FOSS.IN 2006 Ramblings
I have finally recovered after hectic preparations and 3 tiring days of FOSS.IN 2006 conference. It got over last Sunday. This time there was less crowd than last year, attributable to a few stuff IMHO: Weekend, Thanksgiving, Cricket match over the weekend. But nevertheless the SUN stall saw no less crowd.
This time the conference was held in the indoor J.N Tata Auditorium at Indian Institute of Science so we had a constant stream of visitors to the SUN Stall. You can see the pictures at http://blogs.sun.com/madhu/entry/photos_from_foss.in_2006. SUN this time around was showcasing a whole bunch of opensource software: OpenJDK, ZFS, FMA, DTrace, OpenSource Portal, Glassfish, Looking Glass, Apache Derby, Grid Engine. There was also a registration desk where folks could sign up for SUN Developer Network and get an OpenSolaris Starter Kit. It was crowded indeed.
We distributed a whole lot of Starter kits, Netbeans, Glassfish CDs. In addition SUN provided a delegate CD that was included in the Delegate Kit distributed by the organizers to all FOSS.IN participants. It included OpenSolaris source, OpenJDK, OpenGrok, OpenOffice 2.0 (all platforms) and Netbeans. I designed the Delegate CD cover. Here's the image:
Looking Glass caught the fancy of a lot of folks and we demoed Looking Glass using a modified BeleniX LiveCD. Yes, till last week Looking Glass used to only have Linux based LiveCDs. Now BeleniX will come out with a Looking Glass version soon. Unfortunately we could not distribute the Looking Glass LiveCD since there is still some licensing stuff to be worked out. The Derby folks had their stall just beside the LG3D one and they benefitted as people would flock to the LG3D stall and then automatically move onto the Derby demo.
This year we spent a lot of effort planning the event and the whole of India Engineering Center across teams and business divisons were involved. This helped a lot of carrying out the demos smoothly and effectively. I'd like to have a special mention ofSanjeev Bagewadi the SUN Cluster Guru and Vijay Gadre for their dedication and amazing efforts in leading and organizing the whole involvement from SUN. Of course no less credit goes to Sumitha Prashanth and Joe George, managers in Solaris Sustaining engineering team. These folks are the Priime Movers behind the scenes without whom the whole Juggernaut will come to a grinding halt - funding, organizing, collaboration with the PR folks, FOSS.IN organizers. I also need to mention Atul Chitnis here. He is the backbone of India's OpenSource movement. He is the pioneer who popularized Linux and other OpenSource software in India, preaching and giving meaning to the word "Free Software".
During the event I had my hands full, attending some interesting talks giving BeleniX and LG3D demos, and interacting with a range of people. I had the good fortune to meet Aaron Seigo one of the KDE gurus. I was excited meeting one of the top guns behind my favourite desktop and had a long discussion whic included some ideas beihind making KDE more functional on OpenSolaris. I handed him a BeleniX cd as well.
One of the talks I attended had to do with current development in the 64bit Ext4 filesystem which will have support for extents. However it is somewhat weird to see people laboring to solve problems that have been solved resoundingly in ZFS quite sometime back. For eg. those folks are trying to reduce fsck time where fsck lacks a definition in ZFS! They are talking about metadata checksums where ZFS checksums data as well.
Anyway here are a couple of snaps with Aaron Seigo (holding the BeleniX CD) and some folks in the BeleniX team:
From left, myself, Aaron and Kishore.
From left, myself, Aaron and Sriram (works the BeleniX harddisk installer).
This time the conference was held in the indoor J.N Tata Auditorium at Indian Institute of Science so we had a constant stream of visitors to the SUN Stall. You can see the pictures at http://blogs.sun.com/madhu/entry/photos_from_foss.in_2006. SUN this time around was showcasing a whole bunch of opensource software: OpenJDK, ZFS, FMA, DTrace, OpenSource Portal, Glassfish, Looking Glass, Apache Derby, Grid Engine. There was also a registration desk where folks could sign up for SUN Developer Network and get an OpenSolaris Starter Kit. It was crowded indeed.
We distributed a whole lot of Starter kits, Netbeans, Glassfish CDs. In addition SUN provided a delegate CD that was included in the Delegate Kit distributed by the organizers to all FOSS.IN participants. It included OpenSolaris source, OpenJDK, OpenGrok, OpenOffice 2.0 (all platforms) and Netbeans. I designed the Delegate CD cover. Here's the image:
Looking Glass caught the fancy of a lot of folks and we demoed Looking Glass using a modified BeleniX LiveCD. Yes, till last week Looking Glass used to only have Linux based LiveCDs. Now BeleniX will come out with a Looking Glass version soon. Unfortunately we could not distribute the Looking Glass LiveCD since there is still some licensing stuff to be worked out. The Derby folks had their stall just beside the LG3D one and they benefitted as people would flock to the LG3D stall and then automatically move onto the Derby demo.
This year we spent a lot of effort planning the event and the whole of India Engineering Center across teams and business divisons were involved. This helped a lot of carrying out the demos smoothly and effectively. I'd like to have a special mention of
During the event I had my hands full, attending some interesting talks giving BeleniX and LG3D demos, and interacting with a range of people. I had the good fortune to meet Aaron Seigo one of the KDE gurus. I was excited meeting one of the top guns behind my favourite desktop and had a long discussion whic included some ideas beihind making KDE more functional on OpenSolaris. I handed him a BeleniX cd as well.
One of the talks I attended had to do with current development in the 64bit Ext4 filesystem which will have support for extents. However it is somewhat weird to see people laboring to solve problems that have been solved resoundingly in ZFS quite sometime back. For eg. those folks are trying to reduce fsck time where fsck lacks a definition in ZFS! They are talking about metadata checksums where ZFS checksums data as well.
Anyway here are a couple of snaps with Aaron Seigo (holding the BeleniX CD) and some folks in the BeleniX team:
From left, myself, Aaron and Kishore.
From left, myself, Aaron and Sriram (works the BeleniX harddisk installer).