Sunil Mohan Adapa’s Blog

I wrote another article to the Prajasakti Telugu daily newspaper. In it, I have described problems with using non standard encodings on Indian language websites and solutions available to the users and content providers to convert the content to Unicode.

Unlike other articles I have posted, this one is tomorrow’s article today

Recently, I talked at a session to faculty and students of Vignan Engineering College, Hyderabad as a part of two day workshop on Free Software Technologies. I used Fedore Core installer as a means of explaining fundamental concepts like partitions, boot loader and user accounts that are a necessity for installing any GNU/Linux distribution. You can download my presentation slides (as ODP or PDF) which consists mostly of screenshots from OSDir. I demonstrated the installation process and using GParted LiveCD. After my session others have demonstrated the Ubuntu LiveCD.

I wrote an article on GNU General Public License to Prasakti Telugu daily newspaper last month. I did not write the introduction to it and I do not like it.

Sometime back, I gave a tutorial to branch managers at a divisional office of Life Insurance Corporation of India. The tutorial included basics of email communication and word processing in OpenOffice.org Writer. OpenOffice.org tutorials are not in plenty and I spent quite some time deciding the topics for the tutorial. Here is a list of topics I covered in the tutorial.

I went to my home town and there I helped a buddy install GNU/Linux onto his laptop. Even these days, you sometimes have to tinker with configuration files to get things working. So, I thought I should write it down.

Network card - No special configuration required. Goto System->Administration->Networking and specify the IP address manually if your network is not configured for automatic setup via DHCP.

Video card - No special configuration required.

Synaptics touchpad - No special configuration required. Synaptics driver is installed and Xserver configuraiton file was added an input device with synaptics as the driver.

Wireless lan card - For installing the drivers, there is no additional effort required. ipw2200 module was installed and automatically inserted.

Wireless configuration with PSK/TKIP encryption: The following configuration is required. First do:
iwscan list
This will give you a list of all the wireless networks scanned by your wireless card. Note your network name and then, using it, run:
wpa_password "your_network_name" > /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
This will prompt you for the password. Here enter the password that has been set for you wireless network by your network administrator. This step will create the file /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf and write some barebore configuration into it. You need to edit this file and add more configuration to it. It should finally look like this:
ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
network={
ssid="your_network_name"
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
proto=WPA
pairwise=TKIP
group=TKIP
#psk="your_password
psk=a_hexadecimal_key_that_is_automatically_generated_in_previous_step
}
Now, run the command:
/sbin/wpa_supplicant -Dwext -i eth1 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -dd
Here eth1 is the wireless network card’s interface. Check that it did not give any errors. Once this step is successfully done, you need add this to your system so that this happens automatically everytime your wireless network is setup. Edit the file /etc/network/interface to make it look like this:
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
auto eth1
iface eth1 inet dhcp
pre-up /sbin/wpa_supplicant -Bw -Dwext -i eth1 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
post-down killall -q wpa_supplicant
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp


Most likely, after configuring your network devices from System->Administration->Networking you just have to add the two lines starting with pre-up and post-down to the wireless networking intereface.

Wacom stylus eraser and cursor: All the configuration in the Xserver is done automatically only that wacom driver did not get inserted into the kernel automatically. To load this kernel driver everytime the machine boots, add the following line to /etc/modules:
wacom

Update (Sep 3rd 2006): The command for getting the list of available networks is not iwscan list. It is : iwlist scan