Debian inside Gentoo

Gentoo never ceases to amaze me. I was looking for ways to play around with Componentized Linux (CL) - and it seemed that I needed to get my hands on a Debian system. My laptop runs Gentoo, and just for fun, I did an emerge debootstrap. Guess what!! I was inside a Debian chroot environment within half an hour. Wooo..

Componentized Linux for GRIND

For sometime, I have been thinking about using CL for the GRIND initiative. It’s modular structure with pluggable components, along with its use of the GTK2 based Anaconda installer, is ideal for the Indic l10n community. I wrote a short document outlining my thought - it is available here. Linux Journal is also featuring an article on a similar localised distro effort which is also based on CL.

Da Vinci Code

Finally managed to get some time to read Da Vinci Code. Dan Brown is definitely a skillful writer. Well, of course, the part where a Harvard professor of symbology fails to identify the first few numbers of the Fibonacci sequence, or the incident where he initially fails to recognise the famous posture of the “Viruvian Man”, or the portion where the professor, along with the royal historian, along with a cryptologist fails to initially recognise mirror writing is a bit hard to swallow, but from an overall perspective, the book definitely makes for an enjoyable read. I look forward to the movie (especially since Tom Hanks is going to act as Robert Langdon - the man is a superb actor).

Here’s my new head:



P-F-I has been updated to use this new head.

Also, the planet has a new inhabitant now - meet Mayank Sharma.

This week turned out to be pretty eventful. We had our monthly LUG meetings at the West Bengal University of Technology, and, as usual, I set a new record in punctuality by turning up just 10 minutes before the meeting ended (picture below). But since I was coming from college (around 3 hrs journey by long distance bus), the LUG members refrained from participating in physical violence ;-). More pics of the conference are available here.



Karunakar was speaking in that meeting, and on the next day (Sunday) morning, Indra-da and myself went to the guest house where Karunakar was staying. We had some general chitchat about the future of l10n, specially FLOSS l10n (and came up with an idea on uGuntu Consultants), and in keeping with tradition, this meeting was called the Indic SpoonFeed Meet (Picture below).



In other news, the annual GNOME Foundation elections for Board of Directors are scheduled for the end of this month. We had to send out notices to around 120 members asking them to renew their memberships, and then the brave and valiant Vincent Untz processed all the applications by hand. This year, 19 candidates are running for the 11 member board, with around 400 eligible voters (the voter list is not final yet, since we are still to process a few applications, and since some of the members have not yet send in their renewal requests). However, as soon as the election period is over, we need to get a (semi)automated application processing and members’ database system in place - the existing manual system is simply not going to work any more. Also, we need to make sure before the next elections that a mechanism for anonymous voting is in place - so the next year is going to be a busy one for the membership and elections committee.

Recently, I have also been looking at QEMU. I ran some stuff with it, and I guess it would become my #1 tool when I start working on a custom distro project optimized for Indic stuff, as I/we have been thinking about for the past few days. More on this will be posted later.

Speaking of distros, Red Hat has released a set of Free Indic fonts called Lohit. The Bengali one looks quite good - though there are some minor issues (mostly related to the OTF standard). I’ll put them in bugzilla when I get some time.



And in general life related new, I have joined a band at college - it is called “bhaaraaTe uchched koriaa thaaki” (ভাড়াটে উচ্ছেদ করিয়া থাকি) - which, translated into English, would roughly be “We get rid of troublesome tenants”. So I guess you would be able to imagine the general aural quality of the songs we sing ;-).