September 2008

by 0 comments on "Rats and Meow on OpenSolaris"

I was having issues connecting to online repositories of Ubuntu and OpenSolaris as I was connect to a network which was behind a proxy server. Thanks to Avinash Joshi http://blogs.sun.com/avinashjoshi/entry/using_apt_get_behind_a I was able to setup apt on Ubuntu to contact and install packages from the Ubuntu repository from behind the proxy. I was trying to find a similar solution to OpenSolaris too when Ashwin Bhatt, the highly helpful and active Tech-lead, helped me with the idea that a simple export of a ‘http_proxy’ variable with the proxy server and port values i it would do the trick. It indeed worked for me and I could install all the essential things on my OpenSolaris installation. So I downloaded and installed VLC player from Life with Solaris IPS repository.

I had installed audio drivers on OpenSolaris (courtesy Ashwin Bhatt). So when I installed VLC player, AMP stack and stuff, there was no need for me anymore to use M$ Windoze anymore as I have cool Ubuntu Hardy Heron and OpenSolaris 2008.05!

I had brought ‘Jaane to ya jaane na’ (a long time due), on my usb stick from my friend. And it became my first movie on OpenSolaris. 🙂

Movies are basically for 3 hours of total entertainment even though there might be gaping holes in the logic, and JTYJN was one such movie. It is a good enough debut for Imran Khan who manages to look handsome and the gorgeous Genelia D’Souza continuing her mannerisms from ‘Bommarilu’ and ‘Santhosh Subramaniam’. I was really happy watching the movie on OpenSolaris and my friends, most of whom where thinking OpenSolaris was for geeks and it must be so complex and user-unfriendly were left dumbfounded.

Why ‘Rats and Meow’ in the title? The nicknames with which Imran Khan and Genelia call each other in the movies are Miaow (Genelia) and Rats(Imran Khan)! For more details watch the movie itself.

P.S. Imran and Genelia seem to have a nice chemistry and this post is not much about the movie JTYJN 🙂

OpenSolaris can do anything any other OS can do and can do much more….

by 0 comments on "Software Freedom Day @ TCE for the fifth consecutive year! FStival 08"

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Ever since SFI started celebrating Software Freedom day every year in 2004, Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai, has been celebrating it as FStival (Free Software festival). This is the fifth straight year that FStival has been conducted in our college, which is a Free Software hub in southern Tamil Nadu.

As a part of FStival, we organize demo stalls on various Free Software tools and people from various walks of life from in and around Madurai visit and get benefited. This year we had demo stalls on:

  1. Free Software philosophy

  2. Emacs

  3. Vi

  4. LaTeX

  5. OpenOffice

  6. MySQL

  7. OpenSolaris

  8. PostgreSQL

  9. LAMP web stack

  10. LAPP web stack

  11. Drupal and Mambo

  12. GIMP

  13. Blender

  14. GTK Glade

  15. Live Distros

  16. GCC

  17. Debuggers

  18. Subversion and Trac

  19. Compiz-fusion

  20. Multimedia and Games

  21. Ubuntu installation

  22. Bluefish editor

  23. Distro burning

  24. TCENet portal

  25. *nix commands

  26. Linux day to day

  27. Internet tools

I conducted a stall on OpenSolaris and handled a couple of installation sessions of Ubuntu Linux. My friends S.Anugraha, G.R. Karthik and Venkatachalam helped me a lot. A million thanks to them.

We had Mr. Kamesh Jayachandran from CollabNet who works on Subversion. He is the first Indian full committer to the subversion code base. He played a great role in the development of the ‘Merge tracking’ feature included in the latest Subversion 1.5. We also had the esteemed presence of Mr. Joe Steeve, an alumnus of the college and a passionate free software enthusiast. He is the founder of Free Software clubs in the college. Both these distinguished guests enlightened a packed auditorium on Free software and Subversion. Mr. Kamesh Jayachandran inspired us by telling us about his growth in the Free Software industry.

There were about 400 visitors from various walks of life including students from various academic institutions in and around Madurai. They were very much impressed by what they saw and learnt a lot so that they can create an awareness about Free software in their places.

The surprise guest who visited FStival 08 was Dr. Sivathanu Pillai, Chief Controller of DRDO, who was very much impressed with FStival 08 and had words of praise and encouragement for us.

We also played throughout the day, a video of Richard M Stallman, the man who started it all, talking about Software Freedom. That enigmatic and inspirational video would have surely converted many into Free Software users.

FStival 08 was a grand success and left the visitors, participants and organizers craving for more of it and looking forward to the next FStival.

The complete set of snaps from FStival 08 is available at http://fstival.tce.edu/fast_gallery/2008/

by 0 comments on "My Sun blog"

I, as the Sun Microsystems Campus Ambassador of my college, have been given the privilege to have my blog on blogs.sun.com and a Sun email id! I am feeling really overjoyed at it.

My Sun blog is at http://blogs dot sun dot com/guruprasad. I will be blogging in parallel in both the blogs and will try my best to keep both of them in sync.