lab ready with fedora machines

And soon enough I was waiting for all lug-jaipur members to arrive and help me in the workshop, infact more than just helping me, speak at the workshop. We had intended to take the workshop for teachers but were also given the permission to take a workshop for students as well. so we have invited steve to take teacher’s workshop and jai, udit and pranav to help us with students one, along with out college gang comprising of mukul, anuj and some juniors which to my surprise were very interested. And everyone seemed to have arrived at almost the right and steve started his session at the lab running over 30 fedora machines. And he soon started his session on linux basics, making them feel at home on fedora so that those teachers can in return go and do the same to their students, atleast that was is our plan, thankful to our comp science HOD he made it mandatory for all teachers to make their students work on open source technologies, which eventually brought us in.

steve talking to teachers and teaches listening intently

So after leaving steve with teachers I went to see start the students session. And I was amazed at the seminar hall we were given, I had seen it for the first time in my college and it was awesome, with 2 screens and a seating capacity of over 300 students, and fully air conditioned, it surely felt so good to even get onto that stage and talk.

So pranav started talking about a little introduction to foss and then I took a few more minutes asking for some queries and talking a little bit more about foss and in general why linux. And we soon went to jai to talk about web development. Which seemed like an interesting topic for students and they thoroughly enjoyed getting to know intricacies of web, which they were all new to.

A view of the students seminar

I could now leave the seminar hall to fellow hackers and see what is happening around and also talk to nandeep who had just arrived, and was being told the interesting things sarai is doing and there are some possibilities of sarai working with some colleges in jaipur to spread foss. After an hour of talk we moved onto the snacks, and there again, my college surprised me and swept me off my feet. Or it can be that, this is the first time I have organized/done something in my college that I came to know that my college can be a very wonderful host to its visitors. Steve had also come there on a break from his teachers workshop and the response was quite good, some of them were really interested to know what he was talking about. While we were having snacks students had already started moving out, partly because, audience always decreases after the first talk and only the interested ones are left, so its kind of good for the organisers. And udit sharma was sent to hold the crowd in place with his expected to be mesmerizing talk on drupal and advance web technologies (but it proved otherwise ). Well so now we were only left with people who were interested in learning.It seemed they were so interested that some of the guys ended up on stage taking drupal setup from udit and udit soon got swamped by the crowd. So we had to step in between and take the control and move the house back in rest.

Though we had planned for a BoF session, but it dint come out as one instead jai ended up going on stage and talking about stuff from mailing lists, IRC and we also showed them how to get there, community contribution etc etc. And more over I was amazed to see such a wonderful seminar hall in my college.

The whole session was so good and interactive that all of us lost track of time and we had far exceeded our limits but the audience was still in place and wanted us to carry on, but after promising them that we will return soon with more interesting things we parted.

To call it a day, we sat in college lawns to reflect on the day, Also discussed plans for the sarai workshop at MNIT on 14th and 15th, though its already done now and was a success too.

So it seems like lug-jaipur is out again in the socially active world and a spree of workshops to welcome its coming back.Will soon write about the MNIT workshops and the first full-day out with lug members, doing loads of stuff.

Our seat in the bogy 57,59,61 (by jai)

Anyways all said and done, I now write this sitting in the comforts of an AC compartment of Indian Railways and on the first day of our journey which actually takes almost 42hrs, but time losses its significance looking at the fact that we’d be crossing half of the country, from western part of india to the southern, crossing four states and an opportunity to look at India more closely.

mirror trains by jai

For some facts, languages in India changes every 100 KM, though the change would depend on the location but still there are sure enough noticeable changes which actually fills your heart with a sense of the unkown, going through your own country and wondering at what exactly peolpe are trying to say gives a deep sense of belonging and the urge to get to know fellow country men. From changes to lagnuage to clothing to food to even playing cards, which was the most fun part of day 1 of the 2 day train journey. We had the company of two girls and two other boys who were going to pune and on top of that they were all engineering graduates which took the toll to 7 engineers in our bogy, we became friends instatnly and were chatting and eating Indian Railways grub tog, until the moment came at round dusk that a little boy selling playing cards came around, reclusive to goods he was selling but looked like the train man, one who not only travels but live in it, anyways we bought them not knowing how would it effect our journey.

Remains of the day&night well spent by jai

It was 1 AM, with sleep in some eyes, some still wide awake to de-board the train at their respective stops, some still trying to get a hang of the whole thing that just happened there, and some utterly happy and some sublime after being called a many great things, this was now the end of our journey together and also the end of the last game we played. The people whom we met were Ankit, Khushbo, Sunita and Viral with whom I spent a lot of time at the bogy door looking out in the open, at the cloudless skies and the moonlight night whose beauty couldn’t be subdued by the noise of chaging tracks, rolling over bridges, and the gaps in the fish plates, they all seem to add to the little moment of freshness from the bogy filled of people from all walks and parts of india, where some husbands were still clueless about why on earth are they going to meet this distant relative, in whom they have no interest in meeting or some wives were disgrunteled with the train food and the washrooms and telling other women how they just missed the flight they were intended to take and how much gold she owns and blah. While sunita had to get down at valsad and the rest of our new friends were going to pune, they had 3 more hours to sleep and then a morning of office and their damn bosses waiting for them, so we slept after a day full of life. At around 4AM train arrived at pune station and it was time for our fellow travelers to get down, though there was still an important task for Viral to do before he could go home, which was to get something for me from outside the station, which we had earlier used together, and now it was pay back time becuase the train halt was 10min and he had to run and get it, and to my utter surprise, while I was asleep he came, woke me up and handed it over to me and said goodbye before I could say anything to him, he was gone, and I lay there awake for a few more minutes trying to figure what had actually happened, I met a stranger and just after a few hours he dint feel like an staranger anymore. And I slept with a smile on my face, though I could also hear some sarcasm for me and praise for viral

well rest of the journey went quite smoothly and boring, since we had nothing else to do than to try out different snacks and salads which used to come our way in the train and listen to some music once in a while and sleep. But the anticipation to attend foss.in for the first time was growing.

And the rest of them were clicked by me from jai’s camera when he was not around and with a little help from aniket with holding my laptop (mainly in front of his face)

]]> http://acedip.in/blog/going-to-foss-in/feed/ 1 http://acedip.in/blog/ibm-tgmc-and-the-great-indian-debacle/ http://acedip.in/blog/ibm-tgmc-and-the-great-indian-debacle/#comments Sun, 22 Nov 2009 12:13:15 +0000 Anirudh Singh Shekhawat http://acedip.in/blog/?p=98 Everyone feared IBM in the good old days, when guys in black suits and tie would either make you go out of business or buy you off the hook. IBM guys were considered evil big brothers, who were ruthless and sung company songs. So anyways IBM seemed to have changed quite a lot in recent years and we all know its open support towards free and open source mentality, and anyways I am here to talk about what is it doing right now which actually violates that very philosophy.

There is a very popular competition which IBM runs in india called TGMC (The great mind challenge) for students. Well that is all good but the tricky part comes here. IBM only accepts projects made using its technology i.e. the tools which only IBM provides to the educational institute you are in and yes, they dont give these tools to individuals, they can only be acquired once your institute is in the program and it so happens that IBM after sending its big boys to your institute and, your college will soon will make it compulsory for everyone in the final year to make their major projects for IBM, and my college is one of them and we are stuck with making our major projects in TGMC if we want or not.

The tools to be used are : Rational Rose/RSA
RAD/Eclipse/WSAD/ WebSphere Portal
WAS/WAS CE
DB2 Express – ‘C’ or DB2 UDB

and as it seems that you cant do this project without IBM’s help. But what is more important are the Terms and Conditions, what it has imposed on all student developers working on it, here is an interesting one :-

“By submitting entries, entrant grants IBM and their agents of the program the right to publish, use, adapt, sell, edit and/or modify such entry in any way, in commerce and in any and all media worldwide, including but not limited to the Internet, without limitation and without compensation to the entrants. Entrant also grants IBM worldwide irrevocable, nonexclusive and royalty-free right and license to use, have used, copy, reproduce, transfer, modify and/or display any information contained in their entry in whole or part and in any form without compensation.” for a complete set of Terms and Conditions

Woah!! So that means you dont own your work, it just does not belong to you. I wonder what is this giant teaching young students on this country. And what is this policy where, on one hand its promoting open source and on the other its doing this.

And this is not limited to my college alone, I know a lot many college in jaipur, rajasthan, india which have fallen for this and have made it mandatory for their students to work on it.

Machine one (laptop):- Well this was easy and had more chances of success as it already was running fedora 11 and had no issues at all. So I put in the fedora 12 DVD and upgraded fedora 11 to fedora 12, it was running the default i.e. gnome, but my main working installation runs kde so after gnome’s upgrade I upgraded the kde one too. Though the upgrade process is quite long and time consuming but the upgrade was worth the wait.

The login screen is so beautiful.

And so is the plasma desktop, this is why I love kde, it gives you immense functionality to work.

And I have found this application called “digiKam” which I have totally fallen in love with, those I could not install the plugin which lets you export pictures to flickr and facebook as one of the dependencies of that plugin does not even exist on the site , the libkexif-0.2.5.tar.bz2 does not even exist on the download link. fail!!

Machine two (desktop):- Now this is a weird one, and I feel cheated because this machine which has an ATI board and everything else on the chipset by ATI was sold in the market as an intel product as a 3rd party product, but I was stupid enough to understand any of that to not to buy it, so anyways, now I’m stuck with it, and thanks to closed ATI drivers I could never install fedora on it, I’ve been trying fc6 but never, well finally filed a bug and after some work by some people on it, its pending, mainly because of my non-interest, but would now like ot revoke it back and hopefully fix it by f13, though, there have been some improvements and will update the bug report ASAP. So finally I couldn’t install f12 on this machine.

Well even after not a normal boot, I could install fedora on my desktop which is a new milestone in the bug, because I could never even run the install media properly, so this is a very joyful image. My desktop with a kernel option and my laptop being upgraded to f12.yuppy!!

Well, apart from this, there is a f12 install fest lined up in my college on 25th Nov and also another one on 28th in another college in jaipur, seems like lug-jaipur is up for an active week Will report on it soon.

That is just a notice which had to be circulated around the college to inform all the teachers and students what is going around. According to it, all the programming work will be done on linux and we are to assist the concerned teachers to implement it in their respective labs. This becomes so necessary pertaining to the wide spread use of turbo C which sensible people all around the world have even forgotten about but for some god knows what reason it happens to be the most popular IDE in india for c/c++. Though when we were planning our shift to fedora a guy also suggested to use another IDE for windows instead and i remember giving him some strange sort of looks and he knew what was coming and he shut up, but later i also explained him a few things and made that strange thought to go away. Everything seems to have been falling into place and we are about to start with our labs from monday, assisting teachers to write their c/c++ code on fedora.
The project is witnessing a mild start but the whole picture will get clear by end of the next week and how have we performed in the coming week, and there-after we would be too glad to involve lugj and the indian foss community and take the initiative to a whole new level.
keeping fingers crossed

For all you pidign users there is a plugin for pidgin which will let you sign in to your facebook account and sing-in to the facebook chat, and noone would ever know i f you are even really on facebook. Your list of friends will appear just as like any other IM account and under the facebook tag. All thanks to efforts of Eion robb who created the thing in may 2008.

Note: the plugin is available for window and other platforms too, you just need to be a piding user to do this

Well that is not always alright when you have to install from source and that is exactly the thing with the main project site, but when scrolling down to comments you I came across a link which has rpm for fedora here and which has been very nicely maintained since fedora 8

so simply firiing

[Acedip~ #]wget http://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/packages/purple-facebookchat/1.60/1.fc11/i586/purple-facebookchat-1.60-1.fc11.i586.rpm
[Acedip~ #]rpm -ivh purple-facebookchat-1.60-1.fc11.i586.rpm
error: Failed dependencies:
 libjson-glib-1.0.so.0 is needed by purple-facebookchat-1.60-1.fc11.i586

oop, what is that!! well seemed like we have to get it, so after a few clicks i got it

[Acedip~ #]wget ftp://194.199.20.114/linux/fedora/releases/11/Everything/i386/os/Packages/json-glib-0.6.2-3.fc11.i586.rpm
[Acedip~ #]# rpm -ivh json-glib-0.6.2-3.fc11.i586.rpm
Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
 1:json-glib              ########################################### [100%]
[Acedip~ #]rpm -ivh purple-facebookchat-1.60-1.fc11.i586.rpm
Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
 1:purple-facebookchat    ########################################### [100%]

n the picture, you can also set your facebook status and also get all updates form facebook.

And that is it, done with the install part, now what you gotta do is simply.

• Download and install plugin for your specific platform as below
• Restart Pidgin (or go to Tools->Plugins) to redetect plugins
• Add a new account to Pidgin (Accounts->Manage Accounts->Add)
• Choose “Facebook” from the dropdown list
• Use your Facebook email address in the username field
• Start chatting
• you can also update your facebook status from here, no need to even login to facebook, until and unless you want to try out those freaky quizzes and application which maybe even god may find difficult to comprehend.
  

well this was a short guide to get the plugin work on fedora, a complete documentation of all platforms is available on the main package site.

Installation of fedora 11 was quite quick keeping in mind almost all the packages I’d selected to install amounting uptp 1400 of them, and then the system booted, It felt really great on seeing the fedora screen once more in my life (after a short stint with ubuntu because of hardware issues). I choose not to send my hardware profile to smolt until later time and had to do it late with

[Acedip@localhost ~]#smoltSendProfile

and here is my machines hardware profile.

Everything seems fine till now, but I sensed some troubles coming my way as soon as I saw that Broadcom Corporation in my network chips, and there I was struggling over a few late night hours to get my wireless working. I was pretty determined to have it my way and finally after brooding over a couple of web pages and some help from #fedora got the wireless working with this.

Well while fixing it i noticed that the above link would largely satisfy all broadcom wireless needs but this one really helped in knowing about broadcom chips here but this can only satisfy your hungry mind and not actually help you with the issue and I also got to know that there is an IRC channel for broadcom BCMxxxx users at freenode: #bcm-users, though its always better to do your homework before you go to that channel.

Though I still have some minor issues like battery tray icon often doesnt give right readings, but it has to be fixed ASAP, and the default brightness controller keys does not work properly either.

Well the pictures are fine looking at the output from sony ericsson k530i.

The sound of the machine is pretty awesome with two speaker built in the screen. Later I installed Gnash for playing flash, comix for viewing pictures in archives and as the name signifies to view comics, and did other usual stuff to get my machine up to date with all non-free codecs etc. and when I checked for update I was again astonished to see 900Mbs of yum update, woof!!

Its been not more than 3 months since the inception (March 2009) of linux users group jaipur, but yet the activities/workshops organized by lugj have taken the whole town or rather a lot more than that by storm. From activities ranging from install fests and countless talks/workshops given by lug members in colleges around jaipur, raised the need of a bigger event to take place and give a chance to the yet ignorant and neglected parts of india in terms of free and open source to join the main stream community and spread what it is meant for i.e. freedom. With many active members of communities like fedora, mozilla, wordpress and sun, and also contributers to the same in lugj, the task once started was not very difficult to achieve. And soon with the help of a local college lugj announced its first majot all india event named FOSJAM short for Free and Open Source Software Jaipur Meet.

The event was pretty much planned in 10 days because workshop hungry lugj couldn’t wait for 4 months without and activity since all colleges are off during summer and the heat is a killer in these parts. So though short with time we decided to go forward with the event and did our best to reach out to as many people as possible. And more over we were fortunate enough to have speakers and free software developers like shakthi kanan, vivek khurana and atul jha agreeing to come over at such a short notice.

Since it was the first time something to happen on this scale so the event was pretty much planned for the audience in rajasthan who are still new to foss, so all sessions were kept as hands on in the computer labs provided by the college (JECRC – Jaipur Engg College and Research Center). The workshops were more inclined towards hands on sessions. So the first task was to free all the college computers and install fedora on them, (which was an obvious choice) so we installed fedora in over 90 machines, here for a report on the installation day.

D-Day :-

The event received more than 347 registrations and more than 280 people turned up for the event. The sun was not quite so friendly that day with temperature ranging much over 45C but it did not damn the spirit of freedom in people who thronged the venue way before the scheduled time.

Event started with the free software song performed by Kapil Acharya, a LUGJ member, followed by Winblows, busting balloons of (we all know what!!). The ceremony gave a rocking start to the event and all students soon felt the freedom wave sweeping them off their feet and all joined in and sang the freedom song.

Then a brief introduction of all the speakers to the gathering, followed by a word of thought by Mr. Shakthi Kannan. And at last a vote of thanks by Jai Pandya, being a member of LUG-Jaipur and a student of JECRC on behalf of both the organizations.

Since we wanted to cover more in the time we had at our disposal so talks were divided into three parallel tracks and without wasting further time Skakthi kanan (you can also refer http://shaktimaan.com which is full of resources for students and everyone) started with his talk named I-want-2-do-a-project-tell-me-how-2-do-it-fedora. The talk covered netiquettes (mailing list, IRC ,forum etiquette), what/how to choose a Free and Open Source project. Everyone really enjoyed the session with shakthi making them burst into laughs quite often, with his quick wit. The session covered all the basic things everyone should always keep in mind while working/contributing for a Free/Open Source Software or getting any help from the community.

Parallel to shakthi’s talk, Vivek Khurana was taking a session on How to become a hacker who in-spite of the hot and humid seminar hall given to him (because a talk promising to turn one into a hacker would surely attract a huge crowd where one doesn’t really know what it means to be a hacker )

and they were surely not disappointed by the way vivek showed them the to become the one we call a hacker and not a cracker and its was evident from the many gaping faces that they were astonished and glad to get the term right. The talk also covered the basics of free software, how does it matter to us, and what we can do with it .

Another parallel session (what the hell!!, how many were they? Well, there were three) was taken by Atul Jha named Yes I’ll do it my way, well, I never could understand why it was named so, but yes it was a general discussion regarding foss and some general topics which were thrown by the audience and answered by Atul, though deependra singh shekhawat (A lug member and a security specialist) talked about open standards and why are they important and why one should stick to them, and soon the topic turned to firmware and device driver and I din’t miss the opportunity to bash ATI for its aloofness with open standards.

On a moonlight drive:-

shakthi in emacs hackfest

err..what!!, not exactly as the words say it but yes, jim morrison can be considered pretty close in depicting a bunch of computer geeks gathered for the night, with all the college computers at their disposal would do, dive into the unknown (although its much cooler to be a computer nerd now, than it was in his times ) and there we were for an all night hackfest. To my astonishment more than 100 people stayed for the all night hackfest and the things were just started to get hotter and crazy (in terms of hacking)and again I was in a fix to decide which hackfest to attend, and certainly it has to be emacs, because I’d any-day prefer to know more about emacs rather than jQuery, (which has always been a mystery), so there I was listening to Shakthi Kannan on Emacs a day keeps the vi-zing away sweating, but listening (even 3 ACs in a lab with 50 people were not enough) and wondering what force does run Shakthi, who unperturbed from any external factors was busy talking to students and solving their queries. The talk went on till 3 AM with a small break in-between and. I think most windows users there (if any) have not used and thought about notepad than they have on emacs that day, and many also praised the simplicity of emacs (I wonder too) and how they really liked it and it’d be there text-editor for a long time to come (I was feeling totally lost there, seemed like I was the n00b there).

I couldn’t take it any longer and rushed for some refuge at jQuesry session by Vivek Khurana which thankfully had more n00bs than I expected and I was happy to be there. Vivek was cool and nicely handling the n00bs there, though it became more of an introductory session rather than a jQuery hackfest and he was very patiently responding to each students query, no matter how basic or weird they were and was taking full use of the whiteboard and it soon turned into a class of jQuery with rather vivek doing his job more sincerely than any teacher would.

vivek taking jQuery hackfest

Day two :-

Carrying forward the momentum of day one, day two began on a high note. There were three parallel sessions of talks/workshop from 10 am to 2pm followed by workshops from 3pm onwards. Well all thanks to Lalith Suresh because of whom we could stick to the schedule as, everyone was so tired and worn out from last nights all night long session that no organiser could be there at the venue well before 12 o’clock but the audience was rather more excited than ever to further enlighten (free) their minds, and seeing no organiser around lalith gathered all students at one place and started talking about foss in general. As the audience had some idea about the term, unlike yesterday, and were asking more questions and got an even more better understanding of the term and a lot many things. And around 12 o’clock, it was time to carry on the freedom spirit further. With the first session starting with Badam-Halwa of embedded systems (what a better way to start your day with a talk of the named badam-halwa) by Shakthi Kannan.

Shakthi introduced the keen audience to the basics of embedded systems. Students were very interested in knowing about embedded systems and many were from the robotics group from different colleges of rajasthan. It truly proved out to be a badam halwa for knowledge hungry minds. Shakthi also gave demos of some Open Source tools like gerbv, qucs, verilog, gEDA, Tk gate etc. Without wasting much time Shakthi Kannan conducted the next session on Fedora Electronics Lab Demo. This talk had live demonstrations of Fedora Electronics Lab products. How can FOSS help in every field of technology and non-technology. There were students from the college robotics group Xananoids who seemed to be highly motivated after the talk and discussed some future prospective on which they could work on. Now, the time was right for learning some basics about packaging and how is it done in fedora (especially me and udit, fedora ambassadors jaipur were happy to attend to attend this talk) and more over it was caled RPM packaging-red-hot-paneer-butter-masala (I wonder where does shakthi get these interesting names for his talks). This was a hands-on workshop and on how rpm packaging is actually done, in a very practical manner. People were quite happy to know how its all done in fedora, which was quite a mystery for many. Well shakthi had to leave for his flight immediately after the talk so he quickly went and I went to the next talk wondering what is there in it which was getting a big reception from the students and was requested for a repeat as there were more people who wanted to attend How to make a web site in less than two minutes and Atul Jha was talking about making a web site using DRUPAL in less then five minutes or rather as the topic decided earlier was, quicker than making maggie noodles. The workshop covered things from very basics like, installing a web server, basics of HTML, installing Drupal and customizing it according to one’s needs. And in the end everyone went with a website of his/her own. Parallel to atul’s talk, Lalith Suresh was giving a talk on A fools guide to high availability .

What is high availability? How is all that done? Why single point of failure is bad ? All of these questions were answered. This difficult topic was presented very cleverly in a very friendly manner. Students enjoyed this session.

The IRC session:

Now this is something which was really cool and it seemed more like a celebration rather than a talk session. Jai pandya captured the podium just as lalith stepped down and was sweeping the audience with his pep talk. Infact audience was getting restless to know about IRC finally, since they have heard about it so much in the two days in fosjam that their patience was nearing an end to know the damn thing and jai soon came to the rescue. Students got to know How-Tos of IRC, also with some briefing on some of the IRC clients such as “xchat” and “mibbit”. And just as atul’s talk in the next lab got over, I took on th e lab and without wasting a second, all participants in both the labs joined #lug-japur channel with mibbit, and soon there was confusion all over, with over 38 users (a max on #lug-jaipur till now), and then they were told about how to register your nick and some other basic stuff and after a lot of kicking and basing on the channel, finally they were told about the importance of IRC in the collaborative work, how to get help and help others on IRC. And the smile on faces showed that their anticipation was rightly served and have come-up to their expectations, which is still visible as there are people addicted to the IRC and are at #lug-jaipur channel for most of their time.

The happy guy, jai distributing free goddies

The closing ceremony (A new beginning) :-

And the guys who made it most of the event (read partying), of which after-effects are still visible in atuljha (you can guess who:) )

Well as I came out of the lab after the IRC session, I saw jai pandya throwing things in the air and guys running/rolling over each other and getting them and I wondered what has happened to everyone, they were all decent men gathered for a noble cause, and then on a closer look I saw jai throwing away mozilla badges and giving away fedora dvds and stickers, and I was at ease. There is no fun without any music and that was evident from the opening ceremony too, so out for a ‘rocking end’, lugj guitarist Kapil Acharya played some songs like Hotel California, sayonee. But it doesnt seem to end because as everyone was moving out, students started thronging speakers and organizers as soon as they came across one. So after over half an hour of random discussions and putting hungry minds at ease, it was finally over, but rather it was definitely a new beginning of a movement which was about to unfold and is unfolding everyday, with many minds aligned together to change the world. And with great hopes in minds and courage in our hearts, to change the world around us.

and finally the lugj team who made this all happen, (though udit sharma is missing and jai is taking the picture )