My Blogs Sandeep Konchady's Weblog

Some time ago I had blogged about how Sun has open source projects that under grad and grad students from computer science and engineering discipline can work on. Each of these projects, if accepted, will be mentored under the architect of that group and led to completion. Today I would like to highlight our first milestone: San Jose State University and Sun are working on projects for MS students from software engineering department. There are two teams of three working on Sun's OpenESB/JBI project that is hosted as Mural on java.net.

The project that is offered to SJSU students is led by Srinivasan Rangarajan who is the architect for OpenESB. The two projects being worked on are:

1. Parallelizing of ETL based on system profile (Himani Goel, Shivani Tripathi and Tanushree)
2. Supporting mobile interface to OpenESB engine as part of enterprise data mashup (Vivek Modi, Sahil Chokshi and Parth Vora)

The program is managed from SJSU's side by director of software engineering department Dr. Dan Harkey. If you want to see these students in action, visit Community Corner at 2008 JavaOne. One of the team is presenting a poster and the other team is presenting a talk/demo on mobile interface to enterprise data mashup. If any of you students or universities want to participate in similar program, please contact me Sandeep Konchady.

A while ago I posted a blog about Sun sponsoring industry focused projects for graduate students. This is a continuation of the same. I am happy to announce that we have taken this to the next step. Starting this quarter there are three teams from San Jose State University working one-on-one with Sun to collaborate on Sun sponsored open source projects. These projects range from research oriented topics to new feature implementation. Of the many areas where students can work, current projects are focused on OpenESB and JBI located at https://mural.dev.java.net/.

Since we have this pilot program off the ground, I would like to send an open invitation to other universities to collaborate on open source projects with Sun Microsystems. Sun being one of the biggest contributor to open source, has the best advantage for graduate and under graduate students. These projects need not end when school ends. Each student can own a module and be part of the open source community beyond school and exercise his/her passion.
 

I am currently pursuing my masters in software engineering at San Jose
State University (SJSU), California. As a part of my curriculum I need
to either work on a thesis or a project to complete my course. Both of
these options can be research oriented or industry focused. Since I
have a bit of experience in the industry, I would rather do an industry
oriented project rather than research oriented ones. I know I am not
the only one with this thought and SJSU is not the only school that has
these options. So I would like to make this information available to
all schools so that students and future employees of Sun Microsystems,
Inc (SMI) can benefit from learning interesting technologies and also
experience what it is to work on open source projects sponsored by SMI.

The other day I was curious to see what the hype was about Ubuntu. So I downloaded Ubuntu desktop and installed it on my Toshiba Tecra M2 laptop with nVidia display card and Atheros Wifi. I have previously installed Fedora, RedHat, SuSE, OpenSuSE with absolutely no issues with display driver and expected the same from Ubuntu. To my surprise the only way I could login to this system was in single user mode. Xserver just would not come up because of missing driver. I understand that nVidia is not an open source product and needs to be explicitly downloaded and installed. So how on earth does one go about doing this when all you have is a secured Wifi network (which I presume is the case in most homes).

Yes this was my biggest problem. I searched all the support aliases, Ubuntu FAQs, and other resources, but did not find a simple script that allowed me to connect online to Wifi network  using command line. So here I am putting what I struggled for over two days to configure. I hope this helps some folks out there having similar problems.

sudo ifdown eth0
sudo ifdown ath0
sudo iwconfig ath0 mode managed
sudo iwconfig ath0 channel 11
sudo iwconfig ath0 essid <Your ESSID>
sudo iwconfig ath0 key <Your Security Key> (Leave blank if this is an open unsecured network)
sudo ifup ath0
sudo ifconfig ath0

Once you connect to your Wifi network, you can now download one of the nVidia drivers depending on the version of display card you have. You can find details on how to get the version of your display at Ubunty FAQ. Once you get your driver installed you can now login using GNOME or KDE which ever you've installed.