tuxmaniac’s blog

gResistor is a Resistance calculator tool written in Python. I saw this tool in FEL and found out its absence in Debian/Ubuntu. Its a tool with no active development as of now (no bugs, no maintainance required) but very helpful in calculating resistance values fast. A brief description of the tool as described here follows:

To allow for identification, resistors are usually marked with colored bands. Often refereed to as color codes, these markings are indicative of their resistance, tolerance and temperature coefficient. gResistror is a great program that will help you translate a resistor color codes into a readable value. All you have to do is watch the colors on the resistor and then enter them in the program. As you enter you’ll see that the resistor value is changing according to the selected color.

Its one of the fastest packaging I have ever done and uploaded to REVU. If any MOTU is reading this post, it would be nice if the package is reviewed and sponsored.

REVU Link:  http://revu.tauware.de/details.py?package=gresistor

LP Bug report: #251919

As part of the FOSS India Awards, GNUSim8085 was selected in the top 20 projects as reported here. This month’s (July 2008) edition of Linux For You (LFY) has a nice little article about this project.

GNUSim8085 was one of the first FOSS Projects that I started contributing. Now this is enough motivation to close the three bugs still pending by this weekend.

Free Software updates

- PIKLab, the  IDE for application development for PIC Micro controllers was failing to build from source on Fedora 9. Fixed it and uploaded into the Fedora repos. Thanks to Chitlesh for sponsoring the upload. Here is the commit message.

- Working on getting Ecos packaged for Fedora. Fedora Electronic Laboratory 10 “DVD” is on its way..
- Still no updates from the Regents of the University of California regarding the license of Magic. Still to get into Debian/Ubuntu. Same story holds good for IRSIM. But, IRSIM has an explicit COPYRIGHT file which clear mentions that it is licensed under GPL, the debian mentors team would want it to be included on all source file headers. May be I misunderstood this thread. If anyone can provide more clarity on this, I would be more than happy because its struggling to get into the repos.

- Committed a patch provided by Marcelo Souza to fix SF Bug #1966993 in gnusim8085. Still loads more to go.

- It is very clear now that Debian/Ubuntu are lagging behind in the tools available for Electronic design, embedded development. May be I can change that. Seems like the target I set for the year regarding the same is on track, just with some of the above mentioned license issues stopping it from going to completion But its Never say Die. Certain things are never in your hands.

Personal updates

- Been living like a nomad for the past few days out of my car. Sleeping at all friend’s places, using my employer’s restrooms to great extent.

- My three year long stay in Bangalore coming to an end. More updates on that soonish.

For all those VLSI enthusiasts, Magic is now debianised. For people who are still wondering what “Magic” is all about here it goes..

Magic is a venerable VLSI layout tool, written in the 1980’s at Berkeley by John Ousterhout, now famous primarily for writing the scripting interpreter language Tcl. Due largely in part to its liberal Berkeley open-source license, magic has remained popular with universities and small companies. The open-source license has allowed VLSI engineers with a bent toward programming to implement clever ideas and help magic stay abreast of fabrication technology. However, it is the well thought-out core algorithms which lend to magic the greatest part of its popularity. Magic is widely cited as being the easiest tool to use for circuit layout, even for people who ultimately rely on commercial tools for their product design flow.

For folks on Ubuntu Hardy Heron add the following lines to your sources.list, do a sudo apt-get update and then install as you would do any other application

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/aanjhan/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/aanjhan/ubuntu hardy main

For people on other Debian based distros you can directly download the .deb from the below link.

http://tuxmaniac.com/work/packages/magic/magic_7.5.129-1_i386.deb 

The package has been uploaded into Debian Mentors for review and a few review comments have already been closed. But one major hurdle for this package to enter Debian is a licensing issue. One can read the entire thread on magic-dev here and I would be more than happy to accept suggestions as to how I can get this issue resolved.

My “photographer’s block” mentioned in this post, continued into the second and third day of the event. The days were filled with exchange of ideas, knowledge. Conclaves had heated discussions on Proprietary vs Free Knowledge. Food on the second day was like a “kabab fest”. There were rumors after this fest that freed.in would be renamed again to food.in from next year.

The best talk of the second day was “Hacking the Airwaves with GNU Radio” by Rakesh Peter, a talk which I am attending for the second time (attended it during foss.in 2007). Very impressive and great to know the work that is going on. Shreyas came out with his “dormant” idea of setting up a Radio transmission during foss.in 2008. It sounds like a very nice idea to me. The day ended with loads of quotes flowing from the mouths of various people. Details are here in this post by Sankarshan.
Day 3 begins with me feeling the OLPC XO laptop for the first time (Courtesy: Sayamindu). Initially, I was feeling very uncomfortable with the Sugar interface but eventually started liking it. Then it was my turn to take the stage and in my opinion the talk went pretty well with a few questions asked. The slides of the presentation can be found here. The find of the day was “Purisia font”. I think I will use this font for most of my presentations from now on. Flight back home was very relaxing with me getting a seat right after the First Class cabin. Good leg room and the food served was nice.

Freed.in and the ILUG-D folks always make me feel “At home”. This is the second freed.in for me and the feeling while leaving the place just is the same. Hats off folks!! I will mark my calendar every year for this wonderful event and just the thought of meeting up with the folks brings in loads of excitement. I had pretty good discussions with Runa, Sankarshan and Pradeepto and I take home great memories from the same. Special thanks to Gora (who drank H2O), Andrew, Kishore, t3 (for lending his hair to a bunch of people), Old monk, Tirveni, Shreyas and all those who were involved in providing the entertainment. It was great fun!

Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls…. GNUSim8085 has been named in the winners list of FOSS India awards. Announcement can be found here.

I happened to browse through my set of “list” emails and as usual was about to delete the LFY mail sent to some lists. But then something told me, “read” that mail. Opened the mail, and it spoke of FOSS India awards and some winners list. Then I scroll down the winners list to find this name “GNUSim8085″ on that. Now, where on planet earth did that come from???

GNUSim8085 was a project started by srid in his college days. He decided to orphan it at one point where Onkar and myself pitched in and took over the development and maintainance. I guess, its been one year now almost after we joined the project along with Srid and this is a big surprise. A welcome recognition and hope this triggers contribution from students to this project. We have a plethora of feature requests that has poured in suddenly. Students, grab this opportunity.

Its back. This time a bit fast. Yes! Freed.in is now moved to February and this time its happening on 22-24th of this month at Jawaharlal Nehru University Campus, New Delhi. Following foss.in (Theme: “Show me the code”), gnunify (theme: getting new users) and Fossconf Chennai, this year’s freed.in ’s theme is “Knowledge shall set you free”. Interesting. Knowing the evergreen folks of ILUGD, I am sure the conclaves are gonna be full of h0t and fruitful discussions; and the dinners even hotter

Not many people whom I expected for this year’s event are turning up but neverthless a few folks are still packing the bags to Delhi. I am there on all three days and also talking on “FOSS for Electronics Enthusiasts!”. By any chance you happen to be around Delhi at that time, drop in and say Hi!!!

Get ready to be Freed!!!

As I had mentioned in this post about the top gear packaging activity that is going on for a few Science tools (more specifically Electronics), one review point that the packager comes across instantly is that “Do not change upstream code”. This is a Golden rule for packagers. Making these changes as patches in debian/ (for debian based distros ofcourse ) is highly recommended. One such tool for achieving this is DPATCH. kart linked me to this nice page which has a few details on dpatch. Still the page did not have a step by step how to, instead has tidbits. So here goes my how-to or just a documentation of what I learnt.

1. Install dpatch. sudo apt-get install dpatch

2. Go to “your_packages_top_directory”/debian and create a directory “patches”. (mkdir patches)

3. Inside this debian/patches directory create a file “00list”. The reason for this file is explained in the coming points.

4. Open up debian/rules in your favourite editor (I expect it to be emacs ofcourse ) and do the changes mentioned below.

* Add this line “include /usr/share/dpatch/dpatch.make” without the quotes at the top.

* Append to the config.status section “patch-stamp” before “configure”. This shall let the package know that there is a patch stamp that needs to be checked.

* In the “clean” section add “unpatch”. This ensures the patch is reverted when a make clean is performed.

5. Now save the debian/rules and execute the following command. “dpatch-edit-patch {patchname}”. Say for example the patch name is fixing_foo then the command is “dpatch-edit-patch fixing_foo”

6. This opens up a temporary shell where a copy of the source package is ready. Make the changes that you would want to do and exit the shell. Patch is created. Wow! (Check debian/patches directory)

7. Update this patch name in the 00list file that we created in point 3. This file will have the list of patches that needs to be applied in the specified order. Repeat this process until all the necessary changes to upstream is done and patches are ready.

Now give the package for a build. Sit back, relax and enjoy the pbuilder experience!

Happy New Year folks!! I know its a bit late. But looking back its been hard work and travel for the past 20 days this year already. Side effect: I am down with flu. Hope to get back strong in a couple of days.

So guys, wondering what kept me busy these 20 days? Been working for Hardy Heron. Gutsy wasn’t a great Release as far as the Science and related packages were considered and I don’t want a similar situation in Hardy. Been syncing a few new Upstream releases from Debian unstable, getting new and interesting packages (related to Science more specifically Electronics) into Hardy Heron.

One thing that has taken away most of my time and is not yet done is packaging Alliance VHDl CAD toolset for Debian/Ubuntu. Julien and Kumar (kmap) has been a great help to me here. Still MAGIC needs to be packaged and things need to be cleaned up at least 2 weeks before FF. (Schedule of Hardy).

Added the links to pages created by William Grant (Fujitsu) onto the MOTU Science Team wiki for others to check and if some interesting package has been left out, rise a Sync request. More work looming large.

This year is also gonna be a year full of travel with a lot of conferences planned. Already been traveling quite some amount (will blog it separately) this year. All in all I see 2008 a life changer for me. Wait for more news!!

One of my IRC buddies (he no longer hangs around) wahjava pointed a link to a fedora page. Its on “Fedora Electronics Laboratory” which contains a list of packages for Electronic Engineers and most packages are those that I have contributed to. I am extremely happy to see that a LiveCD has been created too. I would love to try it and give feedback. The interview with Chitlesh, the guy behind this project can be found in here

This actually made me think of a similar possibility in Debian/Ubuntu. May be a organised set of meta packages which in turn will install and configure related packages? for Eg. If I need tools related to Atmel AVR Microcontrollers to be installed, just do “sudo apt-get install atmelavr” or some such?? I am not sure if this is a good idea but can be refined to make it a good usable/useful one.

Suggestions from the community are most welcome. Or does Debian/Ubuntu already have a project on similar lines? I see a project DIVE on launchpad but seems not be active.