FAD Pune 2010

It all started with a discussion on having a FUDCON India this year. Someone suggested some agendas, others observed the agenda as more suited to a series of FADs, and we decided to have a FAD, off course in Pune as that would make the job of finding a venue, internet connectivity and people a piece of cake. More on that later.

FAD, which is the abbreviated form of "Fedora Activity Day", is an event where people meet up together and work towards getting things done. Everyone has some plans of how they want to spend their time during a FAD and so did all of us. Someone wanted to do some packaging, others aimed at some serious bug zapping and some just wanted to sit and hack on some tough piece of code. Mine was the simplest plan of getting stuffs packaged. I wanted to get some packages reviewed and review some in return. The next few lines shines some light on what I did in the two days.

I had a very start on the first day when I accidentally broke my specs. Wasn't really able to read stuffs and could not get much done. Still I tried to review rtnpro's python-keyring package as I had taken that up earlier. It was missing some dependency and wasn't really compiling. Tried to fix that for him, could not get it done. Even Kushal da tried his hand on it but in vain. Next was getting python-plwm reviewed which I had submitted earlier. Rahul happily took up the task and recommended a few changes which I did and submitted. In the afternoon had a great discussion on Open Hardware with Siddharth from BHASHA . He is a great guy with a barrage of ideas. tuxdna DNA got interested in the ARMStrongIDE project and took it up actively. In the evening, Rahul showed me how to start a different window manager by using .xinitrc . It was really fun. Thus the first day bode farewell.

After a good night sleep, all of us were back on Sunday, all charged up to get things done. Second day was a little more eventful for me. Got my specs repaired. Susmit da had already prepared a wishlist for Fedora Medical Spin. Started packaging one of those, GNUMed to be precise. Also helped Ankur in his glorious attempt tp package kufper which uses the waf build system that too an age old version. Sayamindu da's talk was the highlight of the day, "OLPC as a downstream of Fedora and problems faced". In the mean time rtnpro worked on his vocab building application and Ankur on Fedora tour. Harsh did some packaging for Medical spin as well. Runa spent the day working on Gnote help. By this time, it was evening and Rahul wanted to discuss what we achieved, what more could have been done, what went wrong. Everyone had different opinions but on one stream all agreed - "We need to have more specific agendas". An online version of this event ought to follow soon. The day was concluded with some FUDCON related discussions and so was the FAD.

This was the first FAD I ever attended and it was a great learning experience for me. It was lot more fun and productive and collaborative than any irc version can ever be. Hope to see atleast annual FADs in the years to come if not more.

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Fedora Activity Day at Dr. B.C Roy Engineering College

On 14th May, Thursday, a Fedora Activity Day was organized by the Durgapur Linux Users' Group (DGPLUG) at Dr. B.C Roy Engineering College, Durgapur. Though this event was in planning for a long time and was supposed to happen 1 months earlier, it had to be postponed by more than a month. But it finally materialised. Well as they say- "Better late than never".

Ratnadeep contacted me long back and I agreed to take a session on FEL and helping them out with the FAD in general. On the day of the FAD, I was all ready to tune in to FEL mode.
The organizers had arranged for a nice computer lab for the FAD. It had around 30 computers and each was running a FEL live DVD, the ones they had burned the previous night. These would be serving a triple purpose- FEL demonstration, KDE desktop demo and free media. All set up, we were waiting for the students who started arriving at around 11:30 a.m and the lab was almost full by 12:00 noon. We were there, ready to get, set and go.
The FAD started with an "Introduction to Fedora project" by makghosh followed a very nice presentation on " Myths about Linux busted with Fedora" by Kishan Goyal. Subhodip chipped in at times where some extra information needed to be provided. These two sessions established the foundation and explained to the people what Fedora is. Next in line was a very colourfull demonstration by our artwork team members, the Linux chix of DGPLUG. They showed some cool Inkscape handiwork and some artwork they had made themselves. What's the use of a Linux installation if you cannot use it. Yes usability is very important and the next demo served exactly this purpose. It was a demo on Desktop usability. Sunny Sharma, with a little help from Ratnadeep and me, did a pretty great job of amazing the audience with the frills and cool graphics of KDE. It was already 2:10 and our stomachs were growling. So we decided to take a lunch break and meet at 2:45 sharp.
The people were really punctual and almost all of them were back at 2:50 p.m after a trip to the canteen upstairs. I forgot to mention that there was a blizzard outside and we had a power cut. The lab was running of UPS which was crying out loud and could give up any moment. All the PCs were switched off and only the bare necessities were kept running- the projector and the laptop. Under such grave circumstances I got up to start a demo of IRC. Sunny Sharma was helping me out. The Airtel mobile office connection that we were using was damn slow and we were left with no other choice than www.mibbit.com/chat as Airtel blocks IRC port. We explained them the concept of IRC, what are networks, what are channels and what are nicknames. Connecting to a network and joining a channel was also showed. Channels like #fedora, #fedora-india, #dgplug, #nitdgplug, ##linux on freenode were sown. Then came the very important thing about IRC ettiquette. Roshan Singh and Shakthi Kannan helped us demonstrate IRC live. Roshan helped establish a very good point that its not always geeky stuffs on IRC but we also have fun.
By this time a few electronics students had joined the crowd and they had come exclusively for the Fedora Electronics Lab session. So we began the FEL session without further delays. The UPS had already run out of life and I had to use the laptop to show them the various things we can do with FEL. No big screen this time. Almost the whole portfolio was demonstrated. I kept in mond the student's necessities and demonstrated only those tools in details which would be useful to them. gsim85, Ktechlab, octave, piklab, gresistor, drawtiming, ghdl were some of the tools. I had prepared some examples and used them to illustrate the functionalities. One student was also asked to try his hand on KTechlab and he did a pretty good job. KTechlab pretty much was the spotlight tool. The students were also give some tips on how to contribute to FEL , the fedora-electronic mailing list and some sites wich might come in handy. The power cut still loomed large and a concensus was reached to continue with the other sessions the next day.
I wasn't present the next day but as I heard that around 30 people attended the sessions, and learned a lot from the gcc, vim, shell commands sessions. As a toping to the ice cream, Subhodip gave a presentation on how to contribut to FOSS. That was pretty much it. All that remained was a follow up to this event which is already under planning and will probably be held in August. Till then the participants ave got enough to chew on.

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Interactive Fedora Know How Session

Yesterday, 9th April, an interactive session was held at NIT Durgapur. This was planned as a follow up to the previously held install fest and was mainly aimed at making people familiar with the various contributing avenues besides being a problem solving session for the attendees. This was also going to be a first speaking opportunity for two of our junior LUG members. One was Vikas Singh who was supposed to speak about common configurations and package managing using rpm, yum and another was Roshan Singh gave demonstration of IRC and mailing lists.

Publicity was done well. Posters and notices were put up everywhere. Announcements were also made on various mailing lists. This session was going to be similar to the session done by Kushal Das last year when he came to our college along with three other ambassadors from Durgapur.

The session was to start from 6:00 pm and people started arriving. We finally started the session at 6:30 pm. Around 25 people were present there out of which almost 20 were new faces. It was exciting to find so many new people interested in FOSS. The session began with package management. Yum and rpm were demonstrated. Dependencies were explained. Then it came to basic configurations like proxy settings, samba, SELinux etc., which needed to be done to make ones Fedora system universally usable. The various important packages and codec packs were named. Packagekit was also demonstrated. Vikas also did a good job in showing the local language desktop and keyboard layouts.


Roshan was next and and he demonstrated IRC and mailing lists, starting with IRC. Thanks to www.mibbit.com for being there to help us out as IRC client do not work in our college due to firewall. He showed how to join the various channels like #nitdgplug, #dgplug, #fedora-india, #fedora etc on freenode.net. He even pinged Sankarshan da telling him that he was on a big screen in front of future FOSS contributors. Sankarshan da waved at the people. He also demonstrated other stuffs like nick registration, nickserv commands, whois command and etiquette of talking on IRC and mailing lists. Next came the mailing list and people were shown how to join a mailing list. They were also told about the various mailing lists like fedora-list, fedora-india, nitdgplug etc. The redhat mailman index page address was also given to them.


I was next and started with installation from source. The steps were explained to them in details and debugging flag was also illustrated. After that came the very important thing of bugzilla. They were explained what a bug is and how do detect it. GNOME Bugzilla was shown to them, how to search bugs, how to file bug reports were parts of it. Bug triaging was also demonstrated with a gedit bug. The various links were given to then. Redhat Bugzilla was also shown. Then came the time for Fedora project contribution guide and they were told about the various sub projects, what are their roles and how to join them. Artwork, Peoples' person, localization were a few that were mentioned. live.gnome.org and code.google.com were also shown to them since upstream contribution was the theme of this session. I also told them about Linux Chix project and the girls seemed pretty excited about it. I also mentioned the wonderful site by Shakti Kannan. That was almost all of it.

I called upon Debayan to conclude the session by sharing his experience as a FOSS contributor and he did a good job in motivating the people present. He told them about planets and showed them planet-floss India. He ended the session with the I am Linux contest videos and the new motto that came up in our mailing list "Just do it because you can".


The session seemed to be pretty productive one and only time will tell us if we actually moved the people's hearts. The various links given to them were as follows:

http://docs.fedoraproject.org/drafts/rpm-guide-en/
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeLove/HowToStart%20En
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeLove
http://live.gnome.org/Bugsquad/TriageGuide
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Join
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/Join
http://www.linuxchix.org/
http://www.gizmostyle.com/2009/04/08/linux-enters-the-im-a-macim-a-pc-row-with-were-linux/
http://www.shakthimaan.com/downloads/
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo

Fedora stickers were in abundance which were distributed to the attendees and extra were given to them for distributing them to their friends. Since then I have noticed some new people on the mailing list and the session seems to be successful but this is too early to say something like this. Hope it helps the FOSS world and in turn the world.

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Blooming Bijra

This post was supposed to be written one day back but since I was busy working on the offline repo and installing Fedora on friend's computer, so this post comes a little late. On the fine day of 6th March, Friday, Shreyank and me went for a visit to a high school in a village located on the outskirts of Durgapur and made famous by the DGPLUG project . This project set up a computer lab in a village school where you don't even get proper drinking water and where none of the students would have never had a chance of so as to even see a computer if not for this project. It was a farsighted one. Kudos to the DGPLUG people.

The Title Stone

Project Banner

I woke up that morning on a call from Ratnadeep informing me that they will be catching the 11:30 bus to Bijra and was telling me since I had showed interest earlier to go to Bijra. I confirmed our visit after getting the detailed route from him. After a hell lot of a trouble, we finally managed to reach Bijra.

That's Bijra Village

What I saw there was simply amazing. The students out there were in some ways more disciplined than Model School students and were so very enthusiastic about stuffs. Ratnadeep and gang were showing them some fun stuffs on Linux, not willing to overload their brains with blah blah information. DGPLUG had installed, with some help from WBUT, a computer lab out there which runs on LTSP. Several low grade network boot machines booting from a high grade server. This reduces the installation cost. After some time with showing them Marble and Kstars and other fun stuffs, they were moved to the lab in groups of 30, 10 per computer since only 3 computers were running. They were being showed the National Geographic videos which were archived there. Shreyank was explaining Global Warming to them. He was stammering a bit with Bengali since it's not his mother tongue. The small kids were actually telling him the bengali words for whatever he was trying to say. I was amazed by that.

Ratnadeep Teaching Geography

Marbles At Work

On other two consoles the small girls and boys were being taught how to use TuxPaint to write their names, change colours, styles, font size etc. Initally they were a bit rusty with the stuff but picked up easily with a little practice and encouragement. It was really awesome teaching them. Then colour filling was demoed and they were allowed to try it out themselves. They were so exhilarated with the experience of actually working with a computer. One thing that simply took me aback was the fact that they learned the 'ctrl+z' undo function just by observing me do it. I explained it to them. At this point I was almost killing myself for the fact that I didn't bring a proper camera. Every moment was photogenic. One incident happened that has to be, has to be mentioned here. A harmonium was lying on the table and its cover was on the other table. A small kid, yeah much smaller than me both in height and age, took the cover and put it on the harmonium, something I had never done in my whole school life. He actually made me feel small in front of him.

That Says "COMPUTER" in Bengali

Shreyank Showing Nat Geo Videos

The headmaster was quite nice and had warmth in his behaviour. He made acquaintances with us and we promised him to help him with the project whenever he needs any. He was very thankful about that. As we came out of the school and were waiting for the bus, the children kept waving at us from the windows (not Microsoft Windows). It was a sight to cherish. We too waved back Shreyank was pushed by all this to promise another visit to Bijra very soon. Thus a great day of enlightenment, for us, for the children there, came to an end.

If You Look Carefully You Could See
Tiny Hands Waing At Us

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