Fedx

I became desperate yesterday night to do some useful things, anything. Had a long offline Puja Holidays. I was struggling to understand “How to write Makefiles”, and yesterday it clicked and I ended up writing a Makefile for the ongoing fedX project. Though the makefile which I wrote is not that great, but I have a start now. Committed the changes to the fedX repository at http://gitorious.org/~rtnpro/fedx/rtnpros-fedx-clone/ It was around 4:00 AM in the morning already. Made some changes in my gitorious project clones. Apart from that, I was trying to download the rpmfusion repositories for Fedora 11. I was using rsync on multiple screens for the purpose. But again and again, rsync used to stop downloading after working for sometime. Then I tried a Firefox addon “DownThemAll” and was very happy to see it work. All I needed was to browse the repository page listing all the packages, right click and select DownThemAll. And then I just needed to select where I want to save the downloaded files and start it. It downloads multiple files simultaneously and does not halt when one of the files cannot be downloaded, rather it pauses it and moves to others. It also supports resume, and has an option to skip the already downloaded files. ...

Happy Durga Puja to all. It has been a long run since I left for Durgapur after the Software Freedom Day,2009 at Kolkata. I reached Howrah station at around 8:15 PM on 15th September 2009. Though I got an e-ticket for Durgapur in the Danapur Express which was about to leave from Howrah at 9:35 PM, I still didn’t have a hard copy. I thought I could get a print out at the station from the .html file of the e-ticket I was having in my mobile phone. As ill luck would have it, the one cyber cafe that was there in Howrah station was being demolished (might be for repairs … drastic). I had plenty of time though, so I went outside the station to try my luck. With some help from the folks out there, I started my venture to find a place to print my ticket. Couldn’t find any in the proximity. Finally I found one, but the shop’s printer ran out of ink. What the hell! It was 9:15 PM and so I returned and boarded the train. My mobile phone was almost out of charge, and so I transferred the only document of my ticket to my laptop. When the TTE came, I showed him the html file and after some arguments, I was able to convince him. It could have been worse. I didn’t have my Identity Card with me. ...

This summer I am working on building a GUI for easy setup of a completely offline Fedora repository as a part of my DGPLUG summer training 2009. This, if successfully implemented, will greatly help us to spread Fedora and FOSS usage in areas where decent internet connections are not available in general. I am being mentored by** mbuf** in this project. He gave a COOL name to this project FedX ...