FOSS.IN 07: Day 2

December 5, 2007 By Anant 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 Anant 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 Anant 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!

Freed!

October 17, 2007 By Anant in College, Conferences, FOSS, Fun, Hacks, India, Linux, Technology Leave a comment

A long overdue update; Freed.IN this year was a bundle of joy. I caught up with a majority of the #linux-india regulars, and met some of them for the first time (ilug-bom-ers mostly).

The event started a bit late (nothing unexpected), but everyone quickly caught up with the schedule over the course of the day. I attended Gopal’s talk on 10 things I didn’t about Python – the concluding demo on getting the Wii remote to control beryl was especially wicked. Immediately after that was my talk on Plan 9, which had more attendees than I would have expected. Niyam’s talk on FOSS multimedia tools was a real crowd-puller, and the samples were very impressive. We had a key-signing party that afternoon, which was fun; if it weren’t for the embarrassment of showing ID cards with 10-year old pictures on them

I missed lunch on the first day thanks to the talk on the Python Standard Library, but it was worth it. I made my way to the nearby JNU canteen and munched on a few snickers before returning to an extremely interesting panel discussion on whether LUG’s should provide commercial FOSS support. (Why did everyone have their hands above their shoulders?):

Later that night, a bunch of speakers along with the ilugd crew found ourselves in the Golden Dragon for dinner; which can only be summarized by ramkrsna’s excellent photography:

The second day began with Raj’s thought-provoking talk on the issue of software patents, immediately followed by a talk on how FOSS can cut costs and keep customers happy at the same time, by Robin Miller (of Slashdot/Sourceforge/ThinkGeek fame). Niyam had another talk on digital creativity with FOSS. The day wound up with a vote of thanks, and a panel discussion on getting FOSS communities to work together. I had to reach Jaipur the next day, so I bid goodbye to all the wonderful folks; but they had an amazing dinner party later from what I hear.

An extremely fun event, executed in typical ilugd style, and definitely improved since freedel. In retrospect, some things may have been better; like keeping the talk halls a bit closer to each other, choosing a more tighter set of talks (there were too many to attend!) and not make lunch clash with any talk! I would suggest Freed start charging for attendance next year to ensure that an interested audience turn up (you can make the lunch and a T-Shirt complimentary), and schedule talks with atleast a 10 minute gap between each other. The ilugd is all geared up for the next edition of the event, tentatively to be held in February 08. See you then!

Gnunify 07

January 30, 2007 By Anant in College, Conferences, FOSS, Gentoo, India, People, Places, Technology Leave a comment

I just returned from Gnunify 07, and I have to say I had a great time in Pune. My talk went off quite well; although the audience count was low, it was a focussed group which is a good thing.

I couldn’t attend any of the other talks in the first day because I was also participating in the PHPThrowDown with Christian. Remind me never to mix two things ever again, Christian sums up how the whole thing went here.

On the second day however, I got to attend a lot of good talks, including those by Louis Potts from OpenOffice; Tony Wasserman from Carnegie Mellon, and Matt Barker from Canonical. The best thing I like about the conferences is that you get to meet a lot of people, and learn so much!

The volunteers for Gnunify were the most helpful lot I’ve ever seen anywhere, cheers to them! The airport security confiscated my spare batteries on my way to Pune, so I could take a few photos only on the next day; after I had some time to buy a new set. Ramakrishna, has a few more. Yet to find a comprehensive set of photos covering the event though.

On other news, Adobe opened up the PDF specs. w00t! We also launched the php-gtk-edge repository today; giving you bleeding-edge widgets for PHP-GTK. Think of it as a playground before extensions make it to php-gtk-proper. There’s also the official Indian channel for Gentoo users, #gentoo-in on Freenode; hope to see you there sometime

Until next post, keep smiling!

Macnix

January 18, 2007 By Anant in Apple, College, FOSS, India, Linux, Mac, Programming, Technology Leave a comment

One of my new year resolutions was to use Mac OS X more often. I was very comfortable with my Gentoo installation; but spending $2800 on a Macbook Pro and then not using OS X is kind of stupid. I did try to “migrate” to the Mac several times in the past; but it never lasted more than 2 days. Gtk looked bad on the Mac, and GNU Parted wouldn’t run. Something or the other kept pulling me back to Linux (the latest reason was the ability to use Java 6). Well, the new year was a good opportunity to change my attitude and I decided to whole-heartedly attempt the move.

After 3 days of endless reboots; installations and configuration, I’m now the proud owner of what I’d like to call the “Macnix” :-D

The first thing I did was to get myself a copy of Parallels. There really isn’t any other decent virtualization solution available for the Mac as of now; VMWare did release a beta but it’s really really slow. I ran through the Gentoo install process on a new Parallels virtual machine, taking care not to bloat the installation more than necessary. Gnome or KDE were definitely overkills; I decided to go in for the lean-and-mean XFCE instead. My laptop has 2 Gigs of RAM; so Parallels was doing good with the 512MB it was allotted.

As for equivalent applications for all my day-to-day tasks; I didn’t face any trouble at all; except the fact I had to compromise by using non-free software in some instances. Firefox and Thunderbird are available for OS X; migrating my old Thunderbird profile to the Mac installation was a no-brainer; as well as my old Firefox bookmarks. Although there’s no decent single application that could replace Gaim; the Adium + Colloquy combo delivers quite a punch. (Gaim does run on the Apple X11 server, but if you love your eyes you would never try that). Amarok was replaced by its original inspiration: iTunes, and F-Spot with iPhoto. Eclipse worked out-of-the-box and so did all the plugins (Thank God for JARs!). Azureus runs on OS X effortlessly.

On the command-line front; the Apple Terminal was seriously lacking; but iTerm proved to be an excellent replacement. After fiddling with the .bashrc a bit; I felt right at home with the classic Gentoo’ish colored BASH prompt. Okay, I still needed a lot more of the *nix stuff. There are only 2 good options you have here: Fink and MacPorts. A quick look at the different versions that they offered immediately shows that MacPorts is way ahead in terms of offering bleeding-edge version. And me being an avid Gentooer, MacPorts was the obvious choice

I had Gtk+ 2.10 up and running in no time, along with Python 2.5 and the wxPython bindings. That’s not all; I also got the latest and greatest versions of Apache 2 (OS X offers only httpd-1), PHP, Git, mySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite and Subversion thanks to MacPorts. PHP-GTK also compiled without hitches. Although all Gtk apps looked really bad in the beginning, getting the gtk-engines2 and gtk-chtheme packages helped a lot.

One thing that really bugged me was the fact that I had to start the X11 server manually everytime I needed to run an X application; and the gross XTerm would appear. Thankfully, these tips helped a lot; X11 now starts automatically on login, no dock icon, no ugly XTerm; and I can run all my X applications from the comfort of the iTerm. I also made the VNCServer (I used TightVNC), mySQL, PostgreSQL and the Gentoo VM start automatically.

You ain’t seen nothing yet. After my Gentoo installation went of smoothly on the Parallels VM; I enabled for X11Forwarding enabled on both ends. Now I can all my Linux GUI applications, again from the comfort of the OS X environment and iTerm. Pick a decent Gtk theme; and it won’t even look bad!

The real icing on the cake is MacFUSE. The absolutely wonderful folks at Google ported the FUSE kernel module from Linux to Darwin. What does this mean? We can now write to NTFS (ntfs3g), mount SSHFS, CryptoFS, WebDAVFS and a dozen other filesystems in OS X. Sweet! I’m exploting sshfs to the fullest; OS X and Gentoo (on Parallels) share the same htdocs, home folders and distfiles.

All of this did take considerable amount of effort to setup though; ntfs3g wouldn’t compile cleanly; configuring X on Gentoo took quite a while; Getting Apache2 to integrate itself with OS X, stuff like that. Nothing that a search in Google couldn’t solve though. If any of you do have any trouble in installing any of the applications I’ve mentioned so far; I’d be glad to help. If you’re already a Linux Guru, you’ll face no trouble whatsoever

Ah, the perfect union of yin and yang. I think I’ve successfully migrated to OS X now; a whole day has passed and I haven’t missed my native Gentoo installation at all; and none of my work on Linux has been curbed thanks to all this amazing software. I love my Macnix!

(P.S.: I initially wanted to give detailed instructions on preparing this perfect “recipe” and also give some awesome screenshots, but I guess I’m too lazy for all that :-p)

Binary Sunrise

Anant Narayanan

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