The Innovation Lover

It is miniproject time for every Sixth semester B Tech students. I would like to update about my miniproject.
I am implementing a Wireless Linux Terminal Server project, Which is an extension to LTSP project.

Basically LTSP as quoted from wikipedia “Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) is a free and open source add-on package for Linux that allows many people to simultaneously use the same computer. Applications run on the server with a terminal known as a thin client (also known as an X terminal) handling input and output. Generally, terminals are low-powered, lack a hard disk and are quieter than desktop computers because they do not have any moving parts.”

LTSP facilities to use a powerful machine shared by many users from different terminals or thin clients. Thin client machines actually don’t do any processing rather than setting up a minimal system to run an X server. Basic principle of an LTSP system are as follows.

There will be a server machine which is having considerable ram, processing power and attached to a network. The client machines are low end machine with few megabytes of ram, low processing power and attached to the same network over LAN through ethernet card. Ethernet cards come with a special chip socket. We can actually flash a chip / ROM containing a minimal OS. We flash a minimal OS in it and call it PXE ( Preboot Execution Environment).
This ROM will setup a Linux kernel and an initial ramdisk atmost of (more…)

I will be conducting a basic Django Web development workshop on Saturday 6th Feb. Check out the schedule from the website. [link]

Last week I had been to Toc H Institute of Science & Technology, to address the Computer science and Engineering students. It was a nice experience to share some bits and bytes about Free and Open Source Software development to the students assembled there.

I was being invited to the college being a Google Summer of Coder 2009 to share about my experience on FOSS and how to get started. I spoke to the students about how I started using the Revolution OS ‘GNU/Linux’, how does the community work and all. The students were very new to the GNU/Linux and they hadn’t been exposed to any GNU/Linux technology stuff before. They were really enthusiastic and excited hearing about it. After my talk on how to get started working with open source projects and how it benefits them, they shot me with numerous questions. They were really enthusiastic about it. After the formal session, we had another one hour question and answers session around the auditorium.

I never had seen this much of questions from any of my audiences before. I felt very glad about it. Felt like a mass transformation would happen around TocH students to GNU/Linux. After the session I had been in conversation with the Jayakumar sir, The head of the Department, Computer Science and Engineering. He told that they were trying to build a FOSS cell around TocH and transforming atleast the computer science labs to GNU/Linux.

It was really nice experience to inspire students to Free Software.

In my hostel, we use asianet dataline internet connection. The connection is established through a webpage authentication and it needs to keep that webpage always open in the browser to get the stable connection. Once we login and releave that page, after five minutes it will require a re-login. Its a real hurdle to keep a page open in the browser for internet authentication.

I just analyzed the http requests from that page and automated using the curl utility.

Here is the script it feel, it would be useful for many.

#!/bin/bash

customer=CNXXXX
password=XXXXXX

if [ -n "`ifconfig | grep -A 1  wlan0 | grep "inet addr"`" ];
then

curl https://mwcp-ekm-04.adlkerala.com:8001 --data "auth_user=$customer&auth_pass=$password&accept=Login" &> /dev/null

echo "Connected :)"

while true
do
	sleep 300
	curl https://mwcp-ekm-04.adlkerala.com:8001 --data "alive=y&un=$customer" &> /dev/null ;

done

else

echo "Wifi not connected";

fi

Copy down the above script in a text file and rename to internet.sh

slynux@slynux-laptop:~$ chmod a+x  internet.sh
slynux@slynux-laptop:~$ ./internet.sh
Connected  

This script has an initial check for ethernet interface. Here it is given Wifi interface, wlan0. If you use a LAN for connection change wlan0 to eth0 and the message as well