Day 3 (Hackfests): FUDCon 2011: Pune

November 7, 2011 at 6:09 pm 1 comment

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.