Bytes Of Binary

This report is retrospection of Flock 2017. This a long textual (zero-pictorial) post , so pardon me. What is Flock? Flock is an Annual conference Fedora community gathers. Flock 2017 was a more action-oriented event than previous years. This affects the types of session proposals that were accepted. The scheduled slots favor collaborative team working sessions and workshops over team status reports. Flock happened in Hyannis,MA this time. It was  a pleasant weather. Noteworthy to say that the event was well thought & planned. The participants had enough time for visa and other important stuff. Kudos to the team behind for putting in immense amount of effort ranging from registration to funding and from websites to executing it in such a great way! :) Why was I there? I proposed an session with my team (Fedora QA) on Kernel and Regression Testing. Most of us test the kernel on our lenovo but we hardly get the chance to test the new kernel on various off the ...

Hey this post is going to talk about the retrospective of Fedora QA onboarding session at Red Hat Bangalore. 15 students from India participated in this event. The idea was to help them get started with contribution. It was good to see people working their way up the ladder. The students began by creating accounts and then setting up their testing environment. Introducing themselves in the mailing list , going ahead and doing Release validation and Update Testing. The details can be found here --> https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/fedoraqasession The agenda covered : 1. What is Fedora QA?-->https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Join 2. Fedora's Release Cycle-->https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/27/Schedule 3. Setting up your Fedora for testing--> 3.1 Getting FAS accounts,pagure,bugzilla,qa-group sponsorship,adding ssh keys(etc). 3.2 Setting up VM for Release validation with current compose. 4. Getting the nightlies and RC-->https://www.happyassassin.net/2016/04...

The votes are in! The next Fedora QA Onboarding Call is on 2017-08-07 at 1330UTC -1430 UTC over blue jeans, while Fedora 27 is having couple of major changes underway , this is good time to get started. In this call we will be talking about how you as a contributor can get started with Fedora QA. The agenda can be found on this etherpad . Hope to see you all!

It's always good to celebrate releases. In Fedora, we celebrate the release by holding a release party wherein the fedora users and contributors comes forward and learn about new features in Fedora and how they can contribute to the upstream project. People from different colleges from Bangalore joined us on 2017-07-22 at Red Hat Bangalore Office to celebrate. As many of the students were new to Open Source , Saurabh Badhwar took the first session briefing about FOSS and Fedora. He shared his story as how he started using Fedora and later started contributing to the same. Followed by Saurabh's talk , I[sumantrom] went up and started to speak about the new features in Fedora 26 and some upcoming things which are coming in Fedora 27. The major changes which were covered other than version bumps of DNF , Gnome and languages were Modularity. It was time to celebrate for all the new features we worked on and we will be using for years to come. It sure was the perfect tim...

First off, let me be very clear up-front: normally, I write my blog articles to be approachable by readers of varying levels of technical background (or none at all). This will not be one of those. This will be a deep dive into the very bowels of the sausage factory. This blog post assumes that the reader is aware of the Fedora Modularity Initiative and would like to learn how to build their very own modules for inclusion into the Fedora Project. I will guide you through the creation of a simple module built from existing Fedora Project packages on the “F26” branch. To follow along, you will need a good working knowledge of the git source-control system (in particular, Fedora’s “ dist-git “) as well as being generally comfortable around Fedora system tools such as dnf and python . Setting up the Module Build Service For the purposes of this blog, I am going to use Fedora 26 (the most recent stable release of Fedora) . To follow along, please install Fedora 26 Server on a bare-m...

The day started with a bunch of students from Chennai coming to Red Hat office in Bangalore to learn more about how to use FOSS technologies and start upstream contribution. The day started with Smit Thakkar talking about Git and Github. This was mostly a hands on session where Smit talked about What is version control system and how it works.He walked though how to put the code to github and how people can solve merge conflicts.                       The next half of the session was taken by Buvanesh Kumar, this was on virtualization , types of virtualization and how attendees can create VMs. This was beneficial to people who are starting with linux for the first time. The third session was on Perf and Scale, where Saurabh spoke about how to get the most out of the resources available at your disposal. The key topics included how to scale up httpd to handle a large number of conc...

This post will be talking about , how you can do kernel regression , stress and performance testing on ARM architecture. Setup: To set up your ARM device , you need an image to get started. I was intending to test the latest compose (Fedora 26 1.4 Beta on Raspberry Pi 3 Model B). Download the file (Workstation raw-xz for armhfp) or any variant that you want to test. Once the file is download, all you need to do is to get a SD card and write the img in the card. There are two ways of doing it using " Fedora Media Writer " which can now burn the image for ARM devices. The other way is the old dd , here is how you do it using dd Once the dd has executed itself successfully , its time to plug in the SD in ARM device and boot it up. Once the ARM device is booted up all you need to do is to clone the kernel test suite from here Dependencies and Execution: You will need 2 packages 1.gcc 2.fedora-python You can install them by executing "sudo dnf in...

Retrospection We had a Fedora QA onboarding on 2017-06-03 and it was successful the Agenda and the Feedback can be found on this etherpad . People from different countries and regions found the call useful. Few changes which made things better 1. Using bluejeans was smooth and better than Hangouts. 2. Starting the doodle 2 weeks before the call and giving enough time to vote. 3. Using a bunch of quick links as reference points and then explaining. Action Items 1. Consistency is the key to success , doing the onboarding call every 2 months will be more engaging. Also , it gives a sense of assurance to the new contributors to simply plug themselves up in one of these calls and start from there even if they miss one , they would still be able to contribute to the release cycle. The proposal is to create a wiki page and link it up to Fedora QA Join where people will benefit from it. 2. Feedback , FAQ ,Quick Links, Logs and recordings should be marked and kept in a wiki p...

There is a going to be a Fedora QA On Boarding Call 2017-06-03 1400-1500 UTC over blue jeans, while release validation for Fedora Beta 1.3 is underway , this is good time to get started. In this call we will be talking about how you as a contributor can get started with Fedora QA. The agenda can be found on this etherpad . Hope to see you all!

Tuesday, 2017-05-09, is the DNF 2.0 Test Day! As part of this planned Change for Fedora 26, we need your help to test DNF 2.0! Why test DNF 2.0? DNF-2 is the upstream DNF version, the only version actively developed. Currently the upstream contains many user requested features, increased compatibility with yum and over 30 bug fixes. To DNF-1 back porting of patches from upstream is difficult and only critical security and usability fixes will be cherry-picked to Fedora. With DNF 2.0 in places,users can notice usability improvements of DNF like better messages during resolution errors, showing whether package was installed as weak dependency, better handling of obsolete packages, less tracebacks, etc. One command line option and one configuration option changed semantic so DNF could behave differently in some way (these changes are compatible with yum but incompatible with DNF-1)We hope to see whether it’s working well enough and catch any remaining issues. We ne...

This post will be summing up what we will be covering as a part of Fedora QA classroom this season. The idea is to understand how to do things the right way and to increase contributors. The topics covered will be: 1. Working with Fedora 2. Installing on VM(s) 3. Configuring and Installing fedora 4. Fedora Release Cycle 5. Live boot and Fedora Media Writer 6. Setting up accounts 7. Types of testing 8. Finding Test Cases 9. Writing Test Cases for Packages 10. Github 11. Bugzilla 12. Release Validation Testing 13. Update Testing 14. Manual Testing 14.1 Release validation 14.2 Update Testing The 102 will cover Automated Testing and How to Host your own test days during the release cycle. To make the workflow smooth , we have made a book which will act as an reference even after the classrooms are over. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bzphf6h7upukTDlrczVEb0l3TmM/view?usp=sharing

This is POC post about how you can start automating lights or a rooms , staircases and much more smartly and then normal switchboards do. The whole point of illuminating a room is to make sure the people who go in stay fine because , entering a dark room for many people is a task not for the chicken heart. Lets first start with the requirements: 1. Arduino as basic as UNO should be fine 2. A bunch of wires 3. Couple of LED (in case you fry by ignoring the ground ) 4. A PIR sensor Let's jump right in: 1. First of all , you need an editor/IDE . For Arduino there is Arduino IDE , you can grab a free copy of the same from https://www.arduino.cc/ 2. Once you grab the files , you can either extract it manually or just let the File manager on your Fedora handle the situation for you. 3.Once that you are done , you need to install the IDE. Once the Arduino IDE is installed , just go ahead and check for two most important things under Tools in Arduino IDE Ports : It should ...

This post is a very small example of how you can start creating small web apps with Rocket which extensively uses Rust under the hood. This post will just give an idea about how to get started if you are totally new to rust. Rocket is a web framework for Rust that makes it simple to write fast web applications without sacrificing flexibility or type safety . All with minimal code. - rocket.rs Getting started: Start by installing rust nightly on your system or virtual box: $ curl -sSf https://static.rust-lang.org/rustup.sh | sh -s -- --channel=nightly                  Setting up Project and Dependencies: Setting up the project is easy cas you can go ahead and execute cargo new hello-rocket --bin Once the execution is completes , you will have a binary application created with a Cargo.toml file and src dir with main.rs inside it. For setting up the dependencies you need to update the Cargo.toml file. Now,...

Fedora Media Writer , is a very handy tool to create live USB media. This became the primary downloadable in Fedora 25. We ran a test day installment to check for 3 major OS Windows , Mac OS and Fedora. The test day focused on writing Fedora images (workstation/server/spins) to a flash drive. This installment of test day will focus on out of the box support for ARM v7 Arch apart from Intel 64 Bit and 32 Bit. The testers can either download image of their choice and then verify if the image by checksum and booting it on KVM and of course bare metal. We will be calling this test day on 2017-04-20 , grab a blank SD card or USB and it will take roughly about 30 mins with a good internet speed to complete the test case. Details will be published in Fedora community blog and @test-announce list.  The wiki page says it all https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2017-04-20_Fedora_Media_Writer

Hey Testers, I just wanted to pitch in the test day report for Anaconda BlivetGUI Test Day. It was a huge success and we had about 28 testers (many new faces) . Testers : 28 Bugs Filed:[12] 1.https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1430349 2.https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1439538 3.https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1439591 4.https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1439744 5.https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1439717 6.https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1439684 7.https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1439572 8.https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1439111 9.https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1439592 10.https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1440143 11.https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1440150 12.https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1439729 Blog of the test day : https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/anaconda-blivetgui-test-day/ I would like to thank each and every tes...

Thursday 2017-04-06 will be Anaconda Blivet-GUI Test Day ! As part of this planned Change for Fedora 26, So this is an important Test Day! We'll be testing the new detailed bottom-up configuration screen has been long requested by users and inclusion of blivet-gui into Anaconda finally makes this a reality. On the other hand, it just adds a new option without changing the existing advanced storage configuration so users that prefer the top-down configuration can still use it. to see whether it's working well enough and catch any remaining issues. It's also pretty easy to join in: all you'll need is alpha 1.7 (which you can grab from the wiki page). Anaconda grew a rather important new option in F26: as well as the two existing partitioning choices (automatic, and the existing anaconda custom part interface) there's now a *third* choice.so now you can do custom partitioning with blivet-gui run within anaconda, as well as using anaconda's own interface...

Hey Folks , this is sincere effort to bring into notice that people who want to stay on top of the game in terms of bleeding edge. The most important part is to check if the kernel version is supporting your system fine. If it does , then its awesome but if it doesn't you might wanna report it to the team with the proper failure logs which might be helpful for future references. To get started with , you need a bleeding edge kernel to start with. You can get the latest kernel from Bodhi . Most of the kernel(s) are updates and hence you need to enable update-testing repo to install the kernel from the update-testing repo.  Once you have enabled the update testing repo , you can also disable it by executing "dnf config-manager --set-disabled updates-testing". While I'm writing this the latest kernel in update-testing for f25 was "kernel-4.9.10-200.fc25" Once , you are done installing now , comes the part of checking if all the virtal features of ...

Here's all that one will require to start contributing to any of the tools of Fedora QA. You can find the list of the tools at [https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Taskotron_contribution_guide#Repositories]

This weekend , Kanika and me went down to SJCE,Mysore to give a talk on Github and Web VR on their annual open source fest - FOSSCamp.     Thanks to Sujan K. and all the SJCE for hosting us. The talk was scheduled from 2:30pm -5:30pm in one of the labs with fully equipped wireless and systems with mostly ubuntu/Fedora on them. After a short round of introduction , Kanika started off with Git and Github. Arvind and me were assisting people who got stuck during the hands on.This was more of a hands-on so we made all the participants run the basic commands and explained to them how they can start contributing to upstream projects.                           We broke for snacks break at around 4 , post snacks Arvind started talking about Merge and Rebase but drawing diagram and then it was open floor for all the students to ask question...