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.

The bug list is getting ready… The GBJ wiki page is taking shape and is growing.. The whole community is excited about it… Lets make it a big success!!!

Get your Ubuntu Bug Jam Cheat Sheet here.. Interested in setting up a Bug Jamming session, then read this page

See you all this weekend!!! Happy Bug Squashing!!!

We are pleased to inform you the next release of Gnusim8085. “1.3.4″ This release fixes two important instruction level bugs #1936852 and #1966993. Thanks to Marcelo Souza and Missouga Dongi for the patches.

Source tarball can be downloaded from here

Request all the Maintainers to update their packages in their respective distributions. Thanks in Advance.

Keep Simulating!!!
–
GNUSim8085 Team

I saw a bunch of students waiting outside the hall and started having a conversation with them. Pleasantly surprised to hear that they were waiting for the electronics talk (yes! my talk, and they didn’t have the slightest clue who the speaker was). Got some “real” feedback on the event which had both positives and negatives from this little conversation I had. Time had come for me to take the stage and these poor fellows were taken aback with surprise as well as shock!! I love to play such pranks! Well, the talk on the whole was attended by a pretty small crowd but the level of enthusiasm and eagerness to learn was high and evident from the interesting questions raised. I walked through the wide number of tools available for students to use right from getting to identify a resistor value (gResistor), simulating simple Digital and Analog circuits (qucs), PCB Design (pcb), learning microprocessors and controllers (gnusim8085) and took them well into the toolchain for coming up with your own chip (iverilog, Alliance toolset, gEDA toolset). The students liked the flow as it started with tools available for simple and basic electronics and ended up in coming out with your own Chip.

Quite a few Fedora Electronic Laboratory CDs were burnt and handed over to the students. Some Ubuntu CDs were also distributed. As it always happens, there was after talk discussions with the students and I had to excuse myself for lunch. Had nice time meeting the other fellow speakers and finally in the evening we had “Lightning talks” by all speakers. The idea impressed me as it gave an opportunity for all other speakers, volunteers, co-ordinators to listen to whatever they had missed in the last 3 days. It was fun reducing a 1 hr long presentation to under 3 minutes.

Time to head back home. Shared a taxi with Sebastien to HYD airport and had interesting discussions on “India - country of contrasts”. Hyderabad airport is freaking good and I had an uneventful, relaxed flight back home to MAA (Chennai). It would be unfair on my part to complete this post without a few big THANK YOUs!!!! Thanks Redhat! Thanks Sankarshan! Thanks FEL team! Thank you Free Software world.

Full Flickr Set here
Random thought: Nice event! Will be interesting to see how it develops in the coming few years.

July 13th, 2008 was Day 2 (I know I am late in posting this entry. But still not too late) of the Bug Jam preparatory sessions which was being organised.  A day which focussed more on the basics of Debian packaging. Onkar did a great job of guiding people through the session. He started with what packaging is all about, then went on to explain the various important files needed to package and the roles they play, gave a few tips on good packaging habits and mentioning some (read as important) of Debian packaging policies.

After the basic lecturing, it was time for the folks to try something hands-on. He (as would most of the packagers) started off with the “hello world” tar ball. All the needed files for packaging were manually created with the idea of introducing the debhelper scripts at a much later stage. Everybody had great fun though only a couple of guys could come out with a successful .deb (rest had some minor issues which got resolved later). Throughout the session the level of motivation was high given that the session went almost after midnight.

The 2 day workshop came to a close and we were convinced of more Ubuntu bug squashers and packager in the future. The logs can be found here.

PS: I think, I was never able to be complete this blog post for a reason. Today, we got news that my good friend, co- GNUSim8085 developer and the tutor of Day 2, became an Ubuntu Universe Contributing developer. And this post would have been incomplete without the mention of the same. Congrats Onkar! Wish you more progress!

Fedora Electronic Lab Updates:

- We were breaking our heads with this long standing open bug on Alliance VLSI CAD toolset. Decided to gather all my bandwidth to resolve this one quickly and it turned out to be a fault in lesstif library which is used by most of the Alliance tools. So registered Bug #457469  and now awaiting updates from its maintainer. *phew*

- My Love affair with Licenses seems to be continuing, as bad news arrived for SystemC and electric also seems be not in good shape to make it into official Fedora repos. But at least “electric” has some hopes if more effort is put in.

Ubuntu updates:

- Xcircuit is a very nice program for drawing publishable-quality electrical circuit schematic diagrams and related figures. There is a crash reported here. Decided to take it up and squash it and then this mail from upstream follows in a couple of days. Feels good!

- Avagadro has been accepted into Debian Testing. It should be nice to have it in Ubuntu. So bug #253324 is raised and awaiting a MOTU to sponsor the package.

- As mentioned before, my love affair with the licenses continued into gResistor as well. But this time Lady luck was with me and upstream promptly responded to fix the issue.

- Did a few bug triages like rising sync requests, closing fixed bugs etc.

Hope the good run continues..

PS: I will be at mukt.in this Sunday, August 3rd 2008 giving a demo on “Free Software Electronics Laboratory”. If someone is in or around Hyderabad, India at that time, catch me in Osmania University.

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

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!

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.