FAD Pune, medical spin, and time to move.

I, along with my friends, attended the FAD pune held during the previous weekend. I worked on the medical spin. Identified and listed quite a few software which are necessary but unpackaged. A number of people has taken up the packaging tasks and so far it is going good. I am looking for a release during F14 cycle.

On a side note, I am moving to NA (Denver/Fort Collins to be precise) this August. I shall do my doctoral studies and research there. At the same time I shall also work as a teaching assistant. I am looking forward to a great research experience and chances are very high that you will find me in the FADs and FUDCons. 🙂

Call for Fedora 13 release events.

We are pretty excited about the release that we are approaching. Thanks
goes to everyone for their brilliant efforts.

The release events have always been an integral part of our releases. Many ambassadors and contributors are already planning the parties.

As we have merely three weeks to go before the release, its time that we start working on placing things in place.

If you are planning an event, you are welcome and encouraged to do it.

To make things easier to organise, please follow these steps (there are not many steps to follow though. :))

1. Start by creating an wiki page. The wikipage should be at
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Release_Party_F13_<your_city>.

2. Edit the page and at the top of the page write {{subst:ReleaseParty}} and save.

3. Now fill in the details. Information requirement is minimal. You won’t need more than five minutes.

4. Link your page from https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F13_release_events

If you need any budget or support for your release event, you are welcome to ask for it. Please fill in the appropriate section in your event page.

Also, we will have a meeting in the second week of May (Around 10th) to discuss issues and clarifications regarding organisation of release events. In the meanwhile, if you want to ask anything or need any clarification, please drop me a mail.

Thank you once again for your brilliant efforts.

GNUnify 2010

Unlike last year, we did not have any separate fedora room. But that didn’t prevent us to do what we wanted to. May be the audience was less per fedora talk, but the good talks and workshops always attracted good crowd.

GNUnify is also a nice event for me because I get to meet many people working at pune and can discuss our future plan for fedora. It has always been a nice tour for me except the food this time. I now hate lamb, specially at pune. 🙂

Coming to my talk, I presented on fedora-medical sig. The slides are here. My talk was the last one of the event so there was not much of a crowd. But the talk was worth it when two doctors came up to me and said they are trying to shift to foss and was interested in replacements of some particular solutions that they use under win$. I also had some input from fedora people specially Sankarshan, who emphasised on having a goal and a roadmap. Let’s see how that goes.

A few other posts on this is here and here. A few more pictures are here.

Fedora Medical SIG. Updates and Cfp.

I was a bit confused about whether I should put everything in a single blog or do two different blogs. 😉

This week, we had the first meeting of our newly formed  Medical SIG. We decided that our primary work will be identifying different workflows (well, there will be many,  may be we will do some generalisation) and attacking one at a time. We decided to start with a clinical practitioner’s workflow. The full meeting log is here.

We now have our own mailling list own mailing list, it is a open list, so you are welcome to subscribe if you are interested. We also have a trac instance for tracking issues.

I am already receiving mails/suggestions/queries for this one, which apparently shows that picking this up was not a bad idea after all.

Fedora Distribution Project.

It has been long time since I last blogged. There is so much to write, but I shall keep it short.

Fedora Distribution Project:

We were discussing about this for a long time. Currently, all the offline Fedora vendors are listed in the wiki and finding a shop near you selling Fedora DVD is not at all a easy task. Neither is maintaining the up to date listing of vendors. The result, crazy amount requests coming towards freemedia. I receive scores of mails saying “I can not afford to buy Fedora Media, so send me a disk”. However, in reality, disks are available in less than a dollar.

I started writing the application for integrating all different types of offline availability in the month of November. However, I had some personal business to attend to and it was delayed. Finally, the prototype is now available. Have a look. The most important things that I need are feedbacks, suggestions and some tesing. If you are interested in helping in any way, please open a ticket or write to me at susmit AT fedoraproject DOT org. Finally, if you find the site nice, thank Tatica and Hiemanshu for their help. I have some more works to do, but those should be easy. The hardest part was fixing the CSS. 🙂

FAmSCo first meeting and a few important decisions.

Hello Ambassadors, probably you have gone through the first famsco meeting log. A few important decisions were taken.

1. The FAmSCo list is now open. We have moved to a new list with open archiving policy. You can now take active part in policy making.

2. We have updated the election rules, which drew a lot of discussions recently.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAmSCo_election_rules

3. Max is working on a monthly report template for FAmSCO members and we shall update the community about how each region is doing. This update will be monthly.

4. I was looking for a TRAC for managing and organising APAC better. Thanks to nb, we have it here. I was thinking if it would be nice to have a APAC mailing list too?

5. We have a few pending items too. If you have something in mind, please add it to the agenda page.

6. Personally, I have received the fedora-distribution trac. Developing the application will be a bit easier.

Ambassadors, what do you want me to do?

First, thank you for re-electing me. I was not very sure if I wanted to run again and if I could be useful to people. My way of testing that was to put a vague, “non-serious” candidate statement accompanied by a complete silence about voting and my candidature. However, the result turned out to be amazing. Thanks again for all your support.

Now that the decision has been made, I don’t want to waste any more time. We lost some precious time during our last tenure. Let’s start working on the things that *you* think essential. I have updated the agenda page. Please update the task list.

As I said in my statement, this time, I shall put equal amount of labour to India and APAC.

For APAC, I was thinking about
1. A APAC mailing list,
2. A budget trac (like EMEA, India) and
3. A APAC magazine, so that we know what is happening.
4. And last but not least, identifying countries where we lack and working on them.

What India needs is pretty much clear to me and we are already working towards it. So I won’t write about it here.

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.