Natty Narhwal Release

Ubuntu 11.04, the thirteenth edition of Ubuntu, aka Natty Narhwal is out. I call Natty a mix bag, with lot of improvements and major digressions from its previous versions.

• Unity: It is the new GUI for Ubuntu, replacing the long standing GNOME-Ubuntu rapport. After a somewhat regressive debacle in the community, Ubuntu vs GNOME, the two have parted and that GNOME will not be officially supported by Ubuntu, and will be available only via a PPA. Canonical is obviously pushing Unity, and although GNOME isn't dependent on Canonical or Ubuntu, it will certainly be a setback for GNOME. I personally am missing GNOME on Natty. On the positive side of Unity is the four point touch support. That is something to look forward to in the releases to come.

• Open Office to Libre Office: With the Oracle takeover of Sun Microsystems, projects such as Virtual Box, Open Office, Mysql, etc.. which were mentored by Sun have been under the threat of losing their traits (although Oracle argues otherwise). With Ubuntu switching from Open Office to Libre office, this apprehension about Oracle effect is reduced, nevertheless Open Office will be missed. (BTW, Open Office and Libre Office are almost the same)

• Banshee replaces Rhythmbox: The default music player for Natty is Banshee, and I don't mind, for I haven't got used to Rhythmbox as yet. VLC still is what I'll be going for. 

• It's still Mozilla: Firefox4 ships as the default browser, and no prizes for guessing as to why. 

 

• Proprietary codecs and Software more easily accessible. In order to attract new users, Ubuntu is more than happy to prompt the users to go for proprietary codecs, which has been under a lot of debate since the release of Maverick.  
• Installation in Telugu and (broken) Kannada are on in Natty.

While the Debian community insists (rightly) to call Debian, a GNU/Linux Operating system as Free (free as in Freedom),

Canonical has been consciously pushing Ubuntu as an Open Source Linux based OS as Free ( as in no price).

Yesterday in Bangalore, the Ubuntu Loco team had called for the Natty Release party, and it was nice to see a bunch of Free and Open Source Software enthusiasts join in and have a small Party for Natty.

PS: Ubuntu is getting no better with every release :(
They're now only "Open", "free" is only a matter of price to Canonical.
But, Ubuntu is like my first love. It drew me into the Free Software Movement, and I am still not ready to part with it.
Nonetheless, if they keep digressing the way they are now, soon I shall have to part with it :)

Day 2: FSMK and Reva State Convention for Academicians

The State Convention for Academicians on Free Software in Research and Teaching, hit a new high on the second and final day. Today being Saturday, as expected we had wider range of audience with a bunch of Industry enthusiasts making it to the venue.

The undercurrent and the motive behind this State Convention has been to float a long overdue Free Software Academicians Chapter,and today it did take shape. With a briefing about the Academicians Chapter, we started off with the parallel sessions for the day.

Saket Srivatsav did an encore of his Android Application Development talk from the Open Day at IISc. Unable to provide him with internet connectivity, we had to reach a compromise on his demonstration. With the enticing term such as "Android", and with a relevant speaker like Saket, the session was well received.This was the CSE track session.

Parallelly, we had the ECE track session, which took off 15 minutes late. Rangeen Basu, Fedora ambassador handled the session on Fedora Electronics Lab. It was, like most other sessions,very useful talk for everyone in the audience, mainly from Electronics background. Personally, a bunch of these utilities have got me all excited, and have to start working them.


While these two parallel sessions concluded, we had the elaboration of the need for an Academicians Chapter by Karthikeyan from FSMK. He touched upon the importance of the role the Academicians have to play in a country like India, where the Economics worked out with Free Software as a solution is more convincing than any other perspective of it. He also accentuated the synergy that comes so naturally with the interaction of Free Software with Academicians.


Mr.Thiruvaazhi from SSN Institutions, Chennai delivered his talk on Information Security and Challenges, within the constraints of time and a missing internet connectivity. Nevertheless, he had impressed the audience with the tools and technology he discussed through the talk. The tools like webgoat which he demonstrated were simple and superb, to manifest the nuances of network security. Other basic tools like Wireshark, SSH were also demonstrated.


Post lunch, one of my favorite talk of the State Convention was scheduled. Hemanth handled an excellent talk, bringing out the contrasts and contradictions in the Cloud and the role Free Software has played and would be playing in future. He very aptly converged the talk to the kick-start of the FreedomBox which the community is all excited about. His hard hitting on public cloud services like Google, Gmail, Facebook, etc... from a well influenced point of view from RMS and Eben must have churned some friction in the audience ( as intended).

In the same session, Bhavani Shankar spoke about contributing to Free Software, using his own experience and expertise as the resource. That must have instigated at least a bunch of them from the audience to take their usage of Free Software one step further.


Ultimately, the coveted Panel Discussion about Including Free Software in Engineering curriculum turned out to be a very good debate. The panel comprised of Prof.K Gopinath from IISc, Dr.Rajanikanth, Principal,MSRIT (also the Chariman for CSE, Board of Education,VTU), Dr. C. R. Venugopal,Prof. & Head, Dept of ECE,( also the Chairman for ECE, Board of Education,VTU) and Dr.S Sunil Manvi, Dean R and D, Reva ITM. The discussion was moderated by Senthil from FSMK.

Although three out of the four panelists took an almost absolute stand for inclusion of Free and Open Source software in the curriculum, Dr. Rajanikanth maintained throughout that a 'blend' between proprietary software and FOSS must be maintained to 'equip and prepare' students for the market environment. This point was revisited multiple times, when other panelists and the audience raised queries.
Prof Gopinath went on to say "If I am a teacher, and I ask students to do research on proprietary software, my head must be examined!" , and also, "Free Software provides an infrastructure, upon which we can dream and build whatever we would want to".

With such phenomenal convergence of opinions in favor of inclusion of Free Software in curriculum, there is now a major responsibility for the Academicians Chapter which has taken shape today, to get this response translated to a policy as well.

All of this wouldn't have been possible without the support of all the resource persons, participants, Reva ITM and FSMK. Kudos to the efforts and Cheers to all.

Thus, the two days of the convention came to an ecstatic end.

Day 1: FSMK and Reva State Convention

Karnataka's first State Level Convention for Academicians on Free Software in Research and Teaching has taken off in Bangalore on the 11th March, 2011, organized by the Free Software Movement-Karnataka (FSMK) and Reva Institute of Technology and Management.

The State Convention which will go on for another day, on the 12th of March is aiming at bringing awareness about the use of Free Software utilities in teaching and learning.

In this regard, Prof.K Gopinath, from the Indian Institute of Science correlated the manner Science has grown by hypothesis, falsification and verification, and how Freee Software takes this iteration one step futher, and allows sharing of the such refined work in the digital domain.

Jayakumar HS, Joint Secretary of Free Software Movement-India, projected this Convention to be the first step in creating a mass movement amongst the teaching and researching faculties. Dr. S Sunil Manvi, Dean R&D of Reva ITM emphasized on the roles such conventions would be playing in enabling the teachers to pursue further research and facilitate students in their academics.

The luke warm response in numbers for the Convention was compensated by the interest all the attendees exhibited while the sessions were in progress.

Mr.Vikram Vincent started off the proceedings with an exhilarating talk, giving the insight into the importance of Free Software in Education, by teasing 'the broken education  system', with stats and figures which supported his points. The demonstration of the MOODLE implementation of Christ University, did get the audience excited. In the same session, Mr.Prabodh introduced other ubiquitously used Free Software utilities for the Engineering curriculum, like Codeblocks, Scilab and others.

The second talk had Prof.Gopinath talk about Pursuing Research in correlation to Free Software, and how Free Software is the most obvious choice for all researchers to endorse.

After the audience grabbed a quick lunch, we did get back on track for the sessions, but with some confusion. Time crunch did manifest itself in an awkward manner.

In the interest of the audience, we decided to make the parallel sessions, sequential, and now I realize it should have been otherwise. In anycase, the first two sessions post lunch went on in haste, but not without impacting the audience.

Bhuvan Krishna from Swecha did an encore of his session at IISc's Open day: Spinning one's own GNU/Linux distribution using Debian Live Helper. This session again got the audience interested, and hope some of them take up some responsible tasks on the lines of localization.

Electric:The VLSI CAD design tool, was demonstrated by Mr.Ravikumar and Mr.Kamal, from NXG Semiconductors. While this tool is a great utility for Electronics engineers, we did sense the obvious mismatch with the non Electronics audience. Nevertheless, this session requires an elaborate revist.





The final session by our own Balaji Kutty, turned out to be undoubtedly the best session of the day with some effective demonstration and very alive interaction with the audience, in his session on GCC/GDB based Programming and Debugging. A no-coding person like myself, was thoroughly enjoying all the tricks he was playing with coding and debugging.


Overall, few flaws ( will certainly work upon); Nevertheless, the vibe of Swatantra energy has been surfacing up amongst the participants. We will amplify the same in tomorrow's sessions!

The talks through the day, spanning from the role of Free Software in Teaching and Learning, Making custom GNU/Linux distibutions to specific utilities pertaining to Electronics and Computer Science were well received amongst the cream of the faculty members who had turned up for the Convention. With more exciting talks scheduled for day two with an important Panel discussion about incorporating Free Software into the curriculum, day two is also going to be of heavy dosage.

FSMK at Open Day in IISc

With one week left for the State Level Convention for Academicians on Free Software in Research and Teaching, the campaigning for the same has been happening profusely. During our stint of campaigning in the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Free Software Movement - Karnataka (FSMK) was approached by the organizers of The Open Day at IISc to put a Free Software Stall and also to handle three sessions in the Computer Science and Automation Dept of IISc.

"I love Free Software"-A vox populi

Within a week's time, we were all ready and did have amazing experience being part of the Open Day. Hundreds of students and researchers were at the venue. This granted us an excellent opportunity to spread the word of Free Software to the ones who knew little of it, and to seek collaboration with the already Free Software inclined people.

The FSMK stall was a big success, with our volunteers incessantly interacting with the interested crowd, handing out stickers and images of the abundant Free and Open Source Software, inclusive of the GNU/Linux Operating systems. Building contacts with many more people has been the biggest plus of this stall, apart from the native evangelism of our team.

There were also three specific sessions which were handled by FSMK activists:
Programming and debugging using GCC/GDB by Balaji Kutty; In which the speaker manifested the simplicity and efficacy of the GCC and GDB programming utilities.

Java based Application development for Android platform by Saket Srivatsav; In this session the speaker elucidated the fact that Android isn't FOSS, and also demonstrated a live application building using Java for Android.
Spin your own GNU/Linux distro by Bhuvan; In this session the speaker got the audience acquainted with live-helper in Debian, which is used to customize and make our own GNU/Linux distributions.

While all these sessions were well received, we did have extra fun at the Open Day itself, visiting other Departments.
Conclusively, FSMK did have a great time being part of the Open Day at IISc, and is looking forward to more such occasions to Spread Freedom in the Digital domain.

State Level Convention for Academicians on Free Software in Research and Teaching

Free software is software that gives you the user the freedom to share, study and modify it. We call this free software because the user is free. To use free software is to make a political and ethical choice asserting the right to learn, and share what we learn with others.  Free software has become the foundation of a learning society where we share our knowledge in a way that others can build upon and enjoy (http://www.fsf.org/about/what-is-free-software).

Incorporating Free Software in Research and Teaching is the most natural settling between the two. When an ethical Software system with the motto of 'sharing and growing together', meets the proponents of knowledge in the society, the ramifications will be profound, as we have already witnessed in the recent past.

Free Software in Academics and Research has proven itself to be an undisputed requirement in today's technology driven society, with most of the Foreign and National universities, Research Establishments inculcating the culture of using Free and Open Source Software to perform all their computational tasks. We have seen entire Governments like in Brazil, Venezuela and the state of  Kerala in India endorse a full fledged Free Software paradigm.

In an attempt to portray this phenomenon of Free Software in Academics and Research at a regional level, the Free Software Movement-Karnataka in collaboration with the Reva Institute of Technology & Management are organizing a 'State Level Convention for Academicians on Free Software in Research and Teaching'. The convention aims at bringing out the various facets of Free Software in Academics and extents of applicability in Research to facilitate and enable the teaching faculty and research pursuers to utilize the abundant resources available in the Free and Open Source Software world.

This event, apart from showcasing the wide variety of Free Software tools available, would also try to emphasize the importance of including Free Software in the system of teaching and learning.

We urge each of you to be part of this Convention, to share and grow together!

More details in the brochure...

Ubuntu Developers Day-2011,Bangalore

"Ubuntu is Humanity", and I have come a long way since knowing Ubuntu in September,2008. That is when I first came across Ubuntu and started using it, right away. Since then, I have almost perennially been on Ubuntu, with a very small percentage of all the 'lot' of technical and non-technical work I do, on anything apart from Ubuntu.

Although, I am no 'Developer', I proudly call myself an Evangelist and better a 'tweaker'( even hacker is a term too big for my C and bash aptitude). To be part of the the meet up was a warm homecoming kind of a feeling.

To have immense passion towards  ' a piece of software' is not regular in the regular world, but amonsgt the FOSS'ers it is a denominating trait. My passion about FOSS and in particular Ubuntu is very explicitly shown by me,for, in 'any' discussion you'd have with me, chances that I do not bring Ubuntu into it would be a rarity!

So, today's Ubuntu Developers Day was something I was looking forward to for quite sometime. And, it did leave me all happy by the end of the day. Today's meet was impeccable- organizationally and pleasantly intuitive - content-wise (except for one sponsored firm's blah blah;)

Firstly, I was a little apprehensive about Unity becoming the default GUI starting Natty Narhwal ( Ubuntu 11.04), but today's sessions have gotten me all excited like rest of the Ubuntu community. Ubuntu will be the first Operating System to ship with full multi-touch abilities, and it was really nice to have had it heard from Chase Douglas.

Secondly, IBM's Linux Technology Center made its presence felt, by very aptly showing off the team behind the ext4 filesystem, and its own contributions to Linux, as a whole.One pleasant surprise in IBM's keynote though was, they mentioning the two Kernel workshops which was conducted along with FSMK,with due attribution to FSMK :)

If I were to call today, a day of de-apprehensions, it would fit perfectly. For, the other major apprehension "The Obscure Cloud" got elucidated in Ubuntu terms. Although, my disassociation with the Public Cloud would still go on, the idea of Private Clouds within enterprises on enterprise owned servers has got me all excited. And, the two great talks by Nick Barcet , did bring a better insight about 'Ubuntu on Cloud' and 'Cloud on Ubuntu'.

The lunch was complex, for we were at the Leela Palace. Nevertheless, I did enjoy the salads and the Shepherd Pie (excellent  minced mutton, baked and garnished like a pie:), with a climactic relishing of the yummy chocolate dessert.

Post lunch, apart from Nick and Chase's second talks the other talk was boring, can't complain, for I know the terms of sponsorship. As, i was running late for another commitment, couldn't stay for the two other sessions post tea.
And in exchange for our feedback, the goody bag given was awesome, with a cool Maverick Meerkat T-shirt, Ubuntu stickers, Ubuntu branded Diary and pen, stuffed in an uber cool bag.

The exhibition rooms, where Ubuntu and variants of Ubuntu were displayed took me by awe. The cutest was Spark's smart book powered by an ARM Cortex and running Ubuntu. Another cool product was the one which would only play media, connect to the net and do some simple things, running Ubuntu Netbook on a Freescale chip,with SD memory! Then the muti-touch demo with the finger painting application was simply stunning.

Looking forward to more of Ubuntu Developers Day, and will try to increase my karmas on Launchpad, before the next UDD!

A decade of Wikipedia

Knowledge Commons, Community Wisdom, Distributed and decentralized collaboration, Creative Commons and most importantly Free Knowledge (via digital means) are the most radical terminologies which have emanated in the past decade, and have revolutionized the World and the World Wide Web.


Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing. 
Jimmy Wales 

Wikipedia has been the mascot and the supreme manifestation of all these ideologies which were presumed to be infeasible. Wikipedia has become synonymous to the term Encyclopaedia, and more so to Free and Community churned knowledge.

Bangalore Wikipedians celebrated Ten years of Wikipedia by organizing a day full of talks,events and Wiki evangelism. The celebration was at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), IISc in Bangalore.
As, I was not present the entire day, I'm not in a position to chronicle the entire event. Here are few pictures from the event depicting the overall spirit of the celebration.

A tech talk on API's for Wiki

One of the best ideas ever

Wiki Jerseys

Happy birthday Wikipedia

Jimmy Wales in his live address from London

Lawrence Liang giving his encrypted talk!

Wikipedians :)