Christy Speaks

DUCS & CRAVE are organizing a week long event called Open Source Software Week at DBIT . The OSS week will be conducted in 3 rd week of October i.e from 13 th - 18 th of October. The aim of the program is to introduce the students & staff to Open Source technology. This will also serve as a platform for introducing the freshers to Open Source thereby getting new CRAVE members (hardly any left). The OSS schedule is for the week is as follows - Linux Workshop (Architecture, Installation, ..) Animation (Blender) Graphic Designing (Inkscape, GIMP) Programming & Web Development (Editors, Apache, MySQL, ..) LaTeX Workshop Open Office Suite Gaming (Openarena, Torcs, UrbanTerror, ..) The Workshops will be conducted by Royston, Maddy & me. As of now the poster for the event has been completed mostly. The registration for the event will begin from 3 rd October. That's all for now, got to do some preparation for the event.

Many of us are familiar to the term Live CD , a common term during Linux installations. Being a System Administrator for past 2 years at CRAVE , a problem which I regularly came across was the need for a CD-ROM during installation process. Now this is absolutely fine when we install distro on a PC or so, but when you are talking about 20-30 PCs this becomes a pain especially if the PCs aforementioned are without CD-ROMs. As I was thinking of possible solutions like 'network boot', it struck me that ' USB boot' is also a possible solution. Though ' USB boot' is not very popular among Linux users, at least now. Currently ' USB boot' is in its early stages. At CRAVE we tried ' USB boot' about 7-8 months ago, the result was we could not get pass the initial loading screen. Making ' USB boot' work involves a lot of tweaking. I believe it is high time that Linux distros start working towards this, the floppy disks have already vani...

Recently I came across a situation that required to create backup of websites maintained by me. The CRAVE wiki and CRAVE site administered by me are not regularly updated so i needed something that would backup the databases monthly. This is when it struck me, that cron could solve my problem. Writing a simple shell script and calling the script via cron solved my problem. Let the script name be dumpdb.sh . The shell script for it is as follows #!/bin/sh db_uname="DBUSER"; db_pass="DBPASSWD"; db_name="DBNAME"; dateVar=$(date +%d%b%Y) mysqldump -u $db_uname -p$db_pass $db_name > ~/mysql_dbbackup/$db_name-$dateVar.sql This script will create dump of the database. The naming of the file is done by appending date with the database name, this way a unique name is created for every dump. The only job left now is to call this script every first day of month. This job can be done by adding the following line to crontab 01 10 1 * * /path_to_script/dumpdb.s...

The installation for Gutsy is very much like in Feisty with some minor changes. First you need to modify the sources.list file and add this line to repository. deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu gutsy partner Next run update command sudo apt-get update Finally install using sudo apt-get install vmware-server vmware-tools-kernel-modules During the installation it will ask for Serial Key, for this one needs to register at their site for FREE. Once registered you would get a Serial Key, which needs to inserted while installation. That's all that is there to it. Vmware installation on Hardy Heron is not as simple as it was in previous ubuntu versions as it is not available in partner repository for Hardy. The only way out seems is to install it manually.

The Crave Lab has acquired a new workstation which we have named as gizmo. The new workstation is one of its kind with some amazing hardware. Below is the 3D model of workstation created using Blender. The configuration of the new workstation is given below. CRAVE Multimedia Workstation (GIZMO) CPU: Xeon3220 (Quad core) Motherboard: ASUS P5WDG2 WS Professional RAM: Transcend 2.0GB x 2 HDD: Hitachi 320 GB x 2 Graphics Card: GeForce 8800GTS 512MB DVD writer: Sony 18X box packed AWG170S­B2 LCD Montior: Viewsonic