Introducing myself to Linux
The two unrelated ideas of an Exotic OS that was not Windows released by PCQuest, PCQuest Linux 5.2 based on Redhat 5.2.
Somehow I got this beast to install on my Wipro Super Genius P-II 266 Mhz with a royal 32 MB RAM( oh the extremely clueless people they sent one after another if there was something or the other wrong with this computer)
Partitioning the Win95 2 GB partition ( FAT32 this was one of the last OSR2 something release) using fips after defragging the harddisk.
After a few hours of wait I was their at the root prompt. Not even knowing there is something called startx that will rescue me.
I didn't have the PCQuest Magazine to have known there as startx and with no users of Linux I knew at that time (only later to find that there were other pioneering users of Slackware before at REC kurukshetra). We had a system of CDs issued to us on Library Cards. What we liked in this system was the demo games that came free with PCQuest CDs.
So once as luck had it I came across Linux and the geek in me awoke out to install something that was not Windows.
Later I started deep exploration of Linux and found the /usr/doc/HOWTO directory to be the best part in the newly installed system.
In those days the whole Redhat linux distribution was installed in something like 500 MB and not 5 GB as of today so it was a simple matter to explore the filesystem looking for stuff to read.
The Linux Intranet
We had sufficient idea of the capabilities of this 'new' OS.
The ramifications were going to be huge.
We had the raw power of a full fledged server OS.
This for mere students who had only a telnet access from a DOS based IBM PCs to an old outdated SunOS
Soon I was evangelizing Linux to fellow students, teachers, CCN staff and everyone.
It mostly began with solving the X-Configuration problems for SIS based cards for others.( I had a good Cirrus Logic card that was well supported
- 1078x768 for 1 MB VRAM).
Few of us like minded 'converts' went on and formed a LUG ( ISTE-LUG ) at REC, Kurukshetra in 1999-2000 with over 100 members.
Huge lecture halls were now for once full of avid listeners to us and many got converted to dual boot their home machines.
We figured out the simple and usable NIS+NFS based architecture for a distributed
Filesystem and central authentication.Landed up at Prof-In-Charge of CCN with a proposal for a Intranet at RECK with not too many things but
not excluding a Webserver + E-mail accounts for all without requiring Internet. (To complete the picture the Computer Science users had access
to messaging available from their Unix and Netware Logins)
The proposal was accepted and we soon landed up for the summer training after the end of III year with a team of 5 to live in Campus and a state owned telco's guesthouses.
Howto after howto was cracked during these hot summer months and thanks to some automated scripts from PCQuest CD we soon had working DNS server, Webserver, Virtual Hosts, Proof of Concept NFS services, and sometimes tricky but working Samba services ( the popular samba issue at that time was that win98 sent out encrypted passwords and Win95 would send plain text to access samba shares which required some hack into the registry)
We couldn't implement a production ready environment after this due to lack of hardware(the borrowed hardware had to be returned and expected
server hardware had not yet arrived).
However the prototype linux server on a crappy AMD machine with 32 MB of RAM continued to serve us for our Minor Project in the Final Year.
We had fine virtual Linux Desktops on our DEC Alpha's fine X-Windows GUI.
The odd semester was spent creating our client/server software with a dialogd based server configuration frontend for a simple multiple type questions multi-client server with simple authentication.
Over the Final Year the minor and major projects did by me and team included the client/server mentioned above and a full fledged proof of concept
GTK+ application complete with autoconf+automake scripts which installed the software with a desktop entry and man page and came packaged as a
typical .tar.gz.
The GTK+ project 'Multilingual Text Editor' on Linux was the highest scoring project that year.
Will surely put up the code for download under GPL if I am able to find it amongst my CD archives. Though I packaged it later as an RPM but it didn't run on Redhat Linux 7.1.
I failed to mention that it was during this time that I read GPL and GNU Philosophy for the first time and applied GPL to our software.
The final shot at Intranet
The lack of resources during the previous summer for the Intranet
implementation rankled my mind and that of a few enlightened
Professors of our institution.
We had the CCN System Administrators convinced of the need to get done
the production ready servers before we left campus. They had seen the
working prototypes and now wanted the production servers.
So while Escosoft Technologies
decided to delay our joining against the campus offer by two months (and later infinitely) I and Nitin Rathee ( who later joined TCS ) decided to chill out for
two months in CCN.
To complete the thread offer from Escosoft never materialised after the due process of dilly dallying ( Unlike Wipro, Infosys and Satyam who finally honoured their
commitments) by them and no compensation to the loss they caused to my career.
From morning till late evening first at CCN and then at Nitin's house where I stayed for 2 months we were hacking through the latest howto's with much more ambitious targets this time.
To run a Apache+Tomcat+Postgres system as our custom App server
and Sendmail+Freeware Chat+Fees Management System (based on the III tier architecture from the above app server ) we lead a team of 10 would be final yearites and III yearites to complete a production ready(only creation of users remained) servers for REC Kurukshetra.
Later the implemented services died due to sheer lack of interest amongst various interested parties and the unmaintained Intranet died.
Aside from that the fact that Optical Fibre Network died while the civil construction (digging going on at that time took out almost all parts of Fiber Optic Cable system network
became small islands) carried out under the fresh grants that MHRD provided to REC Kurukshetra to enable to become the first among the NITs.
