why do i use linux

There are many people around me obviously I am talking about Windows users, who ask me this question.
I have a very simple answer.

1. I dont have to pay for it and to the various softwares that I use. Yes that is it. I realised this after Abhas Abhinav’s Talk during Mukti [strongest of all for me at least ].
2. I get the freedom to change and redistribute, it may not be important for those who dont code. For them the first reason may be a strong reason.
3. You cant install the same product on two different machines.
4. I feel that INDIA is a poor country ( please dont mind ) and if we cant stop importing hardware we can always stop importing paid software. So use FOSS.

Otherwise Windows is also a good OS, I donot intend to compare Linux and windows here, after all we all have used windows at some point or the other. There are also some very good softwares and games like counter strike which I left playing for my love for Linux. May be some time later I may create Counter Strike for Linux [joking] .

This is my opinion and I am FREE to keep any opinion. You may be against it.

server administration is a difficult task

Just a week back I start to manage our GLUG server and since then it has turned out to be a nightmare for me. Every now and then something happens and people start pinging you. Whenever I go out and come to room I just type the url of the server on my browser to see if it is working. It adds a lot to your responsibilities.

I tried several distros and finally ended up with my favourite openSUSE, I find myself very much comfortable with it.

Some works to be done:
1. Fedora 10 repo
2. Ubuntu repo
3. Packman repo (we already have but it needs management)
4. More isos for download and for repo for network install

making direcories and symbolic links in apache web directory

This made me worried for the past two days. Thanks to IRC I got the solution.
Add these lines at the end of your default-server.conf file for apache. On opensuse it is in /etc/apache2/defualt-server.conf

<Directory “path to directory like /srv/www/htdocs/download”>
options Indexes Includes FollowSymLinks SymLinksifOwnerMatch ExecCGI MultiViews
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny

Allow from all

</Directory>

Then restart apache.
This makes the directory visible from web browser and makes apache follow symbolic links !
This was really painful yet the answer was so simple.
I need to look in apache configurations properly.

some people are just unusual

I happen to know one such man he was my mentor, Johnny Jacob (just google him) when I was trying to hack Evolution in summer vacation last year. Nearly one and a half month back he contacted me to work on Evolution again. I was very much excited to do that but I was busy with dhvani those days. I thought that I would do that later on. But then I realized its time for me to think about a job. Yes I definitely need a job. It was then I realized that I cant afford higher studies at least now. So I have dumped the idea of working on any project for a few days until I get a job.
That man suddenly commented on my previous post I never knew he was following me. But it really feels good when some one remembers you.

Oh the installation on the server is finished need to configure everything. Will finish this post later.

setting up an SVN server is as easy as eating cake

I tried to set up an svn server on my laptop today as I have organized a hack session today to bring in more people for hacking FOSS.
I have chosen opendchub for three reasons:
1. They have seen it working. And they actually use it.
2. The source code is as less as 10 c files.
3. The project is dead. I have already applied for the maintainership. You dont apply please

This is a helpful link href=”http://en.opensuse.org/Setting_up_a_Subversion_server_using_Apache2 . I hope everything turns out positively.

Codecracker stats

After the event finished I calculated the stats. This really thrilled me

Codecracker stats:
Total teams that registered for the event : 118
Total teams that submitted solutions : 49
Total number of correct submissions : 44
Total number of submissions : 346

These are stats from Feedjit
The site grabbed attention of many people around the world !

We had people registered from USA and china also. The person from USA actually participated as seen from the image

The person from Bangladesh and China only logged in and saw the score card.


The rest visitors were from our country who actally participated in the event. Others landed accidentally i guess
People from many parts of India participated in the event.

This is what google analytics had to say :

I will elaborate the stats later on. I hope next year it sees participation from more places.

Codecraker Finals

I am writing this post from IT Dept lab from where the codecracker server is running. After a lot of problems and testing we finally managed to get codecracker working in Python and it has run smoothly without any failure till now. Now only 20 minutes are left for it to end. It feels good to be a part of an event as big as codecracker.
Rajat had set questions which were really tough than the last year. Mostly people from IIITs did the solutions. The stats will be given tomorrow morning. We had a team ‘ACRush’ from china. Unfortunately he did not participate. Till now we have more than 300 submissions. The stats will be out by tomorrow morning.
But the performance of students from my college was really poor.
The source code of codecracker will be out very soon.