Mukti ’13

For last 10 days, I was pretty busy attending and arranging FOSS events in Durgapur. One of them that I got the chance to attend was Mukti ’13, the annual national level technical symposium on Free and Open Source Software of the GNU/Linux Users’ Group NIT Durgapur held from 2nd-5th February 2013. Just like last year, this year’s Mukti was also filled with fun and frolic. There were lots of events like Codecraker, Lipi, Hack the Code etc. Students and Foss enthusiast from in and around Durgapur come to this four day festival.

On the first day, Chandan and I reached at NIT Durgapur around 2pm to attend the Python Workshop by Kushal Das. I was glad to see a lot of first years came to attend the workshop by bunking their college classes. A lot of second year also came out to attend the workshop along with Souradeep, Apoorv, Zubin. After the workshop Kushal da took us to a nearby restaurant for dinner

We stayed up at NIT hostel for the night. The very next day, the Python Workshop began at 2pm and Kushal da covered the rest of the topics along with some questions. At the end of the day, we took some snaps and returned back to our college. We thought of attending the MediaWiki workshop but it got cancelled last minute.

But, as always it was a great time, meeting with FOSSy people during Mukti. I really applaud to all those who have put their hard work,labour and time to make this event a huge success and hope that MUKTI 2014 would be even bigger, greater than this year.

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Disk Crash Investigation

Last day, while copying some movies into the NTFS drive my laptop suffered a sudden shutdown.

After restart, I was unable to mount the drive in my Fedora box and it showed a creepy error instead.

Error mounting: mount exited with exit code 13: ntfs_attr_pread_i:
ntfs_pread failed: Input/output error
Failed to read NTFS $Bitmap: Input/output error
NTFS is either inconsistent, or there is a hardware fault, or it’s a
SoftRAID/FakeRAID hardware. In the first case run chkdsk /f on Windows
then reboot into Windows twice. The usage of the /f parameter is very
important! If the device is a SoftRAID/FakeRAID then first activate
it and mount a different device under the /dev/mapper/ directory, (e.g.
/dev/mapper/nvidia_eahaabcc1). Please see the ‘dmraid’ documentation
for more details

This was when ntfsfix came as knight to fight the battle.

ntfsfix sub-packaged under ntfsprogs is a really nice tool to solve NTFS problems in Linux.

Let’s say you need to recover /dev/sda6
Then run: sudo ntfsfix /dev/sda6

Celebrating dgplug’s Birthday.

On 8th September 2012, the day dgplug completed it’s eight successful years, we (Gaurav, Chandan, Biraj, Piyush, Souradeep, Apoorv and I thought of organizing a workshop for the students of our college. We mainly thought to enlighten the students with the ideas of using GNU/Linux. Then, they would be told on “How to install GNU/Linux”. We named the workshop as “Peeping Out of Windows, Looking into the world of Linux”.

We started off with our registration at 9:45am outside our P.G.Building Seminar Hall. At first, We thought there would be a handful participants but just few minutes later we were overwhelmed with interested participants. We had to close our registration because the hall had already ran out of capacity. We started off with the seminar at 10:30am with apoorv giving the opening speech. We had grouped up Apoorv, Souradeep, Piyush and Biraj to give the talk on “What are the benifits of using GNU/Linux”. After the seminar ended, it seemed that the participants were convinced with the idea. The seminar concluded with an Q/A session for the students enquire about the doubts they faced.

After the first seminar, the students enjoyed the tea-break. At around 11:30am, Chandan, Gaurav and I started with the second session on “How to install Linux(Fedora)”. We gave a slide followed by a live demostration on how to install dual-boot Fedora from the root level. Then we had an interactive session with the participants where their FAQs were co-heartedly invited and we tried our level best to solve out their queries keeping in mind our motto to make them well acqauinted with the very OS. We also informed them about the hands-on workshop that we planned to make the participants install the OS by themselves.

We began the “Hands-on session” at 2:30pm at our CS/IT Seminar Hall. The participants started out pouring a bit late. As the participants came, we divided them into groups and started out with the installation session. Some of them needed a fresh installation, some came out to upgrade their system and other queries. Meanwhile, the participants were served with refreshments.At the end we distributed the Fedora Live ISO, Full Installation ISO. We packed up at 5:30 pm and returned back to our nest tired and exhausted.

We are really thankful to Asst. Prof. Dinesh Pradhan and Pratap Sir and everyone who indirectly helped us out for the proper execution of the workshop. We are also planning to continue with this workshop at our college in near future.

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