Few points of Fedora 21 release party @ TIFR, HBCSE, Mumbai

    Fedora 21 release party was planned in quick time, we can say in one week. Attendees were around 25. Few points regarding the event.

• We got number of people from different organization Red Hat, CDAC, TIFR, IIT, Gnowtantra and couple more.
• As far as i know first Fedora release party AT Mumbai 
• Anish nicely explained myths about Gnome.
• Praveen Kumar rather than giving presentation, actually demonstrated Docker, which created further interest in audience. 
• Rahul Bhalerao very nicely explained "How to contribute in Fedora". One can participate even when he is not software programmer.
• We got nice explanation from Dr. Nagarjuna G on Free software Vs Open source software. 
• During discussion with audience we found there is need for further events regarding Fedora AT Mumbai. Specifically one should be install-fest.
• We got excellent answer for question regarding running MS-Office with wine. Wine is developed to run Free software's available on Windows, so is it not good to spoil its intention by running non-free software with it. Libreoffice is good enough and already used by number of people.
• At the end of conference i am happy that we found Fedora enthusiast group At Mumbai and definitely we can do more events for Fedora in Mumbai in future.
• Other blog related to event
• http://kumar-pravin.blogspot.com/2014/12/fedora-21-release-party.html
• http://krazyabouttechnology.blogspot.in/2014/12/fedora-21-release-party-in-mumbai.html
• http://fossevangelist.blogspot.in/2014/12/fedora-21-release-party-homi-bhabha.html
• http://anish-patil.blogspot.in/2014/12/fedora-21-release-party.html
• http://pravin-s.blogspot.in/2014/12/planning-experience-for-fedora-21.html

Planning experience for Fedora 21 release party At TIFR, HBCSE, Mumbai

    It was good experience to organize Fedora 21 release party At TIFR. Started this idea November last week by initial discussion with Rahul Bhalerao. Long time we did not had any Fedora release party in India. Fedora 21 Final release declared on 9th Dec 2014. Rahul agreed to be co-organizer for same. Second we started thinking for Venue. First place name came to our mind was TIFR, HBCSE. This is the place where we started our open source contribution in 2004 under the guidance of Dr. Nagarjuna G.

    We started initial email conversion with Dr. Nagarjuna G. we got go ahead response for same but finalizing date was tricky due to ICFOSS, Swatantra (http://icfoss.org/fs2014/) was happening during our planned date (20 Dec). We decided date 21st Dec (Idea was Celebrating Fedora 21 on 21st ☺).

    Got $100 budget from Fedora and also some travel budget for Pune-Mumbai from Red Hat.

    Second things was looking for qualified speakers. Fedora community is really nice. I discussed this with Ambassadors in Pune and Praveen kumar quickly jumped in for help with talk on cloud. Due to some reason Parag was not available during same time. Anish volunteered for Talk on Workstation. Me and Rahul took care for Fedora intro and How to contribute in Fedora. I wrote one blog earlier for speakers introduction.

    We had meeting on 15th Dec At TIFR for planning remaining activities. Created event page on Eventbrite  . This was my first event as an organizer and i was wondering on Sunday relaxing afternoon how many people can actually make it. Surprising 38 ticket got booked on eventbrite, it was really motivating.

    We got Fedora 21 DVD's just in time. Hats off to Siddhesh for helping for it and Rahul for collecting it from Siddhesh. We somehow managed it and made it available on 21st. Got few Fedora stickers from Rupali At Red Hat Pune.

    I placed order At http://monginis.net/. Online interface has less option. But once one place the order online, we can talk with there customer care with reference number. They delivered order on time.

    I would like to thanks Dr. Nagarjuna for allowing us to host release party At TIFR. It almost solved 50% of part. Next to Rahul Bhalerao for doing all things to make it successful release party. Praveen Kumar and Anish for volunteering as a speaker and also all attendees for making this successful

Why to attend Fedora 21 release party At Mumbai??

Fedora 21 release party happening tomorrow At TIFR, MUMBAI, more information AT eventbrite page


Well qualified speakers for topics
      Anish Patil:
       3+ years with Fedora. Actively working in gnome upstream. He is one of the main developer of ibus typing booster. He is maintaining 15 packages in Fedora. He is going to talk on Fedora workstation product features.

      Praveen Kumar:
     Actively working 4+ years with Fedora community. He own 34 packages and is member of provenpackager and ambassador group of Fedora. He has already talked in dozens of open source conferences. For more information click [2]
   
    Pravin Satpute:
    7+ years in Fedora. Own 43 packages and proven packager in Fedora. Team member of Internationalization, Marketing and Ambassador group.

    Rahul Bhalerao:
    He is working 8+ year with Fedora community. He is team member of Fedora internationalization team and participated as a speaker in number of open source conferences. Being long time Fedora contributor he is going to talk on How to contribute to Fedora project. For more information about him click [4]

Happening AT TIFR, HBCSE Mumbai
        TIFR centre is well known for number of open source initiative. Gnowledge.org is one of those major activity. Learning Studio is widely used Fedora 17 remix for educational activities. We are trying to upgrade this on Fedora 21 release. In 2004 when there was very few open source Indian languages fonts were there. TIFR took initiative and started project on developing open source Samyak fonts. These fonts are available in most of the open source distribution.

Fedora 21 DVD:
        Will provide DVD's of Workstation and Servers to participant. Lots of stickers and goodies to few lucky ones :)

Fedora activity AT Mumbai After long time:
    Fedora activity happening in Mumbai after long time. Lets come meet and plan for some future activities around Fedora in Mumbai.

1. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Anishpatil
2. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Kumarpraveen
3. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Pravins
4. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:RahulBhalerao
5. https://www.eventbrite.com/e/fedora-21-release-party-tickets-14972818102

Talked on Lohit2 project AT 38th Internation Unicode Conference (IUC)

Last month (4th Nov) i gave talk AT 38th IUC[1], yes i did. :)

Did not able to attend conference due to traveling issues. Lucky enough got a chance to give presentation over Google Hangout. IUC is full with interesting and fruitful talks. Most of the attendees used to be busy for attending talk and networking with key contributors. Would like to give special thanks to Behdad for helping to setup GHangout session during conference and also Rick McGowan for allowing me to give talk over hangout.

Trust me it was difficult as per IST my talk [2] was schedule early morning at 4:00am. Everything went well and given presentation at IUC 38.

My talk was on Lohit2 project. I took workshop in IUC 36 conference for creating open type fonts for complex script. In that workshop i explained how its tricky to develop OT fonts for complex script due to involvement of technical, designing and linguistic. In this different domain there is fair possibility of standardizing technical stuff related to open type fonts. Its almost repeatative.

In IUC 38 i presented Lohit2. Project which aims to create easy to reuse standard, effective and efficient open type tables. For Lohit things even become easy for reusability since it is under open source license.

IUC is special conference since this is the time when most of the expert in language computing domain come together. I got nice audience for my talk and had interesting Q&A session later.

Thanks Behdad for this snap. Was not able to see early with whom i am talking :)

I ended my talk with the hope of achieving next milestone in making font developers life easy by making just click and import templates for complex script fonts. Then only things left for designer is to design typeface.  My slides are available in slideshare.  [3]

1. http://www.unicodeconference.org/iuc38/
2. http://www.unicodeconference.org/program-d.htm#S4-3
3. http://www.slideshare.net/pravinds/pravin-s-lohit2

Next releases (2.91.1) of Tamil, Assamese and Bengali available with critical bug fixes.

   We did alpha release of Tamil, Assamese and Bengali earlier. During testing we found following issues.

• Lohit Tamil was not rendering correctly due to issue with auto hinting with fontforge in font.  [1]
• Lohit Assamese and Bengali fonts conjucts were breaking with Matras. [2]
  

    Both critical bugs are resolved in 2.91.1 version.

    Other than this, we did thorough testing of these fonts in Windows XP. Fixed number of rendering issues with XP.
    Few issues still exist [3][4] . These issues are mentioned in README file of specific fonts. Planning to resolve these issues in coming release.

    Font are available to download from fedorahosted. [5]  Need your help for further testing and making it more perfect. Feel free to report issues or provide suggestion at github [6] or mailing list.

    Thanks to Nilamdyuti Goswami, Shantha Kumar, Felix and capellsk for testing and providing input.


1. https://github.com/pravins/lohit/issues/56
2. https://github.com/pravins/lohit/issues/57
3. https://github.com/pravins/lohit2/issues/20
4. https://github.com/pravins/lohit2/issues/24
5. https://fedorahosted.org/lohit/
6. https://github.com/pravins/lohit/issues/new