A Glimpse of GNU/Linux

Wooooww..

I am still intoxicated by the charm of Foss.in/2009. I can’t believe that it is over. It was , by far, the best  FOSS event that I have ever attended.

The reason why I felt it most attractive was it put the “zip on the mouth” and provided you with two powerful hands which could mould your idea into a reality- be it in Software or in Hardware.  This time, there were less talks and more “workout sessions”, which means we could work with the project of our choice, code and if the core developer likes it, it will be committed to the repository , right away!!!

There are pros and cons to every events. Now, let me show you the list of pros and cons of the foss.in  so that you will get a feel of what happened over there. Since, I have the habit of finding pleasure in finding the faults, let me put the cons first

Cons:

1.    The Foss.in people used OSX laptop for projecting presentations in the Main Auditorium

Pros:

1. Less number of Talks (More time for workouts.. go to first floor, meet the people and work with them).

2. Timing was great : 11 AM to 10 PM – In Bangalore, considering the traffic, if you are fortunate enough,  you can  reach a place like NIMHANS and attend the programs if it is scheduled at 9AM. It also allowed the “Software Professionals” like me to, go to office for their daily bread,come back in the evening and attend Foss.in. I was able to attend the Keynotes everyday and also participate in some of the hands on sessions in the evening (after 6 PM ) because of this schedule.

3. Selection of  Talks/Speakers were good.

4. I got the opportunity to meet some of the great minds and discuss something with them. The list is as follows:

a. Harald Welte : We discussed about Openezx project and issues with Motorola not realeasing the kernel source code for A1600 mobile.

b. Santhosh Thottingal: We discussed about the Silpa project. Silpa is an amazing project and Santhosh is doing amazing things with it. He explained the algorithms that he has used in the Silpa project for Language computing.

c. Stefan Schmidt : We discussed about the Openezx project. Tried to boot the A1600 with the latest 2.6.x kernel . However, the attempt failed after about 5 -6 attempts and he guided me to have a look into the bootloader code “Blob”

d. Baiju. M:  He has presented about “Buildout” . We discussed about Silpa.

e. Jain Basil Aliyas:  The “scribus” boy. We discussed about how his girl friend got engaged to another person . Probably he is so busy with his codings, that he couldn’t spare time for her

f.  Milosch Meriac: We discussed about Openbeacon project and he helped me in setting up the arm toolchain for openbeacon project in my laptop.

g. Ciju Rajan : My college mate and now a proud “IBM LTC” guy. I have attended his presentation on “Suspend and Resume”  in Linux.

h. Hundreds of other “Birds of the same feather”  flying with their groups  and very rarely fighting with the birds with slightly different color (KDE v/s GNOME )

5.  The “TRDP” band’s performance at the end of Foss.in was awesome. It was the first time I came to know that the Kannada Folk songs are this sweet. Kudos to Raghu Dixit for a wonderful evening.

In this event, I also witnessed some of my friends get their form back . One such example was Justin’s workout with Openbeacon project. He was so interested in the project that he spent 2 days with Miloch and finally coded the “Jana gana mana ” using the Openbeacon’s PWM in FreeRTOS. Miloch became so happy that he gifted the Openbeacon board and tag to Justin and he accepted Justin’s code to the openbeacon repository after some optimizations.

Justin.. way to go…

Sujith was running around with the KDE guys despite his health issues.  He was totally with the  KDE group that I seldom found him attending other sessions .. Kudos to Sujith

I felt sorry that I couldn’t attend Jain’s presentation on Scribus. I have also missed Pramode sir , who couldn’t attend  Foss.in/2009 due to health issues. Felt sad when Atul Chitnis said he is not going to lead from the next Foss.in onwards.  I think he should be the “BDFL” of Foss.in. I also felt happy when Atul Chitnis mentioned the amazing hack of “GPL” by RMS. In fact, it was the first time I heard Atul said something good about RMS

In effect, it was kind of “event of a lifetime” for me. Some of the snaps from Foss.in

Me along with Harald Welte and Stephan Schmidt

Khasim and Sony Team

I have started my journey from Bangalore to Kozhikode on October 23.  The purpose of my journey was to conduct a workshop on Tathva-09, the three-day annual techno-management festival of the National Institute of Technology, Calicut (NIT-C).

A week before this, Vivek (my friend from GEC who is currently doing in MS in NITC, a GNU/Linux hacker and geek) has called me and asked me whether I can present a session on how to contribute to Free Software projects. Though, it was the first time for me, I never wanted to say “NO” to Vivek. I have agreed to conduct the “User2Hacker” session and prepared the presentation in Latex+ beamer using Lyx.

I have reached NITC campus on 24th, Saturday morning. The organizers has arranged for a cab to pick me and they also arranged accommodation for me at the NITC hostel.

Since  I was free on that day, I have decided to attend the “beagle board” session by Khasim. The session was very interesting and Khasim demonstrated some amazing ideas using beagle board. He also mentioned about the new “Hawk Board”.After that event, me and Vivek went to the Lab to setup the softwares needed to conduct the “Hands on session” . We have installed vim, indent, svn, git ..etc on  20 machines.

Next day, I went to Vivek’s room after breakfast. After that,  we went to the lab. As I have called up Pramode sir about the talk, he has informed a number of students about the talk and almost 10 people from GEC, Thrissur came to attend my workshop. The total number of students attended the workshop was around 50. I was happy about this number as this was the healthiest number of participants for a “Hands on workshop”. Later I have presented the “User2Hacker” workshop.

User2Hacker @NITC

Response from the students were very good. Some of them hav already contributed to the FOSS community. Some of them are willing to contribute provided somebody guide them in the right way. I liked their attitude and determination. For me, this was the purpose of my workshop. I am glad that I could at least make a number of  to seriously think about the various possibilities of the FOSS world.

The organizers were very energetic and professional. I felt the freshness of college after a couple of years. I thought about my days in GEC. The organizers has arranged a cab for my travel from NITC to Kozhikode Town.

I have tried the “Manchurian Dosa” for the first time from Kozhikkode. It is similar to Masala dosa .. however, in Manchurian Dosa, they replaced ordinary “masala” in masala dosa with Gobi Manchurian. It was an experiment worth trying

The Hindu reported “The User 2 Hacker workshop had a positive response” : http://www.hindu.com/2009/10/26/stories/2009102650160200.htm