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Kushal Das

FOSS and life. Kushal Das talks here.

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Going around the problem

I posted this problem , one month back. This started when qt-copy upgraded to Qt4.x . makghosh told me to console login and do a startx , which helped. I just wrote a new .xinitrc file in my home directory. exec ~/kde/bin/startkde And after doing a console login from Ctrl + Alt + F1, I am just typing : startx -- :1

Thanks to Hobbes for the command syntax

Publican, me and fop

Publican helps you build books in DocBook XML. Thanks to jsmith and stickster who introduced me to this tool chain. Now I can write a book using vim :) I really loved the output it generated. But still in Fedora 8, it can only generate html, no pdf yet :(

So, I installed it in my rawhide desktop, but no luck :(. This bug is already filled.  I downloaded the required xsl files from here to do a manual try. Made changes to main-html.xsl and main-pdf.xsl in /usr/share/publican/xsl/ and pointed them to my local copy. It worked! now I can create HTML , but still no luck with pdf creation as fop failed with this.

Fishbone and me

Was having breakfast , rice and fish curry was in menu. Suddenly understood a bone stuck inside my throat . Tried to  swallow it inside by having balls of boiled rice (old Bengali way). But never helped.  Then  I went to the nearest hospital and they said they don't have a ENT dept, so again I ran to another big hospital .

The receptionist asked me to fill a form , but after looking at my condition, she took me to the doctor fast. He did local anesthesia and after couple of minutes manage to remove the bone. It was a broken piece , very small.

This is actually second time in my life. Last time same happened around 7-8 years back.

Modulo operator in Python

Was looking into modulo (%) operator in python. Very basic example is 14 % 3 = 2 ,

but the result is different for negative values . -14 % 3 , 14 % -3. Can anyone please explain me how it works properly ? The closest answer I got is this.

The grassroot and getting new people

This blog entry is a continuation of Soumya's entry.

When I started Linux User Group of Durgapur (dgplug) , the main idea was very simple , learn and teach others. By saying teach others I meant teach your fellow class mates or juniors or sometimes the seniors also. Soumya started working with me almost from the beginning. After I came to Bangalore for job , he took all charges in Durgapur. He tried to get few juniors to whom we could give the batons for the coming years. But suddenly we are feeling that those guys also left the collage sooner than we expected.

It is always good to see people working on the upstream projects, but for that completely forgetting the base is not good as I think. Our motto is "Learn yourself and teach others" but they made it "learn and don't teach others".

Maintaining a LUG from 2000km apart is not easy. I had to spent a lot on my phone bill to do so as Internet is not an option for most of my lug guys. I used to call them and explained over phone different technical stuffs. Again I started doing so as the local guys are not at all interested in helping peers. Basic rule is still same: give them software, tell them how to install , tell them to how to use them. Being a Fedora Ambassador I believe that is helping me to make a larger user-base. I got few more people into Ambassador project and thought they will keep the good things going. But it seems they are only using that identity while asking leaves from the collage authority :(

In the same time I had opposite kind of experiences too. Ramu , who is a colleague of mine is doing nice work. Today Prashad is also agreed to join the team :)

For me getting new users is more important than new developers as if users grow, the developers will grow automatically (my personal opinion). In last night I am being able to help a new dgplug member to successfully using IRC, Inkscape (as she is an artist), python and create a new blog for her. Today I found she went to her other friends and then introduced them to the same technologies and they are on to it. It is always fun to see them playing with these new tools :)

But the whole thing sometimes looks like an educational institute, new people -> they learn -> they get jobs -> they forget about the institute !!

We will keep trying to get new people, tell them the nice things from the Free Software World. I am going to West Bengal in March to visit my doctor as the right arm is not in good shape (I can not feel anything in few parts of it). During my staying I will try to spend as much time as I can with these new comers, will try to spread the message that dgplug is just not another website or just few people, it is a personal relationship which help us in every ways of life.........

Fedora updates & /me and my friends

From the time I got a broadband connection, I always tried to do "yum update" regularly. I tried packages from rawhide only once or twice. My friends complained me before on Fedora updates, the new packages had a tendency to break the stuffs. Now I am telling shouting the same thing. The updates are not working most of the time. If I install the same updates freshly on a Fedora 8 system , they work really cool but if we have a old F8 box and then try to update it then many stop working in the way they were supposed to do. Same result goes for the packages from Livna too. I don't remember all the names as I formated my system and did a new install. The names I having with me now :

pitivi

recordmydesktop (gtk-recordMyDesktop)

Kino (from livna )

Kmail (Volker was also confused on this:p )

Inkscape

Need a good video editor

I am looking for a video editor on GNU/Linux which can help me to add titles , embed pics, and other simple editing.

Kino looked like a good solution but it is crashing on both my desktop and Laptop if I try to mix something.

Can anyone please tell me what are the other good options ? I am on Fedora 8