Bytes Of Binary

This post is going to be about FUDCon APAC 2016 where I presented on Fedora QA and Web VR . My journey started from Bangalore , IN via Thailand and ending at Phenom Phen Cambodia. Although it was a long journey but it was fun ! Let me start from the point which were of vital significance , I met Kushal , Anwesha , Sayan and Parag during my layover in Thailand .  Just after the touchdown , I remember myself running for Visa on Arrival and Custom clearance . Yekleang Dy greeted us and it was awesome . Focusing back on the event , Day 1 started with Brian talking about Fedora State of the Union talk from Brian Exelbierd , Fedora Community Action and Impact Lead.         Then all the parallel session started . The very first session I attended was Kanika's - Programming with Rust , which one a very interactive session with a bunch of college students .                ...

Hey All, this is a call for action for the internationalization[i18n] test day which is happening tomorrow and we will like to have people testing the keyboard layouts of different languages and emojis. How to test If you test with an installed system, make sure you have all the current updates installed, using the update manager, especially if you use the Alpha images.Grab a copy latest nightly , you can get it here . Once you are done you can start testing out for : ibus; https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Testcase_i18n_ibus_input ibus-typing-booster; https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Testcase_ibus-typing-booster ibus-bogo (Vietnamese); https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Bogo ibus-hangul (Hangul); https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Hangul ibus-kkc (Japanese); https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Libkkc ibus-libpinyin (Simplified Chinese); https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Intelligent_Pinyin ibus-libzhuyin (Traditional Chinese); https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/...

SOFTWARE FREEDOM DAY PUNJAB 2016 Although making a software free to use, modify and redistribute was started as fun but was fortunately the first step towards the Digital or Cyber Freedom. And we tech lover of Punjab do understand this very well, so we bunch of people gathered to Celebrate “ SOFTWARE FREEDOM DAY” . I along with the help and support of Fedora Team, Student Space and Mozilla held to organise an event where we can actually celebrate the day by learning more about open source , ways to contribute in, motivate others to come and contribute for the cause. The event started at 10:30 in a small room of student space. We were 20 in numbers including 4 girls. Few of them are from industries, few of them are collage students while some of them were even in high schools. I started with the reason why we celebrate Software Freedom Day and little history of Open Source. I explained them how Mozilla and other giants are contributing in open source world and ...

The event report for Indore Community meetup 22 nd Sept 2016 This meetup was focused to make sure that we update the Indore community about the new Mozilla India restructure . The initial idea is to make sure that we have the key concepts of community (Meta , Functional and Focus) teams clearly conveyed . The meet-up had around 35 mozillians participating from nearby cities. Later in the evening just to give a full action plan , Pushpita  who talked about Mozilla Campus . In this they introduced how the whole of FSA program is being restructured with a lot of brainstorming to ensure every mozilla club can operate nicely and be proactive . Shubham Geete , talked about web VR in details and he explained mozVR . He talked about how people can create VR content on the web using aframe. The participants were amazed to see the power of three.js and WebGL. As every mozcoffee , we had a discussion on a futuristic technology which is connected devices , we briefed the people...

This post will is where i am going to talk about how we executed the planned activities for IoT in Goa. First of all thanks to Espressotive headed by Sudhir Shetty and CIBA for doing all the prep works right from registration to our accommodation . The primary agenda was IoT although to get all the students up to the speed , we started with basic webpage structure and how to nodejs can come handy to write web servers. So the agenda went like, we started talking about HTML5 , CSS 3 and JS to write webpages which was taken by Mrinal Jain , Mozilla Rep from Indore . He used Webmaker tools to explain the basic structure of the webpage and how web works in general. Soon after the basics were clear we moved ahead and I (sumantro, Fedora QA intern at Red Hat) started talking about how a server works and what node.js helps us. The session was more around building the very idea about what are different types of pub-sub frameworks/protocols (MQTT) which ensure a standard way of interfacin...

What is Rust? Rust is a systems programming language which runs blazing fast , prevents almost all crashes , segfaults and data races.  Most of the people now would wonder exactly why do you require another programming language , we already have a lot of them. I'll try to explain exactly why .. Safety Vs Control We have often seen this spectrum where , we have C/C++ which has more control of the hardware which it's running on , enabling the developer to optimize the performance by executing finer control over the assembly generated. However, this is not very safe; it's easier to segfault or to cause security bugs like heartbleed. On the other hand ,  we have languages like Python , ruby and JS where the developer has very little control of what's going on but they are very safe . They can't get segfaults  , you can get exceptions but they are pretty contained . And somewhere in the middle , there's Java and few others which are good mixture of b...

This blog post is a token to thanks to all those people who came together and all the mentors who helped shape the future of Mozilla India . My journey starts from Bangalore on sunny afternoon. After reaching pune , I could see lots of my friends checkin at Holiday Inn. All thanks to Prathamesh and all of the logistics team behind the effort of booking tickets to arranging cabs from Pune airport to the venue. As I reached the venue, I found many of my mozillian friends there in the hotel lobby chatting up with each other. After checking in , I realized it was a traditional day , although I didn't have any traditional wear with me , but posed for a pic !      PC Subhasis Chatterjee Day one started , The first half we had talks on Mozilla India story and understanding why the need for community re-structuring. Ankit and George took the first part of the session and then followed by Deb and Kaustav who explained how proposal , which was printed and distributed to ...

Virtual Reality (VR) is the use of computer technology to create a simulated environment. Unlike traditional user interfaces, VR places the user inside an experience. Instead of viewing a screen in front of them, users are immersed and able to interact with 3D worlds. It's one of the heavily peaking technologies in the market at this point. These technologies are mostly used to make cognitive applications. Having a pretty dynamic coverage , the VR can be either on Web - where the app can run on a browser or it can be used as package. Lets start with a Few JS libs which I will be using 1. A frame JS- A-Frame is an open-source WebVR framework for creating virtual reality (VR) experiences with HTML. We can build VR scenes that work across smartphones, desktop, the Oculus Rift, and the room-scale HTC Vive. 2. Three.js - Three.js is a cross-browser JavaScript library/API used to create and display animated 3D computer graphics in a web browser. Three.js uses WebGL. Let's ...

Building on the premise , that Fedora QA mailing-list started having loads of new contributors, we decided to kick off on-boarding calls for the new joiners to understand the Fedora QA process in the right way. Last Saturday, (2016-08-20) , we got the votes from all the new joiners and started off with the Fedora QA on-boarding call . Last time when we ran it , we faced few roadblocks , major one being the "Participation" limit of Hangouts. Since, we wanted the call to be more interactive we thought it will be best to have it over "Hangouts". One major roadblock was that although we had a very interactive call with a load of question answers , the participation limit was pretty much restricted because we reached the max number of participants. In the last call, we went for "Hangouts on Air" this is where we traded our interactivity with viewership. As this call technically had zero limitation in terms of participation  , the communication pattern was ...

Today is a big day as we are going to initiate FOSS Wave in Bangalore , We begin with a event in Christ University , Bangalore. This event is being coordinated by Vipul Siddharth and Prakash Mishra. This activity marks the starting of a series which will be making it's participants "industry ready" . Today we being with "FOSS and Fedora" with a session on "Woman in Tech" by Kanika (RHT ,Intern) .                               The Agenda will be! 1.FOSS and Feodora 1.1 What is FOSS 1.2 Why FOSS 1.3 Getting Industry ready 2.Discussions around the diversity and contribution spectrum 2.1 All Foss projects are open sourced , so you can contribute anywhere! 2.2 All contributors need not to code , can be designers to documentors 3.How to start with FOSS 3.1Introduce yourself --let the world know who you are! --> Mailinglist 3.2Eve...

Hey All, This is a gentle reminder that we have a Fedora QA onboarding call on Sat 2016-08-20 at 1700-1900 UTC. We will focus on helping the new contributors to start contributing right away. The meeting will be a video call, with a 'piratepad'[1] for text notes and chat. The agenda is already on the piratepad and is designed to ensure that newcomers can follow along and make the most of the call without any pre-requisites. To join the call, just open the piratepad. The call URL will be posted there 10 minutes before the meeting starts. Piratepad is a collaborative text editor with a chat system. You can enter your nickname at top-right and choose a color. Then you can chat by typing in the 'Chat:' box at bottom-right, and make edits to the text on the left hand side - please be polite about editing other people's text and not typing too much! Let's make the most of today's session and make Fedora better! [1] http...

Furthering on the FOSS Wave initiative to make the students industry ready, it was really required for us to work closely and make people learn things in the right way. Bhopal, IN has a good number of contributors who want to learn about Fedora QA and I started off by helping them to start with a few QA activities.                                                                                       The very idea of onboarding starts with how helpful can the mentor be and how interactive the conversation become. After a bit of thinking and the community feedback , I felt that co...

Furthering on the efforts of doing some work around build a strong , tightly-knitted FOSS community around Fedora.I approached a few people from Bhopal and figured out the scope to talk about Fedora and Fedora QA. The target audience were more college students from Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh The meeting was short and simple. The audience were well versed with FOSS and many of them are presently contributing to various FOSS projects. We started off talking about how contributing to FOSS  makes the contributors industry ready and as the cog wheel of time revolved , we shifted to "how people can join" Fedora Project and start contributing! Unleashing the power of Fedora- this topic is what I proposed to the newly formed small community of folks, about building some cool projects on top of Fedora (like IoT,Big Data,ML and much more). The participants were excited about it and we discussed to meet again on Saturday  2016-09-09 to work on Release Validation testing for Fedora 25 B...

On a Saturday evening , Saurabh approached me with the idea of how he would like to organize an event in his college which is going to talk about FOSS and Fedora in depth. Saurabh has been an active contributor to various FOSS projects for last 2 years and Fedora QA contributor for some time now. He possess immense knowledge on containers , automated testing and kernel perf testing . Apart from these , he's is a backend developer with NLP as his forte. The idea was intriguing and was something which will help the contributor spectrum to increase at an pan India level. So, without much delay , we started brainstorming and came up with a plan of how to do the event. Couple of hours of brainstorming and we finalized the event . It was evident that we need to bring more awareness in the college students and help bringing together like minded people who will learn and contribute , eventually form a strong regional community and keep the FOSS culture growing. Furthering on the idea...

Today, we kicked off an initiative for engaging more woman contributors. Kanika Murarka , who joined Red Hat as Fedora QA Intern helped me organize this hangout call. The purpose was to bring in more woman contributors and help them be industry ready. As the buzzwords in the industry boom , these meetups are focused to generate the awareness in the first few rounds and then address the fields like IoT , ML, Mobile App Dev to mention a few. All of these are done keeping in mind , that we use the bleeding edge open sourced linux based Fedora , which is also the bleeding edge for RHEL . In the first few mins, we discussed about the FOSS and the participants exposure with the industry. After a bit in-depth discussion , it was figured out that less or almost zero guidance is one of the major barrier when the participants wanted to contribute to any FOSS project.Also, lack of on-boarding guides are also one major barrier for not being able to contribute to FOSS projects which participants a...

It was sometime since, I haven't had to chance to speak to the awesome people of  Mozilla Punjab community . Mrinal and me decided to schedule an hangout call and have a follow up session about the activities as well as to spread the word about the upcoming Mozilla India community meetup. We started at 9:30pm on Tuesday 2016-07-26 where we gave a heads up about the update about Mozilla India and the new functional groups.                                                                     This was a successful meet with all the FSA taking active participation and ended on the note that they will be submitting ideas of a more scale-able community and more al...

This post will be about how one can use Taskotron for Automated Testing in Fedora QA . ** It's recommended to use VM than any production system for testing. Let's run through the setting up of Taskotron! Making sure that you have the root permission , you can start off by executing the commands    sudo curl https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/tflink/taskotron/repo/fedora-23/tflink-taskotron-fedora-23.repo \             Once you are done enabling the repo , you can start off by installing taskotron " sudo dnf -y install libtaskotron" Since the runtask command writes into system-wide locations on the filesystem, any user who runs it will need to be added to the taskotron group with the command                       "sudo usermod -aG taskotron <user>"      ...

As my first post talked about how you can set up openqa , this part will talk about how you can start initiating workers, give them tasks and set up your machine for testing the images. Assuming that your config files are set up properly, you can run the following commands sequentially sudo setsebool httpd_can_network_connect 1(if SElinux is creating issues) sudo systemctl start openqa-scheduler sudo systemctl start openqa-gru  sudo systemctl start openqa-websockets sudo systemctl start openqa-webui sudo systemctl start httpd                    OpenQA running Start the workers: sudo systemctl start openqa-worker@1  or by sudo -u _openqa-worker /usr/share/openqa/script/worker --instance X --apikey "1234567890ABCDEF" --apisecret="1234567890ABCDEF" This should get the work done, verify by visiting http://localhost To start more workers change the value of @ or the value in the ins...

This post is going to talk about Automated testing and how you can use it and do automated testing. In the last few post I've talked about how one can start contributing to Fedora QA by doing Release validation testing and Update testing in Bodhi and Fedora easy karma. At times, you might feel the necessity to automate the testing . That's Open QA comes into picture. OpenQA is one of the automated testing framework which we generally use to test for Release Validation of the OS images. Basic Requirements remains the same , A minimum of FAS account and a machine with root privileges. Let's start with setting up of OpenQA( I will be working with Fedora 24 1.2 RC ) Note: I am using a VM , you can do it in your bare metal too. Grab your latest Fedora 24 workstation from here . Once you are done, use virtual machine manager  ( I am using Virtual Machine Manager) ; assign some number of cores and RAM ( I have given 2 cores and 2048 MB of RAM ) . I have assigned it the default 2...