The GnuVision Blog

The Free Software scene in Kerala is getting more vibrant, with SPACE Kerala promoting student involvement.
Recently, students of the Govt. Engg college, Barton Hill, Trivandrum brought out a Debian based CD for electronics enthusiasts - read more about it:
Free Electron
Justin and myself tried to do a bit of PCB design with Linux today - […]

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Read my old entry on the Linux based WRT54G here.
IBM DeveloperWorks has an interesting article about data alignment here
The article says that MIPS h/w doesn’t support unaligned data access. I wrote a program to test this out:

#include <sys/sysmips.h>
#include <signal.h>

void handler(int n)
{
printf(”caught %d\n”, n);
exit(1);
}

main()
{
int a[100];
int *p;
signal(SIGBUS, handler);
p = (char*)a + 1;
*p = 1;
printf(”after unaligned access […]

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C.K Raju posted on the fsf-friends mailing list about how Free Software is going to find a prominent place in the laboratory practice of the CS and IT branches in the revamped Calicut University syllabus. This is indeed good news!
At least a few engineering colleges in Kerala currently base all their lab sessions on […]

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If all of us techies remain blissfully unaware of some of these issues, we
will surely fall into a big, big trap. The proponents of `Open Source’ should
atleast reflect a little bit on what RMS has to say before they fall back on their `technical superiority’ and `profit making’ arguments:
RMS Interview
Here is what RMS has […]

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The last few days were spent trying to get a small wireless LAN up and running under Linux. I purchased a Netgear WG311 under the assumption that it used the `Atheros’ chipset which was well supported; but guess what, the WG311 Version 2 uses a TI chip called the ACX111 support for which is […]

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Allen B Downey has written an interesting book on semaphores and synchronization - I am going through it at random - maybe I will steal a few ideas and use them in my class!
The Little Book of Semaphores

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Soon after FOSS.IN, it’s time for Bill Gates to spread the light of Windows all over India. We are about to witness yet another spectacle of our beloved ministers and Industry `visionaries’ queuing up to get his `Darshan’. Meanwhile, Bill G himself tells us that he has a `special’ version of Windows XP built specifically […]

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I arrived just in time to attend 3 talks - the first one by Jonathan Corbet (of Linux Device Driver’s and lwn.net fame) on kernel synchronization techniques. The topic is sufficiently complex to be covered as a full length tutorial of maybe more than 2 hours - there was little time to go through […]

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Landed back home after 4 days of FOSS.IN - it’s home sweet home again, no traffic blocks, no crowds - everything calm and serene.

I am glad that I took part in this event - the organizers had done a very good job and everything went off smoothly - the best part was the chance to […]

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Got to attend some talks on Day 3. There was one on the Xen virtual machine monitor - it was fun watching all three of Debian, FreeBSD and NetBSD running on top of Xen!

Sarath, a 11th standard student from Kerala gave a talk on building Knoppix based LiveCD’s - I think he was accompanied […]

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