tuxmaniac’s blog

Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is believed to be the greatest experiment ever conducted with thousands of scientists collaborating on finding the beginning of the universe. Now, FOSS.IN, the conference which was the prime force behind my contributions to the Free Software world has announced its experiment. A major change in the event format this year. Read the full details here.

I consider this the Greatest Indian FOSS Experiment . Its a move that requires great courage. The focus has been made more clear this time (not that it was not clear last year). “Talk is cheap, show me the code” is getting more visibility. Yes, its going to be the first “Developer” conference in India. Hats Off, Team FOSS.IN. My chances of getting there and finishing off all the todo hacks looks bleak because I am miles away from Bangalore, but will try my best. So ladies and gentlemen, get your wiki pages ready, your brains sharpened and start jotting down your plan for FOSS.IN 2008. Be there and show your code to the world. I am sure its gonna ROCK.
Rant: I am not so happy with the organisers calling “Packaging tasks” as “low hanging fruit”. I am upset a bit because its not such a mundane task as mentioned in the mail, that too from TEAM FOSS.IN.

After all the posts on Planet GNOME, Planet Ubuntu and now also on Planet FLOSS India (thanks to killerX) , I should not be left behind. So here it goes..

1. Take a picture of yourself right now.
2. Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair… just take a picture.
3. Post that picture with NO editing.
4. Post these instructions with your picture.

Loads of things have been happening last week and hence did not have much time to blog. But If you have been listening to my identi.ca notices then you have got a fair idea of what I was up to. Well the news is I have moved to Lausanne, Switzerland and am having great fun. Nice weather (as of now), nice people, nice neighbours, nice apartment (close to Vidy - 3 minutes by walk), excellent campus and the list can go on and on. But I will stop here and let the pictures speak for its own. People have been extremely helpful and most of them speak English here. Well, the campus is truly global. In one of the get together there were 111 people from 19 countries spread all across the globe.

Some other updates…

• SF bug 1875401 is closed. I hate you Onkar. this is worst Copy paste job I have ever done
• I found a GNU/Linux enthusiasts group at my univ. They call themselves the “GNU Generation“. They seem to pretty active with troubleshooting and conducting a few install fests now and then. Exciting!
• Been meddling around with Ubuntu MID KVM image a lot.
• I am unable to get the Fedora Electronics Laboratory DVD image to test. More pondering needed over the coming days.

Now that the Welcome Party at both my University and the housing apartment is over, its time for the grinding to begin. Expect the blog posts to be shorter and more crisp

In the meanwhile.. Enjoy the pics from Lausanne, Switzerland.
Complete Flickr Set of Rhodanie (my apartment and the parties) , Lausanne and the welcome party at EPFL.

My only machine.. A Dell XPS M1210 (not available in the Indian Market now) and I have named it “YODA”

Wise and powerful

This is a very familiar question I am sure many of you have come across from your non-FOSSy friends. I have it always coming from loads of people including my mom who asked “What is this Linux thing you have all around and what are you getting out of it?”. As it always happens with most moms she just doesn’t get it.

Well now, I have been replying to most of them with a standard “I dont know, may be becuase I am having great fun??”. Now I got the answer for that question. Apt and fits me. I always wanted to make a difference to others and myself, hence this is the answer to this golden Question.

I am having FUN and making a DIFFERENCE

I got this answer from Pramode and Swaroop’s blog post. I also would like to take this opportunity to appreciate and congratulate the updates Swaroop has done to his book “Byte of Python”. Great going Swaroop! Keep it going. You ROCK!

If everything goes well, in about 48 hours from now I should be aboard the flight to Mumbai (BOM) from where I will be saying “Bye Bye India” for quite a few months to come at least. Its that time when one meets up with friends, family and exchange wishes, get blessings from the elderly and the usual running around that one has to do before a relocation. When I first mentioned about this move here, it seemed a long way ahead but here it is.. Just under 2 days left.

Last weekend was as memorable as the before one, since a couple of my good friends Ashish and Amit biked down to my place to spend the weekend. Yes!  You read it right, they drove from Bangalore to Chennai on Rane’s Thunderbird. We went on a drive on the Scenic East Coast Beach Highway stopping at Crocodile Bank and Taj’s Fisherman cove. A nice and relaxed weekend it was. For the entire flickr set click here (until the pic with the gun was taken this time) . Ashish has already blogged on it in his new blog here.

It was just not about food, travel and picnic last weekend. Hacking got its fair share too. Some updates below.

• Commited the gnusim8085 changes done at the Bangalore Hackathon to the svn after a quick re check. Thanks Onkar.
• Tested the gnusim8085.exe package for Windows. Works great with a few minor issues (like Syntax highlighting, url linking etc.). Also a installer for the same is in progress. Check screenshot here
• Onkar has already ported gnusim8085 to gtksourceview 2. Seems like quite a few clean ups also done.
• VHDL Emacs mode was packaged for Fedora by Rakesh Pandit and Review request even raised. But only to find out later that it was already a part of emacs-common. I was deeply disappointed at that quality of search done by me before raising that wishlist request. But then, everybody has a bad day. Sorry Chacha_Choudhary.
• gResistor upstream has now uploaded a fresh tarball with the full copy of the licenses included. So I have updated the package on revu. But seems like it is already too late for intrepid. But I must thank Pop Gheorghe for the update.

ToDo : We have been hit by the Wine bug 3915. If someone has faced this issue and managed to fix this please leave a comment. If we dont get this setup right, it will be very difficult for us to go in search of a Windows machine to test our gnusim8085 whenever we have to make a release. Have attached the screenshot of the issue above. Thanks in Advance.

And finally, see you from Switzerland. And do follow me on Identi.ca as I will be posting updates more frequently there until I get settled in the new country.

Goals 2008:

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!

After quite some uncertainties from several parties involved wrt mutually convenient dates for meeting up in Bangalore, it finally happened this weekend. An accident involving the bus in which I was traveling, marked the beginning of this eventful weekend. God knows what the driver banged on when we heard a loud “Thud” and I (seated in the 2nd row) opened the screen to check what was wrong. The entire front cabin was jammed and the driver missing. We had to get out of the bus through the driver’s window as the doors were jammed and catch some other bus to get to Bangalore (yes, all by ourselves in the middle of nowhere. Driver absconded). Reached Bangalore safe and sound at around 0700 hrs (2 hrs late) on Saturday and was joined by Onkar later in the day from Pune. We had lunch and then headed to my ex-office where there was an “Open House” happening. Open House happens once in two to three years when the employees bring in their family members and show around the office and stuff. So we went in as a “family” of one of my partners in crime. They also “complimented” me with a nice WildCraft bag . Being a Saturday night and in Bangalore, the day is incomplete without a “Team Building” Session with good old fellow team builders. This time we had a Video Conference with one of our teambuilders joining in from Hildesheim, Germany on Skype with a bottle of beer and the traditional “Prost” marked the beginning of the 3 hr session…

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.

Since I will be heading for my Masters in Electronics at EPFL, Lausanne a few days from now, I have been brushing up my basics needed for the course. One such activity is learning VHDL (a hardware description language). I was going through several tutorials and came across many recommendations for Emacs as the preferred editor (Yes! My eyes glittered).

Googled for VHDL emacs mode and here it was. Unfortunately, “apt-cache search vhdl mode” didn’t yield any result. I have already raised a bug report for that in Ubuntu and a Wishlist request in Fedora (I like the Electronics Laboratory spin there). As always with anything related to Emacs, the mode is very good and tremendously helpful with the syntax and other prompts.

I will take up this packaging task if I find time amidst the preparations going on for the relocation if no one else pitches in. Definitely worth having this mode in the distributions!!!

Squashing, stamping, killing mode it was this weekend for the Ubuntu India team. Yes! We squashed Bugs. What fun it was! Unfortunately we don’t have much pictures to show. Bangalore and Chennai were at its very best. We stand #5 as of now in the Global Bug Jam event (though most parts of the world would have done with the Bug Jam as I am writing this blog). Check Daniel Holbach’s stats for a better picture. We tagged all our bug triages in these two days with “GBJ-Aug08-India”.
The major focus of the Ubuntu India team were on squashing Science  (Electronics, Science, Mathematics), Bluetooth, Pulse Audio and Alsa related issues. A few Compiz and localisation related issues were also triaged.

Some quick notes that I took so that next Bug Jam can be made more effective:

1. More “Marketing” needed. Didnt have the expected turn out. And most came back at the fag end saying they didn’t know about the event though the info was sent to the mailing lists, blogged on IRC channel topic. Is there something else that can be done to spread the news??

2. The Global Bug Jam preparatory sessions seemed to be useful. We must have more of those before any event.

3. Not many knew about reporting to 5-a-day. Hence quite a few bugs were triaged unnoticed. That should be taken care of well in advance.

4. One should try out the possibility of conducting such Bug Jams in Colleges and Universities during the technical events that happen in most of them. For. e.g during Symposiums, tech fests etc. This should enable use of free software as well put the students into contribution mode right away.

Most of the above notes were random thoughts that struck me during the triaging sessions and the breaks I had in between. If you have anything to suggest please feel free to comment here or may be write your own blog post and link it from the comments section

Have a great week ahead.