Pretty busy with things, but I can not just ignore a thing like this, so this post.
I visited a State Bank branch this morning. There was a list of instructions beside each computer meant for employees. The seventh point read (it was underlined too) , “Please use internet and email from standalone pc only.” 
Yesterday, I got a mail from Dipanjan, an ambassador from my place, saying:
“Is F10 documentation/ user guide available in a single document/pdf? An official at our college was asking for it and he doesn’t have net connection at his home.”
Now, to be honest, I was never interested in documentation untill only a couple of years back, when I used to maintain the fedora mirror at WBUT and the hard disk was to be replaced. Also, I have always heard about and seen a lot of publican documentation, but for one reason or other, I never gave it a serious look. (My bad!!!)
Anyway, coming back to Dipanjan’s query, I started looking for the pdf copy of the release notes, which I couldn’t find. Eventually, I found it less time-consuming to pull the doc from doc git and build it myself.
#checkout the doc git
$ git clone http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/docs/release-notes.git
#just to backup, omit this if necessary
$ cp -r release-notes f11 ; cd f11
#make sure you have at least these
$ ls
en-US Makefile po pot
#give it a test run for possible errors
$ make test-en-US
# make the final doc, you can specify type of generated doc using pdf-en-US or html-en-US or like that.
$ make pdf-en-US
# Now you should have a tmp directory:
$ ls
en-US Makefile po pot tmp
# view: 
$ evince tmp/en-US/pdf/Release_Notes.pdf
Here is the screenshot, the full doc can be found here on my fedorapeople account.
More on publican is here. A big thank to Jeff Fearn for pointing this out a few weeks back.
Also a good tutorial on git to get started is here.
Max has already blogged about it.
Now, let me talk about the most demanding region for freemedia, India.
For the month of March and April alone, we have 524 pending requests. And we have taken up and/or fulfilled 16 requests so far.
If my realisation are correct, here is why there is such a mad rush…
1. Lack of Bandwidth: Very few people has access to good connections. Either it take weeks to download an iso, or connection interrupts frequently causing trashed downloads.
2. India has large number of Fedora userbase. And due to massive number of Fedora Events and ambassadors there is a surge in interest for Fedora.
3. People want to take it ’cause they are getting it for free. In their eyes, ship-it and freemedia are same. So they just want to get a media even if they really don’t require that. I shall bet around 40% or so is such request.
What are the causes of concern:
1. Given the problem #1 and huge volume of requests, it may be so that there are genuinely interested people who are not getting access to latest media and continuing with older F7 or F8. I find a lot of them.
2. Given problem #3, may be a reasonable portion of the request can be ignored safely. To identify this, we can ask the requester to get back to the “Assigned”
person. I am sure many of them will not get back.
Possible solution:
1. To ensure a fixed number of DVD’s are distributed each month. Let’s say 100/Month. Lets look at it’s cost aspect. It is 100*40*6=24000INR= ~500 USD/per release including DVD and shipping cost. May be this is a bad investment, but on a second thought, I think I would like to have multiple channels. A way to do this will be as Max suggested, reimbursing Ambassadors against ticket number.
2. Get LUGs to sell Fedora DVD at a reasonable price. Getting LUGs involved in Fedora as well as getting Fedora Ambassadors involved in Local Lugs will be a good way to increase the availability.
3. Get ambassadors and LocalContacts to fulfil requests usually.
I am still having a feeling I am missing something, but I don’t know what.
We are recently trying to implement a calendering solution for fedora as it would enable us to keep track of meetings, tasks, release dates, QA days, and events seamlessly without having edit the wiki, or converting time to our own timezones.
I tried out many solutions but I found most of the solutions will not serve our purpose.
Correct me if I am wrong and also let me know if there are other solutions exist.
1. Calender Server : No Web based GUI. Dropped.
2 Bongo Project - : Alpha, in their own terms, not suitable for production. Dropped.
3. Bedework -(BSD License): Requires sun JAVA. Dropped.
4. DAViCal - (GPLv2): Need stand alone clients, no web based frontend!! Dropped.
5. OpenGroupWare – (GPL or LGPL): Too messy. Dropped.
5.1. SOGo Requires LDAP, we have none. Dropped.
6. Chandler Project – (Apache v2.0): Will try out today.
7. Zikula – Candidate
8. Citadel - Candidate
For details, and access, please refer to ticket 1197
Thanks to Herlo for pointing out initial list of candidates.
I shall be almost unavailable for next few months.
I need to work even more on my thesis till End of May, then I need to find out what is next.
I shall attend APAC & FAmSCo meetings, will follow the mailing lists, but I shall be delayed in replying mails.
Also I am unlikely to take up any event right now.
Everything else is going to be same as usual.
Me, Subhodip, Arindam together with IDG and the Depertment of Physics, WBSUB, will be doing the 2nd teacher’s training at Barasat State University for next two days. The previous one was here. Basically, it is training school teachers about GNU/Linux and Free Software so that they can do their daily works using Linux. We will be using Fedora (of course!!!) for it.
The main reason I invest my time in it is, teachers teach others!!! So, if some teacher takes FOSS seriously, it will have a ripple effect.
From among all that is surrounding me, it’s the trams plying along kolkata.
A few days earlier, I decided that I would take a _long_ tram ride. Well, that was not my first time, but those previous rides are not related to this post.
So, I took the Number 16 tram from Ultadanga to BBD Bag. It costed me 4 Rupees (~8 cents) for a 8 km journey.
Suddenly, something caught my notice, it was a small metal plate above the driver’s cabin. It read the year of manufacturing as “1903″ !!!!
So, it was one from the first fleet of electric tram cars incorporated in Kolkata back in 1903, probably little modified and very well maintained.
But maintenance done not undermine the fact that the car is running continuously for last 106 years!!!
And what you need to add to this is kolkata’s weather is hot, humid, dusty and until a couple of years ago, the tracks were in real bad condition.
For the rest of my journey, what I was thinking about is, as an engineer, to what level one has to raise himself to achieve this much of excellence.
Just for my reference…
[root@localhost foo2zjs]# history | tail -n 10
201 wget -O foo2zjs.tar.gz http://foo2zjs.rkkda.com/foo2zjs.tar.gz
202 tar -xzvf foo2zjs.tar.gz
203 cd foo2zjs
204 uninstall
205 make uninstall
206 make
207 ./getweb 1020
208 ./getweb 1020
209 make install install-hotplug cups
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Magnum Opus Event Report
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Last week, I was to magnum opus, the tech fest of BHU, Varanasi.
The report is here.
Just to add to this, there was people mostly from computer science, so had a lot of queries about coding, fedorahosted, upstream/downstream development, I use ubuntu, why should I code for Fedora, can we do GSoC with Fedora, mirroring, server setup and others.
They are a bunch of smart guys and girls. I would particularly thank Dhushyanth, who organised it nicely and helped us a lot. I expect to get a few new faces from there soon.
Also we are discussing about setting up a Fedora mirror at BHU.
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Ambassadors
———————-
Started the initial house keeping for Indian Ambassadors.
Every Indian Ambassador should get this ping mail from me.
Please reply to the mail.
In case you haven’t received it for some reason, please let me know.
I shall be sending an ACK mail to all who has responded by 5th March.
———————–
Mirroring
———————–
A lot of proposals for mirror setup from all over India.
They are (1) NIT Agartala, Tripura, (2) BITS Mesra, Ranchi (3) IT-BHU, Varanasi (4)NIT Durgapur, West Bengal.
Next week, I am going to hold a IRC classroom on mirroring.
———————–
Mentoring
———————–
I mentored two girls on fedora-websites.
They are Ankita and Garima from Jaypee Institute of Information Technology University, Noida.
They responded to my mail in fedora india.
Good news is, they have been sponsored in the fedora-web group yesterday.
I am happy.
I also expect to mentor a few more people very soon.
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Infrastructure
———————-
1. The new freemedia process has been cleared by both Infrastructure Team and the FAmSco.
I shall send it to the Board right now. A new SOP has been approved by FAmSCo yesterday and will appear here.
The tickets will be available here.
2.I am working on opengroupware to evaluate it for our infrastructure. It is a messy thing. But a tentative solution for our long pending calendaring system.
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Others
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I shall be away for next two days.
I shall be to Magnum Opus, tech fest of Benaras Hindu University, Benaras.
I am supposed to give an Introduction to Fedora lecture there.
My talk is on 22nd Feb, 9-10 AM.
Hope it turns out to be a great event.
