Colin Charles Agenda

I’ve been harsh when it comes to Linux on laptops. Simply put, the week before going to foss.in (i.e. last week), I got tired with my tried daily usage of Ubuntu (besides, I went through Feisty Fawn and Gutsy Gibbon). So I went with Fedora 8. You’ve got to love rdiff-backup.

What works?

• Wireless, out of the box. This is ipw3945d. Fedora comes with the firmware now, so all is well, it just works out of the box.
• X mirror out, out of the box. Finally, I can present, using my Linux box, without worry that it would suck with an external display. Just hit Ctrl+Alt+Backspace, ensure the external display is connected, and voila! I get a mirrored display. I’m sure setting it up to be dual-screen is the next uphill task, but lets just keep the good memory of things “just working”.
• Suspend, and resume, out of the box. I can place my laptop to sleep, and wake it up, and all works. Sure, I need to hit Alt+F1, then go to Alt+F7 to see the screensaver login (otherwise, it remains blank), but this tiny workaround is very worthwhile to ensure that my laptop, works like a laptop.

What doesn’t work?

• The WiFi light on my Dell doesn’t turn on. The Bluetooth one is, but the WiFi one remains permanently off. Who cares?
• Occasionally (and I mean, very occasionally), the laptop doesn’t wake up from sleep. I haven’t figured out why yet.
• Pressing Fn+Up or Fn+Down, to get the brightness controls going doesn’t work. While I can control the brightness just fine, its the GNOME applet not displaying it fine. Sound seems to work, so I’m wondering what it might be.
• Occasionally, yum barfs, but I’m on a really slow, and unreliable link. yum clean all, seems to fix things.

I haven’t tried hibernate. I haven’t played with the TV Out. However, my laptop seems to be working more like a laptop, than when I had Ubuntu installed.

Oh, a minor point of annoyance. I can get Compiz working. But playing videos with it enabled, makes the video jerky, slow, and well, sucky. So I clearly can’t use Compiz, yet. But hey, it works (bottom-line and all, right?).

Technorati Tags: fedora, linux, fedora 8, laptop, dell inspiron 640m, inspiron 640m

I sat in James Morris talk about how and why you should be a kernel hacker. This was a talk you should have attended, rather than bothering to read the slides, because much of it was spoken, rather than presented in text. James shares that you must have genuine interest,  common sense, and the willingness to work hard to succeed in a FOSS project (he was referring to the kernel, but lets just generalise here). In the getting started sense, he touched on the basics: fixing bugs, scratching that itch you have (i.e. angry programming – something doesn’t work for you? fix it), and trying many ideas (if an idea doesn’t work, try again). Its true that the initial learning curve to submit to most open source projects is steep, so persistence is important. Alas, follow your interests (don’t do something that you’ll dread), and seek mentors.

The part about being wrong. Its quotable: “If you find yourself arguing with Alan Cox, you’re probably wrong”. Memorable. But the advice on admitting wrongness, and moving on – this is crucial, to any FOSS project. Take it as a pearl of wisdom, and heed this advice. Its true for any FOSS project.

James carries an Apple Macbook. He had problems with displaying X. I found it amusing, that throughout the conference, a lot of folk had problems with X, WiFi, and resuming from suspend. In fact, resuming from suspend occasionally stopped working for me, too. Is Linux ready for the laptop? I’ve asked it before, I just keep wondering. Most of the KDE hackers (high number of KDE folk), actually seem to be using Macbooks. As are most of the Sun folk. After all, with virtualization, you can run other OSes (including OpenSolaris). KDE, with Qt libraries, are also generally native (with X11) on OS X. At some stage, I have got to try out GTK/OSX.

Personally, I think my time would have been better spent at Sreekanth’s talk (he’s from Mahiti, Sunil Abraham’s company), which was titled Natively supporting RDBMS in Plone/Zope for storing Content. The slides could do with more expansion (or I get that this is one of those talks that I needed to be in, to listen and take notes), but its something I’m surely going to look into, in the near future.

After lunch, I decided that I needed to learn more about Hadoop [Meet Hadoop! (Open Source Grid Computing)]. Devaraj Das gave a great talk. I had already learned a bit about Hadoop from watching a Yahoo! video, so this was expanding my understanding further. Hadoop requires a blog post on itself, because I have notes from the talk and from the video, sitting in Tomboy.

QtWebKit by Simon Hausmann was the bomb. Demos alone, took the audience by surprise, and made me want to try QtWebKit out. I found that even though they have mailing lists, most of the WebKit work is done via IRC – they’re on freenode #webkit. I found this to be odd – where’s the logging, and is this really setup for external contributors? Not everyone can be on IRC 24/7, and alone, is not the best communication method. Clearly, from this talk, my interest in GTK-WebKit is quite clear and apparent. As a rendering engine its great – maybe we should be out with Gecko. I only managed to check the code out later in the night at the hotel, but after 1.4GB of traffic (via svn), and a compile, my WebKit directory is now sitting comfortably at 2.1GB. Its, not exactly small, even though its just a rendering engine, eh?

Expecting myself to get bored at the talk on Plan 9 from Bell Labs, by Anant Narayanan (having seen a talk on Minix at linux.conf.au by Andrew Tanenbaum), I was actually really impressed. The design behind Plan 9, and the concepts, seem to make this an OS worth trying. Sadly, I never did get to download the ISO from their official site (I did get it from Anant’s site though). Its small (weighing it at 79MB), and apparently doesn’t really run on much “real” hardware, so I’ll give it a twirl on QEMU or KVM to see how it goes. I learned that UTF-8 was created for Plan 9 (and now we get the benefits of it!). This is clearly a project that benefited from the Summer of Code – by the looks of it, Anant got interested in this, after GSoC 2007. And kudos to Google then, for allowing others to realise the potential of Plan 9.

All in all, great day 1. I was planning on visiting the lightning talks, but they were cancelled for Day 1.

Technorati Tags: foss.in, foss.in 2007, kernel, hacker, rdbms, plone, zope, hadoop, qtwebkit, plan 9, plan 9 from bell labs

I have been reading quite a bit recently. Quite a number of them are being read online, in sporadic bits, via my O’Reilly Safari subscription, so at some stage maybe I’ll list them when I complete them. However, in a non-technical sense, here are a bunch of books I’ve read recently:

• Sperm Are from Men, Eggs Are from Women: The Real Reason Men and Women are Different by Joe Quirk – arguably, a complete waste of time, but you might just read it for humour sake. However, I’m wondering if his thoughts on sexual evolutionary biology holds weight – what he says, is actually, at many instances, quite true. Its an extremely easy read, he likes pointing out that he isn’t an expert in any field he talks about (good, I like his honesty), and if you’re a man (or woman), you’ll find out a little more about the other sex. With a surname like Quirk, this doesn’t get any quirkier.
• The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins – if I were loaded, I would buy this for every evangelical Christian with a brain, that I know. And there are a lot of them (those that don’t just listen to what the pastor says and takes it for gold). Giuseppe bought this for me as a gift in Heidelberg, and its truly a great read. Of course, there’s also a book titled the Dawkins Delusion, and at some stage I’ll find that and read it. However, if you’re of the thinking that religion is one of the major causes of problem in this world, read this book.
• The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cell Phone: The Emerging 21st Century Power by Shashi Tharoor – Amazing book. This is highly recommended, do read it, if you want to learn more about India. Shashi Tharoor himself was the youngest under-secretary general at the United Nations, and his writing quality is just amazing. He might be a bit wordy, he is originally a Keralite, but living overseas, but his perspectives are just amazing. I really enjoy the way the stories are presented, as they’re all independent from another.

Seeing that I’m in India now, I picked up all the rest of Shashi Tharoor’s books from the bookstore the other day. You might want to do that too.

The general paranoia at conferences is such that there almost always is WiFi, and there almost always is someone wanting to snoop your traffic. I guess, in a similar vein, this could also happen at Starbucks. So, on day 1, at foss.in I tried to recollect what I used to do, ages ago (when I used to run Fedora on my R51, before the disk died, and I realised I lacked a backup of /root).

iptables
Firewalls break networks? They also secure networks. I have access to some legacy POP servers, that don’t support SSL/TLS like the IMAP servers I have access to. Firing up Thunderbird, to change the settings, to point to localhost, just seems like a waste of time. So the magic of iptables comes into play.

iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp -d my.pop.server --dport 110 -j DNAT --to-destination 127.0.0.1:1235
iptables -t nat -A OUTPUT -p tcp -d my.pop.server --dport 110 -j DNAT --to-destination 127.0.0.1:1235

The above, ensures that to access my.pop.server:110, the traffic is automatically routed now to localhost:1235. Clearly, I don’t run a POP server on my laptop, so this is where SSH port forwarding comes into play.

SSH port forwarding
Provided you have access to a server via SSH, and you trust it, you can tunnel your traffic through it. Its made very easy by the:
-L localport:my.pop.server:foreignport

So using the above example, that would be -L 1235:my.pop.server:110.

Then, let’s not forget the useful -C option, to compress traffic.

And hey, web surfing isn’t secure either, so lets create a SOCKS5 proxy while we’re at it. ssh supports the -D option, which works a charm. Use it such that you have something like:
-D 8188

And now, configure your web browser, to use a SOCKS proxy, localhost:8188. You can also configure it in GNOME, under the Network Proxy, but it seems like not all applications respect it (for instance, I can get pidgin to segfault, and Liferea will not get RSS updates for some reason, etc.).

So to sum it up, your SSH command should look something like:
ssh -D 8188 -L 1235:my.pop.server:110 -C my.ssh.server

Discuss
Am I missing something? Do you have an easier iptables rule? Yes, I realise I can also use a VPN. If you have other tips, please don’t hesitate to comment. Thanks.

Technorati Tags: ssh, iptables, travel, tips, wifi, open access points, socks5

foss.in is officiated. Atul is on stage, speaking and the room is filled up. The lighting ceremony happened, a while ago. “Only an Indian can give a keynote, at foss.in” – here comes the Anjuta keynote, by Naba Kumar. History of Anjuta? The name, was the name of his girlfriend, and now, its his wife (they have a cute daughter, whom we got to see at Opus last night).

Last night quite a number of us went to the Opus, for a Mozilla party. It was truly, a hip event. Lots of beer, lots of chatter, and there was even some local Indian scotch towards the tail-end of the night. We were having so much fun, we didn’t even realise dinner wasn’t around yet ;) Aizat and I wolfed down some amazing pasta in under 5 minutes around 11pm.

Kudos to Shreyas and Shilpa for ensuring we were all safe and sound (and Kishore who sent me home, since I missed the bus :P). It was great to speak with Tejas, Allen, Gopal and the rest of the crew.

Yesterday, spent some time in Juergen Schmidt’s talks in the OpenOffice.org Project Day. I tailed into another talk about translations in Kerala, who seemed to represent the government of Kerala to some extent. Translations alone don’t interest me, but finding out more about FOSS use in Kerala clearly does. I am after all, a Mallu ? I hope I got that right :)

Jumped to see Tom Callaway speak about Fedora Secondary Architectures, though there are some things there that I feel are a little incorrect with the idea behind it. Build machines, not hosted by the Fedora Project? Wrong. Packages and the distribution itself, save for the torrents, not hosted by the Fedora Project? Wrong. Allowing a build of software to fail on a secondary architecture? Wrong. Allowing the secondary arch maintainer to fix broken packages? Smart. Though honestly, I think this might end up having to becoming a team.

Rahul Sundaram’s talk about spins was great. Considering I was building LiveCDs before there were tools, to do so, I’m glad that there are so many ways to do so now (easily, even). And of course chit chatting with him over beer at the Opus later, was fun.

Anyways, time to pay attention to the Anjuta talk. Not a big fan of IDEs myself, but I’m seeing the need for it (for folk that aren’t comfortable with vim).

Technorati Tags: foss.in, foss.in 2007, opus, party, fedora, openoffice.org, secondary architectures, livecd

Yesterday, my agenda was around the Mozilla Day – spent most of the morning, listening to Mozilla-related extension talks. I ran away the moment they talked about accessibility and localisation, and spent some time in the Hack Centre, which was just tables, chairs, WiFi and good hacking :) Then hopped into the GNOME project day, to listen to Ritesh Khadgaray tell us about how to hunt bugs. I continued spending the rest of my day there, for what its worth.

Dinner, at MG Road. Wonder if there are other locations to eat? I mean, I’ve extensively walked around the MG Road area, around Brigade Road, Church St, and so on.

Today, I’m going to jump between the OpenOffice.org and Fedora project days, both of which are projects close to my heart.

Of the 2,700+ registered jokers, the project days certainly seem a lot smaller than I’d have expected… Under-1000 attendees maybe? I guess this will pick up certainly during the main conference.

Photo by aizat

WiFi works wonderfully well at the conference. I’m actually shocked! Has to be one of the few conferences that have got Internet access working. Maybe I should knock wood in case this disappears soon…

Technorati Tags: foss.in, foss.in 2007, project days