Working at www.srijan.in

The story began nearly one month back. I had hardly any work and no internship for the coming summer. Debayan forwardrd a mail from ILUG Delhi’s mailing list for an opportunity for an internship to work on Drupal. Since I had PHP knowledge and I had been managing the GLUG website, so I felt I had some chance. So I sent them a mail with my resume. Though I was not expecting any replies ( I had made similar attempts earlier also), still I made an attempt following my Golden rule – “Try, rather than repenting later that I should have tried”.  Two days later I got a reply that there would be a telephonic interview which happened the next day. The interview was okay. I hardly have anything in my resume that I could boast about. The person was Mr. Sidharth (thanks to the list of names of employees on my desk for the spelling).  He said that he would reply in 15 days about the confirmation which made me think that that they will dump me. To my amazement the same guy called me two days later that I was selected and asked about my convinience for work.

I was very happy and now I am at Srijan trying to digg deep into drupal. Today is my third day here. I must admit that sitting here 8 hours makes me so tired that I fall sleep as soon as I reach home. I hope that I do something great in the coming two months of my work here.

ScribeFire Plugin for Firefox

I like to use Firefox because of the add-ons it provides. I mostly use Fast Dial, Webmail notifier, Download Them all, Twitterfox, Google toolbar. Just now I installed ScribeFire blog editor. This is really a cool add-on. You just have to press F8 and you get a nice interface, go ahead and type whatever you want to and just publish your post.
I have written this post from ScribeFire and from now onwards I will use it to write posts. 

Some things I have been doing these days

I have become a kind of person who does not care about examinations any more and keep on doing some stuffs.

1. I always wanted to have a bot on our channel (#nitdgplug on Freenode, though we have very less to log, you all are welcome to our channel ). So i used eggdrop to create a bot and log messages. It is really a great software, and needs a hell lot of configuration. Here is the configuration bot file. Strangely wordpress does not allows to upload txt files, so you can simply rename it as bot.conf and use.
I made an important change to log all the messages and log it in directories whose name bears month name and year as Apr2009. I played with the configuration file and then it was done. Just create a directory with this name Apr2009 (three letters per month name.
This did the trick

logfile jpk #nitdgplug “logs/” //removed the name of file name
set logfile-suffix “%b%Y/%d%b%Y.txt” // I just added ‘%b%Y/’ to what it aleady was.

you can see logs of our channel at http://lug.nitdgp.ac.in/irclogs/.

2. Today I created a video section for our website with wordpress. I was struggling with Drupal, even if it has a flash player module it is not properly documented (If you know tell me I will be pleased to know). With wordpress it was just a matter of 10 minutes. http://lug.nitdgp.ac.in/videos.

This was really fun. Looking for more things to do .

How to /boot/grub/menu.lst for network install

Yesterday I went to help a Professor from Mechanical Department who had mailed me for help. He was really struggling with windows as desperately wanted to get Linux installed as he was not familiar with windows software. He was the first man I have ever met who said that he was struggling with office excel and wanted Linux.

He had an old HP workstation. I never had opportunity to see a workstation but yesterday I saw one and even installed Fedora 10 on it. I must say the machine was really fast even better than the new Centrino Duo / core 2 duo processors that we use. The instllaion took only 20 minutes and i must say here that he had nearly selected almost all the packages (GNOME & KDE both).

There was another machine whose DVD drive was not working. I had SUSE Enterprise Server installed with barely any software. So I installed openSUSE 11.1 on it from the Local Installation repository that we have. We generally use Unetbootin (Google if you dont know) for network installation. But I was not able to install that due to some dependencies. So I downlaoded the kernel and initrd filles from the installation medium and then i edited menu.lst.

• First I made a new directory in /boot and called it install.
• Then I copied the initrd and linux(kernel in opensuse DVD) to /boot/install.

• Then I edited menu.lst. Since my boot partition was same as root /dev/sda2, so for me i added

title Install

root (hd0,2)
kernel /boot/install/linux
initrd /boot/install/initrd

• Then I rebooted and selected “Install” from the boot menu and it worked out.

Once again it can be noticed how powerful Linux is, I dont know if any other OS gives you such options, if you know then please tell me 

using java on linux

This was a problem faced by my friend. He happens to use only JAVA that too JAVAC. He does not like to use Netbeans I don’t know why. And he said that it was the only problem that stopped him from using Linux. So I decided to help him. These were some links which were really helpful.

http://en.opensuse.org/Java
http://en.opensuse.org/Installing_Sun%27s_Java_on_SUSE_Linux (to be more precise)

The problem was that the openJDK which provides JAVC which is the default installation on openSUSE is different from JAVAC provided by SUN because the same Hello World program which compiled on SUN’s JAVAC failed to compile on openJDK’s JAVAC.

The details can be found out here http://lug.nitdgp.ac.in/wiki/index.php/How_to_use_Java_on_Linux

The repositories described there are Local to our college you can use your package manager to locate the packages. For openSUSE users sun’s packages are in Non-OSS repo

mouting network directory as your own directory, NFS

I manage our local GLUG server. And the server was running out of space. So I was thinking of some alternative, so NFS clicked my mind. I am trying to mirror Ubuntu repo for our college students.

There is another server in the college which I happen to manage, so I decided to give NFS a try. Since both the machines are running openSUSE the distro of my choice, it was not difficult at all. http://en.opensuse.org/NFS This link gave sufficient information about using NFS.

Within 10 minutes I was done. But I need to see how fast it actually is once the download completes. Hope it works out. Then our repo will be complete with support for Fedora, openSUSE and ubuntu. Check out the repo here. http://lug.nitdgp.ac.in/repository/

should i try fedora

Rangeen, who happens to be the only Fedora ambassador in our college did a very good work by creating a local Fedora repository http://lug.nitdgp.ac.in/repository/fedora-local/ . I am an openSUSE user and I am satisfied with it, we also have a local packman mirror http://lug.nitdgp.ac.in/repository/packman/ which happens to be the biggest repo for openSUSE. But the only problem is that it is not a complete repo, I mean while installing packages I need to download some packages from the internet also. But the Fedora repo which also has the updates is nearly a complete repo.

So I am thinking about trying Fedora now.

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.