[KDE-India] GNUnify' 06 Report

[Pradeepto Bhattacharya]

Hi,

     Long time!!

     Well this one is little late and really sorry about that.

     The first weekend of this month saw one of the nicest GNU/FOSS
events happening in the country namely GNUnify'06 [1] at SICSR, Pune.
I was there! . So were many other enthusiastic students delegates,
professionals, awesome speakers and not to mention really nice army of
organisers (students + Pune LUG). Just for the sake of completeness
the students organisers are all from First Year MSc (Computer
Applications).

     I had been preparing for the event for sometime. Lots of stuff
perhaps not that many but this was the first time I was going to be
"speaker" :). Kinda nervous, I was. Plus there were other things that
too that I needed to take care, Kubuntu CDS, KDE SVN CDs, Blank CDs
etc.  Mostly all things were pretty ready. Oh I was worried about a
box that would run KDE and KOffice.

     Reaching there one day early actually was a nice idea. I went
straight to SICSR instead of the nice guest house. The organisers gave
me a nice machine almost immediately. Installed Kubuntu, actually it
was Balbir, a student of SICSR who did that. After it was done, I
immediately did a nice "apt-get" for KOffice stuff. And we were good
to go. Then I was taken to the SIMS guest house at Kirkee road. And
then had dinner at Symphony and back to SIMS. All this time there were
two nice chaps from SICSR ( Prasanna and Varun ) helping me all the
while. I forced some tomato soup down their throats too ;).

     I came to know that G Karunakar was my roomie. I was kinda
thrilled about that I knew of his contribution to the l10n of FOSS
projects like IndLinux [2].

     My talk was next day - first talk of the day. Reached early just
to polish my slides a bit. Before my talk started I did meet some Y!
guys. More about them later.

     My talk started almost on time, thats the good thing about first
talk of the first day :). Well from what I saw the audience mostly
consisted of students. But there were a few professionals. Couple of
them I remember used Qt professionally. The talk was on KDE
Development, mostly giving information about where to start and where
to find information about Qt/KDE development. Information such as
docs,tutorials,mailing lists were obviously given. But more
importantly information what can be done with Qt/KDE development
libraries, their dependencies and what not? Some questions about Qt
Licence were put forward at one point. There were other questions like
- "can we do this with Qt/KDE or that?", mostly answer was yes.
Ofcourse told them about KDE SVN and WebSVN. I finished of my slides
with information about Qt4 and KDE4. Gave them an overview information
about KDE4 technologies like Plasma, Solid etc :). Took a few more
questions to end the talk. Ah and announced about the nice Kubuntu CDs
that I had taken with me.


     After that I was mostly talking to PLUG members and other
speakers . Some of them like Manas were already had quite a lot of
information about Plasma. Manas said that he has been following Plasma
from sometime now. We discussed things like Plasma, Solid and what
not. Everybody was impressed with KIO technology. That brings me to
nice KIO hack that few Y! guys have done. They did some really cool
stuff with KIO and DAAP [3]. It was awesome to see a song (from iTunes
on Mac box) play using Amarok on a box running Ubuntu yes Ubuntu!!!. 
:) The culprits are Pankaj, Gopal and Premshree. And since they dont
like to tell what nice stuff they have done I am shouting for them;).
Nice job guys. Btw I must tell you folks these Y! folks are really fun
to be with. Other PLUG members were cool too. It was nice meeting
Aditya and Devendra whom I knew from #kde-in.

     PLUG had organised a nice Q&A session. Loads of people had loads
of quesions. My favourite question was "How can I create GUIs using
C/C++? and Hows is it even possible?". I loved that question. We
explained him about various toolkits and libraries like Qt/KDE/GTK+.
It was fun. Oh and gave away Kubuntu CDs away when somebody asked for
"nice" distro ;)

     Y! guys had a nice BoF on "Why to be a FOSS Programmer? or Why to
hire one?". Two more Y!s were there - Philip and Raj Shekar. Equally
nice folks. And last but not least there was Baishampayan Ghose. If
you want to meet a guy who eats/sleeps/drinks FOSS thats him :).
Pankaj showed a nice TV capture of an CNBC interview of Philip and Dr.
G. Nagarjuna ( FSF-India Chairman ). Oh and gave away Kubuntu CDs away
when somebody asked for "nice" distro ;) heh heh! Baishampayan Ghose
distributed Ubuntu CDs too.

     I also met Friji Karthikeyan, a PC-BSD [4] project member. PC-BSD
btw is a nice FreeBSD based distro. And it runs KDE 3.5. Yes PC-BSD
team have selected KDE as the default desktop. I did try my hands on
it, nice project. Friji gave me a nice T-shirt with KDE-India logo
"hand-painted" on it by her husband. Love the tee. I am actually
wearing it as I write this report. :)

     There was a nice dinner and cultural program organised in the
evening. It was fun. We went there ofcourse only after having loads of
caffine stuff at Cafe Coffee Day on Fergusson College Road. Danese
Cooper was there. She spoke about GPL v3 over dinner. I think the best
part was when the students of SICSR gathered around speakers table and
asking them various questions. Boy! were they having fun to listen to
exploits of Philip, Gopal, Baishampayan, and Premshree. I was there
too. I didnot bother to go to other tables as I was having too much
fun there.

     The second day was even more fun. With more talks and more
impromptu discussions. Some enthusiasts asked for KDE SVN cds and some
people asked for Kubuntu AMD 64 cds. Thanks to Pankaj and Premshree
for writing CDs for me. The best was perhaps at the last. The
"lightning talks" :).  Gopal and Pankaj did suggest me to go and say
about KDE-India. Pankaj wanted to talk about Amarok. But then we
decided to let the other guys speak for a change. It was much fun
listening to those talks. My favourite was by Krish and this theory
about nothing.

     After the event was over we all went out to a nice a lounge. It
was called "Apache" :). And then headed of to a nice joint called
"Horn Ok Please". Nice place. Then some of us walked (longed walk)
back to SIMS. It was great fun and had wonderful discussions while we
walked back. Especially talking/listening to Gopal's and Raj's views
about FOSS were pretty cool. Karunakar was always there having his
share of fun by clicking everything he could :P. Actually Pankaj too.

     Another late night discussion about FOSS, upcoming events,
pranks, exploits happened. Gopal's anecdotes about LCA '06 and his
meeting with Aaron Seigo was fun. Karunakar was having fun with free
wifi access all the time. I will stop myself at that ;).

     Oh and "Invisible Bob" [5] was there too :) See him here -> [6]
(Hint: hover your mouse on the image)

     Next day morning I left for Mumbai. The bags were little lighter
this time but I carried home loads of memories and new friends.

     I went back to Pune next weekend again. Met those nice students
again. There was a PLUG meet. This time I was not alone though. I had
Ananth ( worlds best webmaster, the dude who does the KDE-India
website).  Ananth was in Mumbai for a week. We attended the PLUG meet.
It must be the world's most organised LUG or something. Ananth will
surely agree on this. Man the way these guys give away Linux CDs is
just neat. Its not just some CDs. There were few hundred CDs, various
distros chosen by people before hand. Nice feed back session happened.
Kaustubh Gadkari forced me to give feedback. I spoke about the nice
event and ofcourse about KDE. This time it worked. I have managed to
find some people who showed a great interest in Qt/KDE development.
Exchanged email ids. Some of them had really wonderful ideas. Some
wanted to add features to exsisting stuff while some wanted to port
some applications. Some just wanted to learn Qt/KDE programming
because they wanted to something else other than "mundane embedded
programming" in some top company :) (I am NOT joking). Limitless
possibilities.

     Well the bottom line is that the event was more than fun. It was
educational atleast for me. I would be love to be a part of this event
again in future. The hospitality shown was simple "awesome". And they
had a lot feets to run the show and they did a great job at it. Thanks
to you all Preethi, Yatin, Balbir, Prasanna, Varun, Upasana, Manu,
Diana, Abhimanyu, Vaibhav ... the lists is really long. Thank you Mr.
Harshad Gune. Must say that you have an awesome team ( I just wish
they wont call us "Sir" :) ). Thanks PLUG.

     I will have to thank a few people who supported me whole
heartedly from a long time now. Till Adam comes first to my mind.
Sebastian Kügler, Aaron Seigo, Kenneth Wimer and The KDE Project :).
But there are small number of friends  behind the scenes perhaps went
out of their way to help me out. Some GLUG-Mumbai members, namely
Anurag, Prasanta, Benoy, Anil - thanks dudes!

     Well after all the fun news I have to tell you something that the
above report missed completely. Too bad the KDE-India T-shirts came a
little late. I had ordered about 50 t-shirts only. I am sure I can
make good use of them. Already given away a few of them. And I will be
sending a few across to some people. This reminds me I have yet to
wear mine. And this reminds me I will mostly be meeting Vivek Rai in
March. Vivek if you guys remember has been an active participant on
the KDE-India mailing list. He is coming down to Mumbai next month.
Its always cool to meet people in person.


     [1] http://gnunify.sicsr.ac.in
     [2] http://http://indlinux.org/
     [3] http://daap.sourceforge.net/
     [4] http://www.pcbsd.org/
     [5] http://invisiblebob.com/
     [6] http://flickr.com/photos/pankaj/95684086/in/set-72057594060082588/

      Cheers!

Pradeepto