Sabayon’s strength has always been to showcase the power of FOSS on the desktop. Once upon a time, it used to come preinstalled with Linux-compatible games. But the current releases have done away with the idea of showcasing the games factor and concentrate on giving an out-of-the box desktop experience.

Sabayon 5 (or Five oh!, as the project team likes to call it) came out on October 2, 2009. As has been the norm since the last couple of releases, it’s been divided into a KDE and GNOME live DVD. The last version LFY had bundled was version Four oh! (we skipped 4.1 and 4.2). It was a single Live DVD that contained both GNOME and KDE. So what our CD team has done this time is combine the two separate ISOs into a single live multi-boot DVD. The downside is, you’ll only get either of the two desktops, at a time.

The boot screen of the DVD gives you several options to boot the following: GNOME, KDE, a media centre desktop, UMPC, etc. I’ve only tried the first two.

Depending on your desktop of choice, you’ll need to select one and proceed. The boot splash theme is, as always, black with a few coloured stripes with the Sabayon branding in the centre—not that great, but pretty smart and professional-looking, nonetheless. Well, the same image is also the default wallpaper in both GNOME and KDE. Coming back to the boot process, the live distro boot speed is comparable to other popular distros, and midway through the boot process, Sabayon starts playing a song that has something to do with “the rock and roll hall of fame.”

Note: On my assembled AMD/NVIDIA system, without manual intervention, Sabayon booted to a 1024×768 px display—although it had detected and loaded the correct NVIDIA drivers. The easiest way to fix this is while you’re on the boot screen – at the point when you select between the different boot options, hit F4 and select the display resolution, there and then. On my Intel-based wide-screen laptop (which uses a resolution of 1200×800 pixels), things worked all right without any manual intervention.

KDExperience

Sabayon comes with a custom themed version of KDE 4.3.1 (v4.3.2 is not available in the software repository yet). Instead of the stock Air theme introduced in KDE 4.3, Sabayon uses Elegance—a dark theme that gels well with the overall Sabayon 5 look and feel. And unlike other distros, a number of other desktop themes are preinstalled to let you customise the desktop the way you want without requiring to download additional themes. Additionally, it comes with a decent collection of wallpapers too, and Kwin effects work out-of-the-box if you have a capable graphics card.

Figure 1: KDE Live desktop

As you can see in Figure 1, the resolution of panel is awkwardly set at a width of 1024px, leaving some blank space on both sides of a screen with a resolution of 1280×1024px (or, any resolution where the screen width is more than 1024px). Well, many not-so-mainstream distros have a fetish for this sort of a Mac OS X-ish panel setting, which sort of seems odd considering the fact that the rest of the screen on the left and right side of panel goes waste. Anyway, we all know how to set this straight, don’t we? Strangely, essential shortcuts like ‘Show Desktop’ and ‘Battery Indicator’ (for laptop users) are missing from the panel. Again, we know how to take care of this.

While the stock KDE only has ‘System Settings’, a home directory shortcut for Dolphin and the Konqueror Web browser as our default ‘favourites’ in the Kickoff application launcher, Sabayon has added more natural fits for our favourites here (Firefox, Kopete, KTorrent, Konversation IRC client, Amarok, VLC Player, OOo Writer and Calc). However, I believe a home directory shortcut would have been a better selection instead of an IRC client; besides, ‘System Settings’ is also an essential app for those who like to tinker with their system frequently.

Figure 2: Default Kickoff favourites

The default installation comes with lots of handy applications for most desktop requirements, but some of the essential apps like Digikam (digital camera tool) and the GIMP are missing. As for an image viewer/manager, Gwenview is also missing. So accessing images means opening them in the Okular document viewer. Of course, these can be had from the official software repository. In fact, although it comes with the Firefox 3.5 as the default browser, the repo also offers Chromium (open source Google Chrome) as an alternative.

After using Chromium for a week, I found it to be pretty stable. I’ll definitely recommend it over FF simply because of the well-thought-out UI which gives you much more screen space to view Web pages, compared to any other browser, besides the ability to run multiple incognito windows (private browsing sessions). Coming back to FF (and even in Chromium), one good thing is that mime types are properly set. So you’ll have no problem in directly opening e-mail attachments, or for that matter, when you download anything from the Web, straight inside the required application.

By the way, wireless connection on my Intel Wi-Fi based laptop worked out-of-the-box. What I also noticed is the NetworkManager system tray widget has been cleaned up a lot. I don’t remember seeing this polish when KDE 4.3 first came out. What struck me as surprising  was the inclusion of the Wicd network manager—which is basically redundant!

Sabayon comes with most of the multimedia codes preinstalled. So whether you throw DVD videos at it or DivX files, VLC should be able to take care of it all. Amarok, on the other hand, takes care of your MP3 music collection. The version is 1.1.80 (2.2 beta)—the final 2.2 version is yet to be made available in the repo. Note that although this version reintroduces an equaliser, yet it’s greyed out in Sabayon. Besides these two power apps, you also have the minimalist Dragon Player and the XBMC media centre application.

The version of OpenOffice.org is 3.1. It comes with an integrated Oxygen icon theme by default, which means better KDE integration because the icons don’t look out of place in KDE4 any more. However, the KDE4 integration is nowhere near complete—the Save as/Open file dialogue boxes are still that of the stock OOo, instead of being KDE4 based. Apart from this, English spelling packs are missing. Another thing to note here is that font rendering inside OOo and Firefox are not anti-aliased out-of-the-box—which makes them look a bit crooked.

It’s again that time of the year when a new version of Ubuntu is released. And like clockwork precision, the latest version of Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” is out. This is the 11th release of Ubuntu and the maturity of the project and distribution is clearly visible. I have been using Ubuntu for the past 5 releases and I can definitely say that this release brings in the most number of changes. As the next release is meant to be a Long Term Support release, a lot of changes have been pushed in. Last month we saw a preview of what was coming in this version. In this article, we will take the new version for a test drive and look at how successful they have been in implementing their plans.

I did this review on a somewhat old system, a Pentium 4 processor along with 1.5 GB RAM and a Nvidia GeForce 6200 graphics card. The reason was to see whether Ubuntu was still good enough on a machine with moderate specifications. This is really important, given the low specifications of netbooks, which are really important targets for Linux.

Installation

So, let me start the review with its installation process. While I have been upgrading the distros for the past 4 years, I installed it right from scratch, this time. I think it is a good idea for everyone to do a fresh install with this release to get the full benefits of GRUB 2 and the ext4 filesystem. The Ubuntu installer, called Ubiquity, has always been easy to use and has been getting a little extra polish in every release. In this release, they added a very useful feature for newcomers to Linux in the form of a slide show during the installation process, which tells you the basics of the operating system. The installer also has the ability to set up an encrypted home directory. This is a really useful feature to have, in case your laptop, netbook, etc gets stolen or lost. The installation took me about 20 minutes.

The new Splash Screen from Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

Boot up

After installation, I rebooted and was welcomed by a beautiful splash screen. Karmic also uses Upstart to handle the boot process. To have a quick bootup, the plan was to start X very early in the bootup process, so that usplash is no longer needed and replace it with xsplash. Although xsplash is present in Koala Karmic, usplash (the white Ubuntu logo on black background) is also available till xsplash is ready to be displayed. Even then, the boot up looks very professional and much better than the one found in earlier versions. Next loads the GDM, which has also been made prettier. It is amazing to see how much progress they have made, in a single cycle, in the boot experience area and definitely makes one have high hopes on the next version. My boot time in Jaunty, from power on to desktop being ready to use, was around 2 minutes and in Karmic it is now about 50% lesser! The plan for a 10 second bootup time in the next Ubuntu 10.04 “Lucid Lynx” version is something I am really excited about.

Desktop showing new design work

GNOME 2.28 Love

Then, the desktop finally loads and the first thing I notice is that a new icon theme being used. They have switched to the humanity icon scheme, which really adds a lot of beauty and elegance. Some minor cosmetic changes like making the icons in the notification area gray tone, like in OSX, do make the OS look pretty. While Mark Shuttleworth had initially announced that the theme would change from brown to something else, it hasn’t happened in this release. A lot of new wallpapers have also been included this time. A particularly interesting one is a set of space wallpapers, which keeps automatically changing every 30 minutes. The wallpapers were selected by holding a competition and selecting the best amongst them. Such efforts certainly help in encouraging a lot more people to get involved.

Let’s look at some of the changes and updates in the applications, starting with the new GNOME 2.28. The latest GNOME release did not bring in too many new features as a lot of developers are in preparation mode for the GNOME 3.x series. So, mainly, there were a lot of cleanups. Yet, a few nice features were added like Totem got the ability to remember the position of video playback, before the application was closed, last time, and resume playback from that position the next time. This is a very useful feature for people like me who view many movies, soaps and videos on their computers. Evince also got the ability to view and edit existing annotations in the PDF documents. However, creating new annotations is scheduled for the next release. GNOME Bluetooth was added to handle bluetooth connections, along with many new features. It now allows the users to use bluetooth headsets very easily and also allows connecting with mobile phones and using it to browse the internet on the computer. GNOME Volume Control also got a lot of nice features added, like per application volume control, ability to control a subwoofer and channel fading. Also, as promised, a preview release of the new GNOME Shell is available for testing and to get a idea of what GNOME 3 will bring.

Empathy has become Ubuntu’s default IM and VOIP client, this cycle onwards, and has also added a lot of polish, along with a lot of new features. It currently supports audio and video chat on Google Talk and Jabber. If you need audio/video on MSN then, you should use the Telepathy team’s PPA at https://launchpad.net/~telepathy/+archive/ppa. It might be a little buggy for now, though. It also supports nice chat themes including those available for Adium. Another useful feature is desktop sharing, which worked nicely for me. The messaging indicator (the envelope in the notification area), which was introduced in Jaunty by the Ayatana team has been updated to support many more applications like Kmail, Gwibber, Empathy, etc in this cycle. Users who are not too comfortable with Empathy, can easily go back to Pidgin by installing it.

The Ubuntu Software Center

Ubuntu Software Store

This brings us to the point of the new Ubuntu Software Center. Many people new to Linux often feel that installing software is very difficult and requires a lot of expertise. To solve this problem, Ubuntu has taken inspiration from the Apple Store and Android’s market place, and replaced the old Add/Remove software application with a new Software Center application. It is designed with simplicity in mind and aims to make the process of installing new applications easier and much more fun. Initially, I was somewhat skeptical of how helpful this application is going to be. But after trying it for some time, I realised this is one of the best change in a long time. The version included in this release only has a few basic features. But it will eventually evolve to include social features like a rating system for the software and the ability to install the software installed by your friends,etc. The long term goal of the Software Center is to replace Synaptic Package Manager and Update Manager also. Though this will take a few more releases to actually materialize. A somewhat controversial goal is to allow purchasing of commercial software. While some purists may dislike this idea, it seems to be a natural move to facilitate the gain of a bigger market share for the distribution.

In keeping with the buzz around “cloud computing” Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) has launched a new Ubuntu One cloud synchronization service. It has some features similar to Dropbox, which is popular amongst a lot of Linux users. The benefit of Ubuntu One is that it is included by default in Ubuntu. This service allows to store and sync files, contacts and Tomboy notes. The information stored can also be accessed via the Ubuntu One website. Though native clients for Windows and Mac OSX will take some more time to develop. There are 2 subscription plans currently available. The free one comes with 2 GB of storage space and the paid plan costs 10 USD per month and offers 50 GB of storage space. Now, again while this represents another revenue channel for Canonical it has brought with it a lot of controversy. As the service is proprietary on the server side, many people felt that naming it Ubuntu One goes against the free ideals of Ubuntu. One thing to note is that the Ubuntu One client is open source and can be easily packaged for other distributions. It is clear that with ideas like this, Canonical is trying real hard to make it’s business profitable and no longer dependent on Mark Shuttleworth’s money.

Another new utility included in this release is the Palimpsest Disk Utility, also known as the GNOME Disk Utility. It allows for some simple disk operations like monitoring of the disks and creation, deletion and management of partitions, etc. In earlier releases, the absence of such a tool was cited as a big inconvenience. The Computer Janitor, which is used to remove unused programs and other cruft, has gained a better interface and some new features. The Network Manager which ships with this release is the latest 0.8 series version. It brings with it a lot of improvements for mobile broadband users and a much better interface. It also allows connecting to mobile phones via bluetooth and using it’s internet connection. Currently only the PAN bluetooth profile is supported. So only the latest mobile phones will work. Work is on to get Bluetooth Dial Up Networking (DUN) support in the next version, so that many more phones can be used.

In this cycle, Ubuntu had many projects to improve usability and user experience like the Papercuts project about which we discussed in the October issue. A Papercut is defined as a usability bug which is easy to fix. I would say that this project has been pretty successful as it has fixed around 65 of the 100 bugs targeted. The project wasn’t limited to GNOME bugs and included some KDE related bugs as well. The project also helped start discussions on usability problems in some projects. Some of the bugs fixed were as old as 5 years and were a source of a lot of frustration and annoyance. Of course the beauty of free software is that these bug fixes will be available for all the distributions to use.

While most of this article we have talked about the desktop version of Ubuntu, there were many improvements in it’s other derivatives as well. Kubuntu seems to be finally stabilizing with a much improved KDE 4.3. The Ubuntu Netbook Remix has also gained a lot of new features and some fine tuning. It’s selection of default applications has also been changed to better suit netbook users. A Kubuntu Netbook Remix was also released for the first time, which KDE fans are going to love. A version of Ubuntu based on the Moblin stack has also been released.

Final verdict

So, with this version does Ubuntu live up to it’s name of one of the most popular distributions? It certainly does and this version is certainly worth the upgrade for current Ubuntu users, especially those plagued by poor graphics drivers for Intel cards in the Jaunty release. There are 2 things which really excite me with Ubuntu. First is that, after six months when the next Ubuntu version comes out, which will be an LTS, things look really good for Ubuntu. Many computer manufacturers like Dell will use it for their netbooks, laptops and desktops. And when the cheap ARM chips based net books finally come out, Linux will certainly be a very good competitor to the proprietary Operating systems. The second thing is that with this release Canonical has come up with some innovative plans to profit from Ubuntu. If they actually are able to make money off the Linux desktop, it will be nothing short of spectacular!

Ed’s note: Do check out the complete Release Notes and LifeHacker for more images of Ubuntu 9.10.

Check out the reports on SubConf 2009, Day 1 & Day 2.

Today (29th of October, ‘09) marked Day 3 of SubConf 2009 which is also the last day of the event. Just like yesterday we had lots of talks planned with 3 parallel sessions at any point of time, but unfortunately there was only one talk in English for the whole day. The Subversion Hackathon went for the whole day where developers got together, discussed and wrote code for the entire day. The talks in day-3’s agenda was mostly concerned on Software Configuration Management and general concepts.

Perforce Stall

09:50 am – 10:35 am

Coding Control — Tony Smith from Perforce Software

Coding Control was all about ‘how to bring in agility and avoid fragility through software configuration management’. This talk mainly focussed on SCM and Agile development.

Michael Pilato

Key points from the talk:

1. SCM is at the heart of Agile
2. Model the flow of change
3. Expect things to change
4. Automate as much as you can
5. Always be constructive

Unfortunately, there were no questions asked from the audience at the end of the talk.

At the Subversion Hackathon room, developers wrote code all day. There were many good discussions about subversion code. We can say, this was a productive hackathon since there were approximately 34 commits the subversion repository with close to 800 lines of change!

The conference officially came to an end at 05:00 pm (German time), but the Subversion developers were not ready to move from the Subversion Hackathon room and they booked the room till mid-night.

To conclude, it was a great conference and there were lot of interesting things which I personally learned from the conference. Looking forward to contribute more to Subversion code base in the coming days. Hope we have more such subversion user conferences and developer hackathon in future.

If you’ve been following the Ubuntu release cycle you know that the .10 release is forth coming. Slated to hit the World Wide Web on October 29th, 2009, 9.10 promises to have quite a number of new features that should please even the most discerning of Linux users.

Here is a video showcasing the new version of Gnome, 2.28, on Ubuntu Karmic Koala. Do write to us with your feedback.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here for the Day 1 Report of SubConf 2009

Today (29-10-2009) marked the Day 2 of SubConf 2009 in which there were plans for many talks by prominent subversion developers and others. Three parallel sessions on various Software Configuration Management related topics went on simultaneously, out of which this report captures only the English sessions that happened in Room:Madrid of the Conference Hotel.

10:00 am – 10:45 am

Keynote — by C Michael Pilato, one of the long term developers in the subversion project right from 2001 till date

The Keynote title read as “The Subversion Legacy (So Far) – Philosophical Musings of a grateful participant”. CMike walked through the past history of subversion, the development methodology, why CollabNet chose subversion to be run as an Open Source Project, how it all evolved, etc.

The following were some of the questions posted by audience at the end of the talk and responses from CMike:

Q1. Why do we have SubConf for Subversion?
Ans: SubConf is good for subversion because it helps users from all over the world to meet in such a great user conference in which we don’t sell anything (it is all there out for free), but get user’s feedback and experiences to make it a more happy ride in the future.

Q2. What does Subversion Community’s feeling about DVCS?
Ans: The Subversion Community is excited about Distributed Version Control Systems (DVCS), since we are part of advancing the “State of the Art” and we are happy that, ultimately we have competitors in the version control world :)

Q3. Is there any Subversion User Conference like this planned in the US?
Ans: There is none but you can get together with Subversion folks in other conferences such as the ApacheCon.

Q4. What is the number of developers working on Subversion?
Ans: Developers come and go, at any point of time we have from 10 to 20 developers actively looking at the Subversion code base.

Q5. Is there a dictator in the Subversion project?
Ans: No we don’t have any “Dictator”.

11:15 am – 12:00 pm

Subversion Release Process — Hyrum Wright (Release manager of Subversion project and President of Subversion Corporation) and Stefan Sperling (Subversion Developer)

This talk explained in detail about the various process involved in making a subversion release. Another focus of this talk was to get more people help with testing of subversion pre-releases which will help in catching and fixing bugs early, though we don’t want you to run trunk on your production data. Right now we have very limited buildbots, so we encourage people to donate boxes for the subversion project if they have any so that it can be used to run some tests remotely and collect results. We need to remove redundancy in tests and introduce more real time tests as the users face in BIG deployments.

Hyrum Wright and Stefan Sperling (left to right)

The following are some of the questions posted by audience at the end of the talk and responses:

Q1. Subversion community can talk with the universities to get help from their Software Engineering and Software Testing departments to test the pre releases of subversion by the students, which will be very useful.
Ans: Yes that is an excellent idea and made a note.

Q2. How to keep track of bugs that are found and fixed between the releases of Subversion?
Ans: They are available from the CHANGES and branch based STATUS files.

Q3. How does a bug fix go from a release branch to trunk in subversion code base?
Ans: We do it the other way :) by backporting fixes from trunk to the release branches.

Playing with GIMP is never boring, every time you do some experiment you come to know of some cool effect. The best part are the filters, which if applied properly, can produce jaw dropping effects. While experimenting with GIMP I came to know that how easily I could create a glassy text with gimp. Although I am not a image maker, or a GIMP expert, I am trying my best to describe this process. I have broken down this process in eight sections, each one describing how to make each image effect component. So let’s start.

Glass Text

1. Create a new 1280×1024 image (or your best monitor resolution) with a black background.
   

   Creating the Text layer

2. Select Text tool, select a big area and type in a text. I have used Bitwise font, downloaded from Internet.
3. Change the color of text to white {#ffffff}, text size to fit the selection and position to justify.
4. Then right click the text layer and select merge down. This will remove the text properties and make the text you wrote into just an image. After this you will not be able to alter the text.
5. Now apply the below filters with appropriate parameters so that the effect looks the best for you and looks good in your display. I have provided the parameters, which I have used, in curly brackets.
   • Filters -> distorts -> emboss {Azimuth=236, Elevation=144, Depth=90}
     

     Emboss layer (section)

     

     Emboss layer (full)

   • Filters -> Blur -> blur
   • Filters -> Edge Detect -> Neon {Radius=4.78, Amount=0.07}
     

     Neon (section)

     

     Neon (full)

   • Filters -> Enhance -> Sharpern {Sharpness=50}
   • Filters -> Artistic -> Softglow {Glow Radius=50, Brightness=0.85, Sharpness=0.90}
     

     Softglow (full)

   • Select the text portion then Layer -> crop to selection
   • Color -> Colorify To Alpha -> From:{#000000}
     

     Colorify To Alpha (section)

     

     Colorify To Alpha (full)

Layers

The first step will emboss the text, next we blur the text, this is needed for the next step. When Neon edge detecting the sharp color transitions will get white, in this case the edges would get white. edges of the text will remain. If this layer was not blurred then the neon edge detection would result in jagged edged, and bad looking fonts instead of smooth edges. The Azimuth will control the white lining of the texts when applying Neon edge detection. Here you can do some research to get the white text outline as per your need. Then the layer is sharpened to compensate the blur. The softglow is applied to make a glowing effect of the text, so not apply too much of it, even it will look good when working, at some later time too much soft glow looks very bad. Then we select the text and crop only the text area. Note carefully when embossing, the values are very important which actually set how the text will look. Then apply the colorify to alpha and make the black background to alpha. And that’s it you get the basic glass text.

Name this layer “glass_text”.

Click “New Layer” button in the layer window and floodfill it to black {#000000} , send the new layer to bottom and rename it to “background” , so that we have the glass texts glowing out of the dark.

The third Subversion conference (SubConf) 2009 started today at Munich, Germany. This is an annual conference in which the subversion committees interact with the users of Subversion Version Control system, get the user feedback and prospects for new features, and also introduce new features in future releases of subversion.

Today is the 1st day of the Subversion conference in which there were two events planned — namely, the “Subversion Hackathon” (which will span all three days) and “Subversion Developers RoundTable”.

Subversion Hackathon

In this event all the subversion committers, who were available today, joined together in a room where they coded and discussed about subversion features. Some of the things which were discussed in this hackathon were the usage of scratch pool inside the subversion code base and working copy next generation library related issues and solutions.

Subversion RoundTable

The subversion RoundTable went on for 1 hour 30 minutes, between 1900 hours and 2030 hours. This RoundTable had a panel of Subversion committers who interact with the users who are mostly administrators of subversion and some developers who uses subversion to version their code base. There were 10 people in the panel, namely Greg Stein, Julian Foad, Dave Brown, Stephen Butler, C. Michael Pilato, Hyrum Wright, Bert Huijben, Stefan Sperling, Niels Holfmeyr and Senthil Kumaran S.

The following were the questions raised in the RoundTable and the answers given by the subversion developers.

Q1. We have a Working Copy next generation library (planned for 1.7 release) under active development in Subversion, it would be great to have pre releases of the latest subversion trunk binaries released often before we get the official release, so that the users will have an opportunity to test them and report back bugs often.

Solution: The subversion community has not released binaries for any of the versions. It is the OS specific package maintainers who has provided with binary packages all these days. The community wants to give away binaries so that more people can test it, but we are in need of volunteers to do that. If you are interested in doing a regular builds of binaries, you are welcome.

Q2. A user had a work flow in which he wanted to have branches for single files.

Solution: Single file externals introduced in 1.6.x version of subversion was suggested to fit his workflow.

Q3. Will there be any change in branch and merging operations of subversion?

Solution: No, there are no such plans right now.

Q4. Is there a way to automatically resolve tree conflicts, like incoming move and incoming delete?

Solution: As of 1.6.x version of subversion, we have tree conflict detection in place, but actual resolution of tree conflicts is under development.
Trumerge is one tool which solves tree conflicts automatically and it works with 1.6.x.

Q5. Problem with UTF-8 in different operating systems

Solution: Some operating systems like Mac OSX normalize UTF-8 and store it differently in the client side. Subversion gets these bits from the client as it is and stores it in the server side. These representations, when they come to a different operating system, are messed up. It may get fixed in 1.7.x since WC-NG where the filenames are stored in the database after UTF-8 conversion in the client side.

Q6. SVN blame/praise/annotate takes a long time. For example, a svn node with 6000 revisions, 2MB size takes 4 hours when fired a blame. But these are faster in CVS. When white space changes are neglected then 4 hours become 1 hour which is again a huge delay?

Solution: CVS does a line based search and SVN does byte based search hence SVN will be slow. SVN can implement a caching mechanism to reduce the time taken. Alternatively, the implementation needs to be changed to reverse blame from forward blame which is not actively looked upon as of now. Also blaming within a revision range will be lot more faster.

Q7. Make subversion diff to create well formed XML in the diffs.

Solution: This can be achieved by plugging in an external diff/merge tool which generates well formed XML in diffs. Use 1.6.x or later version of SVN to plugin this external diff/merge tool since the exit codes are returned properly in 1.6.x.

Q8. SVN obliterate, when is it coming?

Solution: Still in development and we are working on it.

Q9. SVN search of repository, some better way of doing it.

Solution: Should be easy, possible and efficient with an SQL backend which will also have multiple advantages with compromise to speed.

Q10. Are the inherited properties implemented in WC-NG?

Solution: No, we do not have any such plan, as of now. However, WC-NG will help in doing it with ease. The basic notion of developing WC-NG library is speed, robust, enable future feature developments easy.

Check out the reports on SubConf 2009, Day 2 & Day 3.

Software Freedom Day (SFD) is an annual worldwide celebration of free and open source software held during third Saturday of September every year. SFD 2009 was celebrated around the world with great zeal and vigour on the 19th September this year.

Free and Open Source Software(FOSS) Club of Jaya Engineering College, Chennai has been an active promoter in the field of Open Source. The Association aims at providing every student with the basic foundation and knowledge so that we build upon in the field of Open Source society. It not only sows the seeds for the academic excellence but also gives equal opportunities to the enthusiastic and creative skills of every student.

SFD ‘09 was celebrated on 19th September 2009, in Association with Indian Linux User group, Chennai & CSI Students Chapter. Shri K. Purushothaman, Regional Director, NASSCOM, Tamil Nadu & Kerala would be the chief-guest for the celebrations. Prof. M. Kumaran, Head, Jaya Open Source Centre welcomed the gathering. He have highlighted the power of open source software in the Educational Sector. Prof. R. Raja, Principal and Prof. T.N. Kapaleaswaran, Director, IT delivered the special addresses. Prof. A. Kanagaraj, Chairman, Jaya Educational Trust delivered the presidential address and spoke about the Economical and Licencing aspects of softwares. Prof. G. Bharathi Mohan, Co-ordinator, Jaya FOSS Club, thanked the gathering and delivered various ongoing activity of Jaya FOSS Club.

The wheels of progress turn slowly but surely, encompassing all within their turns. Jaya FOSS Club (JFC) released its souvenir “FLOSSAGE” for the year 2009-10. The magazine compiled many thoughts, ideas, works and achievements of Jaya Engineering Students. It unfolds various budding technologies on Open Source. It contains the current and the future projects of Jaya FOSS Research Centre.

Various Technical Talks by Professionals, Various Contests for Students and Demo stalls were the events that made people think about the burning issues in FOSS. The alumni of our college greeted the occasion and presented their technical talks to the gathering on Birth of Jaya FOSS club, How to make money out of FOSS, How to understand Open Source Projects, iTALC : Intelligent Teaching And Learning with Computers, “Free Software and its relevance in young engineers”,and FOSS in Cloud Computing.

They have done an outstanding job in evangelizing FOSS in communities in and around our college society, and a good portion of it has come through their Talks on Open Source where student representatives conducted full fledged celebrations and upheld the spirit of software freedom. Students and professionals from various colleges and institutes presided over the function.

Students from various departments had immense participation in demonstrating their knowledge on Open Source. There were around 30 Demo stalls which had brought in the efforts of many students in bestowing knowledge to other college students.
Live cd and Installation, FOSS equivalent, Office tools, Internet tools, Browsers, Educational tools, Mathamatical tools, Desktop’s, IDE’s, Compiler collection, FOSS CAD tools, RDBMS, EDA tools, LAMP, CMS, Localization, CASE tools, Scientific python tools, Virtualization, Troubleshooting in UBUNTU and Multimedia were some of the stalls put up in the campus.

There were many other interesting events for the participants which included terminal hack, online quiz, gaming, debugging all based on open source tools.
The students are trained on regular basis by the working group on various open source technologies. Working Groups work on various open source tools and helps in inculcating knowledge to the students. Jaya Engineering College has three Open Source Laboratories with numbering of 400 pcs. where all the Lab Courses of CSE and IT are conducted using Open Source tools like Gcc. G++, PostgreSql, Umbrello, Python, etc.

Jaya FOSS Club provides technical tutoring, FOSS resources and news. For deatils login into www.jayafossclub.org. SFD was a huge success in our Society. SFD itself has motivated many students to adopt the open source tools.

The Jaya FOSS Club is driving the effort, but the event depends largely on the grassroot activities of open source software, advocates organizing many events every year.

I was never into coding/development for FOSS. Though I had decent coding skills in some languages, I had never gotten the opportunity to develop mainstream FOSS. When I was told about HackFest at Shaastra ‘09, I decided to give the event a try. Here are my experiences at HackFest.

For starters, Shaastra is not the university in Tanjore, Tamil Nadu. That is SASTRA. Shaastra is IIT-Madras’ annual techfest. This year, it was conducted from the 1st to the 4th of October.

Day 1 of HackFest (1st Oct): There were talks on ‘FOSS and Technology’ by Atul Chitnis, founder of Foss.in, and on ‘FOSS Foundry’ by Shreyas Srinivasan, GNOME developer and co-founder of radioverve.

Chitnis was at his witty best, beginning his talk on a lighter note, talking a little about his past (and why it was relevant to the talk he was giving to us), and in the end, urging the audience to come up with questions of their own. The talk had Chitnis written all over it. He said that there was no organization that could do without free and open source software. “If you use any router today, chances are that it runs Linux. Then you’re a Linux user without you knowing it”, he said. He briefly compared the Linux and BSD kernels and also busted myths about licensing. That there was a lot of dry humour throughout the was evident as the audience chuckled every few minutes.

Srinivasan talked in the afternoon about how he struggled to add a feature to gnome-do. But that was not before he asked us a question about software we use everyday. “Emacs” someone said to which he said “I like”. Immediately, I, being a Vim fanatic shouted “Vim!” to which he said “I don’t like” asserting his position as an Emacs fanatic and making the audience laugh. His talk was filled with humour. The feature he had added, coming back to the point, was the ability to paste URLs into gnome-do in . mode (and tweet them). Gnome-do is written in C# . “Writing code is the easiest part. Even an Infosys programmer can do it”, he said, making the ones that were awake laugh loudly and waking up the ones that were asleep. “Downloading the source and building it is the hardest part”, he added after the laughter died down. He then walked us through what he had done to add the feature, which was apparently only 5 lines of code. This he said, was not accomplished before he had encountered the weirdest of bugs during the build and make process. One error which made the audience roar with laughter was “no: command not found”. The audience laughed again when he showed us a page in an online forum he had found when he had googled the error. Someone in that forum replied to a question on the ‘no’ command that he thought ‘no’ was part of Perl! =P Finally, he had found out that it was an error with because ‘mono’ was not present and then he was able to make. He ended it asking the audience to start developing and contributing back to the community.

Participants were split into 6 groups in the night: GNOME, Sugar, Firefox (Jetpack), the Linux kernel, FFMpeg and KDE based on our preferences after a briefing about each area and what to expect. I chose GNOME.

Arun Changanty, a CS&E student lead our team and taught us the basics of gtk+ programming. The session went on till 2:30am the next morning and I was amazed (coming from a non-cs background) to see how a little modification to the C programming style can let one develop apps using gtk+ libraries.

Day 2 (Night 2 rather): Now that we knew the basics, we set out exploring bugs. http://bugzilla.gnome.org was a good place to start. But we did not visit the page until later in the night. We wanted to do some really basic bug fixing first up. So we set out looking for gnome love bugs. Not having found anything we liked, we started searching on bugzilla. And we struck gold! Gnibbles apparently had a bug which allowed one to change preferences during gameplay if the preferences window was open before a game started. This we found out was because the preferences window was not *modal*. Bingo! we had it. Finding the location of the bug and fixing it was nothing for us with Arun’s help. We only experienced difficulties in building and making.

After toiling it out for hours, we finally had the diff (bug fix)! Arun was really magnanimous here. He let me file the bugfix in my own name. This was the shot in the arm I realized later, that I was badly wanting for so long to kickstart contributing to the community with code. We filed a bug on “2009-10-02 23:34:43 UTC” as the bugzilla identifies it. I had just contributed with code! Thanks to hackfest.

Night 3: Now I was really enthusiastic. I went around searching for bugs, found one in gconf-editor and right away, went to work. by “2009-10-03 23:03:38 UTC”, I had another bug fix!

Apart from the hacking nights, we had loads of fun in BoF sessions and constantly engaged in funny wars with some people supporting GNOME and others.

Thanks to the event, I had successfully started contributing back to the community with code.

It has been a while that WACOM is noted as a leading tablet manufacturer, among the graphic designers. However, this is the first time they launched a series of products that could not just be used by the designers, but by the “aam junta” as well, with equal ease. WACOM just launched the second generation of Bamboo series, in India, yesterday. As the company claims, it is the first interactive tablet that merges multi-touch functionality with pen tablet technology in a single device. Based on current consumer trends and the introduction of popular touch devices such as the Apple iPhone, Bamboo provides a simple and spontaneous way of using your computer. Operating Bamboo is as easy as a touch (finger-based input), or a stroke of our digital pen. The new family is comprised of four different products – Bamboo, Bamboo Fun, Bamboo Pen and Bamboo Touch.

WACOM Bamboo FUN -- Pen & Touch

The selling point of the Bamboo would be the high sensitivity of the surface. Moreover, apart from catering to design needs, it can transform any dektop and laptop into a very cheap tablet PC. Combined with today’s gesture and hand writing recognition software, this device could ease a lot of lives.

Bamboo would be very useful for those of you who use computers as part of your digital lifestyle to communicate, share and create content. It enables anyone to be creative. Bamboo is also a great tool for self-expression and personalisation when producing everyday documents, presentations and blogs, or when communicating with friends, colleagues and family through IMs and social networks.

Combining pen and touch technology into one stylish device delivers the best of both worlds, making it even easier, quicker and more fun to use a computer. With Bamboo second generation, a simple finger tap on the digital pad will allow you to select an icon, open a menu or start an application. Plus, a variety of intuitive two-finger gestures enables you to simply rotate an image or document, flip through a digital photo album or presentation, scroll through a blog or an excel sheet and zoom in and out of a photo or map.

With a sleek, black design Bamboo offers pen and multi-touch input in a single device and is equally suited for your home office and workplace. Bamboo can be used to customise your emails, letters, spreadsheets, presentations and documents with signatures, notes, doodles and scribbles. The addition of intuitive touch input with gestures simplifies navigation both on your desktop and when you surf the Internet. Bamboo comes bundled with Adobe Photoshop Elements and Ink Squared Deluxe.

Lastly, I shall leave you with a video, showing off how the Bamboo works and its potentials.