[Fedora-electronic-lab-list] FOSS.IN Presentation - Review submission

[Aanjhan R]

Hi folks,

Please check the presentation which will be given at FOSS.IN in the below link

http://tuxmaniac.fedorapeople.org/DOCS/FEL_foss_in.pdf

I am waiting to hear your valuable feedbacks and suggestions. We shall
also be discussing them in this Tuesday's FEL meeting. The proposed
timing is 1930 hrs CEST. But Fedora-meeting channel seems to be
occupied. Chitlesh, can you please confirm another place?

Some points regarding the presentation:
1. I would like to add some more info on the current status. Suggestions welcome
2. Is there a need for a separate slide on "Contributing
Opportunities" which very much is going to be similar/in-line with
Future Work slides?
3. I have consciously tried to avoid too much details on specifics of
FEL tools as this is more of a call for participation kind of talk
(hopefully it is ;) )

Since we are all split across time zones (as it was not the case
sometime back, also indication of growth of FEL Team :) ), you can
always post your views in this list and we shall take it up during the
discussion.

With Best Regards,
-- 
Aanjhan

[Shakthi Kannan]

Hi,

--- On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 4:09 PM, Aanjhan R <aanjhan(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
| 3. I have consciously tried to avoid too much details on specifics of
| FEL tools as this is more of a call for participation kind of talk
| (hopefully it is ;) )
\--

* You should atleast put the screenshot of tools available. End of the
talk people should know what tools are available, and by looking at
the screenshots they should know what they will be working with. A
picture is a 1000 words!

* Please provide this mailing list link so people can subscribe to it.
A direct link helps rather than people having to find it through other
means. Or put a separate slide for "Contact" information, and links to
e-mail, mailing list, IRC et. al.

Just my two cents,

SK

-- 
Shakthi Kannan
http://www.shakthimaan.com

[Stuart Brorson]

>  | 3. I have consciously tried to avoid too much details on specifics
> of
>  | FEL tools as this is more of a call for participation kind of talk
>  | (hopefully it is ;) )
>
>  * You should atleast put the screenshot of tools available. End of the
>  talk people should know what tools are available, and by looking at
>  the screenshots they should know what they will be working with. A
>  picture is a 1000 words! 
Just to speak up with a suggestion about screenshots:  There are
currently some nice gEDA screenshot up at the wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geda

Please feel free to use them in any presentation you give.

Stuart

[Chitlesh GOORAH]

On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 11:39 AM, Aanjhan R wrote:
>  I am waiting to hear your valuable feedbacks and suggestions.
>
>  Some points regarding the presentation:
>  1. I would like to add some more info on the current status. Suggestions welcome
>  2. Is there a need for a separate slide on "Contributing
>  Opportunities" which very much is going to be similar/in-line with
>  Future Work slides?
>  3. I have consciously tried to avoid too much details on specifics of
>  FEL tools as this is more of a call for participation kind of talk
>  (hopefully it is ;) ) 
Hello,

First, I would like to thank Aanjhan for his courage to participate in
FOSS.in. I believe in you.
Personal note to Aanjhan: Don't forget you will be talking under the
name of fedora and for fedora on that day (and most certainly under a
fedora polo shirt).

I have been talking with Fedora-Art this weekend and they are
proposing that every OOo document should have the same template.
Mairin has already brought forward and put into practice the idea to
use "MgOpen Data regular" font in all Fedora slides. Paul Frields and
others support this idea. I spent the weekend creating the template
while using this font. I feel it doesn't fit for FEL presentations for
the following reasons:
- µ and other mathematical symbols show like a square box
- bold characters reflects a kiddie style presentation.

[1: more details on my personal marketing strategy, below]

Thus, after many trials, Liberation Sans looks be more compatible with
other Fedora presentations with the "MgOpen Data regular" font and
also more professional. Liberation fonts can be downloaded via yum.
[2]

Thereby, I would like you to adopt this template and drop the black
background as well as the orange text in favour to blue:
http://chitlesh.fedorapeople.org/FEL/docs/fel_template.odp

Let's be consistent with other fedora presentations.

Also as this is the first FEL10 presentation, I would like it to be
the model that other presentations should follow.

Removed all Copyrights from the slides ! You have already signed CLA
and your fedora contributions are safely guarded with it.

> > Need for more collaboration among the Free Software EDA
> developers a.k.a Interoperability :) 
It is not the "need", but it was lacking !
Lack of collaboration and directions in development.

Page 4:
> >From a handful of tools to a complete simulation platform
Please also do mention during the presentation that, all this was only
and only possible due to already existing development fedora
infrastructure. People need to know that FEL wasn't come out of the
blue, but after Fedora Infrastructure has given developers like us
materials so that we can focus on our FEL developments:
- mailing list
- livecd, livedvd torrent hosting
- livedvd kickstart and spin creation tools
- approval to use Fedora trademarks
- git/trac, 150mb personal hosting
- ...

e.g: RedHat lawyers talked to SystemC developers to ask them opt for a
more "open" license. But in vain. However thanks to TomCallaway.

A short reminder(yes I will keep on talking ... :) ), we don't do only
packaging ! We don't do only packaging ! We follow the need of the
users, while keeping us informed with current industry process and
changes. This is what makes FEL development so unique. The end users
don't see it. So during the presentation, It would be nice to remind
them.

As for achievements, please do say that :
2008-01-18 FEL LiveCD shipped with YOU Magazine in ASIA

"You magazine"  bundled Fedora Electronics Lab Live CD. This print
magazine claims to be the only Asian print magazine dedicated to Linux
and has tens of thousands of copies circulation rate. Since they also
run a sister magazine called Electronics For You, they have a good
interest in electronics which probably explains the choice.  [3] [4]

Page 6:
> > Upstream <--> FEL <--> Upstream 
There are 2
items that are missing :
- Users
- Daily documents we follow to keep FEL to industry standard ! I do
it. However, being only 3 now working on FEL, it's enough to get those
ideas into practice.

> > Push more packages into "Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux
> (EPEL)" 
Add a "5" at the end of this line
Do mention during the presentation - for RHEL5, CentOS 5, Scientific Linux

More to come in the next mail (after dinner :) )



[1: more details on my personal marketing strategy]
I have never ever limited FEL use for home users only. My main target
is universities. During the last 2 years, I have been more in contact
with many Field Application Engineers. Thus, listening to their
internals problems with EDA tools and what issues their CAD engineers
are facing. Talking "opensource" to them is :
- no direct reliable contact in their point of view.
- not mature, compared to big EDA vendors.
- 24h support

Since Synopsys, Cadence and Mentor Graphics are actively contributing
to their OpenAccess environment. Companies are ready to have a look. I
_believe_ that if they have a look and were taught the Opensource
licenses by a lawyer(I'm leaning on RH's lawyers if it would be the
case), they will unleash some of their internal tools. Thereby, more
contribution to opensource upstream projects. It is a long shot, I'm
targeting but at least it is a clear one for me. Hence you would have
already deduced why I constantly request quality in our presentations
and work.


[2]: http://www.press.redhat.com/2007/05/09/liberation-fonts/
[3]: https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-marketing-list/2008-January/msg001...
[4]: http://chitlesh.fedorapeople.org/FEL/you.png

Cheers,
Chitlesh Goorah

[Chitlesh GOORAH]

On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 9:10 PM, Chitlesh GOORAH wrote:
>  More to come in the next mail (after dinner :) ) 
Hello there again,


The review continues:

Page 7:
> > LiveDVD Tuning – experience with kickstart 
I don't know
what you mean by that .

Normally, if you look at our kickstart file [1]:
Together with Jereon, we have dropped all OS related issues for
creating FEL livedvd, by just listing:
- kde-livecd ks (which requires the livecd.base)
- FEL packages
- FEL specific post settings

> From now on, we don't have any thing to do with the FEL ks, aside
adding extra packages. All the hardcore work is done by Fedora Release
Engineers + Red Hat engineers. Sometimes there are minor things to
correct, but that won't take one day. But testing requires a lot of
time.


> > Co-operation with Desktop teams like Gnome, KDE etc. for Menu
> category discussions 
Currently there is NO co-operation with KDE and Gnome!
There were some discussion between Debian devs, freedesktop devs,
electronics-menu upstream and I. But it ended where it started.
I guess you misunderstood my future proposals to FESCo. One of the
proposals will consist on setting a new _Fedora_ packaging guidelines
on packages that land their %{name}.desktop in the science&maths
KDE/GNOME menus. The intention is to avoid multiple desktop menu
entries by Scientific packages such as Octave and Qtoctave. The
packaging guidelines that I will propose (together with Fedora KDE
maintainer KevinKolfer) will also ensure that scientific applications
such as Scilab which don't include a desktop file among their sources,
have a proper Category entry in their fedora SRPM package.
The reason that there is no cooperation with KDE and Gnome on this
matter is simply because it doesn't concern them !. It concerns the
freedesktop menu entries. Their devs have acknowledged the actual
confusion with "science" menu category with "education" category.
Once
the packaging guidelines which I'll write in the upcoming weeks will
be adopted by FESCo, it will be easier to get Debian involved as well
to push these to Freedesktop devs. Thus the desktop ecosystem will
benefit from it. Since, no one has stepped up to take such
responsabilities and based on my limited time, I guess it is the only
way to get the job done.

> > Increase the availability of quick start tutorials and examples
> as a package itself 
Currently there are only one/two mailing list post about this. NO ONE
has taken the initiative to do such thing. Unless there is a formal
statement from someone, you can't add/talk about it.

All FEL packages include their upstream documents and examples in
their rpms or sub packages, such as -doc. Currently neither
you(aanjhan), Thibault and I have agreed on such a work.


---
... talk about scilab, we are striving currently to get all its
required BuildRequires: approved before F11.

> > Page 9, 
A short note: I don't recall what her name is, but she took this photo
during one of our measurements and later the group did post processing
of the datas on LabPlot and octave+homemade quaternions models.

this applies to anyone:
If you have any doubt about anything, anything, even the stupidiest
thing about FEL, feel free to talk about it to be _before_ the
presentation. And be sure when you talk about something, to be able to
answer questions about it. It is not a shame for not being able to
answer a question during the presentation. It is normal and even my
case. Tell them that honestly you don't know, but the mailing list is
here for that. I always say "Humans aren't met to know everything."

Kind regards,
Chitlesh

[1]: http://chitlesh.fedorapeople.org/FEL/10/livedvd.html

[Aanjhan R]

Hi List,

I have updated the presentation in the below link. As with the screen
shots, there is now plan to do some live demos.

http://tuxmaniac.fedorapeople.org/DOCS/FEL_foss_in_v2.pdf

Regards
Aanjhan