A new Fedora project

A brainwave is all it takes.  My room mate just reinstalled his Windows system . I was wondering around his system and I happened to notice the “Welcome to windows” app. It got me thinking that maybe it’d be a good idea if Fedora had something of the sort too. The goal is to improve user experience while also making the user aware of everything that Fedora has to offer. It’s only an idea that Ryan and me have begun to work on. (Less than an egg)

Here are the details. Please have a look for yourselves and comment (the talk page?) or right here itself.

I thank Mel for all the clarification and direction she gave us this morning.

 

Microsoft shouldn’t have played with us

Personally, I’m a FOSS lover. But that doesn’t make me a “Microsoft hater”. It’s a good OS, I just prefer to use Linux , Fedora.

Having said that, this blog post is going to show you how irresponsible Microsoft can be.

Some background:: I’m a 5th sem student at Manipal Institute of technology, Manipal, India . My end semester exams just got over yesterday, so technically I’m in 6th sem now The exams were scheduled (for CSE and IT branches )from the 14th to the 24th of November, following which we have a winter break before college reopens on the 4th of January next year. Since it’s impossible to get tickets at the last moment, the entire class (that’s 150 people from computer science and another 60-70 from the IT branch) had reservations to head home asap after the 24th. So, I had a bus ticket for the night of the 24th to Bangalore and a flight to New Delhi the same evening.

The event:: Then!! One fine day, an announcement is made that Microsoft’s coming to college on the 29th-30th of Nov to test/interview us and take “the best” as interns. Needless to say, anyone interested would have to stay back after the exams. Well, helter-skelter  we went, rescheduling trains, buses, flights. A few days later, the date is rescheduled to the 26th -27th. Okay, no biggie, wasting a few days is okay. Yesterday, on the 24th , two days before the supposed interview, Microsoft isn’t coming at all!!! WTF???? How does that work? Aren’t they supposed to take some sort of responsibility? Causing a hundred and fifty students to reschedule and waste money ( cost me more than 1500 Rs to get my flight rescheduled ) and then leaving us hanging here when we should be at home enjoying holidays? It’s preposterous not to forget thoroughly UNPROFESSIONAL. Such a company wants to rule the software market? Haha.. joke.

I’m still in college and don’t have much of an experience of the “corporate world”. BUT, I really din’t expect it to be like this. Still hard to digest. Have a good day!

Fedora India meeting minutes

From my post to the mailing lists:

hey,

To start with, links :

http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-india/2009-11-22/fedora-india.2009-11-22-06.02.html

http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-india/2009-11-22/fedora-india.2009-11-22-06.02.log.html

http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-india/2009-11-22/fedora-india.2009-11-22-06.02.txt

People present (lines said)
1. franciscod (208)
2. mbuf (141)
3. jdk2588 (37)
4. skbohra (37)
5. Pradipta (31)
6. rakesh (29)
7. kushal (17)
8. sm|CPU (8)
9. sankarshan (7)
10. Acedip (5)
11. kishan_ (3)
12. kishan (2)
13. zodbot (2)
14. kedars_ (1)
15. rajeshr (1)
16. rtnpro (1)
17. yevlempy (1)

==================================================================

There were two topics on the agenda as posted on the mailing list:
- F12 release events
- Tamil team
- During the course of the meeting, we decided to discuss the issue of
“people becoming Fedora Ambassadors and not carrying out their duties as
required” also.

Minutes -
Release events:

- Planned at MIT Manipal, early January (Ankur Sinha)
- Release party, install fests at Bikaner (Jaideep)
- Plans to migrate 100 desktops of Coal India to fedora12 (Pradipta)

Tamil team discussion:
Postponed (next meeting?)

Discussion over fedora ambassadorship

- Making sure that blogs of *every* Ambassador is on
planet.fedoraproject.org

- some sort of system to prevent people from signing up (because its
ultra cool) and then not working.
- make a nice proposal and send it for discussion and whatever be the
result send it to FEMSco for approval
- ideas, such as an Ambassador should be participating in at least one
Fedora subgroup (ie docs/packaging/design/websites…)

- Mentoring to make sure newbies holding release fests know what to say
ie – *correct content* (since they’re short on experience, we don’t want
them saying stuff that is different from the community’s working etc.)
- Setting up a wiki page and supplying people with updated slides and
material to be used at release fests.

- collecting feedback after a Fedora event from the audience (ideas
needed on how to go about doing this).

- regular IRC meets : fortnightly *at least*

- good install fests never turning into sustained activities : why??

==========================================================================

These are only ideas in short. Please go through the meeting logs
provided above.

There’s quite a lot of work to be done.

- I’m in-charge of rounding up all “FAs from India”’s blogs and making
sure they’re on the planet.
- Slides etc? (any hands ??)

There are also agendas that still need more discussion. Future meets or
discussions on the mailing list are needed.

Thank you all for attending

Have a nice evening

regards,
Ankur

PS Also forwarding the the ambassadors list.

I saw the code of DEATH in action!

For those who aren’t aware,

su -

rm -rf *

is referred to as the code of death. Really needless to explain why. Well, I had never thought I’d see it happen, but I did. Not exactly the above mentioned commands, but as another lethal variant:

su -

mv /* /somedir

How and when? I was hanging out on #fedora when this dude said he needed help. A fellow admin to his remote server had typed in the above commands (there was lag and something something). Anyhow, so, you do the math. We tried making a shell script to move everything back. OH! but wait! you can only use built in shell commands. Makes it way more tougher, doesn’t it? I couldn’t fix it, but I did learn some stuff trying to.

Sent the dude to #bash, where an excellent fellow, who REALLY knew his stuff, helped out. He compiled an executable using static linking (so it wouldn’t want the moved libs) and placed it in the dir using tcp or something (This part I know nothing about). Since you couldn’t use chmod anymore, they overwrote an already executable binary (sorry unrar). The file moved everything back to where it was supposed to be. This din’t come about as trivially as it sounds.

Sounds simple eh? Trust me, isn’t. At least wasn’t for me.

So, a close experience of the code of death. Lesson learnt : Root is dangerous !!

rtorrent <3 <3 <3

So, I’m basically a terminal user. If I could do everything from the terminal I wouldn’t bother with a DE. Anyway, out of the command line clients, rtorrent’s one I love!! I just read through the complete man page and learnt all the awesome options it has.

Here’s my .rtorrent.rc file: Read the man page to understand what I’ve done

directory = ~/Downloads/torrents/

session = ~/Downloads/rtorrent_sessions/

upload_rate = 20

download_rate = 40

peer_exchange = yes

dht = auto

throttle_up = low,10

throttle_down = low,10

throttle_up = med,20

throttle_down = med,20

Probably a post on irssi next

Fedora : PackageKit change

Not a lot of people seem aware of this. This is from the announce list. Please help spread the word.

The Fedora 12 release contained changes in the default PackageKit
behavior that allow installation of packages by users in cases where:

* the user is logged in on the local console, and
* is installing packages signed with a previously trusted key, and
* is using a previously configured and trusted repository

After more discussion and thought, though, the package maintainers
have posted to the fedora-devel-list mailing list agreeing to provide
an update to Fedora 12's PackageKit.  The update will require local
console users to enter the root password to install new software
packages.  Details on the changes are found here:

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-November/msg01445.html

--
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/

Installing skype: big trouble!!

ah, simple, yum install skype-2.1.0.47-fc10.i586.rpm should do it for me.. But wait!! What do we have here?? It installed without pulling in ANY deps, and obviously skype din’t work. Errors: “missing this missing that!!”

Now I’m sitting here running alternating “yum installs” and “yum whatprovides” to try and manually install the deps.  And, yeah, since it’s an i586 package, I’m installing i686 packages to support it on my x86_64 system. Talk about trouble!

Already, my webcam module wont build. Dunno how they manage to build it here http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=160117&page=3

It doensn’t build ( as you can see from my repeated cries on the thread )

Guess it’s a bad day to install stuff

 

EDIT

Steps (from my comment below):

yum install qt-x11-4.5.3-9.fc12.i686

yum install qt-4.5.3-9.fc12.i686

yum install libXScrnSaver-1.2.0-1.fc12.i686

yum install libXv-1.0.5-1.fc12.i686

yum install alsa-lib-1.0.21-3.fc12.i686

and after all this, it functions with an error (doesnt cause any harm though) which requires

yum install alsa-plugins-pulseaudio-1.0.21-2.fc12.i686

 

Fedora 12: After release stuff

So, F12’s been released. Was awesome to see 580+ people on #fedora during and after the final release countdown

Anyway, sooo many posts regarding “F12’s been released” are already out, so I won’t blog on that anymore. There’s lots more work to be done now that it has been released!

• Release parties!
• More bugs to report!
• More marketing to do! -> diggup

By the way, if you happen to be a fedora ambassador, please be there at #fedora-india on the morning of Sunday, 22nd Nov at 1130AM IST to discuss what release parties we plan and their requirements.

Have a great F12!

Codechef Campus SnackDown

Okay, this post is to do with my life out of the Fedora community.

Here’s a mail I got from CodeChef . The contest is only for Indian students this time, and weirdly enough falls right in between my end sem exams.

Hi Ankur,
I’m writing to let you know about the CodeChef Campus SnackDown, our biggest contest ever, specifically for Indian college students.

<snip>

The details of the contest are included below:

· ACM ICPC style contest with two rounds

o   Round 1: Online Programming Contest on 21st Nov. 2009, Saturday 4pm-9pm

o   Round 2: In Person programming contest on 10th Jan. 2010, Saturday

· Students can form teams of three

· The team which performs best in your college will be recognized on CodeChef

· The top teams from all over India will be flown down to Mumbai for the in person round

· Prizes of Rs 3 lakhs in cash to be won!!

So go ahead and ask your members to register their teams here: http://www.codechef.com/teams/register/SNACKDWN

We have given the details about the contest on our blog: http://blog.codechef.com/2009/10/27/the-super-gigantic-mega-announcement/

Cheers,

Basil Skariah

The poster can be found here:

http://ankursinha.fedorapeople.org/cc_snackdown_poster_1_final.jpg

The F12 beta experience!

Just got my system upto F 12 today (11.92 actually).

Everything works. The installer played bug free, nouveau is looking good (do i need kmod-nvidia anymore?)

The new network manager interface looks awesome. I noticed some improvement in bluetooth too. Anyway, it’s just been half a day. More features to praise and more bugs to swat as we go on!!

With just a few days left for the final release, I’m sure this one’s going to be an even bigger leap than Leonidas. Go Constantine!!