Ride KDE4 with openSUSE 11.0

About Six and half hours of leeching from torrent and 117.4 MB of seeding contribution for self-satisfaction, adds another distro to my wallet – the all new openSUSE 11.0 KDE4 Live CD.

Watching DragonBall on lappie and simultaneously installing openSUSE on my PC made the installation feel fast. After post installation configuration, it automatically logged me in with my username.
I was expecting to see the shiny black KDE4 panel and it turned out that openSUSE build had something else in mind.
A grey panel…err..not so attractive!

KDE4′s panel settings doesn’t have customisation for color and transparency like it did in 3.5.x series. Anyway, I thought I could figure it out somewhere in configuration files or may be live with it.
Some things I found missing during installation include setting hostname, choosing Network Type, Package selections.
After installation I also noticed that an extra user `linux` was created apart from my username.
Who asked for that? Is it a feature or did I do something during installation. ( One eyeball was watching lappie and the other was on PC – trait of suse mascot )

I decided to redo installation with careful check. This time I found that I had not unchecked the option of using same password for my username and root. Using this feature simulates ubuntu’s sudo kinda environment where you use your own password to do administrative tasks.
Even after the second installation, I find the ‘linux’ user existing on my system. So, well may be it’s not something I did and probably it’s a feature which I need to find an use for.

Moving on to KDE4 desktop now. openSUSE 11.0 ships in with KDE 4.0.4 which seems quite stable than my trunk build 4.0.7. Yes, quite stable but has issues.
The plasmoids on desktop lose their rotation when you relogin. They get realigned at their default vertical orientation.
Another issue is when I change colors in my look and feel settings and apply them, I get logged out losing all my open tasks.
openSUSE 11.0 also ships Firefox3 beta5 which hangs when your machine comes back from power save mode. Yet to test out Firefox3 Final on this.

Nevertheless, I am loving KDE4. Soon this ‘shipped’ KDE will be removed and my PC should be living on KDE trunk.

Current distro profiles of my machines – openSUSE 11.0 on PC and Mandriva 2008.1 on lappie.

GSoC student application starts today :)

So here it is, March 24, the students’ applications open today. Other important dates listed here.

Students wanting to participate in GSoC can see Official List of Mentoring organisations or Categorized list of mentoring organisations and Mentoring organisations by Language.

I was wondering if I should try my luck at GSoC this year. Bad that this occurred to me just 4 days ago, so lot of studying time is lost already.
Another hick-up is I’ve moved to a new place and BSNL has not provided my internet connection yet. I called them up so many times; no avail.

Yesterday, I had to work from an internet cafe, I couldn’t convince the admin that it is safe to connect my linux laptop to his network, so at last I had to convince him for xchat (30 minutes to convince him that xchat isn’t a virus and he can safely install that on his windows box.)

I mailed a small game idea of mine to kde-games-devel mailing list; impatiently waiting for reply.
Another interesting idea is Elements under OLPC where I am also interested in writing small python/pygame based games.
Chris Hager (probable mentor) is about to propose a detailed project list in about another 8hrs; will be interesting to watch tickets page of Elements.

Applications should be open around 19:00 UTC, thats around 00:30 March 25th in India. So waiting with fingers crossed.

Higher Caste != Better Programmer

I spent my last week in Guntur, as a .Net and C# tutor for one of the top engineering colleges in Andhra Pradesh.
It was a blast time with my room-mates or co-tutors, but things got to my nerves whenever I entered that college.

The trainees were students of 4th year, and most of them lacked basics of computer engineering. Keeps me wondering whether the faculty failed to deliver or is it the students fault.
Some lacked common sense.
Some of them didn’t understand simplest of the errors being shown by visual studio IDE, while some do not know to close the xml tags that they began with.

To my horror, this college is famous for its caste discrimination.
We grouped the students into 3 per project basis and left the decision of team leader to them. Call it a cult; all the team leaders were of the caste that is believed to be higher in that region.
Well, this was not the end of it. They believe that they are superior to anyone, and one such hilarious case:
A super-intellect higher caste team leader was not able to figure out how to write the abstract of his project.
I explained him all modules of the project and asked him to pen them down. After 4 days, he asks me “Where on google can I find an abstract?”
There is a serious side to this. One of his team members was a non-higher caste guy and he was not allowed to write the abstract, even if he could have done it flat in a day.
The so-called higher caste members of the team do not discuss or share ideas with the other guys/girls of the team.

I’ve even heard that one of the members did bring this issue to the Head of Department, for which she was scolded. Guess what? The HoD belongs to higher caste.

Another important thing to note, these people ‘earned’ placements in giants like Infy, TCS, etc.,

People do not realise that castes’ are created by people, not GOD, not nature. The very sense of humanity is dying. Some people enjoy this power of being able to discriminate and probably there is no one to stop it!

Lets look at the technical trauma I’ve been through:

1. I was amid hundreds of windowsXP machines.
2. IRC, Orkut is blocked.
3. Anything with words chat, games,.. is blocked. This includes google search with words like Internet Relay Chat or XMPP chat server.
4. Debian/ubuntu repo downloads are blocked.
5. Poor students have never heard of ‘bug’ in software.
6. I was not allowed to use my cellphone or laptop in the college bus.
7. I was not successful in using the college projector. i810switch package had problems on my laptop.

Things that made me happy there:

1. The proxy server is redhat enterprise linux.
2. One student uses linux (out of the whole 4th year computer science and IT group)
3. A batch of 3 students have completed their project on COIN (Collaborative Open Innovation Network) using php and MySQL.
4. That I didn’t join formal education for my engineering in any such college.

Lucky me; my assignment there was only for a week, which is done and I am back to my base.

Going Virtual…

I used vmware workstation when I first started using OS on virtual platform.
Later I lost touch, and I had to get back to virtualization for testing and my abandoned LinuxFromScratch project.

I was still using vmware player with vmx machines build on vmware workstation. I longed for a change and started exploring options. Here are few things that ran in my mind since 2 days..

Virtualbox needs Qt as pre-requisite; I did not want Qt on my box.

Qemu – provides Qemu accelerator – KQemu for better performance on x86!
My PC is powered by AMD’s Sempron 2400+ and I might be happy with Qemu’s
performance. What happens when I move my virtual machines to intel box? Install KQemu!

Xen – needs the host operating system kernel to run on Xen itself.
So, probably I need to boot into the xen-mydistro-kernel (like in fedora); which I am not yet
comfortable with.

Kvm – Sun product. I was a little upset with the way things went with opensolaris and sun startup
programmes; hesitant to take a look at Kvm. May be it is a great product, may be it is not.

After hours of studying documentation for virtualization software and asking for suggestions in orkut (The GNU/Linux Group), IRC channels, I zeroed on virtualbox; finally allowed Qt on my box.

Luckily I got a deb package for feisty (saved me the hassle of building from source) and thanks to dpkg for easy installation.

Life couldn’t be much easier, I thought; this did not stand for long, I discovered that I removed myself from my secondary group by using `sudo usermod -G vboxusers`.
The brighter side of it is, I used my ubuntu recovery mode (in grub) for first time; added my name in old group lines of /etc/group and I was back in business.

Now what do I install as my new virtual OS? LFS, Zenwalk(redpill) or Mandriva2008!

Linux Not Windows? (with weird look)

I spent my day(Jan4) trying to make linux and open source reach colleges here in twin-cities (hyderabad & secunderabad) , by means of training and distributing linux distros.
Few things on my mind before I started out:
1. Free is not valued.
2. This will not be easy.

I chose junior, degree and engineering colleges for my venture, of which I covered three junior and one engineering college today.

I was under the impression that indian education system would have matured and institutions would think of more than syllabus books. Irony, I was wrong; some attitude that proves it:

1. (At one of the reputed junior colleges in twin-cities)
Front Office: Linux training! Linux is not windows? Ah, I don’t think that’s useful at all.
Me: Is it possible to meet the principal?
Front Office: He’s gone for lunch. I mean he is gone out.
Me: I just saw him walk into his office.
Front Office: (No Response)

2. (Another reputed junior college)
Vice President: Here, we teach only syllabus and repeatedly make the students read the same
thing. That is how students get good ranks in EAMCET.
(Ah, at least a frank response. I like this.)

3. (Last junior college for the day)
Principal: We are making our students revise the intermediate syllabus.
Me: Not a problem ma’am. We can have this next month if you permit.
Principal: We will do the revision till June. So come after June.

At this point, I was totally broken hearted and headed towards an engineering college here in secunderabad. I had been in contact with the Training & Placement officer of that college and also mailed her the details of training. After lot of follow-up calls from my side, and no return calls, I decided to meet her in person to discuss the training.

4. I walked in to the office and ..
ME: Hi, could I meet the T&P Officer?
STAFF: She has already left for the day.
ME: !

That’s four cases of disappointment for me in a day.
Shouldn’t I be getting a heart attack?

One of my friends has volunteered to help me find more colleges (degree & engineering) and I am yet to go on another ride on the path of open source knowledge sharing.

Will it be bumpy or smooth? Can I convince people to embrace linux and open source?
Only time can tell….