Please give a brief introduction of yourself.

I am promoter and evangelist of GNU/Linux and FOSS. I am an active member of PLUG since 2001. I am also active in CSLUG, IT Milan various Bar Camps and FOSS communities. I had worked on Ubuntu and Edubuntu for Intel’s Classmate PC and HCL’s MiLeap Leaptop.

I also like to do social work in my free time.


What are your contributions to FOSS projects ?

I had organized various FOSS and Community based events like Drupal Camp, Software Freedom Day, IT Milan Seminar, Internship Mela. Also helped in events like GNUnify, Joomla Day, PHPCamp, BarCamp. I had
helped Intel and HCL to launch there product with Ubuntu.

Also I help Seva Sahayog and various other NGOs and organizations to adopt FOSS.


What will your talk be, exactly ?

Talk will be introduction of Beagle Board and building system for Embedded Linux. This system can be anyone can use for application development and testing. Where I will cover basics of ARM, fundamentals of Beagle Board, Linux booting and filesystem, Kernel basics, use of qemu and GNU toolchain.


What do you hope to accomplish by giving this talk? What do you expect ?

Audience should get introduce to beagle board and various options for embedded system development. So in future if they want to build any embedded or mobile ( smart phone ) OS then they can use Beagle Board
as platform. As we all know ARM is 90% market for embedded and mobile. So anyone who want to try with Android, Maemo ( or MeeGo ) can use beagle board as first reference platform.

I expect audience should connect to Beagle Board community and start small activities.


Why did you choose beagle board over other options ?

As Beagle Board have very good community and also TI have good support for BB. So as reference platform BB is best. Beagle board is affordable too, it costs Rs. 9,000/- only. So anyone can start prototyping his idea. Beagle board has good documentation. There are several projects and distributions available for Beagle board


Which important features of beagle board can make beagle board the choice of masses?

Beagle Board is a low-power, low-cost Single-board computer produced by Texas Instruments. Designed and developed with open source development in mind, to demonstrate the Texas Instrument’s OMAP 3530 (ARM Cortex-A8 CPU and TMS320C64x+ DSP) system-on-a-chip. It is like a miniature computer, with all basic functionality and support for various connectors and peripherals. Beagle board can run Windows CE, Linux (Android, Angstrom, Debain and Ubuntu) or Symbian.

The most important feature is Beagle Board have very active community.


What obstacles did you face while implementing your first application with beagle board ?

Though Beagle Board has very good documentation, I jumped too working on Beagle Board. I was facing problem with connecting peripherals. We ended with burned board, by using wrong power supply.


How do you see open hardware design evolve over next five years ?

With explosion of Web and Mobile technologies, everyone is taking help of Open Source. Now in world of Mobile/smartphone and various MID/Netbook/Tablet industry want to collaborate. They want to use crowd wisdom, hence in next five years you should see more open hardware design. Be it Arduino, Hawk Board, Beagle Board every one will follow open hardware design.


have you enjoyed previous editions of gnunify.

Yes 100%. From first GNUnify I am part of this vibrant event. I had meet so many great FOSS community leaders, contributors, participators, promoters. Few speakers had change my world. Specially RMS, Niyam Bhushan, Danese Cooper and Valsa Williams.