Banagalore FOSS Community is celebrating Feb-March as FOSS Month 2006. We met at Kunningham road last friday and discussed the details of organising the event [See the minutes of the meet]. It was a wonderful meet where we discussed a lot of things. So welcoming all of you to FOSS Month.
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Right now listening to phenom on “Radio City Live!”.
We started cooking from last week. Last Saturday we got ourselves a gas connection and sunday we purchased the utensils and started with a grant lunch with ‘payasam’. In the evening we made chicken curry. Now every day we cook dinner and we are enjoying it. I had to consult mom to make beans curry. Today also we had cooked chicken curry as it is a holiday.
Thats all for now.
Mark Shuttleworth of Ubuntu fame (also Second Space Tourist and first African National in space) visited Bangalore last week (Thursday 19th Jan 2006) as part of his Asia Tour. I was lucky to listen to him twice a day, first in HP and then with BLUG. He talked about the reasons why he started Ubuntu project his vision for its future … and most interestingly his experience in space.
He talked about launchpad which is a collaboration tool for Free Software projects, especially for big projects like a distribution. He was very enthusiastic about the collaboration between various distributions and relation with upstream. He emphasised that we (foss community in India) is in the right time and taken a right choice. He talked about a sustainable model for Canonical. Ubuntu encourages customised distros based on Ubuntu and they offer such service too (for example Spain has its own version of ubuntu which is in Spanish and all the bookmarks and RSS feeds are relevent for them). He has autographed on Ubuntu CD for all of us.
To Praveen,
Follow Your Dreams.
Mark Shuttleworth
It was a very inspiring interaction for most of us. I’m looking forward to more involvement in the Ubuntu/Debian community.
He showed us the photos of his space trip and told us all about his experience. He was very enthusiastic about it. He went to Russia and learned Russian for the trip. He conducted some experiments in space.
It was such a wonderful experience which I would remember always.
Update: VR has a wonderful blog entry on it.
I have not got a chance [read: lazy] to write about December blug meet, even though we are discussing about the January Blug meet [Surjo has written about it long back]. Surjo could have made it easier for me only if it was in my cubicle ! It happened in the same office I work, Embassy Icon HP office in Infantry Road. I work in 4th floor and the seminar hall was in 4th floor. This time the emphasize was hack fest which blug has taken up. [Read about it in Tejas's blog]. We started discussing about a desktop application that shouldn’t be tied to a a particular Desktop Environment [Shreyas, who is a GNOME foundation member, was trying hard to be neutral in presence of KDE folks like Swaroop]. There exists a similar application called stardict but what we wanted is the ability to look up meaning in wiktionary and definition from wikipedia that could be accessible from any desktop application[Answers.com is in the making of one and there is a news that it is going to be a proprietary application. Wikinerds Portal has an article about it]. The application will be using dbus to exchange message between applications. The GUI will be programmed in gtkmozembed in python. Tejas has already written the wkipedia query part and after the exams get over more hands will be coding on this. 4 guys from PESIT volunteered for this. Shreekanth Jha [My colleague who joined with me] also came for the meet. After the meet we all moved to Coffee Day in Kunningham Road. The discussion continued and one interesting story I heard was from Kushal Das [From Durgapur who co-ordinates dgplug.org]. There used to be fights between their college and nearby college. When he narrated the incident we were like Ц Oh its like we see in cinemas. The talk about the January meet is already out (on19th). This time Ubuntu team is visiting Bangalore as part of their Asia tour. Blug will be interacting with Mark Shuttleworth [the multi millionaire behind Ubuntu] and other Canaonical [the company behind Ubuntu development] folks. I am looking forward to this interaction.
You can try the live CD from superunprivileged.org I installed GNU/Hurd using cross hurd two days back.
The steps involved are
1. Create a 2GB ext2 partition
update: There is no 2GB limit from k8 onwards
2. mount it (say /root/jail – crosshurd default)
3. Install crosshurd (apt-get install crosshurd)
4. Run crosshurd as root
5. Let it complete the installtion
6. Edit /boot/grub/menu.lst to include GNU/Hurd (Installguide has the grub entries )
http://www.us.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install.html
Some pointers to remember
The Hurd partition naming isdifferent from linux
Linux Hurd
hda hd0
hdb hd1
hdc hd2
…..
hda1 hd0s1
hda4 hd0s4
7. Login in single user mode
8. Run ./native-install
9. Reboot to multiuser mode (change grub entries)
9.1 cd /dev; ./MAKEDEV
9.2 mount the GNU/Linux partition
9.3 Edit grub and reboot.
10. Run console (refer install guide for options)
11. Add CDROMs to sources.lst
11.1 create CDROM device hd2 (in my case)
11.2 mount -t iso9660 /dev/hd2 /cdrom
11.3 apt-cdrom add
11.4 umount (!!!! umount is not there in GNU/Hurd, I have not figured out how to un mount yet, but I just killed the iso9660 server after ps -x)
update: settrans -gf /cdrom/ will unmount the cdrom.
11.5 Take out the CD and insert next CD
11.6 run apt-cdrom add, but it fails so mount the cdrom again and run the command
(Some body need to hack on this – how to unmount cdrom)
Create a file /bin/umount
#!/bin/sh
#Filename: /bin/umount
settrans -gf $@bash$ chmod +x /bin/umount
If you create this file apt can automatically unmount the cd for you after installtion is complete.
Also create an entry in the /etc/fstab file like this
/dev/hd2 /cdrom/ iso9660fs ro,noauto 1 1
#’/’ at the end of /cdrom is important. /cdrom won’t do. It has to be /cdrom/
12. apt-get install vim xserver-xfree86
Not yet configured x, need some hack
13. setup network
14. add apt repos
….
The gcc version is 4.0, gnome is 2.2 wmaker is there. So it has come a long way. It is time to try it for all those who tried it before and disappointed. It gives you a chance to go back in time and experience the joy hackers had in the early linux stage. There is lotta opportunity to hack. Many simple things can be done, which is missing.
May be we can hack on the live CD to have X and so on
I started hacking GNU and if anyone out there willing to do this with me, I’ll be very happy.
I have written about first 3 days earlier, so let me complete this with the fourth day.
I went to Harikrishnans home in the morning and we left for Bangalore palace in his bike. Earlier days we used to take auto. We lost our way once near the Cunningham road side but we reached venue by 10. As usual I was the hall marshal for the Ballroom. I collected the water bottles for the speakers and reached Ballroom in time. Morning session was FOSS Community track and Fred, Karunakar and Kushal presented in the morning. Fred talked about NGOs and FOSS, while Kushal spoke about his experience in Durgapurlug. In the after noon Volker Grassmuck (Wizards of OS) talked about the LiMux (Linux for Munich) project. He narrated each step of the migration and the probelms faced in a very interesting way. Munich chose Debian GNU/Linux for its 14000 desktops. Another interesting talk was by Sunil of Mahiti. He talked about government policy for foss adoption. He had good examples to quote for each of his arguments. There were some more sessions after this. Then the volunteers had to take all the stuff from Registration desk back to the expo hall.
Hats of to all the volunteers who made this event happen. Cheers to Surjo our chief. (We have a party for the volunteers today).
I was given the charge of Ballroom again today. The theme for the morning session was Education. it started with Philip Tellis’ talk. There was some delay in starting the presentation due to some network problem, but sorted it out. It was a very interesting presentation when he tried to compare FOSS process with the Education process and suggested the changes needed in the current education system. after this there was a talk on Moodle (online course anagement software) by Dr. George Easaw of Goa Enginering college. He explained his experience in in setting up moddle in his college and clearly showed the benefits. Then there was a talk on Agriculture software developed for framers. It was followed by Sai Sreeram’s talk on his experience in Kuppam in Tamil Nadu as when he was with HP. I moved to the Intel hall for a presentation of NRCFOSS (National Resource Centre for FOSS) on curriculam developed for Anna University based on FOSS (They have 2 electives and a project on FOSS). I was hanging around in the evening in the expo area. There was Laya Taranga performing today and I was playing with Aasim(2nd atandard) and Arjun(10th standard who gave a presentation with Sarath on Morphix remastering). Surjo also joined us later. Just one more day to go. It was a wonderful experience to meet so many people who share your interests and ideas. Tomorrow we will be having a key signing party.
Today I was in charge(Hall Marshal) of Ballroom hall. Today the sessions at Ballroom were focused on women in foss. There was a very interesting discussion going on and we listed plans to get more women involved in foss. There was a talk by Salamita Garcia of LinuxChix Brazil. I talked to Danes Cooper about the FOSS Community India Education project.
There was an interesting BoF Session on FOSS EDU IN and it was very interesting 11 of us turned up and discussed various issues to be addressed. Laxminarayan Kamath joined me and Barve to discuss more details of how to make it more appealing to the students.
Then we had volunteer meeting at 6.30 were we got our duties alotted. I will be at the Ballroom for the next day too. You can copy GNU/Hurd k10 cds and/or 20051117 (Nov 17) live CDs from download server or come to FSF India stall at FOSS Expo.
I cnnot update it yesterday so I will just brief yesterdays happenings.
I was there by 9am and was at the registration desk handling speaker registration with Tejas. After that I was at the Intel hall when Atul was delivering the inaugural address. Atul said that he would consider foss.in a success if atleast 10 people contribute to FOSS after this and it would be mind bogling succes if 100s of hem contribute. The brief inaguration of the conference was by lighing a lamp by blug representatives from diffrent parts of India, like Swati Sani from Nagpur, Aravind Yadav from Goa, Arjun Asthana from Delhi, Kushal Das from Durgapur and Surjo Das from he host lug,ie Bangalore Linux Users Group(blug). I listen to the keynote address from Linux kernel Maintainer Alan Cox. He explained how to get involved in FOSS development process in very simple and easy to understand words. Then we (with Kanti Jadia) set up the FSF India stall and Pramod was seting up the phoenix stall. I demoed Debian GNU/Hurd in the FSF stall. I was very happy to see some really showed interest and there were a few who tried GNU/Hurd first and one guy had it running currently. Then I listened to Pradeep talking on Plone Content management system. Then I met some of my juniors who came all the way from Calicut to attend it(there wer 5 of them). After all the talks were over Revolution OS movie was screened. With Hari I came back home with a happy heart.
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