gnulinuxclub

Updates in site Contents

2008-06-16T17:43:00.000-07:00

Hello all,

I have sent some of documented stuff to Gaurav for posting them on gnulinuxclub.org.
Gaurav, Please update after uploading the contents.

While browsing, I came across http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/ , which is providing enough, to the point articles with proper examples for shell scripting. I mailed to the owner with cc to Gaurav for his approval for publishing his articles on our site with his user credentials.

On receiving his approval, we can start a new section called Shell scripting and publish those articles.

Please have a look at mentioned site and provide your reviews for starting Shell scripting session.

Linux and FOSS in 10 minutes

2005-12-01T19:59:00.000-08:00

Ten reasons to discard this document

I do not have 10 minutes to spare
Linux?? FOSS ???whats this ,not of my use..
There is no problem with my PC .
Linux is tooooo hard to understand and work with
Linux does not help me with my professional work
Linux is for servers not for desktop PC
I will have to pay to get support on Linux
I am afraid to explore new avenues/ideas.
I am happy to use pirated software
I do not prefer free advice.

.....add up your reasons if they are different from these

This might tend to be a spam in your mail,but you can always spare 10
minutes out of your busy schedule to know about something about the
technology you have not explored yet and why the people all over the
world are going mad over this.
have a look at http://foss.in to see what we are up to in India.FOSS
stands for "Free and Open Source software"

If this gets you interested ,pl keep on reading.
Please forward this to your freinds if you like forwarding it.

We will start with the basics now.

Basics of Operating System (O.S),Kernel,Linux,Free Software,Open Source Software

Operating system: In computing, an operating system (OS) is the system
software responsible for the direct control and management of hardware
and basic system operations. Additionally, it provides a foundation
upon which to run application software such as word processing
programs, web browsers and others.

Example of Operating systems: Windows Xp.windows 2000, windows 98
Suse Linux , Redhat linux,Debain linux,mandrake Linux etc etc

Kernel: In computer engineering, the kernel is the core of an
operating system. It is a piece of software responsible for providing
secure access to the machine's hardware and to various computer
processes (a process is a computer program in a state of execution).
Since there are many programs, and hardware access is limited, the
kernel also decides when and how long a program should be able to make
use of a piece of hardware, which is called scheduling.

Coming to Linux....

Linux: In the narrowest sense, the term Linux refers to the Linux
kernel, but it is commonly used to describe entire Unix-like operating
systems (also known as GNU/Linux) that are based on the Linux kernel
combined with libraries and tools from the GNU Project and other
sources. Most broadly, a Linux distribution bundles large quantities
of application software with the core system, and provides more
user-friendly installation and upgrades. The Linux Kernel was written
by Linus Torvalds

GNU : GNU is a free software operating system. Its name is a recursive
acronym for "GNU's Not Unix", which was chosen because its design is
Unix-like, but it contains no actual UNIX code. The GNU system,
combined with a third-party kernel called Linux, is one of the most
widely used operating systems in the world, commonly known as either
"GNU/Linux" or often simply "Linux"
GNU project was started by Richard Stallman.

Free Software :
``Free software'' is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the
concept, you should think of ``free'' as in ``free speech,'' not as in
``free beer.''

Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy,
distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it
refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software:

* The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
* The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your
needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for
this.
* The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
* The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements
to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3).
Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Open Source Software:
The basic idea behind open source is very simple: When programmers can
read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of
software, the software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it,
people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used
to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems
astonishing.

There is absolutely no problem with your PC, but your PC can be used
to give much better performance if you could try different operating
systems or different software on different O.S. Everything you could
try is new and difficult at the beginning. You need to devote some
energy and time into this so that you Can learn from it and benefit
from it Linux as it has evolved nowadays is increasingly used for
Desktop PCs as well so there is no dearth of applications in Linux for
desktop users.
In fact you will find usage of Linux/Foss in some areas where no other
OS can match its capabilities .Like graphics,multimedia,UTF-8 encoding
support etc etc.

To get a feel of free software on your present OS, you can download a
copy of FireFox browser and use it as an alternative to Internet
explorer .It won't take much of your time to realize why FireFox is
now used by millions of users on all platforms.

Keeping in true spirit of the community , you Can always get a free
tip or advice related to Linux or free software from some very good
forums like
www.linuxquestions.org
or any
Linux User groups.
to start with using Linux you can download or ask some of your friends
using Linux for a free copy of Live CD based Linux
these do not require to be installed in your Hard disk
They run directly from the CD some of the popular ones are
knoppix, Puppy Linux,Ubuntu Live

why i am giving away free advice and spamming your account?

I do not Spam any email accounts but I just make a try once in couple
of months so as to encourage people to learn more about Linux and Foss
so that they can also benefit from it.this is my way to
contributing/supporting to the Linux/Foss community.
apart from this you can have a look to past articles at my website
http://www.gnulinuxclub.org

Any word of encouragement from your side will be boost for me to
continue over this

More On this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU
http://www.gnulinuxclub.org

How to help Free/Open Source Projects

2005-11-06T09:08:00.000-08:00

How to help Free/Open Source Projects

I am writing this article after I took into account if i was doing
something for promoting Open/Free Source Projects .

How many times has that rescue CD we use has saved Us?

How many times has the free/Open source software that comes bundled
with some Gnu/Linux Distro proved a lot to us or that Live Gnu/Linux
Cd helped us and we have felt proud of possessing that
Software/Distro?

How many times we have been able to stand up against pirated software
with our help high along with the Free/Open Source software that works
along with other copyrighted Platforms as well ?

How many times have we been helped by some expert on any forum?

I hope not many of us can take into account the above in pure numeric terms .

What Have we done to promote Free/Open source related projects?

Very few of these projects have the support of sponsors(maybe 2%-5% of
these projects)These projects do require some encouragement and some
monetary encouragement also to survive with the resources required to
keep them running.
Good projects receive some donations in form of Money or resources
such as Internet Bandwidth (Mirror for downloading software),Computer
Hardware for their development or Server . I do not know about any
team that has been making big profits from the donations they receive
. These just suffice them to keep their projects alive and kicking.

Helping these projects is necessary as they provide this premium
collection of software for free .Else they will also start charging
for the premium version or to sign up for some help forum.Already some
Distros and Software Vendors have started following this
strategy.After all they too need to upgrade themselves to survive.

These projects can e helped in some way or the other
some of them that i could think of

Donate some Money directly to these Organizations.
A good way can be through affero.net ,from where you can choose
various organizations who will benefit from any money you donate.(the
minimum amount you can donate is 5$)

Buy the Free Cds that are available for download, directly from these
Organizations ,that way also you can help them and you can get some
more premium service.

Many of these Organization carry ads of their sponsors, these can
fetch some some money(although meagre) for the User Clicks they
generate.Visiting their sponsors can also help them.

Help them while offering a Download Mirror for their Software/Distro,
this wil reduce the Bandwidth Cost for such Organizations.In india
there is dearth of such download mirrors.Corporates/Educational
Institutes can get involved here if they provide the required
bandwidth for non-office hours only.

There are many other ways for helping these organizations. I do not
know how many of us might have helped such Organizations but i think a
sum of 5$-20$ can be donated on a yearly basis to any such
Organization.

gaurav masand
linux4all[at]gmail.com

Changed Links at the site

2005-08-13T20:16:00.000-07:00

If anyone has noiticed that there were some links at the website linking to the other sections at the website.These were not accessbile for the past 2 weeks

The reason for this is that we had our site shifted to another server temporarily.
now,due to some change in the settings in the server the SEO type links could not work so i had to revert back to non-SEO type links and then update the links ,like the links at the "Welcome to GnuLinuxclub" and i have not changed the last one ,instead unpublished the older one and created a new one ,so that if we again get back to the old server we can go to the older type of links.

crontab tutorial

2005-07-27T10:16:00.000-07:00

I posted a Crontab tutorial on the wiki. Please take a look and suggest changes.
Thanks

setup samba as pdc

2005-07-26T02:37:00.000-07:00

Hi friends i have posted an article on "setup samba as primary domain controller"
Check out on site pls...
~pratik

About Us wiki

2005-07-12T14:44:00.000-07:00

I edited the About Us wiki. Just added a couple of lines. Have a look and comments are welcome!

Previous day "Aaj ka tip"

2005-07-12T03:03:00.000-07:00

Not able to scroll with your mouse in Gnu/Linux?
just make sure that you have this line

Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"

and also this line Option "Protocol" "ImPS/2"
in your

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse1"

in /etc/X11/xorg.conf
or
/etc/X11/XF86Config4
file

----------

Reference
http://archu.blogspot.com/2005/07/mouse-scrolled.html

---------

But our site is giving error as it is "OFFLINE"
The error i get is

"This site is temporarily unavailable.
Please notify the System Administrator"

No of Visitors..!

2005-07-12T02:49:00.000-07:00

The number of hits we had in our site is "Visitors: 6464"

I think we are bit popular these days.. :)

How to run a gnu/Linux user group website

2005-07-08T12:59:00.000-07:00

How to run a gnu/Linux user group website

This article explains the above in very simple terms.

It describes much like the way we have followed the development of our current website gnulinuxclub.org

Why do you require a website?

Starting with a Gnu/Linux User group, you need to have a website where you can carry out various activities. It is easy for members to keep themselves updated from a website where they can come to know about activities of the group and get some technical help too.

How to design a site?

when working with a gnu/Linux website ,it is better to develop the website on Gnu/Linux platform. There are many WYSIWYG(What You See Is What You Get) type of editors same as front page

Like Mozilla Web composer

other powerful HTML editors are Quanta,Bluefish

You could also go for a CMS(content management system)

Some of these are PHP powered packages like Mambo,Drupal.

These are very use to use and manage. Choose a template from a no. of free templates,change that accordingly and you are up with your website.

All these CMS have a back end,where you can administrate your website with the click of a mouse.You can add menus, change them , add content etc .Also you can allow registered users to login and submit content at the website .These makes you free of hassles of writing some html code,but you might not have the same flexibility.

Personallyi feel that still CMS is a better option. It saves lot of work and you do not need to be that good website developer to maintain this.

Where to host the website?

For basic HTML based website you can get free web space from geocities.yahoo.com
but you will also get different ads at geocities,which eats up some space at of your site.
Also if you require MySql and php support you cannot go to the above for free.

If you are working for a Gnu/Linux website you can get free web space at
swatantranet.com and nipl.net

With swatantranet you will get a backed panel to manage your web space.

While with nipl.net you will get a shell access to the server. you can login into the shell through ssh .

You can create a mysql database and start with your website using a CMS .

How to generate funds?

Why do you need funds?

You need funds to co-ordinate various activities like distributing free Cds, organizing events etc. If you have any commercial intent from these generated funds,then these are not for you. These do take a good time to come up and a good website with good optimizations only can help you. there are several ad agencies like Adsense program etc.

To know more about tip in improving your website ,you can catch us at

webmaster[at]gnulinuxclub.org.

How to get some help on website development?

When you are developing a site for a Gnu/Linux ,you are bound to get many volunteers for your website.tyo get to these volunteers ,post messages in your user group for website development volunteers.You will get volunteers for your website.

Organize then in different areas of website development like

Website deveopment
Website Content
Website publishing
Website publicity

Do delegate different job and responsibilty to team members.
You can start a mailing list which will be easy for users to track the website development
To start a mailing List you can look for google groups,which is much like a mailing list

It is very difficult to work on the site independently,so the team will be a big help to you.

What content to put at the website?

The content at the website must be updated regularly,so that users can find new things when they visit your website.have a look at differrent websites and see what do they have to offer.you could work on other midules like the wiki and the blog section.Tou need not brings forums ,there are many forums out there, instead promote them.

All that is required is enthusiasm from Gnu/Linux volunteers.Also you need to encourage your team so that they do not end up in a boredrum.Request for comments from personalities regarding your website so that you can make any required changes in your websites.

backup in place

2005-06-28T20:04:00.000-07:00

weekly backup for the website has been planned.
this was required to face any eventuality.
our's is not a static html website but a dynamic one so the backup involves backup of database as well

also to provide some help for learning Mambo CMS and administrating it
the same website will be replicated at another location
and only interested developers will be allowed to try their hand on it.

free software at gnulinuxclub

2005-06-27T15:14:00.000-07:00

After a mail from RMS, i realized that we were creating a mistake by not talking much about free software at our site
we required to highlight that too
so a seperate section for "free software" has been introduced where some basic questions regarding free software are answered with resped to the GNU documentation.

do read on that section at
http://www.gnulinuxclub.org/content/blogcategory/40/52/

to know more about terms such as GNU/Linux, free GNU/Linux,free software, non free software etc.

and friends, do contribute to this blog atleast on weekly basis ,this will bring more ideas to the group and publicity.

as far as publicity is concerned ,we are now listed at google.com after long hours of work in sitemap generation for google.

Edited a lot today ...

2005-06-27T10:25:00.000-07:00

Finally out of my fever today I prepared a gud intro to my article on Open Source making busines sense and published it to public
http://www.gnulinuxclub.org/content/view/76/33/

Edited a lot of articles in Help Docs section correcting gramatical and formatting errors in them
http://www.gnulinuxclub.org/content/category/4/13/31/

Friens I am pointing out some common 'formatting errors' I noticed -
1. You all are not using the inbuilt Numbering system - The WYSWYG editor in Momabo is similar to OpenOffice or MS Word - so start using the numbering and bullets from the toolbar ..it helps preserve formatting
2. Use of -> notation : Again you have a cube in the extreme right of the toolbar which says 'symbols' - use sybols like the arrow (→) instead of -> which doesnt look neat ..
3. Capitalise the first letter of sentence - it is simply carelessness which creates this error. A bit more carefulness while creating a text will save a lot of 'editorial' work !!

going public soon..

2005-06-23T14:34:00.000-07:00

We will be going public in a couple of days
Only some sections, interview,wiki and the corporate section are incomplete.
they will soon be up with some content.

By going public i mean that we will list our website in search engines,leave the url at variuos locations,use the url in our email and internet forum posts etc.

The publicity team will start working in drawing more and more traffic to the site.

flashback gnulinuxclub

2005-06-16T10:11:00.000-07:00

Right from the day i started to work on Linux, it always fascinated me.
To create awareness for this, i stared with a LUG (linux user group) called Linux_iips in 2003
this was the user group meant for my college IIPS, (International Institute of Professional studies).
to reach out to a wider audience, I launched a website as well
masand.sourceforge.net/linux
govinda.no-ip.com/linux_iips

I maintained this website on my own and soon realized that it was not possible for me to work in all areas
so the new idea for a global website was born
initially the name that was thought of was linuxaddicts.org
but this was changed to gnulinuxclub.org after i came to know about the difference between Linux and Gnu/Linux (for this i am thankfull to Anindya and the movie:The Code Linux) and realized that we are not going the right way , when we talk about Linux and not Gnu/Linux
so i made a call for volunteers for a new website , gnulinuxclub.org

within a week i got all the volunteers for the website, so we soon formed a team and work was delegated to the members
the development process started in the first week of June 2005 and here we stand today with our website www.gnulinuxclub.org.

This is just a start and we know that our efforts will surely bore fruit.

The Revolution . . . and us

2005-06-15T20:36:00.000-07:00

Linux and GNU – a silent revolution that started in late 80s can as well be compared to the Russian Revolution by its audience. Youth, Students, and academicians have always partnered to create revolutions. I also got caught in this whirlwind sometime around 1999-2000 when I entered my engineering. I did many small projects and installing latest Linux packages and playing with shell commands became a sport. But as I moved into a management course circa 2003, I found a whole new dimension of this revolution.

While there were numerous students engaged in coding software in the open source spirit, hardly a few volunteers were engaged in marketing, publicity and commercial study of the movement. This was especially so in India – and so I decided to pursue this line in the Open Source movement. After all RMS’ ultimate objective is not to develop a cult but to propagate the benefits of Open Source to the industry and masses and to make them realise how and why this makes more sense than proprietary software.

But I found myself wandering aimlessly – writing an odd article in NITIE’s (my B-school) internal journal or just compiling data on viability of Open Source software model for my own sake. So when I saw a mail from Gaurav Masand in the little_league asking for volunteers to manage website publicity for a new GNU/Linux website, I grabbed the opportunity. My previous experience of creating the Online Business Simulation games event – MaatishK also gave me the necessary experience to take up the job – especially because I had insisted on use of Open Source technologies during development of MastishK.

Well, I should congratulate Gaurav for the initiative he has taken – and of course the other of my Team Mates who are doing a great work. I guess the project is going great and this blog is gonna be useful for coordinating between ourselves. As of now we are wokring on the following two sections
Welcome to the gnulinux club! [http://www.gnulinuxclub.org/]
Why gnulinuxclub? [http://www.gnulinuxclub.org/content/view/18/2/]

Looking forward to intro posts by others and then a barrage of posts and numerous links about sections in progress as the momentum on the site builds up.