tuxmaniac’s blog

We have got a new mailing list for FEL. Feel free to join https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-electronic-lab-list and post your views, wish lists and comments. As Chitlesh has already pointed out here, the FEL team is growing fast and me being one such recent recruit was having troubles communicating the issues to everyone involved/interested. Mails were being addressed to specific people and were lost in the process. Also we were having severe time difference problems (though thats a temporary one for me as I will also be in Europe in a short time from now ).

Already, solutions for problems have started coming in seeing the mails I forwarded to the list for archiving. Am sure from now on things are going to look much much better. Thank you Fedora!

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.

I have been meddling around with Free and Open Source Electronic CAD Tools for quite some time now by means of contributing upstream, packaging a few and evangelizing the use of these tools by Students. Sometime last year, I stumbled upon this “Fedora Electronics Laboratory” spin maintained by Chitlesh Goorah and began to like it a lot. It had almost all tools needed to learn and enjoy Microprocessor coursework, Microelectronic studies and basic Electronics too. On seeing the vast availability of these tools in Fedora and not in my favorite Distros (Debian/Ubuntu), I decided to make some of these tools available to the Debian world as well (partly successful and partly not).

Last week I was offered to help the fedora electronics laboratory project and I gladly accepted. Now, I have the official Fedora packager status and have already made couple of commits to the project. Thanks to Chitlesh and the fedora team and I am sure I will continue to contribute to the best of my abilities!

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!

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.