At WikiCamp

Unconferences are bad for my body clock. I woke up early - on a Sunday, that too - to catch a flight to Chennai for the WikiCamp. When I reached Tidel Park (the venue), Jimmy Wales had started his talk on wikipedia, wikia. He clarified to all of us that Wikipedia was not running out of money as was reported. He'd meant that they had 4 months of money in the bank, and only if they didn't receive a cent in donations for 4 months running (which is highly unlikely) they would be in a crisis.

I met with some of the key Indian contributors to Wikipedia

• Bhadani, the Grand Old Indian of Wikipedia, is No. 45 in the list of worldwide contributors. This banker from Pondicherry humbles all of us.
• Ganesh K (is ganesh a bot or a human?),
• Sundar, the guy behind the Tamil wikipedia, and an admin on Wikipedia.
• Arun R and Atul Chitnis, contributors .

I spoke in the afternoon. My slides:



Atul Chitnis spoke about how to use a wiki as a website, using http://foss.in as an example. Very cool. Until then I didn't know that foss.in was a wiki site. Some clever scripting done.

In the afternoon, I moderated a BoF (Birds of a Feather) session that was hitherto unplanned. Hey, its an unconference, so all this works. We went through multiple rounds of reorganizing sessions till we had something that was agreeable to all. While we were doing it, we were the fancy of many a photographer.

Photo courtesy: Siddhi

So, back to the BoF. We got all the guys I mentioned above plus Jimmy Wales on a panel, and shot questions at them.

Photo Courtesy: Arvind

Ashwin was liveblogging the BoF until (he and) his laptop ran out of battery. There were some guys who were doing a documentary on wikis, and they captured the whole discussion. I'll link to them as soon as I can get their info.

Moot points

1. Kiruba was formally dressed (he had to, he was the organizer)
2. Someone actually asked Jimmy Wales "So, when is Wikipedia going to list on NASDAQ?". Jimmy had the patience and grace to answer it. (No, I'm not going into the lengthy explanation here.)
3. Atul Chitnis got pelted with squeeze balls for exceeding his talk-time to provide the media a "story" (read his comment below). Geeks have bad aim -- only 2 of them hit their target, and Atul is hard to miss. No wonder software projects have so many bugs.
4. Red Bull was one of the sponsors, so we all had wings in the afternoon
5. Chennai was cooler than Bangalore that day.
   

More photos from Arun and Vinod. Search flickr for "wikicamp" to get the whole lot.

More coverage on this event in the Blogosphere (comment or contact me to add your link here)
Arvind
Ashwin
Prathul
Himanshu

Veni, Vedi, Wiki(Camp)

The first-of-its-kind-in-India gathering of Wiki-people is happening in Tidel Park, Chennai on 25th February. If you like/use/want to know about Wikis, then be sure to attend WikiCamp. From the list of topics I see, its all about the guts, the gashes, the gore and glory of using Wikis.

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, is going to be there. It is an unconference, so speak up and participate. Let me know if anyone of you reading this is also going to be there, will be glad to catch up. See you on Sunday.

If you cannot make it for some reason, you can come back here and read about it for sure.

How-to: Create a dual boot laptop with Ubuntu and Windows XP

A few months ago, I configured my laptop to dual boot into Windows and Ubuntu. This post is dedicated to spreading the Ubuntu love :), and comes at the advice of a friend.

System Configuration
My laptop is a Dell Latitude D620, and came pre-installed with Windows XP Professional (+SP2). I also had a Ubuntu 6.10 CD (Edgy Eft) (I'd previously ordered it). You can alternately download it and burn an ISO. Note: Ubuntu comes with GNOME desktop, if you want KDE, you should download kubuntu.

Create the partitions
Mine was a fresh Windows install (the laptop was new), but if your's isn't, you should run defrag to free up any disk space before creating any partitions.

Using the Windows XP administration tool, I created 4 (roughly equal) partitions on my 80GB HDD: 1 for the Windows OS install, 2 NTFS partitions for my data and Windows programs, and 1 "blank" (unallocated) partition, for Ubuntu.

Install Ubuntu
First, I changed my BIOS boot sequence to boot from the CD drive before the HDD. Then inserted the Ubuntu CD, and booted into Ubuntu. I chose the Install Ubuntu option, and followed the steps in the wizard. At some point, the installation prompted me to create my partitions. I chose to "Manually edit partition table" and found my 4 partitions listed there.
I left the windows partitions as is - they show up as as sda* (*=1,2,3 depending on how many Windows partitions are there). Of the unallocated space, I created two partitions.
1. Linux swap, of 2GB (rule of thumb says that your swap partition should be about twice your RAM)
2. Linux (OS) partition, of all the remaining space.

Note: A lot of people forget to create the swap partition.

Almost done, just Reboot
I just continued and completed the installation process, removed the CD and rebooted, and I was ready-to-go. GRUB installed automatically, and figured out its config based on the partitions. It made Linux the default boot partition, which suited me fine. You can always change the GRUB configuration if you want to change the order.

I configured my network connections, including wireless connections using the network configuration utility, and it all worked fine. Amen.

Troubleshooting
If what I described doesn't happen to you :), this is a good place to look for help. In fact, I read the whole article before I dual boot-ed my laptop just for some perspective.