As usual, I am late with updating my blog on the recent acivities owing to the fact that I have lots of other tasks (a Fringe and Big Bang Theory marathon for the record) But still let me try to recollect what all hapened those days.
Day #1
I remember collecting Hiemanshu from Pune station and then taking him to my room and spending the night having some generic FOSS talks and getting to know each other. We did some initial planning for the first GNUnify day but that didn´t do any good owing to the fact that our arrival led us straight to a chaos. Apparently some miscommunication led to some speaker names being wrongly declared for a couple of talks they had specified for the Fedora Track, but soon things were under control and Neependra and Hiemanshu started with ¨Contributing to Fedora”and ¨Introduction to Virtualization¨ as mentioned on the Fedora GNUnify 2011 Wiki. Soon, the discs and the swag came and it was Fedora all over Room 706. The after lunch session taken by Tanushri was a small demo of the upcoming Gnome3 and issues related to developing GUI apps on it. Soon I met Shakthi Kannan whom I had got in touch on some occassions and our Embedded NIrvana gang (Chaitannya, Amit Karpe, Ksinkar & Co) :p It started feeling like home already 🙂 I interacted with so many interested students and shared ideas with them. Apart from the already heated up Fedora sessions, the air was charged with guys like Ksinkar interested un Embedded Linux. We brainstormed for sometime about the lame Hawkboard and mini2440 and then called it a day. We went for the Firefox dinner at SIMS where I met some other FF contributors. I returned with Hiemanshu back to my den and we started planning about an awesome idea on Day 2 🙂
Day #2
What we planned last night was somewhat interesting. Actually I designed a PyGTK app PyQrencode sometime back and had been stuck somewhere (I admit I am a lame coder) and Hiemanshu willingly helped me out. Soon we planned to do it all over using PyQt and take the same concept to showcase app development using both platforms. In the process, I learnt some stuff from Hiemanshu too and our sessions the next day were awesomely interesting! I took up an into to Python and PyGTK and HIemanshu showcased the power of PyQt. Sadly, and apparently, Qt was more powerful in terms of ease of development and features and I lost the mini battle we had. By this time I had missed al the interesting stuff that was going on at GNUnify and my Main Session talk was approaching too. I started a quick review of my talk (which was immediateley after Siji Sunny) and started gearing up. After the FOSS.in MiniConf talk, this was somewhat a not so different experience. The attendence in my talk was moderate but loyal. I could see some familiar and interested faces and knew that question of all sorts would come :-p
My talk Tux Under the Hood was about some personal experiences of mine, gathered while playing around with Linux on embedded devices. I mostly talked about the basics of embedded devices, structure of the Linux OS on them and ended with an elaborate hands-on/demo on QEMU.
Other interesting main session talks were by Neependra and Shakthi on setting up kgdb, GNU Make and Kickstarting C, GCC respectively – which I obviously missed 😦 However, Neependra was kind enough to teach me some stuff during our Embedded NIrvana Sessions at CoEP. I was tired and hungry by this time, and there was a prize ceremony going on for the winners of programming contest. As soon as it was over, I met some other senior PLUG guys and soon me and He-Man-Sue were on our way back pondering what all we did.
It was a nice experience and I got to know a lot about what goes on inside a FOSS contributorś mind. some pics from the event are here :
Tuxology 