Ratnadeep Debnath

Saturday, 31 October, 2009 I set up an offline Fedora 11 mirror in BCREC. I used the fedx makefile for the purpose of syncing the repository from my pocket HDD to the mirror PC ( an HP dual core system with Fedora 10 installed in it). I then setup a dhcpd server in the machine with the help of gdhcpd. I wrote a how to use the service and put it on the Desktop. I also wrote a fedora-local.repo which could be used by the clients to configure their machines to use the service. This should enable newbies without internet connection to get packages and softwares of Fedora 11.

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. ...

On 15th September, 2009 the Software Freedom Day was celebrated in The CSI Auditorium, Computer Society of India, Kolkata Chapter, 5, Elgin Road, 4th Floor, Kolkata – 700020 The following talks and discussions were planned for the SFD 2009, Kolkata : A. Mani to speak on “The Fedora Project” J. P. Mathews to speak on “Using Linux on PCs with limited resources” Ratnadeep Debnath(me) to speak on “Fedora-12 Highlights” Snehashish Chakraborty to speak on “RabbitMQ” ...

On 14 July, 2009, me ( Ratnadeep Debnath aka rtnpro) and Meejanur Rahaman ( aka meejan) and Kishan Goyal were heading towards Barasat University. Kishan took a bus from Howrah at around 8:30 AM and we started from Ruby Hospital at around 9:30 AM to Barasat. We hoped that we’ll be reaching the university at most by 11:30 AM and will have enough time to work. Our bust took a turn from Daak Bunglow. We told the conductor that we need to go to KaziPara, so the conductor said that he’ll drop us a bit ahead. We got down, enquired about the university, and no one seemed to have heard of it. Then we enquired about KaziPara, and then took a van. Then we were amidst a big traffic congestion. We were taking to Taki Road KaziPara, where we came to know that we came off the path to the university and came to now from the folks that there was another KaziPara at Jasha Road. We took a van again to Jasha Road. When we got down there, we found that this was not also the place we wanted to go. We enquired about the university from the folks out there, they were all dumb about that. ...

Today, 13th July, 2009, we ( me , i.e., Ratnadeep Debnath aka rtnpro, Kishan Goyal, Meejanur Rahaman, Harsh Verma, Chandana Boral) led by Indranil Das Gupta and Stephanie Das Gupta, went to West Bengal State University at Barasat, Kolkata. We started at around 10:30 AM from Ruby Hospital, and after a long journey ( changing two buses, then riding on a van, with a few drizzles on the way), we finally reached Barasat University at around 12:30 PM. ...

System Specifications : hp compaq 6515b,business series processor-AMD Turion 64 X2 Dual-Core Mobile Technology tl-50,clk rate 1600 mhz hardisk -80gb ram -1.5gb Video Video card features ATI Radeon X1250 Video Memory Shared video memory (UMA) Max Allocated RAM Size 512.0 MB Issues : Problem with the Graphical User Interface. System used to hang a lot. Moving and clicking with the mouse was a pain. Even there was a latency to browse the application menu. Firefox won’t run nicely. System usage was normal. System ran fine in CLI. ...

Hi all… I have a Dell XPS M1530 running on Fedora 10. It has got a 2 GHz Intel Centrino Duo processor, 2GB RAM, 256 MB Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT, quite a configuration for decent gaming. But till today I had to boot in Windows Vista to play games. So I have been trying to install and run Windows games in Fedora. There are a few tools for this purpose. The famous and proprietory and non-free Transgaming Cedega, Codeweavers Crossover Games and the all free PlayOnLinux. All these use wine which is a free software for running Windows applications in Linux. Though paid, Cedega and Crossover Games don’t support as many applications as PlayOnLinux. And when you are not sure that whether your games are going to run or not in Linux, wine and PlayOnLinux is the free and good option to stick to. ...

15th May, 2009, Day 2, DGPLUG FAD in Dr. B. C. Roy Engineering College, Durgapur. It was around 11:30 AM, that we started the 2nd Day of FAD. The number of participants were less than the Day 1, it was around 15, but we could see some new faces. The ECE students couldn’t join because they had their internals and Lab Examinations the very same day. We started the day with some cool videos from tv.dgplug.org on Okular, KSnapshot, Packagekit, etc. ...

The following is a nice tutorial on how to create a custom Linux Distribution . PCPlus has a tutorial on building your own Linux distribution with the customizations you want, derived from Fedora, using the graphical interface called Revisor. “We’re used to thinking of Linux distributions being set in stone. They’re either KDE or Gnome, use a certain kernel and bundle certain applications. But this doesn’t have to be the case. If you find yourself making the same adjustments each time you install a new distribution, it’s worth creating your own customised version. Revisor is a tool that lets you do just this, and in this tutorial, we’ll show you how.” ...

It’s been quite some time since I started poking with bluetooth coding, but didn’t understand it much. But it was quite some moment this afternoon. I was trying to study the rfcomm source code, and finally could able to find out the part of the code responsible for the “bind” option for rfcomm. Had a code already for scanning for nearby bluetooth devices. Edited some of theirs codes, added some lines, and came up with a code in c which scans for nearby bluetooth devices, displays them, asks the users to choose one of the devices to bind, and accordingly binds that device. But for that, the device must be already paired up with the host computer. Here’s the code: ...