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Web Design and Development Workshop

March 20, 2008 – 11:01 pm

LUG, Manipal is organizing a Web Design and Development Workshop for students of Manipal next week starting 25th March,Tuesday. Our main focus will be to promote Open Source Technology for Web Development and Design. This workshop can be viewed as Workshop no 1 covering Module 1 of the total web design workshops we intend to hold.

The content material for this workshop will be basic HTML for getting a start to web programming. The basics of this tagged language can be learnt at W3Schools. We will then advance to the basics of server side and client side scripting and the differences between them. Client side scripting has been put in Module 2 (next workshop) of the whole web design workshop from LUG Manipal.

PHP is the choice of language for Server side Web Design. Those who don’t know much about this language better pay attention. People usually ask “What is PHP? Is it as powerful as ASP?”. Well! Its much more powerful than ASP frankly. You need to know both the languages before comparing them and just making guesses is a bad habit. To make you feel comortable, we would like to tell you that it is one of the most widely deployed technology of these times. Some of the most famous places where its used is Wikipedia, Wordpress (most famous blogging software), most of the Content Management System. Even Google and Yahoo make use of PHP for their pages.

Now turning to MySQL, this is the most widely deployed database software which has more than 5,000 downloads per day as the statistics revealed by MySQL AB. Being the world’s most famous Open Source Database, its bound to be quite attractive. Being a very lightweight database software, its easy to install even on desktops. People usually have a bad experience after installing Oracle as their systems get badly screwed up with reguard to speed. Its very small in size (some 150-200MB) instead of Oracle which is of some 2GB.

The scripting will be done on Apache Web Server, its the world unchallenged king when it come to server deployments, covering some 70%of the webservers. Lightweight, extensibility , great features make it the no 1 choice of web developers all over the world.

More Details of the workshop is:

  • Venue: NLH 204
  • Time: 5:30PM
  • Starts: 25th March Tuesday to 28th March, Friday

References:

Get the Official PHP Manual from its website.

Get the Official MySQL Manual from its website.

Check the LUG Manipal Wiki Page for this Event

Manish | Meets, Programming, Web Programming, Workshops | Comments (1)

“now playing” Status in Pidgin

March 11, 2008 – 9:48 am

Some of the guys posted in the forums as to how to go about it, hence this post. Going by the list of available plugins to do the same it would seem a cakewalk. But it isn’t as you would be often stranded with a plugin that won’t support the media player you would be having. Trust me, I have had enough of these. So in this post I would explain how to install and configure mpd (music player daemon) on your system and do a lot more than you would have thought of. You would ask, why mpd? I would say its the most ultra light on system resources among all the music players I have used to date.

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.

anomit | Install, Problems | Comments (2)

Configuring WiFi with Ndiswrapper on Debian

March 5, 2008 – 12:10 am

Ok so lets start, you need module-assistant as you have to build the ndiswrapper from the source seperately, so type
apt-get install module-assistant
then prepare the build environment
module-assistant prepare
this will download the kernel-header and setup the symbolic links, now install the ndiswrapper-source package
apt-get install ndiswrapper-source
if you have internet access only via WiFi the download the packages from http://packages.debian.org and then install them, next build ndiswrapper
module-assistant build ndiswrapper
now type
apt-get install ndiswrapper-utils-1.9
now you are ready to install the drivers for that follow this enjoy

Ankur | Install, Problems | Comments (0)

Preventing atheros card from being disconnected often

February 26, 2008 – 4:18 pm

Found out this solution at ubuntu forums after googling a bit. I was totally fed up with the connection acting out randomly. The solution lies in locking the network interface to a specific 802.11 a/b/g mode.

Edit your /etc/rc.local file and add the following lines before exit 0

modprobe ath_pci
(sleep 10 && /sbin/iwpriv ath0 mode 3) &

Actually it uses the iwpriv mode X command to lock the card to a specific mode, where
X=0, for a/b/g
1, for a
2, for b
3, for g
You add this to /etc/rc.local to make the change permanent, so that these settings are loaded every time you boot into ubuntu.

Source

anomit | Problems | Comments (0)

Enabling Wifi on Lenovo R60 in Linux

February 25, 2008 – 7:26 pm

So yesterday after hunting for the solution of the wifi problem in Lenovo R60 so quite sometime i finally decided to try DJays solution to build Madwifi and it worked like a charm. I was thinking that there will be a total Open Source solution of the problem but well i just hope that ath5k will replace madwifi soon, anyway here is something about MadWifi

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!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ankur | Install, Problems | Comments (5)

LUG officially registered

February 13, 2008 – 8:00 pm

Our LUG has been included in the official list at linux.org . Check it out here

anomit | General | Comments (5)

Forums

February 10, 2008 – 3:04 pm

Hi all,

As promised, the forums are up @ forums.lugmanipal.org.

–
Swap

Swaroop | General | Comments (0)

Workshop on “Using Linux”

February 8, 2008 – 2:41 pm

Linux Users Group, Manipal is organizing a workshop on “Using and Managing Linux”. The Event is scheduled to be held on 8th and 9th February, Friday and Saturday. The venue is NLH 303 and all the people interested in attending are expected to be seated by 5:30PM sharp. Everybody is requested to bring their laptops fully charged.

The people who will be conducting the workshop are:

  1. Anomit Ghosh ( 2nd Year)
  2. Manish Sinha ( 3nd Year)
  3. Ankur Srivastava ( 1st Year)
  4. Shashank Shekhar ( 1st Year)
  5. Nitin Abhishek ( 2nd Year)

The first three people will take the responsibility for the first day and the last two for the second. On Saturday we expect our sponsor- Swaroop Hegde to be present at the venue to give share with a few words on what he feels on the future prospects of this group.

For More Info, check these links

Manish | Meets, Workshops | Comments (0)

LUG Manipal now has a wiki

February 5, 2008 – 4:29 pm

LUG is a collaborative project with people coming from all walks of life to work to work together for a common project or cause. Inspired by Wikipedia’s success as a collaborative project we thought of having a wiki at our site so that we can have a platform for working together. We can have vast details and ideas put up on the wiki for everyone to view later.

The Wiki’s URL is http://wiki.lugmanipal.org

At present I have put up FAQ’s and Upcoming Section for People who want to know deeply about the events. Previous events are also aggregated so that people who missed out can derive out of it.

I end up my post here, hoping for your reponse. This is not a monologue but a mutual talk or discussion. Comment back and we will see how much you are sincere :)

Manish | General, Meets | Comments (0)

New Home

February 3, 2008 – 1:35 am

Hello everyone,

LUG Manipal has a new home, LUGManipal.org (and also lugmanipal.com which redirects to the main domain). Who am I and why am I here, you’ll know very soon.

–
Swap

Swaroop | General | Comments (1)