Workshop at IMPS College, Malda

A workshop on Fedora was organised at IMPS College of Engineering at Malda started from 12th October to 14th. You can get the event page here.

As the workshop was scheduled to be started in the morning of 12th, we set out at the evening of 11th. Me, Kishan and Ratnadeep  boarded the train from Malda where Kushal and Harsh already started from Sealdah. However, we reached at around 7:30am at IMPS, Malda.

After talking with the HOD of IT there, we came to know there will be workshop for 2nd year, 3rd year and 4th year IT student. The workshop started with a small talk of Kushal on a brief introduction on Fedora, Red Hat and the opportunity of project works on this field. This was followed by a speech of Ratnadeep. Then we all(me, Kishan, Harsh) shared our experience of working on FOSS, how everybody can contribute to it only with ones wish and endeavour to do. After these all stuffs the main workshop started – the basic python. In 2 class of 2 hour it is not possible to complete the whole python. But it enough to show the student some basics and easy things which arise interest among students. Kushal showed them python in the screen and was giving exercises to do them in between. And we four helped them to do the thing, showing and helping them to fix the errors. Next day, django and differnt more things was shown. These all things were repeated to 2nd year and 3rd year students again. At last, different dvds, pdf and doc. were given to the students for further and future help.

We left in the evening. And wish to have such experiences in future.

The links:

• event page
• photos

 

My first step to python:System-config-boot-tui.py

I wanted to do any small project on python for some days. And in way of searching any project, I found there was no tui version of system-config-boot file. Getting the opportunity, I along with my friend Kishan, decided to work on it.

To do our work , we had to study (newt-python)snack module of python. We also took help from two example of snack named peanuts.py & popcorn.py present in /usr/share/doc/newt-python-0.52.10/. The gui version code at /usr/share/system-config-boot/boot-gui.py helped a lot to understand the concept of system-config-boot.

After completing the code we sent it to Herald, who accepted it, and after some changes we commited it in git. The links are given below:

• link for git: here

• link to the rawhide build: here

And, thanks a lot to Kushal for mentoring us. This is our first works and I expect a lot of works to happen  in the upcoming days.

http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/?p=system-config-boot.git;a=summary

 

a day at HETC

I was in Kolkata for nearly a month. But staying at a same place for a long time is really boring . So, I planned to visit to my friends college(Hoogly Enginnering and Technology College). He also asked me come for 2 years to their place. But I really didn’t get the opportunity. And, I had to install Fedora in my friend, Arsad Ali’s laptop.

So, as planned earlier, I set out at 8:30 in the morning, and reached there at around 11:30 am. He earlier told me that I have to install Fedora in another 4 or 5 systems. But after reaching there, I saw the 3rd year student present there don’t know about Linux or Foss. Some of them heard the word,”Linux” but don’t want to install it. When I asked them the reason, they said they can’t misuse(according to them) the system’s space! But I surprised to see almost half portion of their computer’s memory is occupied by different movies which they were unwilling to delete. I saw my friend Arsad to be the only guy interested over there though being a electronics student. However, I installed Fedora 10 in his system and installed all the repos and packages and codecs needed. I took a pocket hard-disk containing them all, so it was easy without net connection. I taught him how to connect net from mobile in Fedora, and told him how he could contribute to different Fedora -project.

They had a party on that night. So, I also enjoyed much with them. After reaturning at his room, I gave him a FEL live dvd and asked him to use that as he was an ECE guy. Making him understood the benifit of FOSS I told him to use those.  And in the next day, I returned Kolkata in the very morning

 

An update

It’s already have been many days of writing my last post. Many days passed of and many works have been done in between times.

a)Me and rtnpro went on WBUT with IDG for a troubleshooting of the old server was working for 4 years 24×7! The data inside the CPU was to be recovered. The CPU was totally out of order. We failed to start this. So, IDG planned to take out the hard disk and and connect in another CPU then it would be possible to get the data out of it. And the recovered data was to be copied later.

b)After Bula mada’m computer it was the turn of another computer of Najmun madam to be installed. Harsh was having a exam that day, so IDG asked me and rtnpro to do the task in the morning and Harsh was supposed to join us after finishing his exam. We went there at around 11 am in such a rainy day. We had to suffer a lot because of the heavy rain of that day. The installation part has been done the previous day when Harsh and rtnpro went there. First she complained that the dafult boot option has to be changed, time delay has to be changed. So I changed them in /etc/grub,conf file. Her computer has the problems with display, for her SIS 330 graphics and old one monitor of resolution 800X768. However all these problems have been solved. And we returned to our place in the evening after the client being happy with her system.

 

2nd day @Barasat: #Worst journey of my life

Really, that we can call a worst journey, and nothing else what I experience yesterday, while going Barasat for 2nd day.
We started the journey at 9:30 am, much before than the previous day. But the” benefit=/dev/null”. We asked the bus contractor if the bus will go to “Coloni more“. He said “no”. Then I took two ticket for “Dakbanglo more“. But in between rtnpro inquired from the bus contractor and told me “we will not go down in Dakbanglo more rather we’ll go some more further from where our destination will be closer.”

But our destination was our mistake. How a small, tiny mistake can make a big, worst effect, we faced it there. We had to go “Kajibari“. But we used the word “Kajipara“. And to increase our trouble there was really a place named “Kajipara” in Barasat. At that time we were thinking “ok, we’re going now , it will take maximum half-an-hour to reach to the university in riksha.” But when we reached Kajipara, there were not a single person who knew about that West Bengal State University. When our conversation proceeded with the person present there, what we heard that was really miserable. There was not only a single “Kajipara” rather there were 2 “Kajipara” in Barasat. The persons were telling, “you people probably have come the wrong “Kajipara”, but you have to go to the other.
And, still we didn’t know about our mistake (Kajipara instead of Kajibari). However, by that time, we became sure we have visited one “Kajibari”, the another one which we had not visited would surely be our destination.” So we again hired a riksha and went towards the other “Kajibari”. Again, another surprise was waiting for us. When were going, as the path seemed to be different from that of the previous day, we asked the “rikshawala”,”why he path is looking a little bit different today?” and he told us ” you were going from coloni more more yesterday, but now I’m going by another way.” Thus when we reached there, the same thing happened. Nobody knew about the newly built University. (How could they know! Our mistake was at the root level).
We called Kishan and asked him, “what is the exact lacation of the University, ask any person there?”. And he again told “You people just come to “Kajipara”. That’s the name”. We said “we visited both two Kajipara, one at Taki road and another at Jashohar road, there is no Kajipara left out in Barasat now”. He couldn’t help us. We began to inquired the local people and we understood something wrong to be happened.
Again we called Kishan “You first ask anybody, then only you tell the location’s name”. To increase our headache he said after some time “Sorry, I have told you wrong name at that time. The place is Kajibari not Kajipara.” Now, it seemed that we just woke up from our deception and everything became clear to us. And finally we reached to our destination. [:x]

 

Barasat:1st day

Yesterday, I first time visited the West Bangal State University, Barasat. Me with Rtnpro, Kishan, Yevlempy(Harsh), Chandana first went to IndraDG’s home and from their we set out for Barasat. We reached the university around 12:30 p.m.

After reaching university IndraDG led us to the Server Room. He made us acquainted with the equipments in use there. He told us in a brief about the the batteries being charged by this big UPS which seemed to be like CPU[:x]. This UPS is used to charge some 20 batteries which are arranged on a shelf, blocks of 4 in each of the five rows.
After that, we set up a Desktop in place of the already-setup one. But the system was not working properly, so we had to install Fedora 10 again in it. After the installation was complete, rtnpro began his task: downloading the Fedora 11 repository.
By that time, IndraDG took me to the top of the building, showed me where from the 5mbps net connection was coming, another tower that to be set up. I have also seen the wiring in differnt places, and even the library, reading room,behind the tables.
But, rtnpro seemed to be having some trouble with it. Susmit da mailed some instructions to rtnpro and at last IndraDG had to helped him doing these all.

However, finally After all works been finished, we left the university at 5:30 p.m. I, along with other guys and IndraDG and SstephDG came home with the faculty bus and reached at around 8:00. I was so tired that I went bed as soon as I reached to my room.

 

Helped to migrate a person to Fedora

On last Saturday, 11th July me and my friend, Ratnadeep went to install Fedora 10 in a system. Earlier the person was not accustomed with Fedora. And she was suffering from virus and anti-virus problem which made the system very slow. In my friend Ratnadeep’s hard-disk, he has all the repo of Fedora 10. So she was really interested to install and get everything working. According to our schedule time, we went there at around 1:00 pm. And we did all those stuffs and it took almost 4 hours to complete. Lastly one problem left-the DVD &CD issue. DVD could not be played in the system. But madam was busy at that time, and told us to come again on another day, and to see this issue. And then we both came back at around 6:00 pm. The all steps and everything done there is being documented. The link will be given shortly.

 

Summer Project: Subtitle Downloader

This Summer Training of DGPLUG brought to us the opportunity to do a hands-on project. I have chosen the project Subtitle Downloader. Now, let’s come into what the project is all about.

Subtitle downloader is a software which downloads the subtitle for a particular movie. You will get details at http://subdownloader.net

What I, along with my friend, Kishan Goyal, my project partner, am  trying to do is to download lyrics for any songs, save it. And in the next time while playing the same song again it will automatically show the same downloaded lyrics again. No need of downloading again the same thing.

What I just thought is that it will automatically search the lyrics for a particular song according to the name of the song followed by it’s artist’s name i.e: Bailamos by Enrique.

But I can’t make out

a)how to set up link with lyrics downloadable site like lyricsdownloa.

b)How to download the lyrics from the particular site and show it.

c)Again if I would think about the scrolling lyrics then another task will be to maintain the perfect delay, while playing the song.

How to do this all. Just need your help. If anybody knows anything of it, please help us.

 

exam finished

After a huge tension, semester exam finished on 16th. Overall it was good. But though exam has been finished , a lot of works are pending now.

So now first I am trying to finish the left translation work in #sahana and #josm. And also doing with the bengali translation in Songbird. And side by side I have started going trough the python.

অাজ থেকেই অনুবাদের কাজ শুরু।

It seems that truly exam has been finished …but the main exam has yet too be started

 

FAD @ BCREC

Fedora Activity Day , conducted by DGPLUG held on DR. B C Roy Engineering College on 14th and 15th May. As planning all the we the members of DGPLUG , me ie: Meejanur Rahaman, Ratnadeep Debnath , Kishan Goyal, Subhadeep Biswas, Arindam, Harsh Verma and Rangeen Basu Roy Choudhry(sherry151) co-ordinated the program.

@Day 1:

We all reached at college in the morning, and it took almost 1/2 an hour to set up projectors etc.And the the program started  at 11:30 with around 27 students from mainly the 2nd year and some 1st , 3rd, 4th year students. The program started with Arindam giving the introduction to Fedora which continued with Kishan’s “Myths about Linux busted with Fedora”. It was followed with Life with Fedora, and then Amrita, Debashree showed how to draw diagram in inscape vector graphics tool. It was followed up by demo of KDE to the participants by rtnpro, Suny, and Rangeen. It was then time to 2:10, to take a break and we planned to meet at 2:50. in between there was a power cut. We all came within 2:50 , but we had to shut down all the computer and we left only the pojecter and laptop. With he Airtel net connection Rangeen show the IRC, through mibbit.com as X-chat was blocked by Airtel. And now it was the time for the attraction of the day, FEL. There were some around 12 ECE students. But for the power cut, projector also stopped working. Then Rangeen showed the application, tools of FEL , which we show to all the students with our own laptops. And the session to be of 1:30 hour, it it was finished for hat day, and we announced about the next day is going to be a more interactive session to be of commands and programming(GCC, Java).

@Day 2:

The 2nd day session started at around 11:30am. There were some new faces and some old faces were absent too due to their internal exams. However the program started with some videos tv.dgplug.org of ksnapshot, ocular etc. Then the main program started with Harsh , the basic shell comands. In between Subhadeep explained the file heirchy system, and file permission etc. hen I ( rtnpro) took on the how to install softwares in Fedora via the YUM package manager and Package-kit.Subhadeep explained what is repository, and showed local-mirror set-up etc.  The next session was of Vi text editor which was explained by Divyanshu. The students was told to do this in thei computers, and we helped them doing so. And it was 2:20 then. So we called for a break.

We all came within 3:00, and a session of GCC was going to start. It took almost 1:30 hour time to elucide the basics of GCC, why we use GCC, C99 std etc. Then Arindam explained how to run program in Anjuta IDE. It was almost 5:00. Then again a power cut. But still Subhadeep explained how to install Java, to run Java in linux, , Open JDK etc. And he also showed them the code done for GSoc. At last we distributed DVDs and stickers to all and it was almost 6:00pm, when we finished all.