Manish’s Scribble Board

So finally I returned from Bangalore after an exciting two days visit to my elder cousin. Left on 25th night and reached there at 10 in the morning, it took ages to travel from one end to the other where my sis lives. The first day,I couldn’t go out of the house as some of her relatives had come the her flat, so had no work other than enjoying the movies and talking to my cousin who had also came to meet her from his college.

Next day we left at around 2 in the afternoon, dropped my bro at bus stand then went to all major shopping malls which were possible(parking woes ). The visit to forum and some more malls at Cunningham road were excellent and really exciting. I have uploaded some pics. Have a look. Picasa Web Album

So finally we did it! More than 40 installations in 3 hours! Its a kind of record at MIT. Fedora 8 found a decent place on the laptops of people who turned up to get this magical OS installed. As far as Ubuntu is concerned, we didnt have the script for getting the ATI Graphics card drivers to work. Check out my previous posts for gaining more knowledge about the problem faced on ATI cards.

I expected that since the laptops were given by the colleges and had the same configuration, they should behave similarly. To our utter surpise no two laptops behaved the same. Even on some laptops the resizing of partitions failed. Some laptops were unable to boot even in text mode installer. One guy had 4 primary partitions and a heap of free space, so what more can we do with his system? Nothing! We asked him to meet us personally and take a backup of the two partitions on an external hard disk. One guy messaged me that he tried to format his partition and some problems cropped up. These problems do occur.

I have some more pics. Here is the album for yesterday’s event.  Click Here

As I mentioned in the last post, we people have planned to organize Install Fest for LUG Manipal on 23rd and 24th Jan. This time we didnt expect such a huge turnout! More than 50 people attended the meet from first and second year. We collected 39 DVD’s with Name and Registration nos written on them. The distro written on them will be 32-bit and 64-bit Fedora 8. People can choose to install Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon also, but its not recommended for first years as the ATI Graphics Card given with their laptops behaves wildly and crashes the Xserver. Bringing it up is a painstaking work as viewed from the eyes of a newbie.

Today we would be installing more than 40 copies of Linux, the booking of the lecture hall is till 8:30PM! 5:30PM to 8:30PM…3 hours tight schedule. Just installing is not the work we are doing, guiding is also one of the aspects of LUG’s charter. One of my friend at Mumbai recommended me to make a charter or policies of the LUG, so that furture members or organizers dont have to start from scratch. We took some snaps too. Have a look. Here is the Picasa Web Album for it.

So finally our labour bore fruits. LUG Manipal is on its way to development and popularity. We are going to organize an Install Fest where all people can bring their laptops and we will guide them in installing this great OS. In short, we will be making their laptops dual-boot with Windows Vista/XP with Fedora8/Ubuntu. Having two OS on a single computer can be sometimes a problematic feature if you dont know how stuff works. You could even screw up your system badly if you go on playing too much with safety.

The Install fest is a two-day event. First day will be a pre-install event where all people are required to attend to have some basic knowledge what they are going to do. They will be asked to defragmen their hard disk and run a scandisk on all there partitions so that disk splitting software doesnt screw up the filesystems on the partitions.

We are asking them to bring a blank DVD on the first day, they have to get Fedora 8 written on it, or they can submit their blank DVD to us and we will write the stuff on it and return it on the next day. The second day is the main install fest day. It is this day that the installation will be done and all basic setups explained as per requirements. The schedule is as follows:

Date: 23rd January, Wednesday - Pre-install fest

24th January,Thursday - Main Installation day

Venue : NLH 303

Time: 5: 30PM

Registration charges: NONE

So finally reached Manipal after a tiresome journey of more than 60 hours. Was really not well when reached, missed the class and even the lab (first time in my engineering). So today didnt do anything other than sleeping, net and chatting. This time we have 4 half days and hope to get one more. I know its too much of expectations, but there’s no end. Used to it

This time we have good papers and even better teachers than last semester as far as I know (Didnt went to class today). We have all our classes from 8AM which is surely going to make me mad. The day passed just by getting rooms cleaned and arranging my belongings. I got some new snaps of my room. Will put it up ASAP.

So finally Ratan Tata’s dream has been unveiled. Its christened “Nano” due to its small size relative to others. Probably this is the first car in its segment. When Ratan Tata announced that he may soon roll out a 1 lakh car, its competitors dubbed him as *CRAZY*. Now those people are dumb shut and making lame excuses accusing the car of major problems it may face later. Cant the industry face the truth? If you cant make a dream, dont spoil others.

This car has some major changes in design. Though it looks like a deluxe segment one, it has engine at the rear, no hand brake, no fog lights. Its some 20% shorter in length than Maruti 800 but has more space at the interior.The engine is 630cc and gives more than 20 kms per litre. It meets the emission standards like Euro 3. In short, India has shown to the world that there something called innovation.