Three Cheers for GNOME 3!!!

Everyone is celebrating the GNOME 3 release with over a hundred launch parties being organized in different corners of the world. At this moment of applause, I want to extend my sincere thanks to the GNOME Foundation and the GNOME.Asia Committee for choosing India as the spot for the largest GNOME.Asia event ever! Along with the student training sessions, it has definitely sparked a lot of awareness amongst students here as can be seen from post summit follow ups answering which I have spent quite some time after returning from Bangalore.

To the students I want to say a lot of things have to be learnt and this is just the beginning. Your enthusiasm is going to guide you into being successful contributor. I have seen many of you newcomers actively showing up on IRC on #gnome-love and I want to see even more numbers and even more women contributors, at least all those students with whom I had a one-to-one talk!

Thanks to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring me enabling me to attend it. Huge targets were achieved in a manner which was real fun! I saved a wonderful collection of memories from Bangalore hackfest and Asia Summit 2011: 

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More of these can be found on http://www.gnome.asia/photos
For those who could not attend the summit or my talk in particular by any means, you can find my slides here.

GNOME Asia Summit 2011 - Updates

Day 1 and 2 of the Hackfest begun from the Intel's HAL Airport Road office at Bangalore (thanks to Srinivasa for getting it arranged).
I got a surprise on the first day sent to me by Empathy maintainers, Guillaume and Xavier =)

 

Thank you both for this awing surprise! That was really motivational.

The Hackfest was kick started with a round table deciding upon the tasks to be accomplished during the five day event and ended with a wrap up of the entire day's activities done by each person to analyse the effectiveness and time utilization.

I volunteered to assist with marketing and organizing besides hacking.
In this while I had been trying to get more media contacts for interviewing our delegates and covering the event. Two of them from Linux format whom I contacted about a month ago actually arrived here on April 1. We were able to arrange discounted accommodation for them in the same hotel as where we stayed and they have been doing their job well without bothering anyone during working hours. I was made the newest addition to the GNOME Asia Organizing committee and tried to give my best to the role and provided my point of views and ideas whenever necessary, about possible ways of spreading awareness of GNOME in Asia, keeping the often overlooked facts in mind.

Hats off to the release team for worked really hard and preparing GNOME 3 ready for release ahead of time (not to mention the April Fool's prank was unexpectedly adorable ;) I had been observing the extensive amount of work a release requires and sleepless nights the release team members spent busy writing release notes.

For Empathy, I was able to begin making changes on my hugest branch for persistent chats which involved studying about Webkit and Pango. I followed up with the Usability team for their useful input on the design changes required to be done in Empathy for this and also discussed it with Allan Caeg. I reported and pushed a patch for a small MUC usability patch and with Fred Muller's help, found out two file transfer bugs in Empathy<->Pidgin interaction over which I'll be working soon after this to make him happy!

Before the summit, I got a peppy GNOME 3 T-shirt and Free Software promotional stuff including stickers I decorated my laptop with-

On April 2nd, the first day of the summit, I attended keynotes by Brian Cameron and Vincent Untz and also his next talk on Building GNOME on build service and SUSE studio which contained some notable points for me. After this, I spent some time at the help desks with students new to GNOME and Linux in general and tried to ease their Linux fear clearing their basic doubts about migrating from Windows to any Linux distribution and explaining its benefits. Tried my hands over OpenSUSE for the first time on a demonstration system and learnt about it from Manu Gupta who has been supporting it since over an year now.

I'll be giving my talk on "Contributions of a newbie to the free desktop's Empathy" tomorrow! Be sure to attend it on Track 2. Will be updating more pictures soon!

GNOME Asia Summit 2011 - Adventure Begins ;)

Hi!

Today I landed Bangalore, the venue for GNOME Asia Summit, 2011. My travel was sponsored by the GNOME Foundation. Other than Bharath Acharya, the backbone for the event, I met Srinivasa Ragavan, Pockey Lam, Vincent Untz, Andre Klapper, Frederic Peters and Frederic Muller, Allan Day, Ryan Lortie, Josselin Monette and Andreas Nilsson today! We had lunch together, walked up to a nearby mall and talked over a lot of stuff! It was fun! Hoping to meet the other Hackers and Marketing, Design and Release team members in the coming days.

GNOME Hackfest begins tomorrow. 

The week ahead is going to be busy but full of adventure! :D With lots of registrations for the summit already made and student registrations going free, a huge audience is expected for the launch party and GNOME 3 is catching the mood!


Will be adding on more related details as I get time.

Contact Blocking and Report Abuse to be available in Empathy3.0

Many users had requested this feature (bug) and it is now available for all to use.

Now Empathy supports blocking/unblocking contacts on per-user basis for connections that support contact blocking (for ex. gmail) and report abuse for connections that support this feature (though currently there are no connection managers implementing this). Danielle completed two branches for "Contact Blocking" and "Report abuse" last month and I recently re-based them to master for her which took some time since the branches had diverged  much.

Here a few snapshots of the interfaces introduced-

The Blocked Contacts can be viewed and managed with Edit->Blocked Contacts menu-item

in the main window to open up the following dialog

Blocked Contacts Dialog

...on which you can perform usual live search.

One can right click individual contacts in contacts' roster and on selecting "Remove" he'll 

notice this extra "Delete and Block" button, if supported.

The Contacts->Block Contact menu item in chat windows is a check menu-item that can be toggled

The subscription box provides a convenient way to right away block a contact without need to first add him or her.

Confirmation dialog that would pop up on each attempt of blocking a contact

On completion, Empathy was in string freeze while getting ready for release, and the ready-to-merge branch was too cool not to be available in this release, so Guillaume requested a freeze exception from the i10n team which was granted and the branch was finally merged! :)

Recovering data from a broken hard disk

Some time ago, my computer's hard disk broke and I didn't had a recent backup copy which increased my pain.
I hope no computer dependent ever faces such crappy situation. Just like a burnt child dreads fire all life, I have made it a habit to backup my system data at the end of each day (backintime is a super fast tool) and monitor the healthiness (SMART status) of my hard disk's regularly!

Here I describe how I recovered my data in that situation. Most of the commands mentioned here will require root privileges.

It happened one fine day when I started my computer and after making some changes on a set of files, tried to save them for testing. System refused and reported that my file system was read-only. Without thinking much I tried to restart my system and it never opened up in GUI. I ended up with unmountable partitions-

mount: mounting /dev on /root/dev failed: No such file or directory
mount: mounting /sys on /root/sys failed: No such file or directory
mount: mounting /proc on /root/proc failed: No such file or directory


Target filesystem doesn't have requested /sbin/init.
No init found. Try passing init= bootarg...


and then it asks me to enter commands in Busybox.

On much googling I found this somewhat useful.
I decided to use my Ubuntu live CD to recover the data, check the drive's status and reinstall the system if possible. The disk utility reported two bad sectors and when that happens, there are more to follow.
Broken disk was not really bad for my PC was still under warranty but I was worried about my data.
In panick I decided to use the dd command to create an image of the partition on a blank external drive.
I got this error:

ubuntu@ubuntu:/$ sudo dd if=/dev/sda3 of=/media/2c0adbca-f37e-4f53-b975-8c7a99ee2757/sda3.imgdd: reading `/dev/sda3': Input/output error5341584+0 records in5341584+0 records out2734891008 bytes (2.7 GB) copied, 162.043 s, 16.9 MB/s

Then Danni suggested me to use ddrescue as a tool to copy my disk off. ddrescue is like dd, just that it retries, skipping bad bits.
So I tried to install ddrescue onto the live CD but each time apt-get kept getting stuck while unpacking, in D-state (ps aux | grep dpkg showed the unpacking process' status  Ds+ which means uninterrupted sleep.) Processes in D-state cannot be killed until system is rebooted and are termed as zombie processes.

Dismounting the corrupted partition didn't help either, I'm not sure why.
The syslogs kept displaying IO errors on device sr0 which is the cd-rom usually, so I instead burnt Ubuntu rescue remix (which has many rescue tools including ddrescue pre-installed).
Then in hurry and without knowing the consequences of writing a large file onto a MS-DOS file system (which was what this external drive was formatted with), I started creating the corrupted file system's image with the rescue remix.

My disk was spacious enough but the process halted reporting disk to be out of space.

My bad, I doubted this was because of mismatching file system on my external drive and thought of  formatting my external drive with two partitions (for the first time):  ext4 for the image and NTFS for the rest. For this I studied the fdisk and parted commands extensively. I eventually could make a large enough ext4 partition but something went wrong with magic numbering when fiddling with fdisk. The image was ready within a second which smelled of something wrong! :-/

The reason for image creation faliure turned out to be the disk's file system. MS-DOS restricts files sizes from being more than 4GB[?] in size. Danni told me I could save the image (which is nothing but a byte-wise copy) to any file system with larger file sizes permitted (not necessarily ext*), so I deleted all partitions and made a single fully stretched one (using fdisk utility). I formatted it with NTFS whose data I would be able to see using any OS like this:

mkntfs /dev/sdc

where sdc was the external hard disk (mount -l command shows currently mounted partitions or df -T could also be used to check this).

Then, with all other partitions unmounted (umount command) and only the external disk mounted, I ran the ddrescue command. The steps were:

• Mounting the external hard disk file system I was writing the image to (sdc1 in my case) if not yet mounted:
  mkdir /mnt/target
  mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/target
• Writing an image of corrupted partition (sda3 in my case) to the file system mounted:
  ddrescue /dev/sda3 /mnt/target/ddrescue.img /mnt/target/ddrescue.log

This ways, I was able to create my image with corrupted data skipped.

Checking the image using e2fsck couldn't succeed and I needed to run fsck manually:

fsck -y /mnt/target/ddrescue.img

[
FWIW, my image on check (without repairing it) reported:

error: Inodes that were part of a corrupted orphan linked list found

]
Now, rerunning check reported the file-system's copy to be clean and (hopefully) repaired and ready to mount.

I tried it using mount loop (which is just a way to mount a file as a file system) as:

mount -o loop /mnt/target/ddrescue.img /mnt/recovered_sda3

where /mnt/target/ddrescue.img was treated as device and /mnt/recovered_sda3 was the desired mount point directory. Now I was able to use  /mnt/recovered_sda3  just like root directory with all my data in /mnt/recovered_sda3/home! :D
I tried to format my corrupted partition and even to delete the entire partition on the faulty disk but could not do it.
Finally, I installed Ubuntu on a new hard disk afresh, mounted my external drive onto it, mounted the recovered partition's image and copied my /mnt/recovered_sda3/home onto /home :

 rsync -auvxz --progress /mnt/recovered_sda3/home/ /home/

(keeping the trailing '/' intact)

With that, had my computer back to what it was before the snap!

Had I had faced this situation on a healthy hard disk (as sometimes happens if the computer suddenly shuts down while booting) and if direct checking and repairing the file system using e2fsck/fsck failed, I could have copied the repaired image of the partition bytewise back to the same device like this:

dd if=/mnt/target/ddrescue.img of=/dev/sda3

Thank you Danni for guiding me through this and saving me a lot of  time and Google searches.

Internship updates...

Hey people,

Didn't get chance to blog about what I had been doing lately so here's a compiled mix of it all.

Good news first:

• Now Empathy multi-user chats are separated from the chat-room windows they are displayed in. i.e. users will be able to join/leave chats without closing the room [commit].
  
  I am working on the opposite i.e enabling the user to continue being connected to a chat when chat-room window has been closed (bug).
  
  
• The /part command is working for chat-rooms and private MUCs (bug [commit])
  UPDATE: There was a small fault in part message construction in telepathy-idle. It was not sticking to correct format of PART messages as per RFC 2812 sections 2.3.1 and 2.3.2 which was preventing the full part message from being displayed to the members. It has been fixed in this bug now.
  
  
• To prevent a user from deleting significant accounts like freenode from list of networks, a new "Reset Networks List" button was added in the IRC Network Chooser dialog (bug [commit])

New things I learnt in this phase:

• Insight into telepathy-idle
• Using Wireshark to monitor packets sent to and received from a network
• Conflict resolution after rebasing.
  To help me gain more experience with conflicts, Danni has given me two massive branches to rebase.

There were some not so cool things also like, I started my work on notification for enabling/connecting a disabled/disconnected account when trying to connect to rooms affiliated to it (bug) but it eventually turned out to be blocked by this bug. There must be some comparison workaround used by Empathy to keep things working which I am yet to discover! A particular horrible thing was my hardisk snap and not having an up-to-date backup added to it but I was happy to be able to recover my data (thanks to Danni). It was another learning experience and I'll dedicate a separate post to it.

~

Gnome.Asia Summit 2011 will be held in Bangalore, India this time. I am happy to get a chance to speak about my internship experience in my talk- Contributions made by a newbie to the free desktop's "Empathy", in front of such assorted community of developers, documenters, marketing people, GNOME users and prospective contributors. I am particularly exited about getting a chance to see the biggies of this world! :D

India celebrates its 62nd Republic day!

This one's is for all proud Indians and all world citizens who are happy for the republicans of the largest democracy in the world! :)

Today is a day to retrospect and be thankful to all those who brought a revolution to the nation and contributed towards the preparation of a permanent constitution for its people and for their future generations to be able to live a just life, in peace.