Turbans & Terminals

The following is derivative of extended conversations and tutoring by Martin Peres ( irc_nick : mupuf ). This article is an introductory discussion of nvidia gpus with respect to nouveau. Nouveau is the open-source driver which runs the Nvidia cards on your linux pc. A schematic breakdown of the nvidia architecture can be understood through this figure. The first important repository is the envytools ( https://github.com/pathscale/envytools ), this contains the most valuable set of tools and documentation you ll find for/on nvidia cards. To have a look at how the X Window System ( X11 -  current major version ) GUI framework works, let's say all the rendering is done by sending commands to the x-server. Applications connect to the x-server through a socket which allocates a context for their windows and issues commands like draw a line etc. For 2D rendering, the x-server has the EXA interface. The EXA can be accelerated by graphics drivers and the acceleration is done by

Fellow Open-source Enthusiasts Going to conferences is great , getting inspired by attending them is even better but you know what is better? Getting to attend conferences [National/International] for free , getting cool stickers and t-shirts being delivered at your place , being one of the first few to get your hands on a developer device or developer release of an upcoming software/OS and all this for free! I will hopefully be pardoned by true open-source enthusiasts for making this look like an advertisement rather than a motivator but I somehow couldn't resist.  Now , ignoring the above perks because they are 'perks' , the real deal is getting to learn while you work. Being involved with any open-source project brings along a great deal of learning , experience and contribution to real-time projects which people around the globe use in their daily lives. Once you are into development and learning , conferences make a whole lot of more sense as you actually ge

  Google Summer of Code Doc Camp Sprint   October, 2011     The Doc Camp was held at the Google HQ in Mountain View, California ; it consisted of 2 major components - an unconference and 3-5 short form Book Sprints to produce 'Quick Start' guides for specific GSoC projects. The unconference explored topics proposed by the participants. Many topics on free documentation of free software were proposed for discussion during the event. Each Quick Start Sprint brought together 5-8 individuals to produce a book on a specific GSoC project. The Quick Start books were launched at the opening party for the GSoC Mentors summit immediately following the event.     Four free software projects (KDE, OpenStreetMap, OpenMRS, and Sahana Eden) had each sent three to five contributors to write books about the projects this week. The KDE team consisted of four members , namely Karan , Rohan , Valorie and yours truly. A book in a week was an amazing achievement, whether for a fr

Turban -  A turban is a kind of headwear based on a cloth winding; there are many different variations. The Sikhs have a long history of being warriors and refer to themselves as saint-soldiers since their rise in the 1600-1700s. Their turban style and attire gives the identity of a warrior religion. Terminal - A terminal is a serial computer interface for text entry and display. Operating systems such as Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OS X have virtual consoles to provide several text terminals on a single computer. The pilot episode is supposed to bear the burden of getting a TV series selected for production but this is definitely not one such post. It more like a brief on what all I will post about but I didn't want to call it "Introduction" so well here is the "Pilot" post. It has been a while since I have wanted to start a blog but just ended up writing articles and posts for where they were required. Most of the posts are currently going to be related t