Ratnadeep

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 ...

Often I hear questions like this “How do I connect to the internet from linux via my bluetooth mobile phone GPRS?” Yes, there are ways to do that, but telling a newbie to go to the terminal and do hcitool scan, rfcomm, etc. spooks him out. And also The system-config-network, while setting up a Modem Connection through it, one has to com across port numbers, baud rate, etc. and a user not used to Linux, most of the time finds these things weird, especially the users. These issues need to be looked into and some actions are required to come up with a more user friendly interface in this regard. That’s another topic of discussion though … ...

It was afternoon when I tried my hands on trying to upgrade my filesysten from ext3 to ext4. I referred to : http://ext4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Ext4_Howto#Converting_an_ext3_filesystem_to_ext4 As mentioned… I did the following : <code style="white-space:nowrap;color:#495988;background-color:white;"># tune2fs -O extents,uninit_bg,dir_index /dev/<em>VolGroup00/LogVol00</em> <code style="white-space:nowrap;color:#495988;background-color:white;"># e2fsck -fD /dev/<em>VolGroup00/LogVol00</em> After quite some time, the procedure finally completed. I was so delighted that I did a sytem reboot to find that my system won’t boot. The reason, I didn’t update my kernel ramdisk image, and it tried to mount the / partition as ext3 and failed as the partition has already become ext4. What I forgot to do was : ...

I am using Fedora 10 and I was running the kernel 2.6.27.15-170.2.24.fc10.i686 and I was happy until I did a ‘yum update’. My kernel got updated to kernel 2.6.27.19-170.2.35.fc10.i686, and then the system won’t boot the latest kernel. While booting it gave a mesage : Unable to access resume device (/dev/dm-1) mount : could not find filesystem ‘/dev/root’ I wondered what had happened? But, the old kernel 2.6.27.15-170.2.24.fc10.i686 seemed to work perfectly. I became fanatic to resolve this issue. I did some googling, and finally came to know that the issue was with /etc/fstab and my Fedora 10 being installed on LVM. Here is my previous fstab details : ...

It has been quite some time I blogged on our ongoing classes. And how are we doing? So far it’s been quite some good experience taking classes in Bijra High School. Hope to make it better and better. Lately, classes were taken in Bijra High School on 4/3/2009 and on 6/3/2009. Let me remember…mmm…what did we do out there on 4th March…I remember now : We were lucky to get the 11:20 B-Zone bus to Kataberia. People who went to Bijra? Ratnadeep (rtnpro), Kishan, Bappi, Meejanur, Harsh ( with his digikam). We reached the school by 12:00 PM. We called the Std. VIII students in groups in the Computer Lab. Bappi and Kishan took charge of the lab. Basically, it was kind of a recapitulation or better introductory class for the Std. VIII students. They were introduced to the OpenOffice Writer and later they had some hands-on with TuxPaint. I and Meejanur went to Std. V to take theory. O Gash! It was some different Std. V than the last time we saw it, full of din and bustle. We started the speak on the topic CPU and its components. Don’t know what happened, was it that we could not communicate the topic nicely or they were in a mood of fun, the class could not continue. We talked on this matter to their teachers and asked for their cooperation to make the students more disciplined. Then it was the half day break. After that, there was the computer lab for the students of Std. VI and I and Bappi went to Std. VII. The students were serious. The class was responsive and inquisitive. I remember them even asking : ...