Day 3 (Hackfests): FUDCon 2011: Pune

After missing foss.in last year (which was around this time, because of my exams), and having known that I was going to miss the first two days of FUDCon 2011 because of exams (again), I was determined enough to get up at 0300 in the morning and catch a train to Pune for a 4hour standing journey. If you are wondering if it was too much to do, here’s why it was completely worth it.

I thought I had reached late, but looks I was early enough to go to the other side of COEP and have my breakfast there. It’s called the boat club canteen, and hosts a bunch of boats that student use to sail in the river.

Boat club, COEP

By the time I had come back to the other side of the college, I could see some Fedora guys already, so I rushed up to the auditorium, where I met Joerg and Robert and watched the Hackfest guys pitch their hackfest events. Out of the ones I was interested in were:

• System Automation using Puppet
• QUCS
• Virtualization using KVM (probably this one, but I am not sure )
• Dorrie (A Fedora-based clone of SUSEStudio)

and a few more on authentication using FreeIPA, Django and stuff that I don’t remember because of my volatile memory.

So, I started with the QUCS project, because I had to meet Shakthi anyway, at least since he helped me get a modest project to work on when I emailed him. So we proceeded to the second seminar hall, which apparently had better cooling and power supply, and started drawing some simple circuits in QUCS.

In no time, Robert, who was talking about packaging in the same seminar hall, was done with, I asked him to help me with my network simulator source, which I have been wanting to package since quite some time now. So I told Shakthi I would be back in “some time” and sat with Robert, packaging stuff listed here.

Now, it turns out, the Makefiles in the listed sources are very weird, and it took more than “some time” that I promised Shakthi about. In fact, it took us 4 hours to package the two modules, which still aren’t sticking to the Fedora packaging guidelines.

I realized if a person who has been packaging RPMs can’t do it, there’s no way I could do it straight-away. Anyway, Robert is going to look into the source one more time, and let me know if he gets something done.

Joerg spent time with my brother and Sankarshan purchasing kurtas, and you won’t deny that he looks almost Indian (Final image) in the kurta Also, met Jared Smith, who wasn’t keeping well, which is why he joined in late. The pressure of a new release, insufficient sleep and travel. We all understand.

Joerg somehow has a part of the brain that helps him track what everyone wants. I asked some Fedora stickers from him earlier this week, and he got a few for me, along with a Fedora/Red Hat keychain (which he supposedly took from Harish)

We had pizzas for lunch (which was the second batch of pizzas, because the first one got over by the time we reached there), and I had enough of them, so that I won’t have to eat anything more, just in case the trains take a long time to reach back home. In this time, I met Satya (mavu), mether (Rahul Sundaram), Kushal Das (kushal), and Amit (amitshah) and zer0c00l and guys whose name I have forgotten.

As we packaged, I could see the KVM hackfest happening, and it looked interesting, and so did several other hackfests. Hopefully someone will blog about the stuff I have missed.

The Fedora stickers and the keychain.

PS: As a homework, try packaging otcl and TclCL. And then ping me.

[rant]
I did not have a fancy ID like everyone else, and that made me feel sad. :/
No T-shirt either.
[/rant]

This really got me thinking.

Jared Smith mentioned this in his keynote for FUDCon 2011, which can be viewed in its entirety here.

The number one enemy we have today is ourselves. And I mean that with all seriousness. Too many times we shoot ourselves in our own foot, by the way we act, the way we deal with people, in our narrowminded-ness that we develop.

And it is not easy to change that. The biggest battles we wage are inside our own head. And so that’s one thing I want to see worked on in Fedora.

 

Installing Adobe Air: Making it work on F13

Yes. I am finally running Fedora 13 by dual booting my HD, which means bye-bye to all the virtual machines I had used to do all sorts of experiments. Yesterday I came across Prezi, an amazing software with a new way of looking at presentations.

(Free software fans can check out JessyInk extension for Inkscape for the same result)

Anyway, Prezi offline software is built upon AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) which in many ways is turning out to be bigger than Flash. According to the numerous help files, out of which most aren’t specifically written for Fedora/RPM based systems (And some are), installing AIR should allow you to open the .air files.

Still, double clicking on the .air files gives no result.

Executing the file through CLI (sudo /usr/bin/Adobe\ AIR\ Application\ Installer ~/PreziDesktop_3.030.air
) throws up this:

Error loading the runtime (/opt/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/Resources/libcurl.so: cannot restore segment prot after reloc: Permission denied)

One line that saves us:
chcon -t texrel_shlib_t /opt/Adobe\ AIR/Versions/1.0/Resources/libcurl.so

chcon command is new to Linux (Part of SELinux) and there is enough info on that command on the man pages and fedoraforums.org.

Thanks to this guy for helping me out.

Mission accomplished. New command learnt.

Something to share :)

The largest distro collection I have had so far: http://thecodingstudio.com/opensource/linux/screenshots/index.php

How many do you have?

PS: Have been surfing amazing Linux sites right now. Got my hands on Drupal, which seems to be super-awesome.

Got about a 100GB OSes just now!!!

I did not expect much from Pravin Sharma (My savior ) who came from IITKgp this Saturday. But to my surprise, he has got me 100GB of OSes, most of them Linux based but also a few BSDs. Can’t wait to get my hands on the OSes in my Virtual Box.

Planning to send a mail in the ambassadors mailing list asking people to contribute to my OS collection (Or maybe share if anyone is interested)

And yes. I have started reading The Minix book (Which I have been delaying from quite some months) and Unix for Programmers and Users (Glass and Ables) That was after I read the Art of Unix Programming by Eric Raymond (Yes, the same guy who wrote ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar’)

Note: My 1TB is almost full!

Learnt a new command

Quick tip: type “lshw -html > file.html” for a detailed configuration of your PC/Laptop. (You may have to install lshw though I did not)

I don’t know if many of you know this, but the lshw utility really helps a linux user to have a detailed configuration of the system he is using. I think it would find an exceptional use in distributions like Puppy Linux which are mainly used for rescuing systems.

Type

sudo yum install lshw lshw-gui

to install the Hardware lister along with the GUI.

Check this for more.