My new lappie rested in its bag for some days. I had no time to use it and may be I was even waiting for my opensolaris shipment to arrive. It was my third attempt to get free opensolaris shipment from SUN. Hoping atleast the third one would come.
I tried downloading from the website, but the download breaks. One of ilughyd members, theju tried from torrent, I guess he got a bad checksum. So, all in all last, trust was on SUN to grant me an opensolaris DVD.
The wait was getting longer each day and one fine day ubuntu released 8.04 LTS version. This tempted me to try out the distro and still keep waiting for opensolaris. ubuntu studio seemed a good deal to try out. The download was another long wait. 
After install affects:
1. Atheros wi-fi device was not detected.
2. Low quality sound.
Sound could be taken care of later, but lappie is really not mobile until I can go wireless. Limited by time, I left it in that state for few more days. The day I got back to it, I tried using the restricted drivers and madwifi.
Then I tried ndiswrapper deb package and used winXP drivers; no avail.
I was suggested to try compiling ndiswrapper from source rather than using packaed deb, at ‘The GNU/Linux Group‘
That attempt ended in CFLAGS error. Checked around in the internet to find lots of reports on CFLAG errors from various people trying to compile apps from source. Most of them are related to kernel 2.6.24
I was lost in thoughts on what can be done and lo - my opensolaris shipment arrived(release 1/08). Eager to get it run, I tried installing and ended up with bad/non-existing X server on the disk. I couldn’t get into GUI installation and I didnt want to spend time doing command installation and then patch my X.
It is not my natural self to upgrade / install new releases - Long lost habit. I wait for a month or two after the release and upgrade/install, only if necessary. Running low on time, I decided to pull debian4.0/kubuntu7.10 from my CD pack and get done with distro installation.
Atheros didnt work by default in it as well, but then ndiswrapper 1.51 did the job to an almost ok level. I say so because my wi-fi switch doesn’t blink, though I am able to connect to internet and it also works as toggle to switch on/off.
I’ll save the lights thingy for some other time. Got loads of other things to address on priority.
11 May this time it is, second sunday. Doesn’t strike you yet? It’s mother’s day and it’s gone already (atleast here in India).
So well, I hope people didn’t forget to wish their mom.
At least I didn’t, and we (gf & I) packed neat surprises for our moms’.
We purchased gifts two days in advance and ordered for cake on 10th. The cake was sneaked into my gf’s fridge and it lay there unnoticed until the clock struck 00:00 (digital life) 
We woke up our moms’ at midnight to celebrate mother’s day. They were taken by complete surprise; they must have thought we forgot about it. Who wouldn’t? We showed no signs of remembering it throughout the day.
Gift’s were presented before celebrating the cake and what should I say, I guess we made the opposite choices of gifts. It’s up to them, if they want to exchange their gifts now.
Everyone was drowsy and we decided to continue celebrations in the morning.
I found out that mom had to go to office this Sunday. That was so heartbreaking. Nevertheless, when she returned in the evening, we ordered food from a Chinese restaurant. Thanks to my gf’s overestimation of our eating capacity, we all were full by the time we could complete only half the food.
I overate (may be due to good taste) and heck I have a belly now that looks almost like a near delivery pregnancy. Worry not, I will not be wished on mother’s day next year; heavy food just takes some time to digest. 
Before we move on to mukt.in, I wish a very happy birthday to my grandpa. May I get some of his intelligence, wits and goodwill for others.
Oh heck, I am supposed to present gift, not ask for! 
And, mukt.in venue has been finalized today. (in writing by Dr. S.Ramachandram, HoD, Dept of CSE, University College of Engineering, O.U)
The verbal approval was already done last monday; I requested him for a documented approval, incase the sponsoring companies needed them and it was granted today.
So, mukt.in 2008 is set for 1,2,3 Aug 2008 at OU, CSE Department. Party time! 
Now a credits list and thanks to
Dr. S.Ramachandram, for his precious time - We’ve bugged him about over 4 times discussing mukt.in
Aishwarya - for helping me with lots of technical issues; gave me time to work for the venue finalizing.
Pavithran - numerous to & fro journeys (Hyd - Chennai) for mukt.in
Deependra, Shriphani, Ravi Chandra - for trusting me that I’d not take 2 months to fix us a venue
and others who have helped and not-helped.
Its time to change the topic for #mukt.in now.
This is continued from here.
Well, the build from qt-copy progressed, this time faster because I wasn’t reading techbase instructions much. If you remember my first build, it filled up my /home and later unmentioned in my blog, creped in few problems. I was able to run KDE4 applications from KDE3.5.8, KDE4 Desktop using Xephyr and even by running separate instances of X on virtual consoles, but not a full KDE4 session from login manager. It just used to hang.
I wished I could save space by not having KDE3.5.8, just a tiny wish in my mind which accidentally came true when I un-installed gcc4.1 and g++4.1 (since I wanted to use 4.2 ). I used adept, and I didn’t realise that many packages were being removed until I took a glance at the screen to find that it was almost done. That includes kdm, xserver, all kde applications and finally adept itself.
I still wonder if I accidentally touched any other package other than gcc and g++.
Right now, my PC runs minimal KDE4 session, firefox, konversation and yes of course kdegames; well, call it playground/games. I’ve been playing kapman since I could finish building this up.
Oh, this reminds me, another small error I made during kdegames build. I ran svn up without checkout on libkdegames and libkmahjongg. The error came to light when I tried to build kapman. I asked around in #kdegames without trying to debug and passed on the confusion to many there.
I hadn’t build kdegames and how would kapman pick libraries from it then? It struck me when my belly rang a hunger warning. So, it was taken care of after dinner.
Now on KDE 4.0.71, with broken plasma.
Its been ages (well, months may be) since I installed Windows. My last weekend project needed me to install about 48 copies of WindowsXP-Home edition for a new testing & training center - Primora.
Call me lucky, there were 4 people from the machine vendors and my gf also volunteered to lend a hand. All in all, the machine build with peripherals and windows installation on all 48, took 6 of us the whole day.
Since my days at Satyam, I’ve not been involved in such a scale of installation. Another similarity - Primora purchased all original licensed Microsoft products for its students. We rarely get to see any testing & training center do that.
The class rooms are real good, think of anything from new powerful machines, to sleek TFT monitors, full length board, projector and Air Cooled rooms. That’s huge investment for a start-up. It is backed up by the world class experience (~15 years on average) of partners of the company. And it is not their first start-up.
One of a kind training center, that the students should be on look out for.
It’s inaugural batch starts today; I’m sure Primora will rock.
Rejoice all students, finally an end to the long wait for GSoC results.
This time google is funding 1125 students; they received over 7,000 applications for this year.
Post announcing results open by Leslie Hawthorn.
All students should be thankful to LH and whole team as well as the participating organizations for this program. It is a real effort demanding task to carry out such an enormous scale program.
As for KDE, this year’s accepted projects are listed here.
I should thank the whole KDE team for their effort on this.
My application ‘KDragons’ didn’t make it to the selected list; may be it was too stupid.
So, that’s the end of my GSoC road for this year. Now to finish my leftover builds on KDE4 and I should be ready enough to write some patches. I should try to get my SVN account on KDE in another month or so.
KDragons needs hosting somewhere now, may be on kde-playground or if not, my choice would be launchpad.net
Hmm, its 04:35, I am not yet feeling sleepy. Guess results scared the sandman away!
KDE 4.0.x build with kdegames from trunk has managed to take lot of space on my /home. I could have tried building from trunk on /home with different directory. It would have been fun to have both builds together.
I was sure this will end up somewhere before the build and fill up space again. So, I decided to repartition my whole disk for a new start.
My data backup was not much, all my deb packages from apt archives, some documents, wallpapers and few Dragon Ball- Z episodes. Thats it and my blackbeauty was ready for a new installation.
kubuntu 7.10 32-bit found its new home sweet home on my PC.
Current partitions include /boot = 156MB, /home = ~46GB, /var = 5GB, swap = 1.3GB, / = ~25GB
I started building qt-copy again and this time from trunk. Internet was damn slow that night, and as usual slow things make me sleepy and I dozed off again.
Next morning, I completed qt-copy build.
The PC is still in the same state; I had to get back to some unfinished web work for mukt.in 2008
While the mentors might be pondering over my simply simple application for GSoC, I am making efforts to build the development environment.
KDE’s Techbase has a very well written documentation; thanks to everyone who contributed, it made my life a little easy.
The build was smooth until I compiled qt-copy. It failed due to insufficient disk space on my /home. This was obvious, since I had /home of 3GB only.
I use a very peculiar partitioning scheme. On an 80GB IDE Harddisk, I make 11 partitions, having /boot, /, swap, /usr, /var, /opt, /home, /code, /data, /musik, /vm-os.
While, reinstalling my distro with a huge /home would have been the sane thing, I decided to drop my /musik and /vm-os and created a /home of 15GB. I knew I have to build this again, but then continuing at this point would give me more experience.
So, by saturday night I was done with the kdebase build and was using KDE4 applications on KDE3.5.8 Desktop. At this point, my free space on /home was 6.1GB; I had option to delete my *.o files to free up space, which I didn’t exercise.
At #kdegames (irc.freenode.net), jpwhiting and milliams pointed me to kollision, it was fun and I was scoring points until I started understanding how to play.
I fell asleep on my keyboard that night (happens many times); next day’s fun on next post.
Phew, I am back home after a long and tiring stay at Chennai again. I say tiring because, there was not much to do in the extra 3days of my stay due to missing the train.
Luckily I didn’t miss the KDEGames meeting. It was decided that there will be a student’s meet for all GSoC participants of this year. That’s really sweet of the kdegames team.
My GSoC application (KDragons) to KDE has moved from status ‘Available for review’ to ‘Ranking in progress’.
I am back to building KDE4 on my desktop.
At mukt.in, the website theme has been updated with something that looks and feels like open source software atleast. The theme is still under development, so please do not get mad with the colors yet.
The blog and ToDo links have been removed.
Blogs will be updated under volunteers section and ToDo goes in the discussion forum. We’ve decided to leave the wiki as a playground/sandbox for everyone. Selected Ideas from wiki will make it to the website.
Our chat still runs mibbit ajax based web irc client; one of the drupal modules. I wonder if it supports connecting to any other irc server. We may have to configure this to auto-join irc.devnode.org; thanks to devnode for enabling us on their webchat server.
mukt.in welcomes suggestions/comments anytime.
This is how I was feeling yesterday >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Wondering why? Because I missed my train; thanks to the auto-driver’s newly found so called short cut route, takes over an hour to travel 16kms with more than 6 traffic signals to get me boiling angry.
Another auto-driver brings me back in 28 minutes flat via normal route.
Well, this is like paying to miss the train. Especially when travel rates of auto are soaring high in Chennai.
Plus I couldn’t cancel my ticket; not even partial refund (It was booked under tatkaal scheme).
I cannot take a train today; I don’t want to miss my first KDE Games Developer meeting. The next best deal I got was on tuesday-April 8. Thanks to Srihari and also his girlfriend for the lift.
I wanted to reach home on Sunday morning and finish building KDE4; feeling sad now.
That would have enabled me experience some PyKDE extensions before the meeting; now I guess I’ll have to just sit shut up during the meet.
Hoping for things to turn out well.
