Fedora session at NIT Hamirpur

NIT Hamirpur is located at Hamirpur, Himachal Pradesh, India. Nearest airport is Gaggal airport (Dharamsala/Kangra) about 83 kms by road from institute. My event was scheduled for 30th and 31st July. I had sent and planned session proposal couple of months back for approval.

For more pictures please go  here.

For past few days flights to Gaggal airport were getting frequently cancelled. As a precautionary measure I booked train tickets. Fortunately, while going to Hamirpur my flight was allowed to land at Dharamsala. But while coming back I had to come via cab to Una and train to Delhi because flight got cancelled.

On 30th July Saturday my first session was “Fedora – Freedom, Friends, Features, First”. Initially I talked about Free and Open source software in general. After that I gave an introduction about copyright, license and trade secrets.

After that, session included discussion about how most of community projects work i.e development, communication etc. This was followed by discussion about linux distributions and their relationship with community projects.

Later I talked about Fedora project in detail, Fedora values and how institute folks can contribute to Fedora. Session also included few application and library demos. I plotted curves for Bessels functions using scipy module and showed folks how different virtualization modules can be applied to a heart CT scan report via Mayavi. Demo also included recent virtualization support on Fedora. This was followed by bits about different spins provided by SIGs in Fedora community.

Then a discussion about how open source software in general and Fedora in particular can help build collaborative environment in institute. I did used certain videos at appropriate time in session. Most of them are available here.

I also talked in length about different tools and upstream projects being developed in open source community.

Next day on 31st morning I conducted a python session for students and faculty interested in new high level language with large community. This session included introducing few important python constructs and data structures. Every discussion was followed by a live demo of how particular construct or data structure is useful.

Both sessions were attended by large number of folks. At end of session there was a nice discussion about doubts, few issues and topics.

Thanks to Dr. Kamlesh Dutta for helping organise and conduct these sessions. Thanks to Dr. Anoop Kumar for coordinating at different times to make this event possible.

Fedora session presentation pdf is here. Thanks to Dr. Kamlesh Dutta for assembling pictures and passing to me. I had forgotten my camera at Delhi

Fedora 14 anjuta and glade3 testing required

Hello friends. In case you are an anjuta or glade3 user on Fedora, a much awaited update is on its way. Right now it is in updates-testing repo. It would be nice to get some testing and few karmas in case it works as expected. Update is here. Corresponding bugzilla is here.

useful script for Kindle users

In case you have a kindle device, I have a script written for sending files to your kindle account, so that they are sent back to your device after conversion.

This needs you to have a gmail account and that account added to Kindle account.

This works from terminal. So, it saves you from attaching all files to an email via your mail interface (be it any MUA or web browser).

It can be run as python pykindle.py provided you have written all your account information in ~/.pykindle.cfg


# Example:
# [Default]
# gmail_user =
# gmail_password =
# attach_dir =
# kindle_user =


File is here.

Trip to SMVDU – Fedora Fedora!

Day before yesterday I got an opportunity to visit smvdu institute and speak about Fedora Project and Community in general. It was a nice experience.

Institute is located near Katra town and surrounded by mountains. It is located at a distance of 50 kms from Jammu. Traveling to institute takes more then 2 hours via local bus service. Slots I got for speaking were from 5.30 pm to 7.30 pm on 15th Nov and 16th Nov. Because no bus service was available after 8.00 pm I had to stay in campus for a day.

For me main aim/target for this trip was to introduce Fedora Project community and distribution to institute students. Other target was to introduce open source model and how things work using this model. Also, how can they contribute towards Fedora Project.

First day I spoke about community projects and how contributors coordinate around them. This was followed by a discussion about licensing and its importance. Slowly took folks towards Fedora Project in particular and distributed Live Fedora media. This included occasional questions/answers as well.

Second day, I gave a live demonstration of how community communicates & collaborates taking Fedora Project as an example, Fedora Project values, basics about how applications work on operating system etc. This was followed by a long Q/A session.

Thanks to Mr Hari V Narayanan (smvdu faculty) for arranging this event. Thanks to Saurab (smvdu student), Anoop Sharma (smvdu faculty) and Ashwani (smvdu faculty) for helping several times in last 2 days.

Few picture are uploaded here.

YouTube and WebM support – fedora

This is from : https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Flash#YouTube_and_WebM_support

“”" Google has recently open sourced VP8 video format and combined it with Ogg Vorbis audio and a adaptation of the Matroska container to create a new format for free and open video and audio called WebM. YouTube is switching over to using WebM extensively and Fedora has embraced this format as well. Fedora 13 and Fedora 12 has updates to Gstreamer multimedia framework to enable users to play many YouTube videos directly without any use of Flash via browsers such as Epiphany and Midori which use Gstreamer. Fedora 12 users also need the webkitgtk update. Once you have the updates installed, to enable support for it in YouTube, go to http://youtube.com/html5 and click on “Join the HTML5 Beta” link in the bottom of that page. Note that all videos are not available in WebM format yet but this is expected to happen over time. Here is a sample video for testing. Fedora 14 will have more extensive support for WebM by default. “”"

In my view it is fairly a very good news.

FAD Pune

Hello,

Today I was at FAD Pune, along with few fedora India contributors from different places. It was nice to see Susmit, Sayamindu, Ankur and few other friends whom I meet often on #fedora-india channel.

It was started by a nice Autotools workshop by Siddhesh. Later I started looking at security bugs pointed by Rahul. Pushed fixes for few of them during whole day. It also involved tested the reproducer.

Updates which I pushed specifically today were:

ircd-ratbox and ircd-hybrid – update

xinha – update

liboggz – update

Along with those I pushed updates to fedora for aircrack-ng and Clam AntiVirus to rawhide. But I am still to confirm whether fix for them really knocks out the security flaw. So, kept them hanging in rawhide. Also did some bug triaging in between.

/rakesh

Few Fedora Updates

Haven’t posted anything for long. So, thought about writing about what I had been upto with fedora from last week.

* Pushed following updates to rawhide:

1. Mayavi – 3.3.0

which failed because of some nimpy lib failure

from numpy.linalg import lapack_lite
ImportError: /usr/lib64/python2.6/site-packages/numpy/linalg/lapack_lite.so: undefined symbol: zgesdd_

which I will fix tomorrow.

2. Traits – 3.2.0

3. EnvisagePlugins – 3.1.1

4. EnvisageCore – 3.1.1

5. AppTools – 3.3.0

6. EnthoughtBase – 3.03

7. TraitsGUI – 3.1.0

8. TraitsBackendQt – 3.2.0

9. setupdocs – 1.0.3

10. transifex – 0.8.0alpha

11. TaskCoach – 0.78.2

12. pdf2djvu – 0.6.2

13. ginac – 1.5.6

14. gflags – 1.3

15. fuse-zip – 0.2.11

16. flickcurl – 1.16

17. lynis – 1.2.9

* Reviewed following haskell programs to clear long awaiting ghc-* breakages in rawhide
1. ghc-html
2. ghc-xhtml
3. ghc-regex-posix
4. ghc-regex-base
5. ghc-regex-compat
6. ghc-haskell-src
7. ghc-parallel
8. ghc-QuckCheck
9. ghc-stm

* FTBFS: linphone, sitecopy, opencv, taskcoach

* bugzcxx

- Fixed and improved build files
- Fixed examples
- Support for old versions improved
- fixed compilation options
- fixed implicit references to functions from xmlrpc_helper file.
- Removed unused variables.
- Fixed implicit declaration of strptime function.
- Commented out validate_url for later development and removed its (not so sane) usage from init functions.
- Fixed wrongly declared static variable in bugzc/bugzc_product.c .
- Renamed timezone in examples/bugzc/gettimezone.c to time_zone because it was shadowning declarations from time.h
- Fixed return value for bugzc_list_create from bugzc/bugzc_list.c.
- Updated support files
- Fixed password handling
- Updated documentation
- etc

This week was fun

This week has been fun so far. Hopefully weekend will also be cool. Met Dimitris Glezos ( transifix uber_cool_hacker ) yesterday with few fri-en-ds. Had nice Kashmiri food (Roganzosh, Kabargah etc ) at Casinova/Shikara at Kalayani Nagar. There are some nice pics with Demitris and Ramky, will post them sometime later

This week along with updating bugzilla I pushed few updates to rawhide fedora for following packages up-imapproxy, lynis, unhide, zile, ginac, gflags, fuse-zip, enet, ctemplate, flickcurl, djvulibre, gedit-plugins, ortp etc. They are mostly new releases and some of them are bugfixes.

This also involves gedit bug fix push in new update release.

working on inetutils

I have been working on inetutils for some time. Recently added BSD options –timeout (equivalent to -w) and about to write down –timeout-response (equivalent to -W) to ping/ping6. Now is time to remove all redundant calls to sys/socket api and integrate both commands as much as possible.

I will be picking next tasks from TODO. 1.6 release needs lot of work.

Thanks Alfred for all review work

random notes

1. Gach will be released on 15 Aug .. first very basic version .. will have all modules working and at least achieve Nim Nim’s request here. Please file in tickets for all special requests.

project page: https://fedorahosted.org/gach/wiki

2. Next two weeks I will be away to Delhi and then Jammu. Wouldn’t be available online.