First day of the fest, we had a huge turnout of enthusiasts. Majority of the first day was spent on burning the iso’s onto the DVDs and defragmenting the system. After that we made them partition the system and installed Ubuntu on their laptops. Luckily there was no disc errors and the entire process went on smoothly. And by the end of the session, everybody in the workshop had Ubuntu on their systems.

Second day was more of instructions. Firstly there was an introduction talk on the philosophy of open source, a general introduction to LUG and the history of Linux. It was followed by configuration of CNTLM to make them able to access repositories over I-ON’s network. Then a general overview of software alternates in Ubuntu including open office, synaptic, rhythmbox, transmission, geany etc followed, ending the day’s proceedings.

On the last day of the event, there was a talk on Mozilla Firefox from the open source perspective, with amazing goodies, courtesy Mozilla. And rest of the day was spent interacting with the crowd and solving queries. Lots of interesting stuff was discussed.

Overall this event had a great turnout and served the perfect start to LUG Manipal’s line-up for the events this semester.

Click here to download the slides:
Intro to Linux
Open Source Software talk

Coming Next is the Web Development Workshop .

This will be a 3 days install fest Starting on 6th of October 2009 at 5:30pm at NLH 103 MIT.

Distro – Ubuntu 9.04

We are providing with a re-mastered Ubuntu 9.04 which contains the commonly used packages .

6th – Introduction to OpenSource and GNU/Linux and Preparation for Install Fest ( Burning of DVD’s and defragmentation )

7th – Installing Linux (Ubutu 9.04 ) and explaining the basic softwares ( VLC, Gimp,Rhythmbox ,OpenOffice,Synaptic, Geany, Gedit,Transmission,Brasero,Pidgin,gcc/g++ )

8th -Talk about various open source projects like Firefox etc .

*Please come with your laptop and 1 BLANK DVD

NOTE : You can have Windows and Linux both simultaneously running on your laptop.Also ,there will be no problems with your warranty .

i asked DJ if he wants to join me and after few weeks of coding there it was Manipal university’s first (working) Feedback System, when the point of hosting it came, i was surprised to find Manipal University has no Linux servers, i mean come on no Linux what are you people click sys admins, then we decided to setup our own server in the department, thus giving Manipal university its first Linux ( fedora 10 ) server.

currently it just hosts the Feedback System, but we are planning to use it as local ( internal ) fedora repository mirror, we need permission from the WiFi provider ION because almost all the students use only WiFi and not LAN, last time we tried we were denied by saying ” You are a threat to our network “, lets see how it goes this time. we will also require people to manage it but i think this can be handled very well by LUG Manipal, some pics

Fedora 10 server in Manipal

Fedora 10 server in Manipal

PS – i am looking for a way to convene them that setting up a mirror will be helpful for them as well as students can anyone suggest me how to go about it??

What is Preupgrade?

Downloading a new Fedora release, burning the DVD and reinstalling the entire thing is very time taking and requires enough bandwith . Preupgrade is an application that allows you to upgrade to the latest Release without having to do the above mentioned steps. It only downloads updates to packages that you have installed on your system in the background, and runs the final upgrade once this is done. Hence, it saves time, bandwith.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PreUpgrade

https://fedoraproject.com/wiki/Interviews/PreUpgrade

There’s also the “icon way” of upgrading, ie, no terminal needed.

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-May/msg00255.html

The LUG will have the DVD media too. Interested people may please contact us.

The F11 preview DVD is available with us. Please refer :

http://forums.lugmanipal.org/viewtopic.php?f=10&p=1414#p1414

This will be a 3 days install fest Starting on 3rd of November 2008  at 5:30pm at NLH 103 MIT.

3rd – Introduction to OpenSource and GNU/Linux and Preparation for Install Fest

*4th – InstallFest Day1 with proper directives for installation.

5th – InstallFest Day2 and Post Installation Interaction.

*Please come with an empty 10 GB parition and 2 BLANK CDs

I installed Ubuntu 8.04 today and faced this problem of WiFi again but ths time even installing ndiswrapper diddnt worked so had to find a way to make WiFi work on boot and here it is

For this First You need to install ndiswrapper, no need for net coz the packages are included in the CD / DVD of Ubuntu just go to System>>Administration>>software sources then uncheck all downloadable from internet, Third party and Update repo’s only select Installable from CD-ROM/DVD. Now open a Add/Remove from Applications>>Add/Remove.. there select all avaliable appliactions in show, now seach for ndis you will see Windows Wireless Drivers select it and click Apply changes it will ask you for the CD insert the CD and it will get installed, now you just have to install the drivers of your card for this open System>>Administration>>Windows Wireless Drivers and install the windows wireless drivers ( bcmwl5.inf for hp6515b bcm4312) now follow these steps, type
sudo -i now you must be as root then type
nano /etc/rc.local the file should read
rmmod ndiswrapper
rmmod ssb
modprobe ndiswrapper
exit 0

all done now just reboot and enjoy your Linux……..

Install mpd using your package manager (apt for Debian or Ubuntu users, yum for fedora and so on). Now comes the part of configuring it. If you would run mpd as root, it would read the configuration files from /etc/mpd.conf or otherwise from ~/.mpdconf . You won’t need to make any big changes in the conf file other than the location of music directory. Open up the conf file in an editor and see the line that reads music_directory. Just change the directory to your audio collection. As you would notice, the conf file is commented and it says ‘You can put symlinks in here, if you like.‘ This is pretty useful if your collection is spread over multiple directories. You can always start it by typing mpd at the terminal and kill it using mpd –kill. Remember it would read the appropriate conf file depending on how you are starting the process i.e. as a normal user or as the root.

Note: Your home directory ~ may not contain a .mpdconf directory by default after mpd is installed. In that case create one and for an example conf file, copy the mpd.conf file from /etc/ to ~/.mpdconf

anomit@deadbox:~$ cp /etc/mpd.conf .mpdconf/


Now comes the part of installing a client that would interact with the daemon and play music for you. Install ncmpc, a ncurses based client for mpd using your package manager. Then just start it using ncmpc at the terminal. There is also a GTK+ based client called Sonata which would appeal to you if you are more of a GUI person.

If you would like your current track to be displayed in your pidgin status message and also scrobble to your last.fm account if you have one, install mpdscribble using your package manager and download music tracker, the plugin for pidgin from here.

Configuring mpdscribble
To configure it, you need to compute the md5sum of your last.fm account password. Execute the following at the terminal:

$ echo -n "your-password"|md5sum>file-name.txt
Get the md5sum value from the file and add the follwing lines in the /etc/mpdscribble.conf file

username = user-name
password = md5sum


Now just type mpdscribble at the terminal whenever you want the scrobbling service to start and press Ctrl+C to end it.

Installing musictracker plugin

Extract the contents of the file and cd to the directory where it has been extracted. Run the following commands to install it:

./configure
make
make install

Just check the plugins list in pidgin and enable the musictracker plugin. Configure it according to your wishes.

P.S. By default mpd runs on port 6600 on your system. Could someone try connecting to a running daemon using ncmpc from another laptop on your lan? The appropriate command would be:

ncmpc --host=ip-address --port=6600
where ip-adress would be of the system running the daemon.

MadWifi is one of the most advanced WLAN drivers available for Linux today. It is stable and has an established userbase. The driver itself is open source but depends on the proprietary Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) that is available in binary form only.

Ok so lets start, first you need to download the source of Madwifi, go to http://madwifi.org/wiki/UserDocs/GettingMadwifi and download tar.gz source package, extract it now open a terminal and login as root by typing su or sudo -i, then goto the madwifi directory and type
cd scripts
./find-madwifi-modules.sh $(uname -r)
cd .. now you are ready to compile
make
now to install type
make install
Now load the module
/sbin/modprobe ath_pci now you can easily connect to the net on your Lenovo R60 lappy
To enable the wifi led just edit /etc/sysctl.conf, type
gedit /etc/sysctl.conf and add this at the end of the file and save
dev.wifi0.ledpin=1
dev.wifi0.softled=1 reboot and thats it enjoy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We had collected DVD’s from all of them who wanted to get fedora installed on their laptops. Why we choose Fedora? Nice question! This is due to the fact that the Xserver driver for ATI graphics cards provided to first years had bugs. The graphical interface would never come up. Nothing to blame Linux in it, it just incorporated the drivers which it is provided. To get the graphical interface running we had a script that installs a driver from a third-party software provider. The Driver would be put up soon as possible. Hope all of you have it on your C: drive. The driver is in the folder called “script”.

We had collected some 47 DVD’s from people, burnt Fedora and returned them today for installation. We had some 30 Ubuntu CD’s which we too tried to distribute, but as it was late, all people didnt get it. We have lots of pics too, please dont mind, it from Mobile Camera. Bear with us.

Keep checking this site usually, we will roll out lots of nice information,HOWtos and “Tips and Tricks”. Spare out some time to read the earlier posts and comment as you feel.

Pre-Install Fest Pics

Main Installation day Pics