Sysbyte Technologies

The Lohri Experience

Manu Gupta — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 04:37:06 +0000

So often have we said or heard that it is from the simplest of things that we derive pleasure from the simplest of things in life. Listening to the birds chirping or the fragrance of the first rain or having a beer with your friends or taking a walk in a windy wintry weather and I can a zillion of more ors to the list. These things at times are so obvious to us that we tend to undermine the importance of these very simple things in our life.

One such experience was the Lohri experience for me. Being a student and staying away from home, I never had time to enjoy a festival. However, back in Delhi NCR the heart of India, I had my chance to celebrate Lohri. A few things that I noticed

Families coming together and meeting each other
Kids playing in the lawn
Meeting the knowns and unknowns and wishing each other
My WARMEST winter experience
The beautiful bonfire
The Ladies

These are a few things that are right at the top of my head but then it was an awesome experience to remind me of the old age phrase “In Simplicity Lies Beauty”

Google Code-in Update

Manu Gupta — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 13:28:44 +0000

For the first half of Google Code-in, we have more than 94 tasks for the students. Already over 53 have been done and around 12 are work in progress. By the end of the first phase, I really hope to see all these tasks done. Some of the most interesting tasks that have been done by our students are
1. Design of openSUSE Magazine ( This can be used for attracting sponsors and is a work in progress )
2. Porting Bento Theme to Tumblr ( http://safe.tumblr.com/theme/preview/33069# )
3. Several Tutorial Videos
4. Loads and Loads of Translation tasks specially in Romanian, Turkish and Greek.
5. Concept artworks for our wallpapers. login screen etc.
6. Cleaning up our wiki
7. Lots of testing done for GNOME3 specially

These are things that we have done already and during the process I have come to meet lots of interesting people during the whole process. All in all GCI is a fun thing and I again call everyone to become a mentor or help us in suggesting tasks for GCI as this is very much required to get the program running. So if you have something interesting in mind and if you want to get something done but do not have enough time to work or if you want to interact with some of the most brilliant kids around the world, its time for you to sign up as a mentor. Every little bit of help is appreciated.

If you have a task in mind and do not have a lot of time, please add it as a comment below.
If you want to mentor, its the most awesome thing and we will have more helping hands please register at http://www.google-melange.com/gci/profile/mentor/google/gci2011 and mail your user id at manugupt1[at]opensuse[dot]org so that I can invite you.

Google Code-in and openSUSE

Manu Gupta — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 20:15:31 +0000

After Google Summer Of Code 2011, openSUSE plans to participate in Google Code-in. It is an excellent opportunity for openSUSE to meet young talents and introduce them to the ways of open source.

What is Google Code-in?
It is a contest hosted by Google for pre university students every year where they are encouraged to participate in open source projects and are awarded cash prizes for their contributions from Google. Various open source organizations participate in it and mentors from every organizations help these students to get up to speed and advice them on how to complete the challenge. The contest period is from November 21st to January 16th 2012

What are tasks?
Every open source organization has a lot of cool ideas in mind and likewise every member of the community has some ideas in his minds. These ideas are collated and put together and are categorized into three levels of difficulty – Easy, Medium and Difficult. Students are rewarded points as to what task they complete.

Deciding the tasks
The mentors decide the task, off -course community can suggest but at the end of the day it is the mentor’s discretion on what task they want to work on. Tasks can be anything and for a more accurate description of the tasks visit here.
Note that not all tasks will be code related, so even a non-technical guy with enough experience with other skills can participate in Google Code-in as mentors. Tasks can range from Documentation to translation, artwork to marketing and off course what is a code-in without code related tasks like code refracting, testing, finding and squashing bugs and a lot more things.

Preps for Code-in
openSUSE has already started preparations vigorously and is already coming up with a list of tasks and is looking for mentors. While lots of us have already signed, we are looking for lots more to sign up as mentors and see more interesting tasks ahead.
More information can be found at en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:GCI
and http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:GCI_Tasks

Along with the above 2 links, make sure to have a look at http://google-melange.com/

Thanks to Jos for reminding the links do not work

openSUSE & India

Manu Gupta — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 13:52:03 +0000

Well recently we had a huge discussions at the conference about how openSUSE was faring in India and it seemed that India was not faring well. I must say it seemed. So I think I must reput everything what we have done from last December so that we all know that we are doind saw g well despite of the huge geographical differences we have in India itself.

FOSS.in
This was the first time I met a lot of other openSUSE people like Bharath Acharya, Akhil Ladha, Vibha Yadav, Punit Jain, Suresh Jayaram ( we met agian at oSC 11 and we did not recognize each other while at oSC 11) and saw a very vibrant community of openSUSE.

KDE Conf
Here also the amazing team from Bangalore did an excellent job. Will came down to India and did an excellent job. Here we found Akash who was already doing an excellent job in promoting openSUSE and sadly we did not know about him.

GNOME Asia
This was the time when I had the chance to meet Vincent and Sankar P. Both of whom I wanted to meet for a long time specially Sankar at that time who has helped me a lot while in openSUSE. Yes the rest of the crew, Bharath, Akhil who were organizing the whole event along with Punit, Sridhar and Vibha and if I guess correctly srags ( his irc nick ) were there too. A whole new number of faces like our star from KDE Conf Akash and also Vikash who helped a lot at the openSUSE booth were present during the conference. We distributed a whole bunch of gnome and openSUSE dvds and at the end of the day we had to do with SLES since we had no more of openSUSE. It was great. Forgetting Max , oh how could I do that.. He had come all the way down from Taiwan to India to attend the conference.

PyCON India
Well, Saurabh Sood he is one of the best friends I have found in the community. He studies at the same place where I do. He could not get into GSoC sadly his application was rejected but he continued to work on the project he applied for. This goes on to show how in our community passion and people matter such a lot. He went for it and he got a lightning talk about developing osc plugins without even applying for it at PyCON India

Manipal
Yeah, this is the place where I live and I think this deserves a bit of attention. We have come up with excellent contributors from this place like Prashanth and Saurabh who work tremendously hard to make the openSUSE Project a big success. They really understand the value of people and what makes a community in real.

Gujarat
Jigish Sir, the one man army he is been working a lot with openSUSE Edu-L-i-f-e and is one of the major contributors to the education project uses openSUSE at a lot of places like in schools and universities. Also he is very active on the opensuse-india google group where I believe he is the one of the very few people who provide support to it.

Assam
Neel Kamal Kalita, is a professor at Guwahati ( I dont remember the university sorry Neel ) but has regularly distributed DVDs among his students for a long time. He is aone great guy who I had a chance to meet in person.

Hong Kong
I know it is not in India but still I must mention Koushik Kumar Nundy who is becoming the local ambassador there after he moved to HK from India and is doing a great job there too. Its a lot more difficult for him as he is the only ambassador in Hong Kong

Unknowns
I believe since such a lot was going on in India and no one really had an idea I can presume a bit more of stuff going in other parts of India too.

Thats all folks, I guess by the time I finish it I must add up to say we are not that inactive but we do not like lime light or let others know what we are doing. Pleasemake sure to add a comment to praise these hardworking ambassadors in India.

SaX3 – Status

Manu Gupta — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 12:08:19 +0000

The changes I have made in SaX3 in the following week

1. Fixed a few nasty bugs.
2. The monitor module does not work which works now ( I need to be more careful the future)
3. Tried porting to openSUSE 11.3 ( Testers Required)
4. Pushed to factory, but it is hghly recommended to add X11:sax as your project repository for sax until 12.1

SaX3 – Touchpad module

Manu Gupta — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 13:05:38 +0000

Hi All,

Actually this report is 2 days late, those who have already added my repository and updated it should have the sax3-touchpad module.

For others, you can get it here

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/manugupt1/

From now on, I will focus a lot on fixing issues and polishing the UI, specially the touchpad one and yes offcourse clean some code.

I have moved to code.google.com but the transition is not complete yet

SaX3 – Monitor Module completed

Manu Gupta — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 17:36:20 +0000

As part of GSoC Project, I am working on SaX3 and I have completed the monitor module.

You can get the latest repo from my home repository
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/manugupt1/

Please test it thoroughly,and let me know if common troubleshooting use cases for a single monitor is supported. If there is anything missing let me know. Xinerama is not supported
For both factory and 11.4.

Next up is touchpad, which I will finish by this thursday. And will begin pencil downs the following week onwards.

SaX3 – Get your hands dirty

Manu Gupta — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 21:06:59 +0000

Its been a long time I posted anything, but things look promising now, SaX3 is moving forward and 2 of its module have been completed, the keyboard module and the mouse module, so please test it and give me your feedbacks and if there are any bugs. BUGS will certainly be squashed, I dont know about UI changes. Suggestions are welcome. I plan to work on touchpads next.

For factory users

For 11.4 users

Otherwise, you can all use my home repositories too http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/manugupt1 for the more connvinient zypper way

Feedbacks and comments are most most welcome.

SaX3 – GSoC 2011 – Weekly Report 2

Manu Gupta — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 16:32:41 +0000

This is my 2nd report, this week not to show much for the users, but we did a quite interesteing things. SaX is now module oriented.So, if anyone wants to write a module for SaX3 it is possible now. Besides the important things which I did was

Learn the augeas C api
Submitted a .desktop lens for augeas
It is module oriented
Tried out Doxygen
SaX3 is now localised.

The launcher is now complete Again, the source code is here http://github.com./manugupt1/sax3 Regarding modules, If anyone wants to check out how modules work, they work using .desktop files in /usr/share/sax3/modules.d. If you will remove it we can remove it from the launcher.

SaX3 – GSoC 2011 – Work Report

Manu Gupta — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 18:44:31 +0000

This week I worked on SaX3 internal UI architecture, offcourse we will be using libyui but we wanted to make it as flexible as possible so that the UI Library can be replaced by anybody and still keep SaX usable, for that we implemented the factory pattern and most of the code was working. Finally, we have something working and the screenshots below show that SaX3 is working in graphical mode and ncurses mode.

I am adding screenshots of the launcher that will launch various configuration modules such as keyboard, mouse, graphic card etc etc . Also this is just a start and by the time I present my next report I week, this will be much cleaner and you can play around more with it. Right now it does not do anything so dont get surprised.

Source code can be found at github.com/manugupt1/sax3
The working branch is newui1.

cmake is a bit messy, I will update it in the following week and a bit of other clean up tasks and try some other stuff like localisation in it