Dell Studio and Fedora 12.

Today I installed Fedora 12 on a brand new Dell Studio laptop. This is the only line I can write because there was nothing else to note.

lshw

I didn’t know about it. But it is a small and pretty application that can help you when you are going to buy a new laptop/desktop. (you may need to #yum install lshw).

Try running it like

# lshw -html > test.html

Here is my output.

Foss.in: Last three days.

So it has been a couple of days since I last blogged. There were tweets and blogs from the others so I could afford to be lazy.

Day 3.02: This day starts after my blog 3.01. I wrote the blog and went down to have breakfast which was nice one. The only funny thing that happened was Rahul asked me to bring a piece pine-apple for him, and I could not remember what pineapple means. So he had to point to my plate and show me what it was!!! We were off to venue soon and found others to be present there already. Me and Kital started working on membership stuff and it was done in some time. Then I started manning the booth with others and also work on my workout. We worked for sometime, had lunch and went out with Kital to get some gifts for his wife. It was a nice outing and he bought a couple of nice shawls. We went to M.G. Road and had some snacks. Here we parted. I went to meet one of my friends and Kital and Heimansu went to take some snaps. Kushal suggested that we should go to RR which is a nice restaurant and we tried to find it out for twenty minutes, gave up and went to another one I knew only to find that it was RR itself. It was a nice evening and was back to hotel by 10 after asking 15 people. A day of messing up for me.

Day 4: We arrived at the venue as usually and Kushal and Sayamindu got interested in hardware.They bought two boards to play with and Kushal got a speedometer too!!! I was determined to get my workout done by this day (which didn’t happen eventually) so I spent all the time before lunch working on that. After lunch, Kital, Heimansu, Shreyank went to visit some temple. We stayed back and worked on getting the authentication module done. In the meantime, Dimitris got interested Dorrie, and started working with/advising Shreyank. Sayamindu was working on pushing out a new release of e-book reader. Kital gave me a private presentation on Fedora Security Spin for around one hour as I missed it. That is so nice of him. The time shoot past and it was evening. We attended the keynote, enjoyed some “rock” and went to the speakers party. The party was a lot fun, laughter and leg pulling and nice food and not so nice beer (they said, I didn’t drink ).

Day 5: It was yesterday. Kushal got more interested in hardware, bought some soldering iron and other stuff and tried to make something which didn’t worked out finally (he was almost crying). I got my work almost done. (A bit polish and testing and I am ready to deploy it.) I got a new address for membership administration, talked with kital about improving overall ambassadors experience, polished the first reply draft for discouraging students form doing ambassadors stuff only, brainstormed about integrating fama, fas, and mailman so that only one sign up is required, pinged Rakesh to get mwclient packaged for EPEL. Finally, just before leaving, me, Kital and Dimitris had a chat for improving the ambassadors experience (for both people in and out of the project). Finally, wished others goodbye and Rangeen dropped me to the bus terminus. Thanks Rangeen.

Here comes some anticlimax. In the airport I met a person (whom I won’t name) who, from he word go stared lecturing me how I should think about my life and career. This was the first time we ever talked, I hope it would be the last one too.

It was a highly constructive and entertaining tour for me and fedora. The arrangement was awesome, the food was nice, the people around was talking/working on technology.

Team foss.in, thanks a lot for such a nice experience.

Foss.in. Day 3.01

Here is what we plan for today:

1. Man the booth well: A usb station will be nice. I have some copied of the one page release notes.
2. Continue the workouts. (Security Spin/Dorrie/Distribution)
3. Tweet our activities on http://twitter.com/fedoraindia. You can follow it. We will also tag the tweets with #fedora #fedoraindia #fossdotin so it will be searchable.
4. Acedip from Jaipur LUG is attending, so I shall like to discuss things with him and (I am not sure Ankur is still here or not) with other LUGs.
5. Have some more coffee (I had 10-12 cups yesterday) and brainstorming.
6. Let’s see.

Will update you in the evening.

Foss.in. Day 1.99 and Day 2.

Day 1.99: It was 1st dec, 5:30 PM at Kolkata. I receive a call from Sayamindu that we have a booth at foss.in and they have no swag with them. Call up, fix budget, get designs, rush to shop and get things done. All in three hours!!! We now have some really nice swags, release notes, stickers. Visit the fedora booth if you want to have some.

Day 2 : I was dead tired yesterday and could not write a post ( by “Jetlag” for flying in a aircraft whose monitoring system was indicating the front door was not shut properly and by waiting 15 minutes to cross a two lane road!!!).

Reaching there, I found Prodeepto da from KDE waving at me and I was at home at once. Lunch was set and I went to have it. I met Kital there. I recognise him at once and its a pleasure to meet him. He has also gifted me a fedora cap (thanks Kital!!). Now I spotted Kushal wearing a LED on his speaker badge and announcing his presence. There was Rahul, Shreyank, Subhdeep, Mak, Dimitris and other people around. We had our lunch and set off to the auditorium once again. The first talk I attended was Kedar’s Fedora-ARM and it was a informative talk about ARM. Then Kushal went with Python-Newt. He demonstrated how easy it was to build a *-tui thing. That was pretty impressive. I recorded both, but the acoustic of the room/my choice of place was not that good and I ended up having bad recording. I shall try to look at them again.

These was followed by Rahul’s talk on Fedora Remixes and he had received a lot of questions. Then there was introduction to the workouts which we will continue for rest of the days. These was “Dorrie” by Shreyank, which is a nice web interface for building up custom spins and my continued work on distribution app. Let me hope I can get it done by the end of this conference.

I was in for another surprise. I met Mak (Mahayalam Khan,from fedora-Bangladesh and ankur-bangla). It was very nice to meet him too. It feels good when

Finally, /me, Rahul and Kushal sat down with Kital and brainstormed about how to make Fedora project better as a community and as a distribution.

Finally, we ended up in “Gufa” or something, where the food was awesome.

That’s all for yesterday. We had a highly constructive day.

Also, the organisers deserves a lot of thanks. They have taken care of everything so very well.

foss.in..tomorrow.

So it’s time. I am landing on the second day, but that should not be a problem.

I am looking forward to meeting old and new friends, get some works done and have a few brainstorming sessions.

We are having “Fedora Project of the day” on 2nd Dec, so if you are around, join us.

See you and meet you there.

Periodic updates will follow.

FAmSCo…Will I or Won’t I?

Time for another election. The last year was tremendously enjoyable, a number of improvements and a few unpleasant but necessary changes.

But before running for another election, I would like to know if I could live up to the expectations and deliver. Well, I did as much as I could, but was that sufficient and beneficial to you? Time for feedback.

But running or not, my sincere thanks to all the ambassadors for their supports that I enjoyed and to my FAmSCo colleagues. It is a privilege to be a part of such an wonderful team.

Maps reloaded.

…which brings me back to the reason why we’re here. There is no escaping reason, no denying purpose, because as we both know, without purpose, we would not exist. It is purpose that created us. Purpose that connects us. Purpose that pulls us, that guides us, that drives us. It is purpose that defines, purpose that binds us…

My purpose on this was some fun coding. You’re the one that has to walk through it and let me know if you want to keep it or trash it.

If you want anticlimax, refer here.

Announcing Fedora Medical SIG.

I have just sent this to fedora-announcement-list.

It dates back to a lazy afternoon of July, when I had my occasional “spark of enthusiasm” for doing something. So I started a conversation in Fedora India mailing list. It was decided that such a thing would be helpful.

More seriously, we do lack packaged applications and dedicated spins in the area of healthcare. If someone wants to put in a FOSS based solution into a hospital/clinic workflow, there is no elegant solution. So if we can have a medical spin, that is going to be of help.

The initial wiki page is here.

Simply put, the goal of the SIG is going to be:

1. Working on identifying the various workflows / needs of the medical or healthcare community in terms of software.
2. Bring together and package the software those fitting in the workflow.
3. Composing a spin to get a out-of-the-box solution.
4. At a later stage, developing any crucial app that may be lacking.

To make it a success, we need volunteers. So please join, if you feel that it is a worthy cause. Once a few more people are there, we can discuss and take it forward.

I am keeping my fingers crossed.

Fedora Distribution Process Mockup

This evening, I worked a bit on the upcoming integrated distribution process. This should redirect a reasonable portion of media request traffic towards online/offline vendors.

The mockup is here. The source is here.

Your comments are appreciated.