1. Go on AIR on Radio City 91 FM on Software Freedom Day
2. Spread the word about the day through blogs and articles on News Papers

We had earlier thought of going to colleges and discuss about the importance of software freedom and advantages of using FOSS, but unfortunately we could not go forward with it on SFD since most of the colleges we contacted were having exams (My college NITC is having internal exams from 5th and Thejesh’s college BTL is also having internal exams and Thejesh was the only original Bangaloreans came for the meet). But we have not chucked out the plan completely. We plan to take up this issue after the SFD.

3. Meet VC of VTU and submit the petition (see VTU Floss Campaign for more details )

Another topic we discussed was to bring out a live CD with all the available educational tools (especially one for VTU). The ambitious project aims to develop a customised GNU slash Linux distro for Educational institutions customised for India ( The problem we face with the current aproach is discussed earlier – see this).

We discussed the problems facing for the adoption of FOSS tools in colleges (The main issue is that most care about only the marks and nobody is interested to try out something new and the reluctance of teachers to accept a new tool even makes the matters worse). Gopal V descibed how some of his friends who chose Scilab in Mechanical lab got less marks than those who used Matlab. Now we want to make sure people who chose FOSS would succed. So we plan to hack on Octave to make it work like Matlab (It is very similar but many don’t want to learn something new). So as the first step we plan to have a session by someone who actually use Octave for his work (In IITs they use Ocatve) and understand the issues and extend if necessary to suit to Indian circumstance, which include preparing tutorials to suit the Indian Curriculum needs.

Kamat sugeested designing wallpapers and Screen savers describing software freedom and its importance (He is a good artist and showed us many images designed in gimp for gnome artwork – Most are available from Gnome Art)

I had EduMorphix CD (live CD cum Install CD prepared for use in High Schools in Kerala as the curriculum includes a chice between Windows and GNU slash Linux) with me and we tried it on Kanti’s laptop. We also had a quick view of GNU slash Hurd live CD too. It was followed by a brief discussion on Monolithic and microkernel. Gopal V explained that the concept of everything is a file in Unix is taken to a higher level in GNU slash Hurd — everything is a pipe (See my seminar on GNU slash Hurd )

We were ready to leave by 5.30 with a focused aim for SFD – be on AIR

Then we discussed about mono and dotGNU (the foss competeters for Free Implementation to Microsoft’s .NET technology). It was like ‘Straight from the horse’s mouth’ as Goplal V described about internals of dotGNU — He is a dotGNU core developer for last 4 years.

Gopal V ported dotGNU portable .NET to Encore simputer during Linux Bangalore 2004. Quote from Atul Chitnis - The conference Organiser.

”I threw the challenge as a joke, the bet being a cup of coffee. Gopal borrowed a PC at the conference, and finally an Encore Simputer, and came to me on the third day, saying that I now owed him a cup of coffee. It took a few seconds before the enormity of that statement hit me.”

Then we dispersed and I walked with Gopal V from Woody’s. We discussed about dotGNU and Free Software and a lot on the way. I went to his home and then we went to Landmark in Forum where he purchased some books and I came back to BTM drenched fully in Rain. I walked a lot and the discussion was so interesting that I didn’t know I was walking this far ! From Jayanagr to Forum through Tavarakere and back to BTM near water tank. I was looking for the expansion of BTM for all the time since I started my stay in BTM and now Gopal V told me that BTM stands for Bommanahalli – Tavarakare – Madivala as it was formed by taking parts from each of these.

I came back home with happy heart. It was a great day.

Update: Early in the mornig (6.30) I was up and went to ground to play football (we ie, me, VR, Kaustup and Ganjan played the day before for the first time). But no one turned up so I went to my friends ‘ home near Madivala lake in BTM 2nd stage. I had breakfast there and at 10 we went for boating in Madivala lake. It was really a good experience to see Pelicans very near [The species seen in Madival lake is Spot-Billed Pelican]. It is an awesome scene to watch pelicans land in water, like an aeroplane landing.

Madivala lake. location: 29th main, tankshow road, ii stage, btm layout. size: 114.16 hectare. total wetland area 24.74 acre. department it comes under: karnataka forest department. history: the madivala lake was built by the cholas nearly 300 years ago. it is said to have been built overnight. it got its name (which means washerman) because the lake used to be primarily used by the washermen population that lived around it. still the water was supposed to have been so clean that people would travel several miles to take drinking water from it.

The day started when mom woke me up at 4 ‘O’ clock. I had to be ready by 5 so that I can go to Kadampuzha temple with my cousine. I prepared tea and had break fast with beaten rice (Avil) and banana chips. But there was a misunderstanding as I didn’t turn up the day before and he thought I was not going with him ! So he didn’t stop for me and it was disappointing to wake up at 4′O clock during vacation and for nothing Anyway I had ‘Lord of the rings’ to read again at an unexpected time. (I always read books at these irregular hours like once I ventured to read Harry Poter 5 during my sessional exams during 5th semester, a night-out to read ‘Five point someone- what not to do in IITs’, ‘Dance Dance’ (Complete novel – highly recommended ! but you may find something not fiting into the scheme — because it is a sequel) of Haruki Murakami when everyone in the campus was deep in RS agarwal and Sakunthala Devi for campus placement preparations, ‘Sea Leopard’ during s8 exams and ‘Da Vinci code’ within a week before the s8 exams, to point out some )

From Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami

«Tell me, Kiki, are you dead?» I ask.

She spins around in the light to face me.

«Gotanda thinks he killed me,» says Kiki.

«Yes, he does. Or he did.»

Anyway it was great time for reading. Now I got hooked to the novel (though I started it two-three days back I didn’t feel the thrill as the pace of the novel is very slow and you take time to get to know the plot and characters and it is also a sequel to ‘The Hobbit’).

By 7.30 I left for Sabeel’s home after extended breakfast with Upma – or Salt Mango tree as one of the Mohanlal‘s teacher characters translates it and ‘Onion Rice’. He was not yet up and when I woke him up he was astonished to see me that early. I am famous (notorious ?) for my early morining sleeps (extended sleeps). I explained to him my situation and watched TV till he was ready for yet another adventure.

World Environment day

As it was the world environment day there was a live (over phone) discussion on Kiran TV ( a malayalam channel from Sun Network) about the environment. One participant from Mumbai urged the government to make sure the pollution control measures are taken before granting permission when starting industries. She pointed out that there are strict rules in Mumbai for getting license for new ventures. Another participant was talking about the sound pollution from bike horns and need for strict law and fine should be increased to prevent violation of such laws.

Another day of GNU/Linux Hacks

At about 9 we left for Rauf’s home for another day of GNU/Linux hacks. We booted into the GNU/Linux box and examined the xorg.conf file and found out what the problem was — virtual resolution. We commented out the virtual resolution stuff and the desktop looked even nicer. Then we moved to the text console ( CTRL+ALT+F2 ) and tried different commands. Sabeel had gone through the book and had an idea of the commands. We tried in detail how to add new users first. Since Suse does not come with adduser command which is an easier edition of the useradd command which is available with most of the Linux-based GNU distros. We tried adding users with different uids and many other options like home dirctory and default shell. Then I showed them /etc/passwd file and how to use finger. The I told them about the .plan file that contains more info about a user and which will be used by finger. [We changed the contents of /etc/default/useradd that contained the default values for useradd - we made zsh as the default shell instead of bash ]. We moved on with ls,pwd,cat,more etc and pipes and input/output redirection.

Recovering Windows

Then we had to recover windows for him. We tried to boot it by adding it to grub menu but without success. We tried to see if editing C:\boot.ini file will get the thing working. boot.ini is the configuration file for Windows’ default boot loader. We had no other option left but to re-install the windows OS. We tried to rescue it but the dir command gave error for C and D drives which were affected by Partition Magic, but E and F was healthy. So went on with installation. When we tried to format D it showed us C as FAT32 which was unknown(to windows installer) till then when we formated D!! (later we knew that it formated C not D to show it as FAT32) It made a mess with the partiotions (It is not at all staright forward). Its userfriendliness was even made clearer when we splitted a 10 GB partition (D) which previously had XP and formated K drive, it went on with installing it on K (we wanted it on D). Anyway it got installed in K with two free partitions C and D. The default boot loader (NTLDR) over wrote grub and we inserted Suse 9.3 CD 1 to recover Suse by installing Grub.

Update: Now I know how to install grub in Windows and add it to c:\boot.ini (I found out it when I was struggling with GNU slash Hurd installation).

We expected an easier way to install grub like in mandrake (with just an enter) but got a root rescue shell (Now I think Mandrake – now Mandriva is recommended for newbies).
So we entered grub shell and setup the suse images and installed it in MBR. Now Rauf’s system happily dual boots betweenMicrosoft Windows XP and Suse GNU slash Linux – once we thought impossible – we did it !!

Then we rebooted to Suseand took a copy of Slackware for Sabeel using k3b (The CD burner software for KDE which we use extensively in NITC Main CC). Now we had to leave as Sabeel had to leave for Trivandrum for s7 registration.

Notes: The problem was with the partitions (Windows XP made it a mess so that even Partition Magic and GNU Parted failed to resize a partition).