Fedora

Event Report: FudConIn 2015

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As promised I am back from fudcon india with loads of experience and new knowhow about various tools.

::DAY ONE::

The first day started with keynote talk by Dennis Gilmore on “Delivering Fedora for everything and everyone”. He discussed about the future plans for Fedora release engineering team. Next I moved to a different room where a talk on GlusterFS was being held by Vikhyat Umrao. This was the first time I heard about Gluster File System so was pretty much curious  to learn more about it. After that I attended back to back two more talks on GlusterFS, which are  “Geo-Replication and Disaster Recovery in GlusterFS” by Bipin Kunal and “Efficient data maintenance in GlusterFS using Databases” by Joseph Elwin Fernandes . I must add session by Joseph Elwin Fernandes was great, he is a really good speaker 🙂 . After lunch i attended Jared Smith’s talk on “Whats new in Drupal 8?”. I learned about new features that are going to be added to Drupal 8, like REST support, editing content directly, easy installation and language selection etc. The day ended with a keynote talk by Harish Pillay on how to evaluate open source projects and spoke about “open source prospector” a tool to track FOSS projects over the globe.

::DAY TWO::

Day two started with a keynote by Jiri Eishchmann on the future of fedora workstation. He spoke about better graphics support, better battery life in F23 also more reliable weekly updates. Then there was a session on Haskell by Jens Petersen. Next I attended Rejy Cyriac’s talk on Selinux. after which i too configured my selinux for the good 🙂 . Soon after that a interesting workshop was done by Mayur Patil on how compile linux kernel and wrote a small test kernel module. Day two ended by tenzin chokden with his keynote talk on how GhostNet affected the Tibetian Community and how Linux helped them stop GhostNet from spreading.

::DAY THREE::

Day three was mostly meeting people and attending fewer talks and workshops. Aditya Patawari, Lalatendu Mohanty took a workshop on Docker basics. Next Flask 101 workshop was taken by Sayan Chowdhury and Ratnadeep Debnath. Finally closing ceremony by Rupali Talwatkar after the lunch. Oh yes! also a photo session was there 😀 .

Will update with the link to the talks soon.

::ABOUT PUNE::

Pune is a great place! Had awesome food! Enjoyed alot! Also was almost lost on my way to the venue since there were two MITs and I reached the wrong one! Light drizzle on the day of return. Awesome experience altogether! Waiting for next Fudcon India 🙂 .

PS: Pics coming soon

Event Report: FudConIn 2015

10 years of DGPLUG

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We recently celebrated the 10 glorious years of DGPLUG. On this occasion we had a 5 day workshop (29th August to 2nd September) at NIT Durgapur.

::Day 1::

The first day was more or less introductory session where we discussed about what are our goals , our history and our programme for the future. The attendees constituted mainly of 1st,2nd and 3rd year engineering students of various colleges. The speaker for the session was Kushal Das, he told them about the Summer Training conducted by DPLUG for free every year. We told them about Open Source and how they can contribute to opensource projects. The next talk was by Praveen Kumar and was all about Fedora Project and how we can contribute to it. Next we had a really interesting talk by P.J.Prasad on Iptables. At the end we concluded the first day of the workshop with light discussions on various topics and also asked the students to get some packages installed for the next day.

::Day 2::

On the day two of the event the auditorium was teeming with eager faces , a workshop on Python was to be held. Kushal Das took the session on python along with the introduction of Vim. We had a tough time helping them to this new editor nevertheless we enjoyed doing it. Python for you and me book was followed in the session. We covered basic python commands , data structures and other basic functions of the language. By the end of the day we managed to write a program which could list down the files and folders of a directory quite similar to ls command of linux.

::Day 3::

On the day three we had workshops on flask, a web-framework based on python by Sayan Chowdhury in the first half of the day. Later In the second half we had workshop on unit test module of python by Ratnadeep Debnath where we learned to write test cases for our functions.

::Day 4::

On the Fourth day of the event we had a session on documenting our codes by Kushal Das. We introduced reStructuredText to write our documentation and then use rst2s5 to convert them to presentations. After that we used a powerful python package sphinx and prepared a demo documentation.

::Day 5::

The day five was all about how to contribute to upstream projects, Learn using Git, making patches, and other important git features and commands. After that we had a general discussion session followed by feedback session. We got many positive feedbacks and suggestions for improvement which has been noted down and will be kept in mind in the upcoming events.

Finally we talked about various projects in hand, and newer project ideas to be developed. Hoping to meet these awesome people soon at Pycon India. Till then Keep Coding! 😉

10 years of DGPLUG

Disabling discrete AMD Graphics card in linux

subho, 3 Comments

This article is posted to show how to disable the discrete AMD graphics card in a switchable graphics setup in laptops. The integrated graphics card can be an AMD or an Intel. Disabling the discrete graphics card will save your laptop from overheating and will save considerable amount of power.

This article is intended for those who are ready to have only the integrated card enabled. If you can configure both cards correctly, then you probably don’t need this. If you would like to have both cards running and want to switch between them, you need to look elsewhere.

The Problem:

I’ve a Dell Inspiron 15R model with HD 7670M discrete graphics and Ivy Bridge Intel 4000 integrated graphics card. All the distributions I’ve tried so far ran too hot with a lot of fan noise. In some cases, the laptop would turn off all of a sudden as it reached the maximum temperature it can handle!! The integrated card is capable enough to play 1080p video and desktops effects and hence I prefer the dedicated card turned off all the time.

The Solution:

  • Check if you have two graphics cards

Open ‘terminal’ and type the following command.

$lspci | grep VGA

If you see more than one graphics card, then you have a switchable graphics setup.

  • Check if both the cards are powered on

To check this, we need be able to view the file /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch. Type the following in terminal.

$cat /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch

If you get  ‘Permission Denied’ error, then type,

$sudo chown <your user name> /sys/kernel/debug/

and then, type

$sudo chown <your user name>  /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch

Now you should be able to view the file using the ‘cat’ command given above.

If you get ‘No such file or directory’ error when trying the command ‘cat /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch’, then type

$sudo mount -t debugfs none /sys/kernel/debug

and follow the above ‘cat’ command to view the ‘switch’ file.

The result of the ‘cat /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch’ will have ‘Pwr’ in both lines (for integrated card which is denoted using the string “IGD”  and“DIS” for discrete card)  indicating both cards are powered on.

  • Disable the discrete graphics card

To disable the discrete card, type

$echo OFF >/sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch

and if you check the ‘switch’ file using the ‘cat’ command given before, you can see that the ‘Pwr’ has been changed to ‘off’.

You can use a temperature or power monitoring tool to compare the power usages before and after disabling the discrete graphics card.

To have the discrete card disabled at system start-up so that you won’t have to do all these steps at every time you boot your system, you may use rc.local file.

Notes:

  • I’ve tested the above method only using the ATI/Intel available in my laptop
  • Distributions tested : Ubuntu 12.10 and Fedora 18
Disabling discrete AMD Graphics card in linux

FHS

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On the 2nd day of my Summer Training @DGPLUG, i learnt about FHS(File Hierarchy standard). FHS is the way in which Linux maintains its system files and folders which is completely different from that of windows.

Note that all files and folders appear under root ‘/ ‘ :

  1. /bin                        :           This folder contains all command binaries used by all users such as cd, ls, mv, rm.
  2. /dev                       :           Linux loads the hardware devices in this folder and those hardware are visible as files here.
  3. /home                   :           This is the home directory for users containing saved files.
  4. lost+found           :           This is a system folder which keeps files which might have been deleted during some malfunctioned        process.
  5. /mnt                       :           Used to mount other filesystems temporarily.
  6. /proc                     :           This is a virtual file-system which gives information about runtime process.
  7. /sbin                      :            Important command binaries for system administrators are kept here. e.g., init, ip, mount.
  8. /srv                        :           It contains services’ specific data from the system.
  9. /tmp                       :           It contains temporary files stored by different applications here. These files are temporary and stored in between system reboots.
  10. /var                        :           Contains variable data files whose data keep changing explicitly during normal system runtime..
  11. /boot                     :           Everything required for boot process resides here including boot loader files and kernels. It also contains certain configuration files.
  12. /etc                         :           Contains all configurations files. No binary files or other files go there. They are static and change is not necessary unless you are changing some configurations.
  13. /lib                          :           Its a library containing all the binaries required in /bin/.
  14. /media                   :           Mounts all removable media.
  15. /opt                         :           To keep additional softwares.
  16. /root                       :           This is the home folder of the root user.
FHS