Flock 2017 : The Fedora Conference

Its really awesome to travel to meet people who inspired you and whom you can only meet online.

On 29th August, I got a chance to fly down to Hyannis, Massachusetts to attend Fedora global Conference, Flock’2017. Being contributing to Fedora for more than an year now, it was my second Fedora conference other than local meetups and Fedora release parties. Also, it was my first trip to US :).

I was working on a Symbol library under the guidance of Mairin Duffy, my next blog will talk more about this library.

I was traveling with Sumantro Mukherjee, who is newly elected member of Fedora Ambassador Steering Committee and Fedora Qa contributor 🙂 and Sinny Kumari, who is contributing to Fedora architecture for long now. We boarded our flight from Bangalore Airport on 29th August morning, although we were little worried about jet lag yet we were full of excitement and enthusiasm.

We landed at Logan International Airport of Boston at around 4 pm and took a bus to Hyannis. We reached the venue (The Resort and Conference Center at Hyannis) late around 9pm. The room was clean and pretty. The view from my room was a never ending golf course which seemed amazing.

Conference day #1

Flock started with a powerful opening speech given by Brian Exelbierd and Matthew Miller. Also, I volunteered for Fedora Badge Design Workshop where I explained about my project, how can they use it, its advantages and disadvantages, you can find my slides here. The workshop was organized by Marie Nordin and Masha Leonova, I managed to make one badge in the workshop -> https://pagure.io/Fedora-Badges/issue/342. After that I headed towards Fedora Magazine session taken up by Paul Frields, Ryan Lerch and Justin W Flory, it was quite interactive session, I enjoyed the discussion and also gave suggestions.

Conference day #2

It was raining, so we had breakfast in the resort itself, it was good and not too expensive. After that I attended a session on Simple User Testing- early and often by Jennifer Kotler, although I was little late but I managed to gather few important points at the end. She explained how can one write unit tests for particular type of mockups, it was great the way she explained with examples. The next session I attended that day was Fedora Hubs Hackerfest, since I have contributed to this project in past, so I really wanted to attend this session. It was taken by Aurelien Bompard and Sayan Chowdhury. They made widget making in Hubs so easy :).

Conference day #3

I went out for breakfast with Sumantro Mukherjee and Sayan Chowdhury, walking on streets of Hyannis was an another experience altogether, the roads were peaceful and beautiful. We clicked a lot of photos on the way.

This day I attended Suzanne Hillman‘s session on her UX design case study for Fedora contributors as part of her Outreachy project, I really liked this session as she explained everything she has been doing in her project. The next session was on Fedora design pattern library given by Mairin Duffy. She introduced us the project PatternLab that she is working on and how we can contribute to it. This session was followed by a Design Hackerfest where we started contributing to PatternLab project.

Later on this day, I went out for dinner with Adam Williamson, Lukas Brabec, Tim Flink and Sumantro Mukherjee. I was really glad to meet them as a team member.

Conference day #4

The last day was all about thank giving and winding up session. I met all the people I could meet.

It was great to meet and talk to Adam Willamson and Mairin Duffy, as I have talked to them many times over mails and IRC. Also, I got to meet Robert Mayr (robyduck), Sachin S. Kamath, Justin W Flory, and many more great contributors.

All in all, It was a great experience and I would like to thank Fedora community for inviting me for this conference.

I also explored Boston and New York City on this trip. Glimpse of my trip:-

 

 

 

Technologix’17 : SJCE, Mysore

On 16th March’17, Sri Jayachamarajendra College of Engineering (SJCE), Mysore invited Red Hat to be the part of there ongoing CSI fest, Technologix. Red Hat was the premium sponsor of the fest.

The event was a success with fresh energy, most of the students were sophomors and were aware about Fedora, Linux and opensource.

Four speakers, including me, decided to go and talk about different technologies which are being used at Red Hat extensively. We travelled from Bangalore to Mysore in a car, with made the journey more exciting. It took us nearly 3.5 hours to reach our destination.

On reaching there, Vishnupriya, a student from SJCE, welcomed us and guided us to the guest rooms.

The session started at 2:30 pm with about 150-200 students waiting to learn about technologies used in industry. The CSI members welcomed us with flower bouquet and inspiring words.

Virtualization

The first talk was given by Buvenash Kumar, who is engineering intern at Red Hat. He has been working with Red Hat for last 1 year. He talked about virtualization, different types and benefits of virtualization. He also talked about various hypervisors in market like Red Hat Enterprise virtualization, VMWare Esxi, Xenserver.

Ansible

The talk on Ansible was given by me. I talked about SSH, Introduction to Ansible, Introduction to YAML, Setting up test environment, Ansible config and HOST files(demo).

Openstack

The talk was given by Ankit Raj. He was a part of GSOC’2015, and contributed to Ruby community. He works on gluster project as Associate software engineer at Red Hat. He talked about the Openstack and it’s usage, OS searchlight concepts and flow and its contribution guide.

Git and contribution to opensource

This session was taken up by Sumantro Mukherjee who is Associate Quality Engineer, Fedora Project, Red Hat and Arvind Chembarpu, who interns as Fedora QA at Red Hat.

The event ended on a great note and a small speech by Dr. SK Padma, the head of department of computer science SJCE, she mentioned about the opensource wave in there campus and how they promote opensource. The speakers were awarded trophies.

After the event, we explored the beautiful campus of the college.

Special thanks

CSI chapter of SJCE, Sudhir Dharanendraiah, alumni of SJCE and QE Manager at Red Hat, Red Hat organization and Arvind Chembarpu for making the visit possible. And thanks Rejy for dvds.

Fedorahosted to Pagure

Fedorahosted.org was established in late 2007 using Trac for issues and wiki pages, Fedora Account System groups for access control and source uploads, and offering a variety of Source Control Management tools (git, svn, hg, bzr). With the rise of new workflows and source repositories, fedorahosted.org has ceased to grow, adding just one new project this year and a handful the year before.

As we all know, Fedorahosted is shutting down end of this month, its time to migrate your projects from fedorahosted to one of the following:-

1. Pagure
2. Hosting and managing own Trac instance on OpenShift
3. JIRA
4. Phabricator
5. GitHub
6. Taiga

Pagure is the brainchild of Pierre-Yves Chibon, a member of the Fedora Engineering team. We will be looking into Pagure migration because Pagure is a new, full featured git repository service and its open-source and we ❤ opensource.

So, Pagure provides us Pagure test instance where we can create projects and test importing data. Note:from time to time it is been cleared out, so do not use it for any long-term use.

Here is How Pagure will support Fedorahosted projects ?

Features	Fedorahosted	Pagure
Priorities	We can add as many priority levels as required with weights	Same
	We can assign a Default priority	No such option
	Custom priority tags	Same
Milestone	Ability to add as many milestone as we want	Same
	Option to add a due date	Same
	Keeps a track of completed time	Does not record completed time
	Option to select default milestone	No such option
Resolution	Ability to add as many resolutions as we want	Same
	Can set a default resolution type	By default it is closed as ‘None’
Other Things	Have separate column for Severity, component, Version	Here it is easy, it has just Tags
Navigation and Searching	Difficult	Easy
Permission	Different types of permission exist	Only, ‘admin’ permission exist
Creating and maintaining tickets	Difficult	Easy
Enabling Plug-ins	Easy	Easy

So, lets try importing something to staging pagure repo, I will be showing demo using Fedora QA repo, which has recently been shifted from fedorahosted to pagure.

1. You should have XML_RPC permission or admin rights for fedorahosted repo.
2. We will use Pagure-importer to do migration.
3. Install it using pip . python3 -m pip install pagure_importer
4. Create a new repo ex- Test-fedoraqa
5. Go to Settings and make the repo, tickets friendly by adding new milestones and priorities.
6. Clone the issue tracker for issues from pagure. Use: pgimport clone ssh://git@stg.pagure.io/tickets/Test-fedoraqa.git.This will clone the pagure foobar repository into the default set /tmp directory as /tmp/Test-fedoraqa.git
7. Activate the pagure tickets hook from project settings. This is necessary step to also get pagure database updated for tickets repository changes.
8. Deactivate the pagure Fedmsg hook from project settings. This will avoid the issues import to spam the fedmsg bus. The Hook can be reactivated once the import has completed.
9. The fedorahosted command can be used to import issues from a fedorahosted project to pagure.

   $ pgimport fedorahosted --help
       Usage: pgimport fedorahosted [OPTIONS] PROJECT_URL
   
       Options:
       --tags  Import pagure tags as well.
       --private By default make all issues private.
       --username TEXT FAS username
       --password TEXT FAS password
       --offset INTEGER Number of issue in pagure before import
       --help  Show this message and exit.
       --nopush Do not push the result of pagure-importer back
   
   
   $ pgimport fedorahosted https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-qa --tags

   This command will import all the tickets information with all tags to /tmp/foobar.git repository. If you are getting this error: ERROR: Error in response: {u'message': u'XML_RPC privileges are required to perform this operation', u'code': 403, u'name': u'JSONRPCError'}, means you dont have XML_RPC permission.

10. You will be prompted for FAS username and password.
11. Go to tmp folder cd /tmp/
12. Now, we need to push the tickets to new repo. The push command can be used to push a clone pagure ticket repo back to pagure

    $ pgimport push Test-fedoraqa.git 

13. Refresh your repo, and it will look like this
14. Now you can edit tickets in any way you want.

Stuck somewhere? Feel free to comment and contact. Thanks for reading this 🙂

FUDCon APAC’16 Phenom Penh

It took me long to write about this, this was the first international Fedora event I attended.

FUDCon is the Fedora Users and Developers Conference, a major free software event held in various regions around the world, usually annually per region. FUDCon is a combination of sessions, talks, workshops, and hackfests in which contributors work on specific initiatives.

I was lucky that I got a chance to be the speak at FUDCon Asia Pacific held in Phenom Penh, capital of Cambodia from 4th to 6th November, 2016.

My talk on Rust programming language got accepted at the last moment and this was going to be my first international trip, so I was both excited and nervous. FUDCon Phnom Penh was to be conducted at Norton University along its Barcamp nomenclatured ASEAN.

Barcamp, Norton University

I landed in Cambodia on 3rd Nov and reached Hotel Mekong Heng Mohaphel late night. Reaching there I met Sirko Kemter (gnokii) and Robert Mayr (robyduck), who greeted me at the doorstep of hotel, I was sharing the room with Noriko Mizumoto (noriko).There were around 50 speakers from around the world to give talks related to Fedora and open source culture.

The next day I interacted with other speakers and Fedora contributors, it was great to meet them in person. That day we had our breakfast, some sight-seeing on Tuktuk (the local transport there), the team lunch and a stomach filling dinner.

Me trying to pose. PC: Sumantro

On 5th Nov, we all got up early and after having our breakfast, we marched towards Nortan University. The university was decorated with technology and creativity through their projects and presentations.

The event was inaugurated with an introductory speech given by Brian Exelbierd (bex),Fedora Community Action and Impact Coordinator.

 

Brian, giving introductory speech

Then starts the FUDCon talks. My talk was in the first slot. My talk was on Rust programming language. Rust is a systems programming language that runs blazingly fast, prevents segfaults, and guarantees thread safety. It is maintained by Mozilla. I explained the importance of Rust, in the world of different programming language, its features, few syntax paradigm, Rust package manager-Cargo and Rust on Fedora OS with the new package ‘Rust’. I also mentioned the pathways to contribute to the upstream projects using Rust. The session ended with a fruitful discussion.

 

The room for my talk

 

Gerard, talking about his experience with Rust

Then I attended Kushal Das (kushal) talk on Python Programming. He is a core developer of CPython, and director at Python Software Foundation. The room was full of students who seemed new to programming. He beautifully explained various aspects of python programming through examples.

The next talk I attended was by Alex Eng on Zanata, a translation platform. He is one of the lead contributor of Zanata project. He gave a great session explaining new features that will be available in the next release of the translation tool. I was bit familiar with Zanata due to Fedora Hubs project, so the session was very fruitful for me to understand Zanata in a better way.

The next talk was on Web Virtual Reality by Sumantro Mukherjee. He is an Associate Quality Engineer at RedHat, Bangalore and an active Mozilla contributor. The highlight of the talk was A-frame. A-frame is a web framework for building virtual reality experiences and works on almost all devices.It was started by Mozilla VR to make WebVR content creation easier, faster, and more accessible. The session was interesting and fun to attend.

The last talk of the day was by Anwesha Das on A walk on licenses in Fedora ecosystem. She gave an overview of all the open source licenses, why it is important to use a license and what are the best practices of using a license. She explained the literal meaning of words ‘open’ and ‘free’ in the world of open source software. The session was quite informative.

The day ended with a team dinner with Indian folks and Ryan lerch(ryanlerch).

I had my exam on 7th Nov, so I wasn’t able to attend the event for next day and missed many amazing talks. But, overall the event was a great fun and a way to know community in a more diverse and better way. I was really amazed to meet and talk to people that I used to see on IRC, it motivated me to work harder.

I would like to thank Sirko Kemter, Brian Exelbierd , the Norton University and Fedora Community for giving me an opportunity to be a part of this event.

Speakers of FUDCon APAC’16

Thanks Srijan Agarwal, for sharing your notes with me.

 

 

 

Inkscape: Design your imagination

Design in Linux, was something that took a lot of time to build trust, among designers. But, as it is said, trees that are slow to grow bear the best fruit.

When I started as a designer, I was quite young, like about 8 or 9 years old. I used to make creative animals (that doesn’t look like real animals :p), made various sketches of the people I used to see in my dreams, used to do graffiti, which my mom doesn’t used to like much. When I grew up, one of my friend asked me – what makes you call yourself a designer . I told him, any person who can draw in any form, the things they can imagine – is a designer.

GIMP has made his place in the audience, next comes the vector tool Inkscape. Inkscape is evolving as a powerful graphic tool for vectors, it is very similar to Adobe illustrator or CorelDraw in Window. Here is a quick starting guide on it:-

Inkscape can be downloaded to any OS, from here. Lets start with a simple image that I have made as a wallpaper for my machine. A short and handy guide of tools can be seen here.

1. When inkscape gets started, you will have a screen like this.

Today we will concentrate some of the tools on the awesome tool panel present on the left.

2. Lets size the document to the size of wallpaper size – 1024px x 768px. For that go to File > Document Properties… or press SHIFT + CTRL + D. Enter the values, press ENTER and close the box.

3. Make a rectangle as big as a document, using rectangle tool. You can adjust size of the figure using tools in Tool controller bar.

4. Right click the figure and choose, FILL and STOKE, or press SHIFT + CTRL + F.

Under fill select LINEAR GRADIENT. Click on EDIT GRADIENT.

You could see a line with 2 dots, each representing one color each, click on the dot to change the color of gradient.

You can drag the dots to give various path to gradient.
5. Select the SELECTION tool and set the stoke color to none.

6. Lets make a triangle now.You can PRESS and HOLD DOWN CTRL key, to give your triangle an angle and symmetry.

7. Select the figure and press CTRL+D, to duplicate that(the duplicated figure will overlap the existing one only), or just simply COPY PASTE

8. Select the figure as shown, and go to OBJECT > FLIP-HORIZONTAL or press H
9. I will be using the following three colors. You can use any.

10. Select all and group them – CTRL + G
11. Make whatever pattern you want.

12. Lets do one more trick, I need to fill those spaces.
13. Make another rectangle as shown below, such that it covers exactly half of rectangle.

14. Select both the figures, and goto OBJECT > CLIP > SET

15. Now I can fill those spaces :p.

16. You can adjust the triangles in many ways, and can add pictures onto then by going to FILE > IMPORT…

17. Last and important thing, how to save it as a png file. There are 2 ways:-

FILE > SAVE AS… > select png from drop down, type in the name and click SAVE

or

FILE > EXPORT PNG image, select the file location and name, and click on EXPORT

 

The following is one of the example

 

You can work creativity on your designs. Let no tool be a barrier to your imagination. Come up with beautiful wallpapers and submit the designs for FEDORA 25 wallpapers. Your design might get lucky enough to be used by thousands of fedora users.

Hope this article helped you get started. It was a very basic one. For any sort of doubt, feel free to comment or contact. I will be posting follow up articles on Inkscape. Let your imagination go wild on mouse :p.