Fardad's OOo Experience

Bravo Fedora Project!!!!

2009-01-20T00:30:00.004-05:00

I am so impressed.
I just got Fedora 10 and decided to upgrade my computers at home from F9 to F10 before the course load becomes too heavy.
It was quarter to 12 and I thought tonight is going to be a long one, but in around 30 minutes I installed Fedora on three completely different computers with already existing operating systems, dual boot and dual head.
And the reason it took 30 minutes was that I only had one installation disk!

Everything works perfectly, all devices detected correctly and all I have to say is WOW!!!

Bravo Fedora!!!!!!

A New Beginning

2009-01-15T14:25:00.001-05:00

We had our first session of Open Source subject in Seneca today.

10 students has joined the Open Office group. Soon you will see their blogs and visit them on IRC channels.

We are very excited and motivated to join the Open office community and try to soon become contributers to this amazing project.

In fewer words: Hello World!

Seneca meets OOo (OpenOffice.org)

2008-09-22T08:33:00.000-04:00

It has been more than three years since Seneca joined the Open Source community and doing so a close relationship is formed between Mozilla and Seneca.
Up to now the major focus of the Open Source community in Seneca was based on Mozilla projects but now we are trying to join other communities to widen Seneca’s participation in the movement.

To initiate this David Humphrey introduced me to Louis Suarez-Potts. Louis, is the community manager of OpenOffice.org. He is mostly focused on developing communities based on small business and education, etc. We met and through our meeting he suggested introducing me to the community and let me join the team and use the experience to help our student join the OOo development.

Doing so I started to send emails to the project leaders of OpenOffice.org. I asked them to help us find projects that are within the proper scope for students and those who are new to Open Source community, as I myself am one of those!

I received many replies with helpful guidelines and referrals that are still being followed. Among all I had the pleasure of meeting Eric Bachard. He is the leader of the Education Project in OOo. He also has been doing core development for Mac OS X for more than 4 years. He also did mentoring for Google Summer of Code twice and he is a professor of Applied Physics at UTBM France.

Eric suggested that we meet on IRC to talk about possibilities and steps to be taken for Seneca joining the OOo development community.

We invited Louse Saurez-Potts; OOo Community Manger, David Humphrey; Pioneer of Open Source movement in Seneca and Pastea Pierre, student of EPITECH institute who has just joined the Education Project in OOo.

In the meeting it was pointed out that we (Seneca) need introductory but not too simple projects for the student to take over. The students then ideally will take the project to 0.3 release during the first semester and then continue it to 1.0 release till the end of second semester.

To have an idea of the how Seneca introduces the projects to students take a look at here: http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/wiki/index.php/Potential_Projects

OOo Education Project has a similar way, but apparently the difficulty level is only an estimate and the real scope can only be known by doing it.
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Education_Project/Effort

It is a fact that size and complexity of the OOo is discouraging for new comers but this also means that there is lot to be done and many simpler, less complicated tasks can be found to be taken over by newcomers.

Having said so, since the semester has already began and the projects are yet to be identified we are looking for projects to begin in January. Ideally this, hopefully, will produce a lot of good things to be done for Eric and us and therefore good things for the whole OOo community.

To identify the projects, it was pointed to ask the project leaders to propose tasks, but they are not only too busy to donate their time but also their managers won’t let them to do so and therefore, "good for community is not always good for productivity".

David added “this have to change or else the community won’t grow”.
The key is to get the leaders think about students as contributors and get them in bugs. Then it will become trivial to work with each other. Like this the developers don’t have to do anything different than normal.
We have done this with Mozilla and now many of #Seneca channel participants on irc.mozilla.org are Mozilla Crop employees. This culture took time to build, but we did it.

To build the same culture between OOo and Seneca Eric suggested to use #education.openoffice.org on freenode.
Meanwhile I will work with Eric on Education Project and learn about it and also work on OOo development to be able to soon help the students to do the same.

Hopefully this will be the beginning of a wonderful relationship….

See the log of the meeting here.

Revolution OS

2008-09-03T23:43:00.000-04:00

I just watched Revolution OS documentary by J.T.S Moore.

It is so amazing to see how power of public and open contribution to a common goal can bring such success.

At first glance you may think that opening the source of a project to public will bring chaos beyond control, but the documentary proves the fact that Open Source not only is NOT chaotic but also is very reliable and robust due to the fact that there are literally thousands of eyes and brains looking for possible glitches and bugs to report or fix.

I believe Open Source movement is kind of an upgrade to Free Software movement by giving the authors and contributors more chance of earning a living for their work without setting any obstacles for others to do the same.

Ability of redistribution of a software and its code and letting others to use it to create their own without damaging the original author's work to all people regardless of their affiliations or their fields of endeavor using the same license regardless of being part of a software or being shipped along other types of software is Open Source. And this may be the most beautiful thing ever happened in the history of programming.

Read the Open Source Definition, it's good for your health!!!

Where to begin

2008-07-21T16:47:00.000-04:00

Few weeks ago I joined the team of open source in Seneca College. I am to work on Ooo (OpenOffiec.org) . My first goal is to be able to build the Ooo, and hack it (fix or add features). To begin I dived directly into the developers world and tried to make heads and tails out of this huge project. Unfortunately this was not most satisfactory so I had to find a way out to find my way in!!!

The first step was to install an IRC client to be able to be in direct contact with my colleagues and the community of open source developers.Long before any of the current common chat programs were out, I used to use mIRC; for this sole reason, I installed mIRC and joined the following channels:

#seneca

#openoffice.org

#dev.openoffice.org

To help you decide which IRC client to pick, take a look at HERE.

Second step was to choose an environment and try to build the project. Focusing on windows for past six years, I chose windows and not to my surprise I found out that the amount of information on the subject is much less on Windows environment compare to Linux. The open source nature of Ooo and Linux and the vast amount of available help and information on Linux lead me to decide re-learning the Linux operating system and then retry the build again on Linux. So my second step that was "choosing the operating system" switched from windows to Linux.

Having Chris, such a resourceful colleague on Fedora, out of all the available distributions of Linux, I chose Fedora.

Following Chris's advice, to start learning Linux right away, I downloaded and installed VMWare Player. VMWare is a virtual machine. It simulates a PC on your computer using a single file image. What is great about VMWare is that you can have several different images and experiment with them without worrying that you might screw things up beyond repair. These images are called Virtual Appliance. Just download one, open it and you have a pc running whatever you like.

For more than a week I worked on Linux and I have to say, I was amazed with its improvements in past few years. After working on VMWare, finally I am ready to install Fedora for real.