A Glimpse on 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

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