Category Archives: Gentoo

FOSS.IN 07: Day 3

December 6, 2007 By in Conferences, FOSS, FOSS.IN, Gentoo, Glendix, India, Linux, Mozilla, People, Plan9, Programming, Technology Leave a comment

Day 3: The first day of the main conference. We thought we were running late (left home only at 09:50 after getting our Gentoo T-Shirts on) but the inauguration ceremony started half-hour late (as usual!) so we were able to catch the whole action. After FOSS.IN/2007 was kicked off by Atul & Kishore, Naba Kumar came up to give the keynote on Anjuta DevStudio. I didn’t know the origin of the name Anjuta earlier, but it was certainly fascinating :)

I had my talk on contributing to Gentoo right after the keynote, and we started at 11:30 on the dot (the schedules in other rooms were on-time). Gora gave an excellent introduction, and I began speaking to a somewhat-filled room about the different entry points to Gentoo development. The audience were really interactive and the questions were brilliant – this is something that I really liked about this years edition of FOSS.IN. There was a lot more interest in Gentoo than I had originally anticipated and it was nice to see our stall really crowded immediately after the talk. Hopefully, we’ve brain-washed atleast two-dozen people into using Gentoo :)

The remainder of the day was spent talking to people who approached our stall – it got a bit monotonous though, answering the same question “Why is Gentoo different?” over and over again. We’ve decided to print out an FAQ poster and put it up to make things a little more easier for us ;)

I had my third talk on Plan 9 from Bell Labs scheduled in the evening, right beside some really interesting stuff including the talk on PulseAudio and the lightning talk session. Again, I really didn’t expect much of a crowd for my talk, but I was happily mistaken. The room was not only full, but there were also people seated on the stairs and near the door! The talk went off really well, and I think it was *the* best talk I’ve delivered so far. The crowd was really smart and it was fun to interact with such an audience.

We’ve planned to have a small Mozilla hack-a-thon today, let’s see how that goes. Besides that I’ve planned to attend a few other interesting talks. Looking forward to keeping the pace up, I’ll catch you all tomorrow!

FOSS.IN 07: Day 2

December 5, 2007 By in Conferences, FOSS, FOSS.IN, Fun, Gentoo, India, People, SoC, Technology Leave a comment

We reached a little late for Day 2, because there were no talks in particular that we had wanted to attend. After reaching the venue at around 11:00, the first thing we did was to distribute the Gentoo t-shirts so folks could wear them today (the t-shirt needs one wash before wear). Shyam (fox2mike) had brought the Gentoo banner so we set that up in the stall.

G0SUB and myself then attended pradeepto’s talk on setting up a KDE development environment. This was followed by an amazing demonstration of dtrace by the one and only GMan (Glynn Foster from Sun/GNOME). dtrace is really powerful, although I keep hearing about it, yesterday was the first time I actually understood how useful it is.

After lunch, I attended Debarshi’s talk on Opyum, his summer of code project for this year. Also got to meet a bunch of other SoCers and we’ve all planned a SoC BoF along with a few mentors who are also present at the event.

Then we got busy distributing invites for the Mozilla party, and hung out with the Mozilla gang until it was time to leave. The party was at Opus which was a nice place with good (loud) music :) . The karaoke was a big hit. After meeting a lot of people and having some good discussion, I decided to call it a day (I had two talks to prepare for!).

Day 3 begins in a few hours – both my talks are today and we’re going to kick off the Gentoo stall, so I’m really excited. See you tomorrow with another update!

FOSS.IN 07: Day 1

December 4, 2007 By in Conferences, FOSS, FOSS.IN, Gentoo, India, Life, Mozilla, People, Technology Leave a comment

Quick update on the first day at FOSS.IN. We reached the venue at around 09:00 – the stalls were the first thing that caught my eye (especially the Sun & Google ones). After about 20 minutes of frantic organizers moving all over the venue at lightning speeds, all the speakers got registered and we moved to SDA/250 for the Mozilla PD.

We started a little late – around 10:30 as opposed to 10:00. After brief introductions by Mary, Myk kicked off the project day with an excellent overview of the add-on scenario in Mozilla. This was followed by Prasad’s talk on building applications on the Mozilla platform. The calculator example – complete with it’s own add-on manager (for adding scientific support) – was a great way of giving the basics of Mozilla application development as was the highlight of the tutorial.

I gave the next talk on writing add-ons with JavaScript using XPConnect. Prasad and Myk had already covered a lot of ground on the basics of add-on and application development, so I was able to wrap up my talk in about half an hour – bringing us right back on schedule ;)

The last talk of the first half was given by Mary which focussed on the various non-technical ways in which you could help Mozilla. The talk brought to light a lot of cool activities Mozilla was involved in. We broke for lunch at exactly 13:00, promising to meet back at 14:00 for the second half. Mary also kept a lot of Mozilla swag at the entrance of the hall – which included badges, mobile holders, tattoos, stickers and wrist bands. The crowd was ecstatic about them and needlessly to say that they were a great hit.

At lunch we caught up with a lot of other FOSS friends from #linux-india. Aanjhan transferred the Gentoo stickers which he kindly volunteered to print, and we hope to setup the Gentoo stall today so that we’re ready for tomorrow. I finally met G0SUB in real life, took me some time to recognize him because of the shaven beard though :)

Post lunch we began with Krishnakant’s talk on accessibility in Mozilla, which as Gora said was an eye-opener is many ways for all of us. I was really impressed with the level of accessibility that the Gnome environment and Mozilla Firefox provided to the disabled. We discussed some ways in which accessibility could improve in Mozilla applications.

The next talk was by Axel, which was about Localization in Mozilla. The coolest part of the talk was when Axel fixed a bug on localization (though it was ultimately closed as a WONTFIX!) because it gave a very good overview to the audience about the life-cycle of a bug. The final talk of the project day was by Chris Hoffman, which was about QA in Mozilla and how you can contribute to these areas which require some technical skills – “for people in the middle”.

We rounded off the project day with about an hour of one-on-one discussion with all the Mozilla folks, which was, in my opinion, the best part of the project day because we got to discuss a variety of topics (not only related to Mozilla or Technology even). We also decided to have a hack session for Mozilla, which would be tentatively on the 7th at the hack center.

After all the dust settled, we packed up around 18:30 and a group of around 12 went for dinner to “Sunny’s”, a nice Italian restaurant. Discussion on virtually everything ranging from food to movies and dtrace to macports ensued and we were done by around 21:00. After reaching home I just fell on my bed and now here I am, all geared up for FOSS.IN: Day 2! :)

Karunakar posted a few pics of Day 1 here, check them out.

Community Pooling

November 14, 2007 By in Conferences, FOSS, Gentoo, India, People Leave a comment

Pradeepto put up a post about how the community can help FOSS organizations scheduled to appear at FOSS.IN this December. Besides attending the Project Days and Stalls, you can look forward to some cool swag from your favourite organization. Almost every organization is planning on T-Shirts, Stickers and Posters.

These things, unlike knowledge, aren’t free. And I am all for pradeepto’s idea of the community stepping to help. This is all the more important for FOSS.IN, because organizations aren’t allowed to sell anything at the event. The best way, therefore, is for you to get in touch with the co-ordinators of your favorite FOSS organization and ask them how you can help.

Within hours of pradeepto’s post, he received a message from a community member willing to chip in with some dough for the T-Shirts. I find that to be really encouraging. I think it will be a lot easier for us, if, for every T-Shirt/Sticker/Poster we give away, someone would “buy” another. Keep it up, folks!

Oh, and while I’m on the topic, consider this to be a public call for volunteers for the Gentoo stall, scheduled for the 6th, 7th, and 8th of December at FOSS.IN. All Volunteers get a free Gentoo T-Shirt (hopefully, paid for by a fellow community member – in any case, myself and fox2mike have the expenses covered for now ;) ). So, if you love Gentoo, and will be in Bangalore around that time, there’s no excuse for you not to appear!

Experience Plan 9 on Linux!

May 31, 2007 By in FOSS, Gentoo, Glendix, Linux, Plan9, Technology Leave a comment

Plan9 is an operating system that is designed to make up for all the mistakes that UNIX made. And it’s quite different from any of the current UNIX clones, be it any of the BSDs or Linux. To ease the migration, there’s a project called Plan9Port; which is essentially a port of several Plan9 utilities to the POSIX platform.

I recently made an ebuild for  Plan9Port, also called Plan from User Space. Just ‘emerge plan9port’ and spread the Plan9 love!

Speaking of which, my Summer of Code project for Plan9 is progressing well. More details on my SoC blog, or the aggregator at KiX. Laters!

D in Gentoo

May 23, 2007 By in FOSS, Gentoo, Hacks, Linux, Programming Leave a comment

Hiya! This is probably the first post that will appear on Planet Gentoo since I last posted on the Gentoo SoC Planet – so I’d like to say hello to all my fellow developers and the all the awesome Gentoo users out there :)

Now that the greetings are out of the way, the real topic of this post is to introduce you to the new D system in Gentoo. D was introduced to portage recently with the introduction of the ‘d’ USE flag for GCC and the dmd-bin ebuild. This provides you with GDC 0.23 and DMD 1.014 respectively and both of them use the standard Phobos library. You can have both the packages simultaneously on a system, no slotting is required, no executable names clash.

I also added support for using the Tango standard library instead of phobos – the ebuilds can be found in my overlay. Full instructions for building DMD with Tango can be found here. The Tango ebuild also supports replacing phobos for GDC, but hasn’t been enabled yet since I want to double-check with the toolchain ninjas that I’m doing everything correctly first :)

Enjoy!

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