Code for freedom

India gained freedom 60 years ago. To commemorate this event, Sun has launched the "Code for Freedom" contest. This is open to all graduate/undergraduate studets in India. The contest will run for 6 months (upto Feb 08).

The prizes include

• Sun Workstations/Laptops for the grand prize.
• iPods Shuffles for significant contributors.
• USB sticks for early bird prizes.
• T-shirts for each valid submission.
• Sun hardware for university with the most worthwhile contribution.
  

You can choose to do your project in any of the following technologies depending on your interest:

Technology	Type of project	Interests
OpenSolaris	Work on solving bugs here. Solve as many as possible. Try to take on an easy one first and then try to move up the complexity.	C/C++, Operating system, Unix
Project GlassFish	Improve Project GlassFish by submitting bug reports, bug fixes, enhancement requests, code, documents and localizations. Click on the left link for more details	Java, Servlets, Client-Server model.
NetBeans	Code, Bugs and Documentation for the Netbeans IDE. This is one place where non-technical users can contribute in the form of tutorials, help pages, etc.	IDEs, Java, Netbeans.
Apache Derby	Putback code into the Apache derby codebase. Derby is a complete relational-database implementation with a very small footprint written fully in Java.	Java, Database
Open Portal	Portlets, Bugs, RFEs, Documentation. Work on the technologies (listed in link). Help with the integration with Netbeans.	Java, website, remote accesss

A suggestion to fellow students. Select your project depending upon your interest. It wont matter if you haven't contributed in the field/project before. This contest is meant to be that bridge. Once you have a topic selected, join all the appropriate mailing lists and IRC channels. Download the relevant source code and look through it. Once you have an idea of the flow of code, you can start with the actual coding. Be sure to learn how to ask questions on a mailing-list. The folks who work on your selected project will be more than happy to help you.

Go here for complete contest guidelines. You can take a look at the rules and FAQ.

Drop any queries you have below.

Welcome to free software. Happy coding!

BeleniX FanSpeak!

A video is probably worth a million words. So here goes:

 

Bosug Hackathon

The even went as planned and we had a great time. We came up with 35 spec files :)

The details are here. The pizza was good, the interaction was great. Wiht a large percentage of the participants being students (including myself), we learned a lot at his event. A 'thank you' goes to Shivakumar for organizing the event. Looking forward to more such.

I wrote the spec files for gnomad2 and its library dependencies.. and now you can easily connect and manage your creative music players on solaris :)

PS : I know Madhu took pictures, so if someone knows where they're uploaded, could you post the links here?

First ever opensolaris Hackathon (..that I know of)

 
A bunch of us at BOSUG, and few others around the world, will be participating in the first ever hackathon in OpenSolaris land. Its a 10-4 event on the upcoming Saturday.

Topic for Hackathon: Writing SFE spec files for open source software and contributing back to pkgbuild/specfiles repository. Most of these will be software already into BeleniX (..the BOSUG sweetheart!).

This event is being organized by BOSUGians Shivakumar and Ananth. Collect very good tutorials on pkgbuild and the GNU toolchain.

Around 20 members are participating in the event, with the ambitious target of 15 spec files per head. That should be close to 300 new spec files if we reach the expected results! The current repository is around 400 files big.

The discussions for the hackathon have been taking place at belenix-discuss. Join in to participate in this fun community.

Thats it for now. Will update later on how the event went.

Java Tutorials

I'd like to point out a great site for beginners getting into Java.

http://blogs.sun.com/thejavatutorials/

They contain great step by step instructions to create desktop applications using the Netbeans IDE. You might want to read the posts from the bottom, to stay in context. the page looks like it is currently active, so new tutorials are being added, so time to add that link to your bookmark (or RSS reader).

Another tutorial at http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/uiswing/learn/index.html

OpenSolairs and GPLv3

There has been a lot of talk about the recently released GPLv3. Few, like Linus, have been reluctant in supporting it, while few others call it revolutionary.

I lie in the 'dont-understand-the-issues-well-enough-to-comment' department. However, OpenSolaris is now at an interesting position. Jonathan Schwartz has made positive comments about GPLv3. However, there has been no concrete information regarding OpenSolaris going  GPLv3.

Here is my personal view on the subject. _If_ OpenSolaris does have plans to go GPLv3, now is the time. There are a lot of developers who are looking to move to GPLv3, either due to legal reasons or their philosophies on freedom. And they are on the lookout for a robust kernal to build upon. OpenSolaris would lose out on this large initial mileage if it waited too long. Just like Solaris lost a lot by waiting too long to go open.

Visit to the US of A

Wow!

Got back yesterday from a wonderful week long visit to the SUN campus in Menlo park. Five ambassadors (including myself) from around the world were invited to meet the SUN Executive Leadership Team to discuss the Campus ambassador program and talk about the students perspective of Sun and it's technologies.

The Indiana Wishlist!

There has been quite a discussion after a new binary distribution of OpenSolaris, Project Indiana, was announced.

The opinions are flying around, but there are a few in the noise that want to see this come up. Here is my wishlist of things I want in Indiana:

*The base: Belenix. It would be the best starting point for Indiana. Indiana _has_ to be a LiveCD, as a try-before-you-install environment is essential to spread awareness and use. Moinak's work on clofi and the fast boot by rearranging files on the CD are a _must_ as these allow for upto 1.8 Gb of stuff on a single CD and quick bootup respectively.

*Next is the installer. It should be GUI installer with an icon on the desktop of the LiveCD (ubuntu fashion). I know many folks simply want a console mode installer, but many others simply prefer a GUI. here again BeleniX has it's own installer, and a few BOSUGians have taken up the initiative to use PerlTK to modify the current installer to a GUI. With Gparted now available on OpenSolairs (and the latest release of BeleniX), it makes resizing of partitions, modifying the partition table and VTOC easy. Parted again was ported by folks in Bosug. I dont know what the status of the 'Caiman' project is, but if it anything close to release 1, this can be the way to go.

*Next is the desktop flavor. Indiana is headed towards being _the_ opensolaris distribution (or that is what I understand from the discussions). A good method to follow here would be the Ubuntu style separate installations for Gnome, KDE (and if possible Xfce). All three have been known to compile and work fine under OS. BeleniX by default contains KDE and Xfce, and the next DVD release will contain Gnome. Compiz should be added by default as it is stable enough to be part of the distro.

*Port Ubuntu's settings importer (from Windows). This should make the transition very easy.

*Get as much device driver support for monitors as possible. I run into problems much more regularly than care about when X doesnt come up. I understand that the device driver condition is improving at a slow rate and there's nothing much to do other than biding time, but atleast this one factor should be looked into. Getting folks to work on an OS is much better than not by losing out due X not recognizing the video card.

*I'm sure with Ian on board, everyone's expecting apt-get. Well we already have Blastwave and pkg-get for Solaris right now. But I dont like the /opt/csw/ method. Somehow pulling stuff that already in there does not make sense for a new distribution. A package management system need to be setup (and a GUI along with it would be great) that uses a repository to install to /usr. This perhaps could be hosted on the Blastwave servers along with their current array of packages. Folks from Bosug are working on one such system that will also allow rollbacks.

These are need-to-be-done-stuff. Now coming to what would be nice to add.

*Get xgl working, so non-Nvidia folks can have a little 3D fun!

*Change that text bootup. This really is a pet peeve of mine, I Dont want to know that rtls0 has been down and up and if c0d0s0 is logging. At the vey last escape from the 80x25 and put all of these stuff in a drop down console box, that interested users can pull down to see what's going on.

*Add Ubuntu like 1-click codec downloader for media formats not bundled.

*Sun Studio 12 IDE bundled in. Seriously, looks like one of the best C IDEs out right now. This should help in picking OpenSolaris up in educational institutions.

*USBDump on the CD, so you can carry the distro around in your USB :) (I'm working on using encryption here using Xlofi, more on this in a later post.)

*First release before 2008!

Looks like this is the first wishlist out for Indiana, so I'd like so to see most implemented. Will update later if I have stuff to add on.

BeleniX 0.6!

If you guys havnt heard yet, BeleniX 0.6 has been released!

There are a bunch of stuff that have been added including:

Compiz 0.5.0 3D Manager integrated into Xfce and KDE. Works only with Nvidia display cards (with the included Nvidia driver).

Usbdump integrated into the LiveCD. You can now boot from the CD pop in a USB stick and execute usbdump in a terminal to get BeleniX on USB.

3000 OpenSolaris manpages

Give it a try. download it here.

For complete release details go here.

 

Corona

Whew!

Campus ambassadors from Bangalore (& our friend Nitin from NIT, Suratkal) conducted a hands on event 'Corona' today.

We had limited seating, so registered 80 participants from various colleges/universities.

Corona started off with an introductory talk on the OpenSolaris community (I used the slides by Tim Foster). This was followed by a talk on Sun Studio 12 and it great features.

CA head for India, Ganesh, attended the first talk, and we has pictures taken. I'd like to mention now that he was the one who encouraged us CAs to come up with Corona. Thanks Ganesh!

Finally, Corona concluded with a hands on session on Java ME with Netbeans. You could hear all the "Wow"s and the *sigh*s when Anand dragged forms over the Java ME forms!

In between, we conducted a programming contest on C, and another one on Java ME. We gave our 4 USB sticks to the winners. All of the 70 who attended walked away with the SXDE DVDs (see pic below!), Netbeans CDs and the SUN pens.

The enthusiastic crowd at corona!..

 

.. And the ambassadors actively promoting temple of the sun ;) 

(Nitin, Pradeep, Anand, Jayanth, Yours truly, Trisha, Pooja and Ankita) 

Nomenclature

I was random-click browsing, and came upon a pretty amusing article comparing Internet Explorer with Firefox.

At one point where the names are compared:

Microsoft leaves no doubt what their products are. If they made toilet paper it would be called Butt Wiper.

Nothing against MS and their browser, just appreciate the funny stuff and all that..

You can read the whole article here..
 

Java EE Tech Demo

Continuing the Java theme, I conducted a Java EE tech demo yesterday. For all interested the slides and sheets are available for download.

Netbeans EE Presentation

Netbeans Web Application sheet

Netbeans Web Services sheet

Netbeans EJB

To the guys who attended: There's surprises coming up in the next demo, including a chance to win 5000$ ! Stay tuned for those ;)

Micellaneous Solaris stuff..

Lots of things have come up in the last few days that demand to be blogged about.

First off.. theres Compiz packages for JDS! Show your friends things Vista can't do! You need a minimum of Solaris Express build 60 and an Nvidia Card. More instructions here on Moinak's blog.

Here's a screenshot!

On the BeleniX front, expect the 0.6 release in a couple of weeks. New stuff I'm exited about:

• Compiz/Beryl possibly built in!..
• Ability to save your changes back to writable LiveMedia like USB. More ubiquitous computing
• Encryption support for USB.. all changes will be encrypted. Work on this is ongoing.
  
• Performance enhancements.
  

A few fellow students from MSRIT have ported GNU parted to Solaris, and this will help in porting various linux installers to Solaris (Woot!)

Win 5000$ playing a wonderful flash game! This is a promotional campaign for Sun Studio, you'll need to have that installed to finish the game.

Demo: Netbeans for the desktop

Gave a tech demo for Netbeans today explaining it's neat set of features.

The link to the slide is here. The collaboration data sheets are here and here. The GUI (matisse) sheet is here. And the profiler sheet is here.

Now to the questions:

A good tutorial for netbeans is at http://www.functionx.com/java/Lesson01.htm

The instructions for registering for the online training and the certification tests are at this orkut page. You have to go here to register and use the training..

I think that covers most of it. If I've left out any queries, do leave a comment and I'll get back.

Livemedia presentation