How to add repositories in Opensuse 11.0

What is a repository?

Repository is a database which stores rpms, debs etc which we can use to install packages on a Linux system. They are helpful because while installing softwares from a repository we need not care about the dependency problems which we face when you try to install using rpm -ihv .

Adding Repositories in OpenSUSE:

To add repositories, open yast, which would require the root password. In the software section, there is an option for managing repositories called “Software Repositories”. Click on the Add Button and select Specify URL option and press Next. Now add the URL of the repository that you want to add and press Next again. Some of the repositories that you might like to add for a comprehensive list of software packages are: http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.0/repo/oss/ http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.0/repo/debug/ http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.0/repo/non-oss/ http://download.opensuse.org/update/11.0/ http://packman.iu-bremen.de/suse/11.0 http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home%3a/MunkOil/openSUSE_11.0 http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home%3a/dmitry_serpokryl%3a/Enlightenment-cvs-core-metapackage/openSUSE_11.0 http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/MunkOil/openSUSE_11.0 http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home%3a/MunkOil/openSUSE_11.0 http://packman.mirrors.skynet.be/pub/packman/suse/11.0

And for users who are inside the NIT Durgapur Network,

http://10.0.0.150/repository/suse11 http://10.0.0.150/repository/packman/suse/11.0/

For each repository, check the enabled option and un-check the Automatically Refresh Option (Except for the last two, as that does not take too much time). Now, click finish and you are done with adding repositories. Now, if you want to install any software, go to yast-> Software Management and search for the software that you want to install, if it is there in any one of the repositories that you have added, it will show up in the list there. Select those packages that you want to install and Click on Install Button there. Then Apply Changes. The packages that you have selected will start getting installed.

RSS feeds parser

I wrote a command line program in Python to read RSS feeds. I made use of a module in python called feedparser (http://www.feedparser.org). It has a few functions which make it very easy to parse the feeds. You can download the .py file here. I am trying to create a version of it for windows as well. The feedparser module must be installed in your machine in order to run this program.

To Do List:

(1) Better Formatting

(2) A Graphical User Interface

(3) A web interface

Mukti ‘09

The Linux Users Group (LUG) which will soon be GNU/LUG of NIT Durgapur has started preparations for the next edition of Mukti, that is Mukti ‘09. This year, we are going to make it big, bigger than ever! Its the same feeling that’s going through the minds of every member of LUG. And that too for obvious reasons.

mukti

Last year, due to some unavoidable circumstances, Mukti was held along with Aarohan, which was a shocker to everybody in college. This also drew a lot of criticism from the public and since then we had that fire in us to make Mukti ‘09 a grand success. We have been having a lot of meetings and have decided to have a lot of new events this time in Mukti, and it is expected to pull a lot of crowds from across the country. I will be the event coordinator for two events namely: pen[GUI]n and Rush-Hour.

I just submitted the write ups for the events which will be put up in the website of mukti, that is http://mukti09.in

Here are the event details for PenGUIn:

penGUIn is a GUI (Graphical User Interface) designing contest, which will test your skills in various GUI designing tools available on Linux. Some of the tools/Programming Languages that can be used are: Java, wxPython, GTK, QT, PyQT, PyGTK, etc. The participants may have to work on some FOSS and design GUIs for some command-line programs which do not have a graphical user interface. The maximum no of participants allowed in a team is 2. The event will be organized in two rounds:

(1) The Online Round: The problem statements of the online round will be put up on the website by 15th January. The submissions for the online round will end on 22nd. The results will be announced on 26th Jan.

(2) Finals: Around 8 teams will be selected from the online round for the final round which will be held in NIT Durgapur during Muki ‘09 (6th to 8th Feb). If the participation is more in the online round, then we can consider more entries for the final round. The final round will be an overnight event and challenging problem statements will be given to the participants.

As a build-up to this event, various workshops will be organized in January in NIT Durgapur by the students and professionals in the Industry.

To download videos from youtube and other video sites in LINUX

[FOR YOUTUBE ONLY]:-

It’s easy. If you are using suse, then just open the terminal, become su and type:

zypper install youtube-dl

Exit su mode.

Then just go to the folder where you want to save the video and type

youtube-dl <url>

For other distros of linux, it depends on which package manager you are using:

Fedora–> yum install youtube-dl

and there is apt-get too–> apt-get install youtube-dl

You can play these files using mplayer and it works fine!

[FOR OTHER VIDEO SITES]:-

I recently found another command line tool that is even better than youtube-dl, it is called Clive. You can get clive and use it in the same way as youtube-dl. Through Clive, you can download videos from any site that offers streaming video, ofcourse you just have to know the video url. For suse;

sudo zypper install clive

For using clive:

clive <url>

There are a few command line options as well:

eg. with -o you can specify the filename by which you want to store the video that you download, with the -s option you can specify the path where you want to store the video.

Finally, working on something!

All these days, I was not sure which project I would work on. I had this project called GRASS (by OSGEO) in my mind all these days and a lot of small bug fixes and feature enhancements that I was thinking about, but then came the breakthrough (not in my work, but the idea). I came across a software called Strong DC++, which is an improved version of the older DC++ clients. In Strong DC++, there are a lot of new features that make it a lot better than the others. The best feature that I liked is the multiple source downloads, which makes the downloads much faster if the same file is shared by more than one users and if the download slots are available. For more on Strong DC++, visit: http://strongdc.sourceforge.net/index.php?lang=eng

Though it is an opensource project, it was developed in windows and it uses WinAPI(WTL). So there is no version of StrongDC++ on Linux. And if you want it to run on linux, then you’ll have to use an emulator such as Wine. I have started using it through wine and it works fine. It crashes unexpectedly a few times, but its not bad for a software that we are running through wine. But still, I want to add a few more features to the existing StrongDC++ and also for further development, I thought it will be useful to rewrite the GUI using the wx toolkit. We have also planned to make this version a bit more customized to our LAN (or for that matter the LAN in any engineering college).

So here I am trying to learn Python and then the wxPython toolkit, to implement a GUI for the STRONG DC++ client!