Semester starts, less blogging

Well, I presume the title explains it all. There are lot of things I wanted to blog about, but plan to postpone indefinitely, such as “the most useless Kavalur trip ever” and “Are concerts recordable” and “TNK’s recent kutcheri I attended”.

This means that I have less time, and if by my good fortune, you, one of those guys who ask me technical support for Linux, have stumbled on my blog, it means that YOU WILL NOT GET TECHNICAL SUPPORT FROM ME. There is this beautiful site that offers all possible technical support for every problem you may have, and you should really really look at it.

Dell Inspiron 1525!

Yay!

Finally got a Dell Inspiron 1525, Ruby Red Color, No Windows. It came with a nice CD of FreeDOS that said “with sources” and said that the stuff inside was licensed under GPL. But bleh, a whole lot of Windows drivers along with it. Anyway, Linux 2.6.25 supported both the network card and the sound card (Linux 2.6.22 did not).

Well, I had an old image of Debian testing with a 2.6.22 kernel that Varun had given me. The installer did not detect my network card and I had to declare that I had no network card. I brought Linux 2.6.25 from my desktop in a thumb drive and installed it.

I had trouble figuring out how to start the network because I thought the problem was with the driver, while the problem was actually with the cable. I replaced the cable, did:

ifconfig eth0 inet up {IP Addr.} netmask {Subnet Mask} broadcast {Broadcast Addr.}
route add gw default {Default Gateway}

And added my DNS servers to /etc/resolv.conf and things started working beautifully. This helped me, because I didn’t know the correct usage of ifconfig.

Yet to test the webcam, WLAN and so on. But what I need for my basic usage is working.

I plan this to be my portable music player, KDE Development Device and communication device. So far, I’ve barely set up the minimum requirements on it (I started at about 11:00 PM and it’s been 6 hours so far) but I think I’ve done a fairly good job in setting up the KDE development environment this time. I added a small bit of code that changes my coloured prompt to indicate whether I’m in a build directory or source directory, and also the branch I’m working on into David Faure’s cd function.

Right now, I’m compiling kdebase and hope to have KStars ready for tomorrow’s Kavalur trip [What perfect timing!]

An idea for easy KDE development within IIT Madras.

I think the most painful part of developing KDE is to build the dependencies etc from the SVN checkouts, i.e. setting up the development environment. Now, let’s say I’m developing kdenetwork. I will need to have qt-devel, checkout and build kdesupport, kdelibs, kdepimlibs, kderuntime and then kdenetwork. Now, a newbie who does know C++ need not be very comfortable with the build process or with debugging the builds, but could be capable of coding for KDE.

Why not set up a KDE development server within IIT Madras, to which you can SSH with X forwarding and just start developing?

For starters, let’s say I do this on my machine. What I would do is to create a new user account for “public” KDE development, and then learn to use kdesvn-build to automatically maintain fresh copies of KDE. Then I could request anyone who is interested to create an SSH key and mail me their public keys, so that I could put it in the authorized_keys of this account. This way, there will be no password sharing hassles.

Whenever someone wants to kontribute, all he need to do is to login through SSH, make his changes and build. Of course, once a developer has created a patch of his work, he could do an svn revert, so that it keeps the work clean.

The major trouble of making a public server of this type would be the bandwidth limitations that would cause SSH with X forwarding to be unmanageably slow. Any suggestions / ideas?

Memory Management UI – Trial #2.

I’m going on my third north Indian trip tomorrow, spiritual purposes only. So I’m off the net for next 2 days. I happened to hurriedly do this:
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kstars-devel&r=1&b=200807&w=2

I’d want comments on that UI, because I have no idea about UI design.

Debian installer for universities?

How would it be, if we developed unified Debian / Ubuntu installer addons that would solve all the painful issues that somebody in a campus like ours at IITM faces while installing Debian / Ubuntu?

I initially had these plans for IITM. Interestingly Ritesh Bhat from NITK had similar plans (and I gave him the scripts I had written). Why not have a community project under a relatively free license where we extend the Debian / Ubuntu installer for institutes, universities and colleges?

What should such a project do, ideally speaking?
1. Set up specifics for the campus network. Configure proxy, DNS etc and configure apps to use services available on the local network. Eg: IITM has a local Debian/Ubuntu mirror, so we should use that instead of the default mirrors. NITK has a local Ubuntu cache, so we should be using that instead within NITK.
2. Configure things that a college student would typically want to configure – GMail chat, IRC (to get help), Firefox web browser etc.
3. Solve typically faced Windows-compatibility issues – like gstreamer-ugly-plugins, realplayer or NTFS support.
4. Preseed the Debian Installer, so that we ask only those questions that should really, really be asked.

Now, this is like converting Linux into Windows! But I think this is the best way to help newbies set up Linux on their systems.

I notice that most of these scripts are going to be similar across institutes, with only certain settings that need to be changed. I don’t know how far I am right in this. Everyone would want pidgin to be configured, for instance, irrespective of the campus environment. Every campus would have a proxy server, so we would need to configure proxy settings in all cases.

How much sense does it make, to have a unified framework to do this? Can we open a project on sourceforge? Is there already some project that does this?

KDE.IN Monsoon hacKathon – Photos

http://members.bas.org.in/kstar/kde.in-monsoon-hacKathon-2008-pics/

2.5 million stars in trunk!

Yay! All the machinery for loading 1e6 stars has been moved to trunk and the 2.5-million-star Tycho-2 catalog has moved to the ‘Download Data’ (Get Hot New Stuff) feature. I plan to put up a screencast on how to use this and the conjunction tool from KStars sometime, along with a whole lot of other features.

To get the Tycho-2 deep catalog, just click on File->Download Data and click ‘Install’ next to ‘Tycho-2 Star Catalog’.

KDE.IN Monsoon Hackathon – Day 3???

Day 3 was a flop show for me .
I got up at 1:00 PM, when the Hackathon was _over_. But, well, that was a slightly well-deserved sleep. I joined the folks from the Hackathon over lunch, just like that. Shashank taught me how to enable his Panaromio plugin, and I think I must investigate it sometime.

Great, so I’ve done nothing today, other than fart on the way to the BIAL (seeing of Pradeepto and Sharan Rao). And I hope to start right away.

Well, I will put a consolidated blogpost about the KDE.IN Monsoon Hackathon and the photos sometime. Unfortunately, I have not been able to capture anyone in an uncomfortable position or doing something funny, and they are straight, honest photos. But before that, I must thank:

• Atul, for sponsoring the event via GEODESIC and FOSS.IN
• Tejas, for giving good hacking company, and helping us get comfortable at GEODESIC
• Pradeepto, for organizing the whole thing.
• Gopala and Shashank, for being great hacking company
• Shreyas, for giving us someone to GNOME-bash all through, and for making good company too

I’d like to have more hackathons. There’re four of us in Bangalore till 17th… so maybe?

KDE.IN Monsoon Hackathon – Day 2

Day 2 turned out to be very productive for me. As you have figured out, my hacking ends only by 3:00 AM, back at home. It’s just that the “spirit” of the Hackathon gets carried home with you, because when you leave a problem half-solved, you have the itch of solving it completely.
I am completely satisfied with today. I’ve made about 8 commits today.

Today, I made some improvements the Conjunction Tool. To think of it, the conjunction tool is a very generic tool – it can do eclipses, lunar occultations, planetary conjunctions and shortly should be able to do comet rendezvous too. Now, those are four different names for the same problem – that of finding the occurances of small separations between objects. I like the conjunction tool all the more, because it was the first feature I added to KStars (with Jason’s help, of course). The changes I made to the conjunction tool:

• Add Deep Sky Objects and Stars (named) to the conjunction predictions
• Double click on a conjunction and you see the conjunction happening!
• Add Comets and Asteroids to the conjunction predictions

Other work that I did, on my GSoC:

• Test whether the duplication is solving the expected issues with proper motion – things worked beautifully
• Modify binfiletester to check star data files for jumps in magnitude or other inconsistencies – this revealed a lot of inconsistencies in trixel N000
• Modify mysql2bin to correct the error causing the inconsistencies, and create/commit the new data files
• I am also prepared to move deepstars.dat (Tycho-2 Deep Catalog) to the Get Hot New Stuff feature, and have already requested for commit access to GHNS

So, here are my TODOs for tomorrow:

• Remove restrictions on second object in a conjunction and make it possible to have a comet / asteroid as the second object
• Implement Jason’s idea of filtering by Ecliptic Longitude
• Move deepstars.dat to GHNS
• Merge the summer branch into trunk
• Start work on the Auxinfo hash??

And as for the rest of us (a brief summary of what everyone else did, from twitter):

• Gopala “ported NoteWidget to use TextItem classes” (although I don’t know what that means! )
• Pradeepto did some good research on writing unit tests and the Qt test libraries
• Tejas worked on a rather interesting bug encountered in Kopete, attributed to Qt
• Shashank made significant progress on his Marble – Panoromio integration. (I could see pics hanging all over the Globe. I’ll probably go and investigate more tomorrow )
• Gopala also ported ActivityWidget
• Sharan Rao taught us the use of EMacs / KDE EMacs / EMacs + GDB scripts. [Screencasted]. GDB integration rocks bigtime!
• Tejas quickly learnt to use GDB+Vim!

We had a really nice chat about KDE development, KDE developers, aKademy, Contribution to KDE from India etc. over coffee. Dinner time was more of general talk.

I’m sorry for such a disorganized blogpost, but that’s all I can write at 3:00 AM in such a sleepy state. Goodnight!

KDE.IN Monsoon Hackathon – Day 1

Day 1 was almost entirely spent by me in the following activities:

• Install Debian on one of the systems Atul had so kindly provided us with. (They have a local Debian mirror, so it rocks!!)
• Copy the KDE sources from Sharan’s harddisk
• Play around SSHing into my system
• Build KDE
• Discuss about FOSS.IN 2008 and KDE’s place
• Frantically realise that you’ve done nothing at the end of the day and try to commit something that builds, whether it adds some value or not

I had a nice time being with all the KDE kontributors around. We also had a few talks by Pradeepto, explaining David Faure’s method of setting up the KDE source tree and svnmerge.py.

Other folks did useful things – Pradeepto made a release (of what, I don’t know. Definitely will have to do with KDEPIM or KMail). Tejas commited his Bonjour plugin for Kopete.

I learnt something about Bonjour from Tejas. Nice thing it is. Sharan has agreed to help me use EMacs more like an IDE than like “Notepad”.

Dinner @ Nandini, RMV Extension. Dinner back @ home as well, because I had promised the folks at home.

Although we could only get the stuff building today, the inspiration from the KDE Hackathon got me working all night till now (despite the fact that I need to get to Day 2 tomorrow) fixing some stuff. Finally, it looks like I have “achieved” all my GSoC goals. Anyway, that apart, the proper motion code is tested and found to be proper – that’s a good thing. I finally learnt how KStars draws lines on screen (many thanks to Jason. I’d have been lazy to find out myself ). I also commited the data files that had the duplicate entries, because they seemed to work without any trouble.

Finally, I thought I must blog about ‘Day 1′. Atul was insisting that we all blog, so here it is . We are also actively microblogging on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/kdehackathon

Looking forward to Day 2. I hope to:

• Ensure that binfiletester also verifies sanity of data. That way, I’ll have the ultimate testing tool to receive that catalogs to come. That way, I’ll also get a hint on why KStars is spewing out trixel jump message of late. (Wasn’t doing that before I remodelled the trixel2number and number2trixel code).
• Random bugfixes for KStars

Thankfully, I have access to my phpmyadmin from there

BTW, Photos by Kushal are here.