mukt.in experience

I had a good experience participating in mukt.in. There were a lot of interesting people and ideas floating all over the place. Even though this event was happening just the second time, there were good set of speakers from all over the country. I spoke on the topic “Learning to develop in the open source world” (Download the presentation). I was extremely excited when I got to speak again the third day to an even bigger audience. I learned quite a few interesting things and streamlined my concepts when the participants acknowledged how the methodologies I had mentioned were exactly how they started and continue though they didn’t realize them consciously. I learned tidbits on usability from vindoh’s presentation and as he said an hour’s talk can’t teach you everything about usability but it at least did spark an initiation .Besides the talk and learning it was also a great experience to meet old friends after a very long time. I also learned about the contributions of opensuse and their new packaging system from cyberorg . Who can tell you better than a novell developer himself :) We were sitting till 4 am in my room after the last day of the event and a little bit of socializing checking out on  QIWI-LTSP. I was quite surprised to have my laptop boot using pxe with all the drivers including my webcam working, completely automated. QIWI LTFS is not yet in production and he is still working on it.It was fun with cyberorg and it got better to know that he is also from a training background and runs a Novell certified academy of his own. I had promised him to really try using opensuse as my primary desktop for a month, a hard move being the debian addict that I am. I for once believed I could never leave apt for yum and yes I wont. But zypper seems to be as good as apt, and having learned about zypper in opensuse I might really migrate! My other concern is migrating my emacs configuration as debian has a lot of necesseary elisp already packaged. It is not just about the packaged elisp for emacs but also how well they play along even when I am using a compiled version from git. I guess Suse’s quick build service could be of some help. I am going to figure it out tonight! I am eager to start using kde4, it seems pleasing to the eyes. I wonder if it really matters as everything that I do I do it in emacs except for browsing. Anyways it feels good to power on a sexy machine!