w | grep "ieu"

Last Sunday, ROSEdu organized a new edition of Linux Install Fest. It was an enormous success and we are very glad we could help people enter the amazing Linux world.

In September we started to think about how we would like this event to be and what improvements we can add to attract more participants. It was a massive promoting campaign on Facebook and, with help of “Introduction to Operating Systems” assistants,  we managed to deliver our message to all first year students.

Every year we double the number of participants. In the past, we use to have this event in one or two labs from our faculty. I’m so glad we took the decision to move this event in the EC lobby because we wouldn’t have had space to host over 80 participants in the labs.

We receive help during the event from Arch, openSUSE and Mageia Romania. Ubuntu Romania gave us 100 CDs for participants and we also gave them a sticker:

It was a great success and a fun event and we are very anxious about the event next year .

This is the second year that I have been coordinating CDL [1] (Curs de Dezvoltare Liberă - in Romanian; Open Source Development Course - in English).

CDL is a course addressed mainly to the first and second year students of University Politehnica of Bucharest. It aims to involve students in existing Open Source projects with help and mentoring of ROSEdu [2] members. We want them to see what real world development actually means and to make their first contributions in the Open Source world.

The course is divided in two parts:

• at the beginning there are some theoretical presentations combined with practical laboratories so that students can get familiar with Open Source tools and various programming languages that they will use
• in the second part, there are some presentations held by invited guests about different technologies, careers opportunities, software engineering, etc.

Each course has a practical part, also known as “hackaton” .

This year, we published 5 little assignments. Students sent an e-mail with an essay about what motivated them to apply to this course and the solution of one of the assignments. We had 91 applications registered. 58 student were called for an interview. 16 students were accepted at the end of the process.

Every year we wish to accept more, but we don’t have so many resources to deal with such a big number of students. We hope that they will not be disappointed and will try to involve in Open Source area (our presentations are posted on-line and if they sent us an e-mail I’m sure they will get some support ).

I think that this year was the biggest success so far. Students were very enthusiastic and geeky! You can find a list of the students  here [3].

The most pleasant surprise was to find out that we are not the only ones believing in the value brought by this course among undergraduate students!  The Romanian subsidiary of IXIA[4] has supported us with a significant sponsorship! It consists of a fully sponsored trip to Poiana Țapului (offered as a reward at the end of the course) for our students and mentors to get to know each other better! We have had a great time! [5]

We also received books and prizes from Google Open Source Team [6] for all participants and mentors of the program.

We are very greatful for the help we received and we hope we will collaborate in the next editions too.

We think that you will find out more information about CDL in the next autumn.

You can find more pictures here: [7]

[1] – http://cdl.rosedu.org/english

[2] – http://rosedu.org

[3] – http://cdl.rosedu.org/2011/cursanti

[4] – http://ixiacom.com

[5] – http://media.rosedu.org

[6] – http://code.google.com/opensource

[7] -

• http://media.rosedu.org
• http://media.rosedu.org
• http://media.rosedu.org

← Older posts

CDL v3.0 Overview

Posted on May 31, 2011 by Victor Cărbune

So here we are, at the end of the 3rd edition of the OS Community and Development Lab!

I have just finished reading the feedback from our student participants and I’m very happy that the overall opinion matches what I have thought: the course has been a great success!

 

CDL Students & Organizers

Our participants have learned a lot: from general things about open source programming and understanding a project’s design to actual implementation of a completely new functional feature using a codebase that seems untouchable at the beginning!

 

The most pleasant surprise this year was to find out that we are not the only ones believing in the value brought by this course among undergraduate students!

First of all, I should start by presenting World of USO.

WoUSO [1] is an educational game made for students of the Introduction in Operating Systems course (Utilizarea Sistemelor de Operare = USO, in Romanian) of the Computer Science & Engineering department at the University Politehnica of Bucharest.  It was designed four years ago by a group of enthusiast students (also known as ROSEdu [2])

In my first year as a student, I played WoUSO too. It was fun, competitive and geeky!

From the second year, I became a member of the content team: I created interesting question and tasks for quests.

As usual, at the final course of USO, ROSEdu awarded the bravest students… those who didn’t sleep in the winter vacation, those who didn’t watch movies so they could accomplish more tasks from The Quest!

Here’s a list of the top 10 students from this year:

1. Vlad-Ștefan GRIGORIȚĂ
2. Mihnea DOBRESCU-BALAUR
3. Bogdan CROITORU
4. Robert SASU
5. Alexandru PREDA
6. Adrian STRATULAT
7. Mihai BIVOL
8. Cozmin VELCIU
9. Andrei PETRE
10. Marian STAN

Congrats!

You can find more pictures here: [3]

[1] – https://wouso.rosedu.org

[2] – http://rosedu.org

[3] – http://media.rosedu.org

As usual, last week was a new edition of the Install Fest[0] by ROSEdu.

What’s new? The event (already at its fourth edition) has changed its name: Ubuntu Install Fest is now Linux Install Fest.

Why? Because we wanted to move to an event where people with experience will come to help people without experience.

We’ve succeeded! We managed to gather at least 49 people [1] (unfortunately, we failed to take all their names down) that installed Linux on their systems. What we enjoyed very much is that support was provided by people with extensive experience in the field (Open Suse Romania, Fedora Romania etc.), ROSEdu members, older Computer Science students and even students in their first year!

Part of the success was due to the cooperation with Tech Talks, a ROSEdu event [2]. Răzvan Deaconescu [3] gave a presentation on the effective use of CLI.

It was a success!

[0] http://rosedu.org/lif
[1] http://rosedu.org/node/27
[2] http://talks.rosedu.org/
[3] http://swarm.cs.pub.ro/~razvan/blog/

The two modules that I have to implement for the pjsip project are almost done.  They are in this state since last month, but I did not have time to post an entry about them.

Presence Server (implemented by Cătălina) knows how to communicate using pjsip library. The manager does not use this library and is platform dependent. Thus, for modularization, it was necessary to implement a Presence Client that links the two modules.

The Presence Client has two threads running simultaneously: one to communicate with the manager and one to communicate with the Presence Server. Synchronization between the two threads is achieved using a semaphore.

The Presence Server and Presence Client use pjsip architecture for communication.

The following diagram shows how SIP messages are passed back and forth among pjsip components:

At the heart of the SIP stack is the SIP endpoint, which is represented by opaque data type pjsip_endpoint. The endpoint responsibilities are:
- a pool factory, to allocate pools for all SIP components (this is pretty cool, actually you don’t have to worry about memory allocation)
- the transport manager instance which has SIP transports and controls message printing and parsing
- to manage pjsip modules
- to receive incoming SIP messages from transport manager and to distribute the message to modules.

Here, the endpoint manages only one module responsible for the communication between the Presence Server and the Presence Client.
The client does not need to check when receiving a message if the type is SIP because the transport manager handles it.

The Manager is a server.
Thus, the Presence Client connects to the Manager and sends an XML message like:

<xml>
<type> PC </type>
…
</xml>

Modules communicate with each other only through XML formatted messages.  Thus, it is much easier to extract the necessary information from the message.

The connection with the manager is one of the two threads that runs within the Presence Client. As I said before, the second thread is used for the connection with the Presence Server.

When the Presence Client receives a message from the Manager, it puts it in a circular buffer. As long as the buffer is not empty, it takes the messages and sends a  PUBLISH message to the Presence Server.

In the next post I will discuss about how I have decided to implement the Manager module. Sources are kept in a private svn, but I will post them when the whole project will be ready.