Arindam’s Weblog

In the recent implementation of LTSP for Bijra School Project (in the ambience of WBUT LIbrary) we have used Fl_TeacherTool for global control over all the terminals. Now I found that in Fl_TeacherTool we can do everything except Shudown/Reboot the terminals. These two things we have to run from command line using #ltspinfo (ltspinfo) which is a module that comes with the LTSP iso. But for people over there in the school (even for the teachers over there) it is a difficult job to run ltspinfo from shell. So i thought of designing a good UI for this and integrate it with the Fl_TeacherTool. I am writing down a shutdown module for Fl_TeacherTool in Qt. The core thing is that I will insert a Shutdown/Reboot button in Fl_TeacherTool and that in turn will open a GUI. A screenshot is given as follows:

This is just the basic structure of the module. Now, I will work on the following things:

1. Replace the text box based input with a dropdown menu in which we can select one out of the currently logged in terminals. But, this will be done only after the text box-based one works fine.
2. Add Shutdown/Reboot button in Fl_TeacherTool. The dialog can work independently quite well. But its integration with Fl_TeacherTool needs lots of work.
3. Link all the events properly.
4. Also work on the look and feel of the GUI.

Last but not the least, I chose Qt for this because it can do cross-platform jobs efficiently.

During the InstallFest we faced a weird problem. The mouse was working but the mouse pointer was invisible. It was M$ optical mouse with nVidia video driver. So we first added the mouse device in /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "InputDevice"

Identifier "Mouse"
Driver "mouse"
Option "device" "/dev/mouse"
Option "Protocol" "Auto"

EndSection

Then we added the most crucial line in the nVidia driver section of xorg.conf. By default, HWCursor is on.

Section "Device"

.......
Driver “nv”
Option “HWCursor” “Off” #New option

EndSection

For more details of options of nVidia video driver “nv” see #man nv

Yesterday, WBUT (wbut-lug) organized its’ 1^st LINUX Install Fest with the help of ilug-cal. This was only the first day of its 3-day venture. It was also the first of its’ kind in West Bengal . Actually wbut-lug existed for quite some time now (without much activity). But few days back some students (namely Rabi, Ankur & others) of WBUT itself said to Indra da,

“Many people have lots of problem while installing Linux…..also we can’t listen to mp3 music in Fedora etc….why not we organize a workshop for this?”.

So the obvious answer, “Why not?”. From that day preparations started. Indra da supervised the entire affair. First of all, since in WBUT we have only a 2 Mbps connection which is still not enough for around 22 computers trying to do YUM install/update, Sushmit da created a local repository for Fedora 7. Lots of credit goes to him. Handouts, Notes and flyers were also prepared. Debarshi da also brought lots of Fedora stickers.

We all (members of ilug-cal) went down to help out around 22 students gathered in the IBM Centre of Excellence at WBUT. The event was scheduled to be started on 12 noon. Though we were an hour late, it started very well. The day started with a brief but definitive introduction from Indra da. We started showing the students about how to do a Network install of Fedora 7 (ofcourse from the Local Repo). For this we also used the boot disk of F7. The CD/DVD installation is only a subset of this, so it won’t create any problems for them. Then we instructed them how to do Yum install/update. The yum installs were directed to the local repo too. Overall, they recieved a much better means compared to their home owing to the resources at WBUT. Because practically in India, very few does a Network installation.

Well now, some students brought their home CPU’s and Laptops. Others were using WBUT systems. Two of them had 64-bit box and hence installed x86_64 bit version of F7. Rest of them installed the 32-bit ones. After F7 was installed, we yum installed audio/video codecs & supports (xine, libdvd, ffmpeg etc) in all the systems. They learnt how to actually do Yum install. Then, we played music, videos and DVD’s on their systems and showed them how well is the multimedia support of Linux.

On th second half, we also yum installed some popular games like OpenArena and Torcs on all the systems. Now, games make everyone crazy. They tested them for some time. Then we also showed how to use K3B for CD/DVD burning. All of them individually tested it by burning CD’s themselves. Now, we made it clear to them that everyone was free to ask questions and we would go around to help them. As Indra da said, “He is a biggest stupid who doesn’t ask questions!!”. Some of the popular questions were:

• Why doesn’t swap partition have a mount point?
• Why doesn’t F7 play mp3 by default?
• How to mount ntfs & vfat partitions in Linux?

Problems Faced:

1. One of the box had a weird problem. It had a nVidia chipset and AMD Athlon 64-bit processor. The mouse (Type: optical Make:M$) was working but pointer was invisible “Hollow man” mouse . Anyways, Soumyadip da fixed this by adding some lines in /etc/X11/xorg.conf as given here: Invisible mouse pointer!!
   

2. Another one had ATI video driver. So he could not play OpenArena due to rendering problems (Needs to be fixed).
3. Two of the systems were miserably slow. So we couldn’t install F7 in them.

See all photos: WBUT LUG’s 1st InstallFest

Must see posts: Installfest Zindabad

Today we did all the necessary ground work for a seminar “A Day with Fedora” that is being organized by dgplug. It will take place tommorow at the seminar hall of our college (BCREC).

Recently I am trying out some shell scripting stuffs……its very flexible and damn powerful. I also tried some very simple ones…

One is as follows:

#!/bin/bash
clear
while true
do


df -a
sleep 2
clear

done

This allows one to constantly monitor the disk space while running install, updates, backups etc. I also tried another for generating fibonacci series:

#!/bin/bash
x=0
y=1
echo $x
echo $y
for i in 1 2 3 4 5
do


let 'x=x+y'
echo $x
let 'y=x+y'
echo $y

done

That’s just the beginning…I’m exploring more about shell scripting. This accompanied with a programming language can work wonders. I’m just loving it…