tuxmaniac’s blog

O_o Thats tuxmaniac at work.. recent pics after the hair cut. Any change?? No Na!!

Baaah!!! Today was a black sunday for my hair. I saw it all go down my head into the floor of a local Chennai Saloon… Now I dont have any, rather very little left outside my head (Till date it was very little inside my head only )

September 16th 2006 was celebrated as Software Freedom Day (SFD). I could not head to my home LUG (ILUGC) due to several commitments So decided to take an active role in FSUG Bangalore’s SFD Celeb activities. We had met two times prior to the event and discussed about the proceedings. The final plan was to have Sessions at three different colleges simultaneously.

The colleges were BMS, DSS and MVIT in Bangalore. Praveen, Shrikanth, Dilip and myself decided to go to BMS. Saurabh and the Sun Guys went to MVIT while Ramprasad and team went to DSS.

Dilip came home and picked me up and we proceeded to BMS College after asking a lot of Autowalas the route which supposedly Dilip “knew” We reached BMS at around 9:15 AM to see the Audi filled with Praveen, Dilip and myself only. Ahem… It was 9:30 and lo behold!!! The AUDI was jam packed with people not having place to sit and extra chairs been roped in. Great!!! 350 people packed in a 300 capacity audi!!

We started the days proceedings with the Revolution OS video being shown for 15 minutes. i took up the mantle and started blabbering the same old FLOSS philosophy, differences between Hacker and cracker, Free Software and Open Source etc etc.. Y0! I have become a seasoned professional in glueing (whatever that mean) my audience to the seat.. Keep it up tuxmaniac.. Surprisingly the students knew quite a lot and were very interactive. Something that I have not seen in many colleges. Keep it up guys. Questions like Multimedia on GNU/Linux, Importance of GNU/Linux for a person wishing to do a MBA etc were asked and replied to by Shrikanth, Praveen, Dinesh (Yes!! He came from nowhere suddenly! Felt surprised) and myself. Then I opened the students to the world of AIGLX/Compiz as usual and the rest was history.

Then came the most interesting part. A guy from Novell (Guess so… ) came and started speaking about Open Suse and its advantages to students. Some nice quotes he told.

1. Companies like Debian, Ubuntu …. blah blah

2. Mono is a tool with which you can download Windows programs to Linux.

3. Microsoft has delayed Windows Vista release due to Novell :O

4. Anything that is Free wont last long (and he ended his speech by saying Freedom will last the life)

and many more.. will add whenver I remember some.. I was literrally clutching my fist.. Somehow I cooled down by opening my laptop and started playing “Four in a Row”. After this we took up the stage once again by organising BOF sessions and students threw their queries and discussed a lot of things. Hats off guys for the amazing enthu you guys showed. We had lunch at Angeti on Church Street and parted around 4 PM.

This week has been an eventful week for me. I got my iPOD Nano to boot GNU/Linux with podzilla app running. Battery life is a bit less though I have not been able to exactly time it. Rest I can say is amazing. I will put up my experiences with it in a different blog. But now its AIGLX. I had no window borders, loads of other bugs with my existing AIGLX/Compiz thing. But thanks to G0SUB for figuring out the issue and telling me the fix (Though it is not the *solution*).. A small howto..

Follow the how to given here.

If you dont get window borders etc then its a problem with the recent xserver-xorg-air-core package. Do the below.

$sudo vi /etc/apt/preferences

Paste the following contents
Package: xserver-xorg-air-core
Pin: version 1:1.1.1-0ubuntu1
Pin-Priority: 1001

Download http://ubuntu.compiz.net/pool/aiglx/x/xorg-air/xserver-xorg-air-core_1.1.1-0ubuntu1_i386.deb

$sudo apt-get remove –purge xserver-xorg-air-core

$dpkg -i xserver-xorg-air-core_1.1.1-0ubuntu1_i386.deb

Restart X

Viola!!!!! Everything is up. Million thanks to G0SUB for providing a solution to it.

Y0! A cool Saturday morning in Chennai ! I got picked up at home by Mr.Maran (Placement Officer, SSNCE) for the Embedded GNU/Linux and VLSI CAD tools workshop we were gonna conduct today. We moved on to the college after picking Shakthi. After reaching college at around 9:00 AM we met up with the CSE Head Of Dept Dr. Chitra, and quite a few other CSE Staff. The workshop began with a introduction to FLOSS philosophy by SK. After which I took a session on Icarus Verilog and other GNU EDA tools that can be used by the students. After demonstrating some small examples, SK demonstrated the ALLIANCE VHDL CAD Tool. Next came the surprise package. The one that dazzled the students. Yes! It was a demo of AIGLX on my laptop. Every body were shell shocked or rather surprised We moved on to meet the principal and then lunch. Back from good lunch at the college Guest dining room, I introduced the students to basics of Embedded Systems followed by some probable projects that one can do. SK gave a demo with his Little Chips board of how exactly “Embedded Systems Development” takes place. SK also presented a Embedded GNU/Labs How to and then we had some discussion with the students. At around 3:45 PM we left the college.

Photos are here: SSN Embedded Workshop Photos
PS: w00t!! We treated like real BIG guests Special thanks to Srikanth and Jagadeesh and the entire CSE Dept. Thanks to Mr. Maran (Placement Officer), Dr. Chitra (HOD, CSE) and Mr. Prasad for all the support and hospitality they extended.