Posts tagged gnunify10
Know your speakers: Amit Karpe
Feb 18th
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.
Know the speakers: Senthil Kumaran S
Feb 18th
Please give a brief introduction of yourself
I am a subversion developer who is passionate about Free software. I did my under graduation in Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai. Right from my college days I was interested in Free software and attracted towards its philosophy. During college days we gave a complete free software based solution for day to day activities using free software technologies (http://www.stylesen.org/tcenet_best_innovative_project_of_the_year_2007_by_pcquest), which was the time when my Free software journey started.
What are your contributions to FOSS projects ?
I develop subversion which is one of the most popular free software project today. I am the Second Indian Full committer for this project and had contributed some features especially things like password/passphrase caching using GNOME Keyring. Almost all softwares which I worked with are FOSS and available for download. Another notable contribution was TCENet which fetched my team “The Most Innovative Project of the Year” award from PCQuest competing with the software majors. I have a rank (900+) too in ohloh 
What will your talk be, exactly ?
I will be presenting two talks. First one is “Collaborative Software Development” which is based on my experience in developing free softwares and CollabNet’s products which are based on Collaborative software development environment. Second will be on my area of interest “Version Control Systems” in which I ll explain version control systems in layman terms and touch upon the two major types of version control system existing today centralized and distributed.
What do you hope to accomplish by delivering this talk? What do you expect ?
I would like to make people, understand about collaborative environments for software development and emphasis on the usefulness of version control systems which will help them to develop softwares in a smart way.
What kind of tools you are developing at collabnet ?
We develop “Subversion”! CollabNet has products such as “CollabNet Enterprise Edition” which is legacy now, and the future is “CollabNet TeamForge”. If you don’t understand what these tools are visit tigris.org, openoffice.org, java.net. These are just the community sites (there are lots more), but CollabNet supports many Software companies to manage their projects and provides an environment for them to collaborate.
With so many new open source version controls available, how do you think Subversion will handle the competition ?
At last we have some real competitors But this is fun since we are part of advancing the “State of the Art”! Think about a world with just Coke, it would have been boring, thats why Pepsi came in, the same thing happens in the version control industry we have DVCS now. But there are lot of advantages of using Subversion in corporate environment, when you attend my talk you can get a clear picture of these differences.
What kind of projects you recommend to be based on Subversion, instead of other version control systems ?
When you are new to Version control and you have a large team in a corporate environment Subversion suits your needs. If you want a ready to go, simple to learn and easy to use Version control system, then Subversion fits your bill. You can rely on Subversion for project of any sizes.
What’s the most important piece of advice you would give to people working on their first contribution to any FOSS project ?
No patch is trivial! You are making a difference!
Have you enjoyed previous editions of gnunify ?
This is my first GNUnify, I expect a lot of fun and excited about meeting new people from the Free Software world 
Know the speakers: Hiran Venugopalan
Feb 18th
Please give a brief introduction of yourself?
I am Hiran Venugopalan. I am from Kerala, and have been active in the promotion of Free Software in Kerala. I am a designer, typographer, usability/ accessibility expert, and a front end designer. I had contributed to the Malayalam Localisation and Computing Community – SMC and other various project. Currently I am looking more on the Usability and Interface Designs and is working as a freelancer in those topics for the last half year, after completing my BTech, and is now running behind my dream to make it a firm that provides the same services.
What are your contributions to FOSS projects ?
Well, as projects I had contributed to Swathathra Malayalam Computing, was a GSoC participant for the same in year 2007. I had also designed a pair of fonts by my own, namely Perizia and Rufscript. Also have worked along with various other GPLed fonts like Dyuthi, Reghu, Lohit, Smayak and GNU Freefont. And have contributed to the FOSS communities as a designer – by designing posters and logos and such things, that ranges from GPLv3 conference of 2006 to the Bluebream logo I did a some weeks ago.
What will your workshop be, exactly ?
I am doing a four hour workshop, for beginners that provides them an introduction on how to use Inkscape for designing purposes. Starting with a bit of history, and idea about the Vector graphics the workshop introduces the tools that inkscape has, and provides them an idea on how to use what to make things, which will be followed by deconstruction of some of my works.
The second one is a talk, that provides the basic idea of what exactly a font is, and how they are designed, and how to make it ONLY using free software, as I had made those fonts. The session also provides a brief idea about developing Indic language fonts. And my experiences and suggestions.
What do you hope to accomplish by conducting this talk? What do you expect ?
Three things. Audience should know that there are designing tools in FOSS. Audience should feel that they are capable to replace there daily using designing tools and become confidence to make a trial on Inkscape. Some should come forward telling his interest in developing a font for his language that I dont know to read!
What kind of design work you do ?
It ranges from web layouts, general graphic designs like posters, brochures, logos and visiting cards. I use Inkscape to do these works. Other tools that I use include GIMP, Imagemagik, Fontforge (font designing) and Scribus. Currently I am more concentrating on web layout designing, and logo designing and typography.
While FOSS has some awesome tools for designing, why do you think most open source applications lag behind in terms of look and feel, wow factor and user friendliness ?
Well, that is changing. Neither the GNU Project or Linux Kernel project where started meant to be for a PC usage. Now they are getting to common people. Machines with GNU Linux is becoming popular in homes and We are improving alot.
Dont say we are not behind designs, the improvement that our projects had, for example the change that KDE had in last 2 years is amazing when compared to UI improvements that ‘the most used OS’ interface had. Also I am having a huge expectation over the GNOME 3 Design.
Also the wow factor, is clearly more in GNU Linux these days. I still remember a dozen of incidence where people where really amazed by watching the Compiz fusion!
What tips will you give to developer working on UI of FOSS applications ? How can they improve ?
I am still young to provide tips to ‘developers’. Well, in my coder-cum-designer, the advice to newbie’s in the case of web development is “Know the standard, Follow those standards, Do Hand code, and Do Hate IE6!”
What according to you are the most usable FOSS software ?
Well! That is a complex question to answer. It depends on the user and user need. In my early days of web development, I was a core fan of Filezilla for FTP, now I prefer command line. So it depends on each users and there exact need and the amount of time that they spend for doing thing and how many number of times the same process in repeated.
Have you enjoyed previous editions of gnunify ?
I had no luck yet to attend any previous gnunify editions, and and is longing to be part of that event this time. it is so privilege for me to be a speaker there!
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