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.

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.

Axis 08 ..detailed report

I am little bit better now so considered writing a detailed blog post on Axis 08 .

Susmit worked hard to get some dvd’s, stickers and posters ready for the trip. So we finally had about 37 dvds and at around 450 stickers .

On 24 th we boarded the train and reached nagpur on 25th . On 25 th we mainly did some setup . though we had some trouble. my mac was not outputing any sound and arindam’s was facing trouble with projector.

On 26th we had our scheduled talk . it started at 4 pm . Susmit gave a nice talk on fedora . I gave a talk on “myths about linux” and arindam gave talk on fedora live.

We did had some audience during talks . At around ~55 people.

However people did asked questions . My talk attracted most questions and Arindam successfully converted his talk into a mini workshop as his laptop was not working with projector. 😛

It went through for more than 2 hours . 

From the feedback of students and organizers there we came to know our talk attracted  some people.

On 27 th we had our workshop scheduled .However due to problems like lack of labs and coinciding with their cultural show . we were delayed . but still some students (at around 20) came by ,mostly from previous talk day audience.

We got only an hour before we got request of pausing our workshop (cultural fest was about to start) and request from organizers to hold it next day .

On 28th we started off in the morning . The crowd was large as compared to last two days. We had a install fest (installation over http) , setting up personal machines . quick quide to basic tools like firefox,pidgin etc , some detailed guide to syllabus oriented tools including gcc,gnu octave,Fedora Electronic lab(FEL) which gathered good amount of interest .

The workshop lasted for 3.5 hours and we packed up at around 2 o clock.

Good to mention is that NIT nagpur had their introduction to opensource through sun’s seminar conducted last year . So we decided to ask them to form a LUG . They decided to form it with basic infrastructure like a google group and some in person meetings .

You can see all photos here .

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.