I attended GNUnify 2012 on February 10-11, 2012 at Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research, Pune, India.

Day I

The first day first session that I attended was on “Build your own cloud computing infrastructure” by Arun Khan. He addressed the different concepts and tools available for setting up a private computing infrastructure. After the first session, I moved to listen to Saleem Ansari’s talk on “Torque Box - Ruby App Server”. TorqueBox is small adaptation layer on top of JBoss’s Java application server. I then attended Srikant Patnaik’s talk on “Web based embedded project design”. He demonstrated a simple example of using an LED with Arduino and controlling it with a Python CGI webserver. He also demonstrated the use of Fritzing to build the demoed circuit. All the tools are available on Fedora:

 $ sudo yum install fritzing arduino

After lunch, I attended the talk on “Btrfs - The next Generation Filesystem on Linux” by Neependra Khare. He addressed the different problems in the current filesystems, and how Btrfs tries to solve them. For the last talk of the day I attended Dr. Abhijat Vichare’s (from Computational Research Laboratories Pune) session on “Portability concepts in GCC”. It was a detailed session on the internals of GCC.

Day II

I attended Suchakra Sharma’s session on “Developing QT Apps on Android”. I then went to assist with the system programming contest organized by Neependra Khare. The participants were given a written test on the first day, and based on the results, few were selected to compete in the programming contest (sponsored by STEC). For the contest, few programming problems were given to the participants to be solved in C within couple of hours time. The first, second and third prices were worth INR 5000, 3000 and 2000 respectively. Kiran Divekar (from Marvell) joined us, and we reviewed the code and chose the winners. After lunch, we announced the winners and the organizers and PLUG members helped with the prize distribution.

I then went to attend Arun Khan’s session on “Convert your old laptop to an useful network device”. He had illustrated with numerous examples on how he had used old hardware into functional, useful network devices. It is extremely useful for beginners who are interested in getting started in working with inexpensive hardware. I then had a chance to meet and talk with Gen Kanai and Rakesh “Arky” Ambati from Mozilla. It was also good to catch up with lot of Wikimedia folks, with whom I went for dinner at the Vaishali restaurant. Few pictures taken during the event are available in my /gallery.