file containing an entry for /opt/ltsp .
b) making sure to have the right filename and root-path entries to point to the right kernel and ltsp tree in /etc/dhcpd.conf