Today i delivered my first talk outside college thanks to Sun.it is a great honour to represent sun out side my college.I truly felt like a sun recruit.
I was initially apprehensive as to how i would handle it when rajesh ( my coordinator) spoke to me about it. In fact i even asked him if he could trust me on the job :D.Then spoke to a few CAs ( kumar abhishek  and
ashwin bhat ) as to what i could do as a part of the session.Abhishek  helped me in  putting the talk together with a few ideas  thanks to him the whole talk could be out planned well.
I gave a general talk on open source technologies of Sun and how you could contribute.I initially started with a brief discussion on open source technologies it was more of a interaction session to make it more effective presented a video as a comparative study between open source technologies and proprietery ware ( if you know who i am speaking ). Then moved on to speak about participation age how important it is for students to get involved now.Then gave a general overview of all the sun technlogies from Java  to SPARC.
Then i took up three technologies SOLARIS,JAVA and SUNSPOTS. i spoke individually of  the technologies and how students can contribute to each of them  where  they can look for help. The audience was hugely interactive.We gave out goodies for those who asked questions and also ditributed a  few  opensolaris  cd among  those who were interested...
At, the end of the day all i can tell you now is i can go and speak any where and to anybody . I think that is one of the advantages of being a CA you get to learn things everyday and today boosted my confidence to an all together different level .





 

 

The job of a campus ambassador is not just about taking demos on solaris , netbeans or any sun product and collecting a handsome pocket money.For me it is a door that opened a lot of opportunities  to let me do what i love the most to be a evangelist of what i strongly believe in "open source".I was on the look out for how to get my peers to participate in this movement.it struck to me that the only thing that is preventing them from getting their hands on stuff is confidence.In an effort to boost it i decided to conduct a hackathon.
It is very easy to get the geeks  to hack but getting the freshers to hack is hell of a task.
The very first challenge of a hackathon is to determine the domain to conduct the hack. I wanted to attract the first timers as well as professionals like the linux user groups in mysore as well as people from my group  ( obscura open group).So, i decided to hold hack in two domains open hack where one could create any application or RFE using open source tools( this had no restrictions) and a closed hack on open solaris.

The other requirements for a hackathon are internet connectivity and platform for the hacks.
we did not have enough  systems with os we overcame that by conducting a install fest in college along with os we installed all kinds of open source tools to facilitate the event.
the preparations began a month before the event. we started working on oss-bite-sized bugs from the open solaris community. with some help from my mentor miss. manjula and mr. ananth srinivas we found a series of suitable bugs. we picked a few from the foss hackathon as well .
the bugs were more chosen to help the first timers participate.

we started the event by giving the instructions on how to search in code and how to build environment and then went to actual solving.
we gave bugs in three categories

level 1 bugs -this was more to get the participants used to searching and modifying . these consisted of very simple bugs

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level 2 : involved a bit of logic in solving them and searching them

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the level 3 bug was of a step higher

 6607664 it invited a lot of different solutions from the participants.it was great to see different ways of solving by different participants.

there were 8 teams each of two to four who participated in the closed hack of which two teams successfully solved all the bugs.the rest were not very far behind .

In the open hack domain we had one team taking up the belenix challenge of writing spec files
along with this they also wrote a front end for the  list !!!
the other team wrote a application to get live update on stock points of your favorite shares. we tested it to check the 'java' shares (unfortunately they had fallen down on the day )
the event was a marathon of 6 hours 10-4 with the undying enthu of the participants i never knew how the time flew.At the end of the day it was great satisfaction to see the participants sweeting out . first timers confident and some invaluable contributions and to forget the repentance of people who could not participate .
I had  great fun conducting it. thanx to the open solaris team on 6th floor divyashree chambers for all the support and of course ganesh sir , rajesh and vijaya for helping me get the  resources at  the right time.
the happiness you get when someone learns something from you is unmatched

i have a hp compaq laptop. getting a fully working linux was on hell of a task i have ever had to do to install anything

part 1:

i install solaris with windows  pre installed windows . inspite of having a 1 gb ram i had to use solaris express due to incompatible hardware( the graphics card the real hero of this story). i complete the install in the process overwrite my windows partition my fault while assigning the partition for solaris

result: bad PBR signal .

 i curse myself and abandon it for the day

part 2:

day two i take my laptop and start reinstalling  solaris i put my laptop in stand by while travelling and awesome thing happens it just stopped installing ok my system and got stuck.
 i meanwhile come to foss venue and fortunately ask assistance from anil. he being considerate hands me another disk and we start reinstalling solaris.

we start its one hour still 20 percent...
two and half hours its 60 percent...
it takes around 3 and half hours to install ( thanks to my slow disk read) 
result: x cannot be initialised
awesome ... moinak tries a work around for it
it shows no monitors found even after workaround.

part 3:

i try the latest builds , live cds, various other linux its gives me the same result.
at this point some one would ask why do  u need a gui when you can actually work on the command line
i personally require a gui because i comfortable that way.what is wrong is choosing an easy way out when it is available. i am sure most programmers would disagree with me.

ok back to my laptop and solaris on it 

 part 4: my mission is to get any linux fully running on . with a lot of search i find a repository for support.
now i need to integrate it. its definitely greek and latin for me. ( yup another half literate ,i always wish i could turn into those fundu ppl seriously ).

i finally decide upon installing solaris on vm ware . i come to sun office in bangalore and get my laptop along as requested by my mentor.it is  abandoned after serious trials by  a lot of ppl and finally load vm ware onto it

 part 4:

i start installation on vmware.thanx to awesome solaris disks. i miserably fail.along with that i loose my grub.

it should typically not happen but it so happened that my linux partiton changed cos i used a new partition for the virtual machine . now i have the grub recovery process initially it was difficult to figure out what happened later thanx to the drivers guys i guess i owe them a lot we recover the system and anath helps me integrate driver support for linux ... yup i finally get linux with gui .

solaris on vm ware : it was another journey .. bad disk writes..download iso then install  which gets  stuck due to stand by install all over again and finally ...

 finally i have solaris on my laptop

 

 

 

code for freedom is a wonderful concept to get people participate according to a lot of people. create competition ,distribute prizes for every significant contributer.it is some how not fascinating enough neither to me nor to my fellow class mates it just sounds a bit too high or inaccessible . it is quite a genuine problem it is a bit of a mental block that we are never upto the level of contribution.we had a cff promotional seminar in college which did not still make things clear.i wish something can be done to remove this mental block.we are all interested to learn and contribute. the only hinderance is " to get the ball rolling" . we wish if some one can help us kick start
in this direction to get people to contribute i even got a few internal competitions lined up one of the participants could create a you tube plug in on netbeans.hope to have a few more breaks like that

 

unfortunately my RAM does not allow me to mount developer edition of open solaris on my system .

I am compelled to explore solaris through live cd's .I downloaded a belenix live cd .well i created it long back but got chance to explore the compiz pack recently .It is awesome.Its great exploring it next time will upload the snap shots and probably setup network connections as well.

 I found one particular thing interesting the Dtrace tool it has quite an impressive documentation.The other thing was the mplayer and the chat module both seem quite impressive(well i am using these open source modules for the first time  so pretty exciting )

i conducted a seminar on net beans  day before yesterday.did a few demos on java programming,code completion.profiler,desktop application and did one demo on uml .i basically gave a general overview of the
ide.it was a live session planned to make it a lab session but some how did not work out so made it a live session .overall it went ok sort had ppl requesting for the cds soon after the session.
the next course of action would be to introduce them to cff and get into serious participation hope things workout
 

this pic is of the sun ca group (south).The wonderful people i met at the induction.

well it all started with me getting a call from sun telling me that i have been chosen as the sun ca for my college.I was totally in shock well if that was not shocking enough they asked to attend the training from the very next day that was a total unexpected event.

I arrived at sun the time they asked me to report that  was like stepping into unknown i was wondering how i could cope up especially when i was not prepared at all thank fully it was a great 3 day program i got learn a lot(actually i became a literate ).

The first day when i attended a session on open solaris i was uncomfortable being a Linux enthusiast i was not very keen on this os.But,gradually i felt proud to even be a part of this community god it is definitely the next generation os the zfs,dtrace it actually created a lot of enthusiasm in me.
The other thing we learnt was the net bean ide it is a marvel in itself

i learnt a lot after the session through the live training sessions and self learning so far i have given two sessions and both of them have been great learning experiences.The fear of teaching someone wrong made me learn better.

This Friday we had session in sun on net beans god i never knew it had so much in it .It can be use to not just write programs debug them or check the functioning of the system while the program is working.we can also create gui's ,create mobile games,url pages,do data binding without writing code how cool is that it was one complete session on it.the practical  demos were awesome.
technology is definitely infinitely growing
it is time we catch this change and move along with it.

until a few years it was unimaginable to boot os from a cd now we can not only do that we can also boot from a thumb drive and the latest is from a mobile phone (wow!!!).someone told me mobiles are the future gadgets which will be inseparable parts of  our live i totally believe it now..working in this area would be one of the best thing to be done now.

 

Each one of us have dreams and desires.Its important as a person to not just dream but also accomplish those dreams.There is a saying if you work towards your dream the whole world conspires to help you.I too have dreams and one of my dreams was to work with open source technologies and here i am a sun campus ambassador learning and teaching these technologies :).I really even to this day don't know how i made it here probably sun could explain some day why i am here :). But,the journey after that got me a fair amount of experience though. i started a sun club in my college.I got to introduce open source to a lot of fellow students. Held a talk on open solaris and a session on java it was a awesome experience for a change i got to be the person who teaches and learns (spread the light :))rather than just trying to learn.It gives you a whole new dimension. well this was my story until now hope to create one everyday love chinmayi.s.k