I sporadically get my hands dirty with linux and sometimes i need to re-invent (or atleast re-discover) the wheel. So some sort of logging on what i did when and how i did it will be helpfull to me (and possibly to others).
Some important feats i could achieve are:
Around the time of 3rd sem – Got linux cds from various places. Installed it on my pc and friend’s pcs. Formatted i-forgot-the-count number of hard disks.
From 4th sem to 5th sem – Got linux installed at various places – including my college (L.D. College of Engineering) and hacked boot loaders to solve different problems.
Around the time of 6th sem – Recover a corrupt partition table using gpart (guess partition). This tool proved to be a life-saver when I corrupted my partition table using ancient version of norton disk doctor. gpart runs on uncorrupted linux system and uses its file system modules to find `signatures’ of various file-systems on the corrupted disk.
Around the time of 7th sem – Learnt to write init script and build rpm packages. I wrote an init script for dictionary server. Init scripts (stored in /etc/init.d) allow starting and stoping of deamons systematically during boot, shutdown as well as run-time. RPM building basically boils down to writing a good SPEC file. I referred to RPM building howto to get started.
14/6/03 – Installed w4l on redhat 8.0 at DA-IICT. Requires files and instructions from win4lin directory. Also tried hard to access Windows network resoruces through linux. Failed to get LiSA server going but managed with LinNeighborhood.
14/6/04 – Figuring out how to get NFS and SAMBA going on linux and how to access my stuff on Suraj (our linux server) through windows machine. No success yet.
17/6/04 – Exactly one year after first success I am again trying to get win4lin working – this time on kernel 2.6.5 that comes with Fedora core 2. Need to patch the kernel with win4lin patches and compile the kernel.
Posted by Shalin Mehta 
