Its been a long time since i’ve blogged, and I will not try and make any excuses explaining myself. Today, I am gonna talk about some of the stuff I have been upto and itching to blog about.
Two things that I am really into at the moment –
Firstly,..the goodness of ubuntu…
I have been an ubuntu user for around 3 years now. Its a great operating system, it has all the software you could ever need. It has the most gorgeous eye candy you could get on a computer screen. It has a huge and very helpful community which is always ready to help you. Just google your problems, and the solution is there within the first few hits.
Second, a natural extension of using Ubuntu is that you learn to appreciate the FOSS i.e. Free and Open Source philosophy. Its amazing how some amazing people from around the world devote time and the result is much greater than the sum of the parts.
As a programmer, I am pretty intrigued and inspired by the open source development workflow. So, I decided to contribute to the “open source” development. But how?
Well, I started with analyzing what were the two greatest open source softwares that I used. They were Ubuntu and Python. So now,
Python : Went to python dev, and tried to figure out how to get started. Install subversion, checkout a working copy of a branch, find and fix bugs, submit patches … sounds good …
Ubuntu : Really good help for newbie contributors. They have an entire set of youtube videos to guide you along. They start with the basics and you basically start by helping maintain the packages in the universe repository ( see here for more on that). Hence, the title MOTU (Masters of the Universe) ..
For now, I am biased toward Ubuntu because of the (apparently) easier learning curve. Lets see whats in store … will update the blog with new stuff…
Do you / intend / plan to contribute to any open source software? Please leave your comments …
P.S. If you still dont know what ubuntu is, go here. Download it, ship it .. its all free.
In case, you have not heard of python, go here — a beautiful programming language.
March 17th, 2010 6:21 pm
Well yes!! Suvir tries his best to introduce as many people as he can to the open source community. And it his because of his consistent efforts that I have finally ditched windows completely and migrated to Ubuntu, and I must say WINDOWS SUCKS!!!
. I am into another open source language, Ruby, developed on the lines of Python and Perl. More information can be had from http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/ .
but I am not into python
PS: if you decide to go for Ruby, then don't forget to go for Ruby on Rails (http://rubyonrails.org/)- the most killer application developed in Ruby