The Innovation Lover

It is miniproject time for every Sixth semester B Tech students. I would like to update about my miniproject.
I am implementing a Wireless Linux Terminal Server project, Which is an extension to LTSP project.

Basically LTSP as quoted from wikipedia “Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) is a free and open source add-on package for Linux that allows many people to simultaneously use the same computer. Applications run on the server with a terminal known as a thin client (also known as an X terminal) handling input and output. Generally, terminals are low-powered, lack a hard disk and are quieter than desktop computers because they do not have any moving parts.”

LTSP facilities to use a powerful machine shared by many users from different terminals or thin clients. Thin client machines actually don’t do any processing rather than setting up a minimal system to run an X server. Basic principle of an LTSP system are as follows.

There will be a server machine which is having considerable ram, processing power and attached to a network. The client machines are low end machine with few megabytes of ram, low processing power and attached to the same network over LAN through ethernet card. Ethernet cards come with a special chip socket. We can actually flash a chip / ROM containing a minimal OS. We flash a minimal OS in it and call it PXE ( Preboot Execution Environment).
This ROM will setup a Linux kernel and an initial ramdisk atmost of (more…)

My frequency of blog posts are exponentially decreasing these days. There is a common trend among netizens that frequency blogs are changing in inverse proportion to the number of tweets. Tweets are heavily gaining momentum.

This is a post which was tagged in draft from the day I’m back from NITC FOSSMeet. But due to hectic life around college and end of the semester, I couldn’t post it.

From FOSSMeet@NITC 2010

From FOSSMeet@NITC 2010

From FOSSMeet@NITC 2010

From FOSSMeet@NITC 2010

From FOSSMeet@NITC 2010

From FOSSMeet@NITC 2010

From FOSSMeet@NITC 2010

FOSSMeet @ NITC was a nice experience meet all the FOSS folks whom we used to meet online frequently. It was a good chance to meet all of them in real time and have fun. One of the surprizes during the event was Praveen’s birthday. His friends and FOSS community surprised him announcing it.

Binny VA and I conducted a split session Web frameworks - workshop. Binny gave a short tutorial on CakePHP and Ruby on Rails. I conducted a short kickstart workshop on Django development.

Blender workshop was one of the highlight of FOSSMeet this time. Many participants got much enthusiastic about it.

Every FOSSMeet looks at having a few new contributors at the end of the day.

See you all folks at FOSSMeet next year

Pull the django-workshop slide from here

UPDATE:There is a Django development tutorial written by me published in Linux For You Magazine, March 2010.

I will be conducting a basic Django Web development workshop on Saturday 6th Feb. Check out the schedule from the website. [link]

Last week I had been to Toc H Institute of Science & Technology, to address the Computer science and Engineering students. It was a nice experience to share some bits and bytes about Free and Open Source Software development to the students assembled there.

I was being invited to the college being a Google Summer of Coder 2009 to share about my experience on FOSS and how to get started. I spoke to the students about how I started using the Revolution OS ‘GNU/Linux’, how does the community work and all. The students were very new to the GNU/Linux and they hadn’t been exposed to any GNU/Linux technology stuff before. They were really enthusiastic and excited hearing about it. After my talk on how to get started working with open source projects and how it benefits them, they shot me with numerous questions. They were really enthusiastic about it. After the formal session, we had another one hour question and answers session around the auditorium.

I never had seen this much of questions from any of my audiences before. I felt very glad about it. Felt like a mass transformation would happen around TocH students to GNU/Linux. After the session I had been in conversation with the Jayakumar sir, The head of the Department, Computer Science and Engineering. He told that they were trying to build a FOSS cell around TocH and transforming atleast the computer science labs to GNU/Linux.

It was really nice experience to inspire students to Free Software.