4. Get the Ubuntu membership

One more goal down. Yes! I got approved of my Ubuntu Membership on Aug 26th 2008 by the Asia and Oceania regional approval board. The IRC meeting logs can be found here.

Since this will be my first post on Planet Ubuntu, here goes a short intro on myself.

Name: Aanjhan “tuxmaniac” Ranganathan

Interests : Embedded Linux, FOSS VLSI Cad Tools, Electronics

What I (will) do: Masters Student (in another 2 weeks) at EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland.

Hangs out in #ubuntu-in, #ubuntu-motu, #ubuntu-bugs @ irc.freenode.net mostly.

Future with Ubuntu: Become a MOTU (in short)

Rest of the details can be found in this wiki page.

Thank you Ubuntu India folks and my wonderful set of FOSS friends for the wonderful support. Special thanks to Sankarshan and Runa,  for continuously motivating me to keep contributing to Fedora and Ubuntu. Thanks to Jordan Mantha and Barry De Freese for the initial sponsorships and support extended when I was a newbie and was clueless where to begin. Ofcourse thanks a lot to the wonderful Ubuntu MOTU IRC folks for the great help extended in this ongoing learning process.

Looking forward to more uploads and bug triages.

Chao!

The plan of action for Day 2 was to meet up at Parthan’s place. We planned to do a mini Bug Jam but it turned out to be a “hackathon” with Onkar and me working on the Windows port for gnusim8085, Parthan triaging a few bugs in Launchpad, Roshan (ubunturos) doing some Python reading and Barkha (baks17) trying to get GNU/Linux (Installfest ) on her newly bought laptop. We had great fun as you can read from here. Good news is “Gnusim8085.exe” is not far away *fireworks*.

The day ended with Ashish, Amit Modak, Onkar, Barkha and me having dinner at a chinese restaurant “Chung Wah” discussing random things and finally today, I bid goodbye to Bangalore for a few months to come. Back in Chennai and time is running out.. tick tick tick..

Complete flickr set of the Ubuntu India friends meet up.

All these dramatic prologue apart, the session started of with me welcoming all the participants and taking them through what was coming in the next few weeks. Yes! We are planning quite a few interesting online sessions and a few surprise ones too which will be announced on the Ubuntu India Mailing list as it gets finalized. These online sessions, I must admit were inspired from Kushal’s amazing work at dgplug (more on that later as a separate entry). After the brief round up of whats coming, the agenda of the day was put forth. It was mainly on Bug Squashing basics. People were asked to create their own Launchpad accounts and a briefing of what LP is all about was done. Later Parthan took over the stage along with Onkar, to describe the basics of Bug Squashing. They started of with what a triage is, then moved over to explain the severity levels of bugs, bug life cycle, responsibilities of a bug triager, etc. During this time, I was busy collecting some basic bugs which could be thrown at the participants for practical exposure and helping both of them to answer a few questions that were being asked.

I was sure the session was a success when quite a few folks suddenly started disappearing from the channel when bug 247861 was thrown at the participants for triaging . They returned to cheerfully say that they have reproduced the issue. Great! Most of them were becoming greedy for triaging and confirming bugs, when we realized that it was already past midnight and it is better we “officially” stop the session here before the greed becomes uncontrollable.

The logs of Day 1 have been updated in the wiki page here and today is Day 2, where we will be concentrating on packaging related issues. Onkar has already mailed the list with some details. Looking forward to it and be there at #ubuntu-in-classroom by 2100 hrs IST. As usual a plain “Hello” is most welcome!

 

Date: 12, 13 July 2008 from 2100 hrs.

More details are here -> http://ubuntu-in.org:81/wiki/Events/BugJamPrepSessions

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!!!

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!

As things are shifting to top gear we are facing quite some issues with respect to printing Tees. Due to various reasons the printer with whom we were planning to give the order for has backed out and now we need a replacement. If someone has any information on Printers in Bangalore, who can print around 30 Tees in 6-7 days, we would be immensely grateful. If so please ping either technofreak or me offline.

First Update from the Ubuntu-IN team. The sticker designs are out.

Go grab ‘em all at Debian/Ubuntu Project Day on Dec 4th 2007. More goodies to follow. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, hold your breath!! Its big than ever before!!

Thanks to Niyam for helping us out with the designs.

After lunch, we lazed around, met Hobbes`, dumbhead, vegpuff, tuxplorer and chatted away to glory! It was time to move out of BCB5 and head for dinner. Dumbhead took us to V.V.Puram’s Food Street. Man o Man, its a must visit for food lovers. The entire street has only “Road side eateries” serving right from Gulcand icecreams, Idlis, Benna Dosas, Pav Bhaji and chat items at a very economical price. All you delegates coming in for Foss.in take note of this place and ask your geeky/fossy friend to take you for dinner here (especially the mumbaikars ). Weekend comes to an end.

Special appreciation: Dumbhead, I have to appreciate your action towards that poor woman who asked for food. Hats off dude!

Complete photoset here