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PCQ Linux8.0

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PCQ Bureau
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Ever since PCQuest started distributing Linux CDs with the magazine at intervals bordering on the irregular, they have been one of the most eagerly awaited issues across the country. Tons of reader mail, congratulating, thanking and, yes, criticizing the efforts of the PCQLinux teams, pour in for months after the issue hits the stands. (Even now, we are answering queries on PCQLinux 7.1 that came out about a year and a half back). The responsibility that the team shoulders in creating new versions of PCQLinux is tremendous, which is why bringing out such an issue is one of the most nerve-racking, technically-challenging and ego-bashing journeys, yet one filled with untold hours of exploration, growth of knowledge and, of course, fun, sweat and tears.

Installing on NTFS Partitions
Installing PCQLinux 8.0 (Aquamarine)
Installing and Uninstalling Software
Configuring your PCQLinux
Configuring New Hardware
Printing and Scanning
Set up your USB Webcam
Internet Connectivity
Chatting and Web Browsing
Accessing Windows Desktops
Ripping your Music
OpenOffice Suite
Floppies and CD-ROMs
Accessing Windows Partitions
Playing Audio and video
Dynamic IPs with PCQLinux
DNS on PCQLinux
Firewalls with Linux
Configuring your Proxy Server
Linux on a Windows Network
Intranet Mail Server on PCQLinux
.NET on Linux
Apache
Supercomputing with PCQLinux 8.0

Unlike in the last few years, this time PCQLinux was created completely in-house, at PCQ Labs. Some of the team members, though are not a part of Labs, worked from their own places, coordinating efforts over mail and mobiles and, occasionally, instant messengers, when someone had to travel out of station. The team inside Labs had the major pain of collating, including, creating and testing the changes.

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Of course, all this would not have been possible without meeting in person and solving the problems as they occurred. All Saturdays were reserved for us ‘outsiders’ to take over the premises and boss over the poor, all-suffering insiders. Whether it was a holiday or a working day, we had to meet up on all Saturdays, and on every day during the last ten odd days, usually working together till late. Lunch would be the time where we would take time off to gorge ourselves with whatever KK would let us have! He, thankfully (or selfishly, for him), however, ensured a continuous supply of caffeine!

Creating the PCQLinux CDs required each of us to work on different areas of the install process itself. One of the most difficult parts was right at the beginning–the objective of bringing the Red Hat Linux (RHL) 8.0 three CD set down to two, required us to throw out a lot of stuff. Kicking out all the extraneous language support was the easy part; however, that did not bring us anywhere near our goal of two CDs.

That brought us to the hard part of deciding the apps to throw out. Many hours of discussions, trolling of news groups and everything short of fistfights later, we had our final list. Many of you will find apps that you were expecting not present. We have tried to provide alternate and, most of the times, better apps than what was given in the past or in RHL. A case in point is the exclusion of xmms. Instead we have mplayer, which with its GUI and even an encoder plays everything xmms does and much, much more.

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Next came the job of customizing the installer itself. Anaconda, as it’s called, was easy enough to modify, the difficult part was changing all instances of Red Hat to PCQLinux (as required by RedHat). Surprisingly, in the RHL 8.0 CDs, the word Red Hat itself appears both as a single word (RedHat) and two words (Red Hat).

Adding and modifying packages to the installer was also simple enough. Creating newer install options came next. In most part, adding the departmental server, gateway server and everything options was simple and so was customizing the packages to be installed in each option. We had little trouble in getting the packages to get selected correctly. Just before deciding to break for a late lunch, we thought of investigating how the package selection works in the installer. And, imagine our surprise when we found one the worst things in programming–hard coding!!! We found that the installer has many places where string references (the text you see on the screens) as well as selections in further screens are completely hard coded into the program itself.

Aaaargh!

Support

PCQLinux 8.0 is based on Red Hat Linux 8.0.



But Red Hat is not responsible for the support of this distribution in any way. For support, check
www.pcquest.com/linux. Frequently-asked questions on this distribution as well as links to the latest updates are provided there. Also available there is the archive of all Linux articles that have appeared in PCQuest.



If you don’t find the answer to your question at www.pcquest.com/ linux, e-mail us at linux@pcquest.com. Our team will try its best to provide you with a solution at the earliest. However, do note that this distribution is being provided as a free service to our readers with no assurance of support whatsoever.
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Getting the supercomputer install process done was one of the more ambitious parts of the project. We wanted PCQLinux 8.0 to address everything from a personal desktop to a supercomputer. Unfortunately, we ran into a major roadblock at this point. Oscar, the supercomputer installer for Linux, is not available for RHL 8.0. The reason for this is simple–RHL 8.X is so completely different from the previous versions that the Oscar team has not yet gone for it. So, we decided to do it ourselves.

This turned out to be one of the most frustrating parts of the project. Not only are the lists of RPMs required for the nodes, hard coded, but they are also required for the server. Moreover, RHL has done the extremely (to our eyes) mean thing of changing the names of common RPMs in this version, removing certain RPMs and using a completely new compiler (namely, GCC). So, for each error that was caught, we had to check what the RPM was, find out the name of that RPM in the current version and replace it in the scripts! We also had to re-compile many Oscar packages. Because of Oscar, we just could not progress to Release Candidate in the last week of January. By the fifth of February, however, we were confident that Shekhar would deliver Oscar. And, finally, by the tenth, he had it up and running. Whew!

By the tenth of February, when everything was almost done, we were literally being inundated with newer versions of the packages. It began to look like every developer out there was up with a vengeance, releasing new versions and bug fixes just to catch us on the wrong foot. And, every such new release meant that Sanjay and Anindya had to stay up all night, downloading, integrating and testing. No wonder that warm bedding, extra clothes and shaving kits started making their appearance next to the PCs in Labs!

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Finally, by the second week of February, many hundreds of CD-Rs, uncounted number of betas and release candidates later, we had the final CDs ready to ship to the duplicator.

But, our work is far from over. Even as this is being written, each of us is busy writing the articles that have to go with the distribution. And, setting up the infrastructure to handle all the mail that will come pouring in, once this has reached your hands.



Can we call it a triumph? Yes. If only you think so too. We will be waiting for your verdict.

The PCQLinux 8.0 Team



Anil Chopra, Anindya Roy, Krishna Kumar, Sanjay Majumder, Shailendra Malik, Shekhar Govindarajan, Syed H Imam,
Vinod Unny

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