This post will give you a quick overview of the things from Fedora Cloud SIG meeting (and few other things) on 2014-11-05.

The meeting started with a discussion for a bug related to Fedora Atomic image where it was told that docker binary is missing. After digging into the issue we figured out that it was the Cloud Base image and also found for some odd reason the Atomic image was not pushed to the Fedora mirrors. We have a rel-eng ticket for the same. In future I will keep an eye for the releases availability from the Fedora mirrors.

There is an article on the state of the Cloud SIG waiting for the availability of the Atomic images. jzb will publish it on next Tuesday (most probably).

There was also a longer discussion related to tests days for Atomic images. Again jzb will do the official announcement but most probably it will be on the next Thursday.

I also updated the SIG about the current process of releasing Fedora images on Docker, lsm5 is doing it manually. We all agreed that it will be nice to use official koji builds into that same manual process.

We also discussed about participating in OpenShift Commons. This (Openshift Commons) may be helpful to coordinate on efforts related to docker and atomic and package origin v3 back in the distro.

There was a Fedora security FAD in Pune on 1st November. I attended the event for some time and closed one bug. I had some prior appointments on that day, that is why I never managed to stay online longer time.

I think I was the only remote attendee of the event, but that was not a problem at all. This post is to remind people that they can also attend most of the Fedora events/FAD(s) remotely if they want. Just make sure that the organizers know about you before hand, that will them to plan the event accordingly.

I am using Fedora from the very first release. Started contributing to the project from around 2005. I worked on Fedora during my free time, I did that before I joined Red Hat in 2008, during the time I worked in Red Hat and after I left Red Hat last year.

But for the last two weeks I am working on Fedora not only on my free times but also as my day job. I am the Fedora Cloud Engineer as a part of Fedora Engineering team and part of the amazing community of long time Fedora Friends.

Last week I worked on DNF for the first time. In this post I am going to explain how I used Docker and a Fedora cloud instance for the same.

I was using a CentOS vm as my primary work system for last two weeks and I had access to a cloud. I created a Fedora 20 instance there.

The first step was to install docker in it and update the system, I also had to upgrade the selinux-policy package and reboot the instance.

# yum upgrade selinux-policy -y; yum update -y
# reboot
# yum install docker-io
# systemctl start docker
# systemctl enable docker

Then pull in the Fedora 21 Docker image.

# docker pull fedora:21

The above command will take time as it will download the image. After this we will start a Fedora 21 container.

# docker run -t -i fedora:21 /bin/bash

We will install all the required dependencies in the image, use yum as you do normally and then get out by pressing Crrl+d.

[root@3e5de622ac00 /]# yum install dnf python-nose python-mock cmake -y

Now we can commit this as a new image so that we can reuse it in the future. We do this by docker commit command.

#  docker commit -m "with dnf" -a "Kushal Das" 3e5de622ac00 kushaldas/dnfimage

After this the only thing left to start a container with this newly created image and mounted directory from host machine.

# docker run -t -i -v /opt/dnf:/opt/dnf kushaldas/dnfimage /bin/bash

This command assumes the code is already in the /opt/dnf of the host system. Even if I managed to do something bad in that container, my actual host is safe. I just have to get out of the container and start a new one.

Last week we had PyCon India in Bangalore, from 26th to 28th September. I reached the hotel on 25th morning. Michael Foord (voidspace) and I went out for dinner but got stuck in rain while coming back. Trip back to hotel was an adventure.

Day zero

I met Michael and Noufal in the hotel lobby and went to the venue in Noufal's car. First few hours went with meeting and talking with so many old friends.

I did my workshop "Document your code" after lunch. Most of the participants were from industry than students this time, which meant less errors due to typos. Overall the workshop went well, I still have to wait for the feedback from attendees.

Day 1

Keynote time for me. In the past few weeks I made sure that I time it well but somehow spoke slowly and missed a few things in my talk. The title of the talk was "Moments from my ongoing journey", the slides are available and you can watch it too. The idea behind the talk was to share stories about the people and projects, who helped me to learn more and to tell (the students mostly) that it is a journey. The journey is more important than the point where we are in life. We always underestimate what we can achieve in long term and over estimate what we can do in short term. I also found that the most of the participants are first timers in PyCon.

After the keynote many people came to say hi. I tried to explain a bit more about my slide on reading more source code. Reading is a good habit in general :)

Joined the food testing team and was blown away with the quality of the food. We can easily call PyCon a Food conference any day, I must thank Vijay for the excellent quality of the food.

We had a PSF members meeting in the afternoon, around 40 people attended the meeting. We discussed various queries people had related to membership models and how PSF works.

Just like most other conferences I spent the time in the hallway talking to people than attending the talks. We can watch them now on youtube. Later in the evening we had speakers and volunteers dinner, good food once again.

Day 2

Met Noufal and Michael in the breakfast room in hotel and went in ahead of time. The day started with Michael's keynote. After the keynote we all moved to the hallway. Few students talked about the final year projects.

Occupy Staircase

Oh well, you can call it annual dgplug.org meeting too. We meet during PyCon India in the staircase, photos can be found in twitter. As usual we discussed about current projects going on and the near future goals. The following picture is of the group members in front of the main banner. We also met few summer training students from this year's summer training for the first time. In the evening there was the AGM for PSSI.

PyCon India has become the best place to meet old friends and make new ones in India for me. Met Parthan this time after 4 years iirc. Met all other Python friends in the conference. This is conference run by volunteers, we all together can make it even better next year. Remember to join in the mailing list and participate in the discussion there. We had around 1200+ participants this year, which made it the largest PyCon India ever.

You can find all the photos from PyCon India 2014 in the right place.

Saw this few days back. They are really happy with the OS as almost no downtime for them.

From 29th of August to 2nd September we had our ten years meet in Durgapur. NIT Durgapur hosted the meet.

I reached Durgapur in the morning of 28th August and made sure every thing is in place including the hotel rooms. Assistant Prof. Animesh Dutta was incharge from the college and he did an amazing job on the organizing part. In total this was a flawless event as I saw it.

Rest of the speakers arrived in the evening in Durgapur, there was a taxi strike in Kolkata on that day but things worked out well.

Day One

The day started around 9:30am in the auditorium, our team along with the volunteers from the college were the first to reach the place. The students started coming in slowly and the event started on time. Day one was mostly filled with talks, history of dgplug, how different members started their journey in the group. Praveen led the work on introducing the Fedora project to the students. Prasad took the most anticipated talk of the day, on Iptables. The day ended with light discussions related to talks and programming in general and some cloud :)

We found that around 25 students were traveling from UIT Burdwan to Durgapur and they were going back in the evening. Almost same number of students were participating from Dr. B. C. Roy Engineering college, Durgapur. We also met few summer training students from 2014 batch (session is still going on).

The network was kind of slow, but we were prepared for that and asked everyone to install required packaged at their home/hostel.

There was a speakers/volunteers dinner in the night.

Day Two

The room was full, 150+ seats were taken. All of the dgplug members acted as TA during the Python sessions. We introduced the basic of the language and then actually went into basics of Vim editor. Most of students had trouble with typing, so introduced gtypist. As usual the highest numbers of error were from typos. But with time people were in sync with vim.

We saw the features of the language and basic data structures it provides. We were following my book Python for you and me for the same session.

By the end of the day the students managed to write few basic scripts to implement their own ls or free command. Few of the professors also attended the session. We had lot of fun during the session as students' reactions were priceless.

Day Three

I was not present in day three as I had to come back to Kolkata for a family event but the feedbacks for the day three were really good. First the team did a follow up of the day before. Then there were sessions of Flask and testing in Python.

Day Four

I was back in Durgapur in early morning and started the day with a talk, "Document your code". The talk was as usual interactive type, we heard many ideas on documentation from the students.

Then I introduced reStructuredText in the first half and then wrote some basic project documentation using Sphinx project. We also demoed how to create presentations using rst2s5 tool.

At the end we had a members meet for dgplug. The discussions from the meeting are as follows:

• Current drupal and mediawiki systems are too heavy for our needs.
• dgplug.org will have a static landing page.
• We are moving into a simpler wiki system which our members can manage.

We had around 120+ people in this day.

Day Five

We did a session of git and then demoed how to send in patches to the upstream. Then there were lots of discussions on project ideas, general queries etc. It become an informal discussion session where people asked where to start or how to do certain things in their laptops. We also fixed couple of issues in people's laptops in these 5 days. Praveen actually formatted many laptops and install Fedora 20 during the sessions.

Few points for any such future event

• Teach how to close the auditorium door properly :)
• Teach how to type (use gtypist for the same).

These two seems to very much needed action items for any future event. The college authority were surprised to see the attendance in the sessions. We never talked about the event much. Praveen has notes from the feedback session of the event. He will write about it.

The idea is to continue doing things in the local colleges in the same way. Our goal is to build more upstream contributors, which is more difficult than writing code. But we are in it. Next 10 years we will see even more changes, new faces, new friends, new technologies but we will stay as a group of friends, having fun together.

At the end I want specially mention Abhijit, Poulami and Bikash for the all hard work during the event, Red Hat and Sanisoft for helping in many different ways.

You can view the full photoset in flickr.

Ten years ago I started a Linux Users Group in Durgapur as I thought that is the only way to go forward. All most no one in the colleges had enough idea other than couple of users in each college. "Learn and teach others", the motto was very much true from day one and it still holds the perfect place in the group.

The group started with help from a lot of people who were from different places, mostly the ilug-kolkata chapter. Sankarshan, Runa, Sayamindu, Indranil, Soumyadip they all helped in many different ways. Abhijit Majumder, who is currently working as Assistant Professor in IIT Mumbai, donated the money for the domain name in the first year.

After one year, I moved to Bangalore for my job and gave a talk in foss.in about that first year's journey of the group. The focus of the group also changed from just being a user group to a like minded contributors group.

Then from 2008 I started the summer training program, the 7th edition is currently going on. This program actually helped to keep doing the rolling release of contributors from the group. People from different countries participated in the sessions, they became contributors to many upstream projects.

I have to admit that we are close to the Fedora Project and Python, as many of us work on and use these two projects everyday.

We managed to have couple of meetings before, 2006, 2007. We will be meeting again from 29th August to 2nd September in NIT Duragapur, most of the active members are coming down to Durgapur, day times we will be spending in few talks and workshops. From evening we will be busy in developer sprints.

Suchakra Sharma made the new logo and tshirt design for the event.

The event page is up and the talk schedule is also up with help from Sanisoft. We are using their beautiful conference scheduler application for the same. Come and meet us in Durgapur.

2014 version of dgplug summer started this weekend. Though there were 600+ registrations, we can see 130+ participants regularly during the session in the IRC channel. It is still a huge number of participants for us.

There are few participants who already informed us that due to timezone difference, they will follow the logs and the mailing list.

This year along with the session logs, we are also putting up small details into this guide. Hoping that this document will grow with time.

I was spending a lot of time on my chair. My fitbit was telling me that on the face everyday. I had a trademill at home and of course was not using it enough.

Decided to change the scene with a walking desk. Converted my treadmill to a walking desk with the stuff found inside of my office room :) Did around 17k steps in day1 and around 20k+ steps from next day. I am feeling great. I increased the height of the monitor after I took this picture.