FUDCon KL Day 2 had talks for newbies. There was very less for me to do since my talk on Puppet was the next day. The day started with keynote from Joshua a.k.a. sitapati. He talked about documentation and translation and encouraged the local people to contribute in building the first ever crowd sourced book in their regional language. After keynote, I went to hangout room to check if someone is there. I wanted to package graphite and nodejs and revive the kde netbook spin. Day 2 for me was mostly hacking around and talking to people as they came with questions. FUDPub was scheduled later that evening. I did miss the noise created at FUDPub Pune but the cake at KL was delicious. There was a point when my stomach was full but the temptation of cake..!

Day 3 was more eventful for me in the sense that I had a talk to deliver and not to mention it was the last day of FUDCon KL. My talk was scheduled at 11 am so that was the first thing I did. It seems that Ankur recorded it and uploaded it on archives.org. Goh Choon Ming’s talk was a short one. For the first time I got to learn the difference between hypervisor based virtualization and container based virtualization in a proper way. Post lunch we shifted to a bar camp style format again. Syamsul’s talk on Boxgrinder was amazing. I am planning to use to to build some custom stacks for ec2. Closing keynote was as inspiring as it can get. Abu Mansur delivered it and he talked about how and why we should encourage open source. The benefits we can get out it. I must say, he speaks with power and authority which is expected from a keynote speaker.

The FUDCon KL came to the end. I guess it was the least disastrous FUDCon ever. All the guys Izhar, Maverick, Gurdeep and all the volunteers did an excellent job. Putting together an event of this magnitude in just 8 weeks is really impressive. I hope I’ll see them again in some other event.

Postmortem:

I have packaged graphite (3 packages total) and they are up for review. I think Praveen has already taken graphite-web.
Here are the links for the Review request:
graphite-web: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=824357
carbon: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=824348
whisper: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=824361

With help of Danishka’s kickstart file, I think I would be able to revive kde-netbook spin in a short time. I already have a build with me. I need to test it out before going ahead.

Here I am, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia with some of the awesomest contributors of Fedora Community writing about the events of last day. The flight landed a day before here and Ankur, Praveen and me went for some sight seeing on the first day. We saw The Petronus Towers and visited Central Market. We came back hell tired, met everyone and went to sleep.

The Day 1 of FUDCon KL started with Christoph Wickert giving keynote on leadership. As with every FUDCon keynote, it was awesome. One thing that Christoph said in the end really strike me “It may not always be pretty, and it may not always be easy, but persistence wins”. Amazing thought.

The Day 1 was dedicated to bar camp style talks. Immediately after the keynote, the pitching started. I guess a little over than 20 talks were pitched for about 15 slots which, in my opinion, is a good number. I pitched two talks, one on Git and another one on Metrics Collection. The git one got through, sadly(well, not that sad) the Metrics Collection was shot down. Most of the selected talks revolved around students contributing which was a good thing given that most of the audience consisted of students. I got a handful of people interested in Git who were happy to talk to me about it after the session.

We had a big face-to-face APAC meeting back at hotel. We did missed David Ramsey and Harish. Several important points were discussed during the meeting including budget, swags, mentorship and general promotion of Fedora across the Asia Pacific region.

The day ended along with several discussions on a bunch of topics. I guess several emails on the lists will appear soon about the action plans.

Last weekend I visited Thanjavur with Arun and Srishti. We were invited in SASTRA University for a two days Linux workshop. The college is situated between Thanjavur and Trichy, closer to Thanjavur. They are very strict with discipline, clothes, timings for hostel and most of the things which I found superficial but that is just my personal opinion. I was initially asked to talk about Linux kernel and I was astonished. Students in Indian colleges don’t usually have basic Linux skills, kernel was something way beyond the reach. Till date, I am not sure if I understand kernel well enough to talk about it. We created a talk schedule comprising of some basic talks on Linux, python, git, vim, django and similar topics and handed it over to the organizers from SASTRA.

We reached there on Sat, 4 Feb after 6-7 hours of bus journey on bumpy roads. I hardly slept for 2-3 hours, same for Arun. We had two classrooms full of students. Arun picked one and started with Introduction of FOSS and Linux while I took the other one and started with Python Introduction. Srishti talked about Qt after that. The day went by and we had talks on Vim, Emacs, Python, Qt, RPM packaging by Arun, Srishti and me. As my initial expectation, the level of Linux awareness was not much. I guess that is the problem with most of the colleges in India.

Day two started with me talking about the basics of DNS and Load balancing and Arun talking about Django. We dialed down things to the beginner level and tried to explain things in as simple form as we could. I was kinda skeptical about both of my talks, Load Balancing as well as Puppet, because these are fairly advanced topics but students kept their patience which I should appreciate. I asked them to configure a puppet master on the spot and all of them were able to do the same after an hour of debugging session. We closed on a good note (I hope) and some fun moments.

We visited a temple afterwards, a huge temple. I still fail to understand why would they spend so much time, resources and money to build a temple but i guess faith is something which is beyond my understanding. A few non-linux points about this workshop:

• We saw a doll which Arun loved. The doll, made up of wood, i think, swings its head.
• Srishti likes to click photographs even when food is at stake.
• Arun has replaced pink slippers with yellow ones.
• Food at SASTRA canteen is far better than what we had in my college canteen (Birla Institute of Technology).

GNUnify, Pune this weekend