‘MiniCamp Jaipur’ Updates : We are ready to roll

MiniCamp Jaipur

MiniCamp Jaipur

Mozilla Community Rajasthan is conducting “MiniCamp” on Sunday, 17th August, in Pink City Jaipur for all active and newbie contributors in and around Rajasthan.

Last weekend we conducted an online meeting and discussed about progress of preparations of the event. We also got to know that many people are very excited about the event, we have already started receiving cool posters from different Firefox clubs. We have planned to post updates of event planning for all excited attendees, and for all others who are interested to know what’s going on in Rajasthan community. So here I am, On behalf of MCR, to inform you about event and give you updates about the event planning.

 

What is ‘MiniCamp’ :

As I mentioned earlier, MiniCamp is an event being conducted by Mozilla Community Rajasthan on next Sunday (i.e., 17th August) in Jaipur. This event is open for all active and newbie contributors who are in and around Rajasthan. Following are few of the goals of this event.

  • This event will serve as a scrum for the upcoming months for the community members to work in more Productive Way.
  • On boarding newbies: In this event, new contributors will be given exposure to major areas (of all contribution verticals) of contribution by experts.
  • Community building planning.
  • Creating action plans for next one week, one month and six months.
  • Planning Firefox OS launch related activities.

 

Updates from online meeting about event planning:

 

Updates about Attendees

  • As of now we have we have got request from moe than 40 individuals to attend the meeting.
  • List of all can be found at http://trishulgoel.com/mcr/minicamp.php.
  • List of all mozillians attending the event can be found at https://reps.mozilla.org/e/mcr-minicamp-jaipur.
  • More than 15 attendees are active contributors.
  • Most of the attendees are coming from different colleges of Jaipur, Jodhpur, Udaipur, Pilani, Lakshmangarh, Gwalior etc.
  • * * We are also expecting Vineel Reddy Pindi (Amazing Mozilla Rep & Mozilla India’s Community Liaison) to be present in the event :)

Tentative Event Schedule

12:00 – 12:30      Welcome
12:30 – 13:00       Introduction to Mozilla, Mozilla Communities, Contribution Verticals
13:00 – 13:20       Firefox OS

<Ice Breaker Session>

13:30 – 14:00       Introduction to WEBMAKER & APP DEV sessions &
‘Announcing Webmaker & App Dev teams’ strategy of next 3 months activities’

14:00 – 15:00      Parallel Tracks

  1. WEBMAKER
  2. APP DEV

<Break>

15:30 – 16:30       Parallel Tracks on Contribution areas

  1. APP MAKER
  2. SUMO (L10N, FORUM, AOA)
  3. DEVELOPMENT (MDN, BUGZILLA, CODEBASE)

<Ice Breaker Session>

16:40 – 17:00       Session on FSA, Clubs & Community Building
17:00 – 17:15       Case study activity: GeoLocation, FSA / Club Activities, Firefox OS Creativity

<Ice Breaker Session>

17:30 – 17:50       Time to set action plans for next one week, one month & 6 months.

 

Planning for upcoming days

  • We will be sending mails to all participants on Wednesday to ask them about their preferences for the parallel tracks. All information related to those tracks will be there in the mail.
  • Participants responses will be processed and final schedule will be out on Friday.
  • Teaching kits and learning activities to be ready by Friday.
  • Content and sessions rehearsal will be held on Saturday.
  • Event execution on Sunday.
  • Follow up with participants with their actions plans after events.

Contributing to Firefox Codebase

Useful Links:

  1. Contributing to the Mozilla codebase :

    https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Introduction

  2. Simple Firefox build :

    https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Simple_Firefox_build

  3. Finding Bugs :

    http://www.joshmatthews.net/bugsahoy/?ff=1&html=1&simple=1

  4. Tracking Bugs :

    https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/

 

Steps to build Firefox on Linux:

1. One-Line Bootstrapping
You can attempt running our system bootstrapping script to install all system dependencies:
” wget https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/raw-file/default/python/mozboot/bin/bootstrap.py && python bootstrap.py ”

2. Get source code
” git clone https://git.mozilla.org/integration/gecko-dev.git ”

* You may get error saying – The program ‘hg’ is currently not installed.
Simply install hg using - sudo apt-get install mercurial

3. After successfully building Firefox, follow
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_guide/So_you_just_built_Firefox

Contribute to Firefox OS

Ways in which one can contribute to Firefox OS

1. App Dev

2. Firefox OS Localization

3. Bug Fixing

4. Firefox OS Compatibility

5. Getting involved in Firefox OS Events

6. Mozilla Location Service

Mozilla introduces ‘Content Rating’ mendatory for all apps of Firefox Marketplace

Hi App Developers,
Mozilla has recently introduced Content Ratings for all apps. You are supposed to answer few question to assign content rating to your apps. You have to assign content rating to all of your apps by April 15, 2014, otherwise your apps will be disabled. Visit https://marketplace.firefox.com/developers and give content rating to your apps.

Content rating will provide users information about ‘The recommended minimum age’, ‘Content description’ & ‘Interactive elements’. So I have taken this step as another milestone by Mozilla to keep the web open and safer.
Read more about Content Ratings at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Marketplace/Submission/Rating_Your_Content.

Below are the screen shots of my app TicTacToe (available at http://marketplace.firefox.com/app/tictactoe-1)

Message Says : This app will be disabled if no content ratings are assigned by April 15, 2014

Warning Message Said : This app will be disabled if no content ratings are assigned by April 15, 2014

Content Rating of one of my apps.

After setting up the Content Rating, here is the summary.

Mozilla Monument, a gift by Mozilla to all contributors

In the new year, Mozilla gives gift to all its contributors. Mozilla is working to construct a 14 foot (4.26 meters) structure that will sit outside of the new San Fransisco space.

At the end of last month, a blog post said that the monument is coming to San Francisco soon (https://blog.mozilla.org/community/2013/11/26/the-monument-to-mozillians-is-coming-to-san-francisco/). Now its almost ready, here are the pictures of this monument. Find out about it on Mozilla wiki at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Monument.

I am glad to share that this monument has my name also printed on it :) :)

'Ram Dayal Vaishnav' on Mozilla Monument

‘Ram Dayal Vaishnav’ on Mozilla Monument

front_bottommainfront_top left_bottom left_top  right_bottom right_top back_bottom back_top

Open Source workshop at JNV-K

Yesterday I visited my school (Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya Kuchaman City, Nagour) for Mozilla’s Open Source workshop. It was an wonderful experience to teach my younger brothers & sisters. Out of all events I conducted till now, this was most pleasant workshop :).

We all gathered in computer lab at 02:30PM and talked for some time informally about their board exam preparation. Then from 0300 to 04:30 we talked about Open Source, Mozilla, Mozilla products, contributing to Mozilla etc. Students were very excited to know about open source, because this was the first time they were exposed to such things. They came to know about many open source software. They were also given few exercises to do related to open source.

We also talked about Webmaker tools – Popcorn, Thimble & X-ray goggles. When they saw remix of a webpage with x-ray goggles, they were very surprised. They also liked Mozilla’s goodies provided to them. Thanks JNV-K for such a wonderful opportunity.

JNV-K Schoolgirl participants boyswith allAfter workshop, with computer teacher & volunteers

One Month, One Mozilla, One City & Me

One Month, One Mozilla, One City & Me

Hi everyone. I am talking about December’s Mozilla Activities in Jaipur by myself.

I was planning to come home last month, and I was thinking what will I do in this 1 month vacations? Then I though why don’t we plan few Mozilla events for Jaipur! I got in touch with Osho Parth, Dron Rathore, Raj Suthar etc. We planned couple of events to be executed in December, Link to our planning’s etherpad is https://etherpad.mozilla.org/rBOixOkE2s

Events which we planned -MozJaipur

  1. Beginners workshop at TechnoByte Computer Education.
  2. Developers workshop at Subodh College
  3. Mozilla event for School students (will be held in the last week)
  4. Community Building Meet up
  5. MCR Online Meeting  (will be held in the last week)

Here I would like to share my experience with these events.

Beginners Workshop:

First of all we had couple of online meeting with our team and decided upon events, summary can be found on etherpad. Then I had a short meeting with Dron to collect swags etc. Unfortunately he could not be with us because of his exams. And I met Osho Parth, Vikas Meghwani day before first event and planned for event.

We met up at TechnoByte Computer Education for beginners workshop. We had Mr. Prasoon Srivastava and Dhiraj Sir as volunteers. We had around 50 people as audience, and workshop was 2 hours long. Following topics were covered in the event by myself and Osho Parth-

  • What is webtechnobyte 1
  • What is Open Source
  • Mozilla, its mission, its products
  • Firefox OS, and Apps for Firefox OS
  • Small Web Development Session

Soon we will have another event at same venue, and we will have next workshop. Then we will surely have some active contributors from the event. Click here for more photos.

Subodh College Workshop:

This workshop was at Subodh College, where we had MCA and M.Sc. students waiting for us. We had around 60 students for the workshop.  We had many volunteers there too including Vikas Meghwani, Bheemraj Saini, Vikas and Yogendra. We took three sessions –

First session was taken by Osho Parth to introduce Open Source. Students were actually very keen about hacking, so he shown them many practices of few hacking tools of Kali Linux. Following that he told student lot more things about Open Source. When students saw source code of Firefox(on github) and LibreOffice (on opengrok), they became very surprised.

Next session was taken by myself on various Mozilla products including Firefox, Thunderbird, Etherpad, Webmaker tools etc. I also told them about Persona, Bugzilla etc. As planned we proceeded for ‘Hour of Code’ session, but we could not finish it successfully, because of weak internet connectivity. Then I told students about SuMo, AoA, submitting bugs etc.

Next session was on Firefox OS and FSA. First I told them more about Mozilla mission and why Mozilla started b2g? Then we told them pros of Firefox OS. Students were very happy to know how easily they can develop apps for Firefox OS. They found this session most interesting because they found Firefox OS very fascinating. Then I asked them, are you also interested in contributing to Mozilla? Of course they replies as Yes. Then I introduced them Firefox Student Ambassador Program.

Overall this was a very good experience for us. We got nice response from students also. Lots of swags were also distributed to active listeners. After the workshop, we spend around half an hour to talk to students informally. We got few students who are interested to join JOSOC (Jaipur Open Source Open Community), I am expecting few active contributors from Subodh College soon. Click here for more photos.

subodh event 1

subodh college mozilla event

subodh college mozilla event

Birth of Mozilla Community Rajasthan

Once Dron Rathore started a group chat for Community Building in Rajasthan, where I met few other contributors. Then I thought why don’t we start a new community for all Rajasthani Mozillians. I proposed MCR- Mozilla Community Rajasthan. We created the group and asked all to add other related people also. Till now we have get 17 people in MCR. We are planning to conduct few workshops in January.  Details of our members can be found here.

Restore grubloader

When can dual-boot your computer to run any of Linux and Windows OS. But sometime the booloader get disturbed and we need to restore it. In such case you can simply load Linux OS from live CD/Pendrive and use following commands. [set X & Y with appropriate value according to where you have installed linux. In my case XY were a1]

Commands –
sudo mount /dev/sdXY /mnt
sudo mount –bind /dev /mnt/dev
sudo mount –bind /proc /mnt/proc
sudo mount –bind /sys /mnt/sys
sudo chroot /mnt
grub-install /dev/sdX
grub-install –recheck /dev/sdX
update-grub

how to install firefox aurora on linux ubuntu

We can Install Firefox Aurora Browser for Linux, even with other Firefox Versions without any problem. You must be knowing that you have four different Firefox (Stable, Beta, Aurora and Nightly). This is how we do it –

1. Download Latest Firefox Aurora for Linux from http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-mozilla-aurora/ and extract the .tar.gz file to /tmp

2. Open Terminal Window, try following commands
sudo su
mkdir /opt/firefox
mv /tmp/firefox /opt/firefox/firefox-aurora
ln -s /opt/firefox/firefox-aurora/firefox /usr/local/bin/firefox-aurora

3. Now give following command anytime to start Aurora in your computer :)
firefox-aurora

Army of Awesome, Support Mozilla Firefox by helping twitter users

Mozilla provides many ways to contribute into their support team, which is called SuMo, and one of them is AoA – Army of Awesome. In Army of Awesome, contributors respond to twitter users. Whenever anyone tweet anything related to firefox, it is filtered and displayed on AoA page where contributors can reply to these tweets.

How do I start with Army of Awesome:

  • 2. You will see there “Save the world (from the comfort of your couch)”, click on the button below it saying “Get involved – Help other users”
  • 3. Now go to section “Pick a way to get involved” and click on “Army of Awesome: help users on Twitter”. Other ways to contribute to SuMo are Answer questions in the support forum, Write help articles, Translate help to your languages.
  • 4. Now you will see Army of Awesome page saying “Love Firefox and have a few moments to help? Help other Firefox users on Twitter. Good things will come to those who tweet! “
  • 5. Just log into your twitter account to reply the tweets.
  • 6. Replying is also very easy, either you can also use pre-defined replies or reply with personalized message(recommended).

If you are not a frequent twitter user, and you start it only for AoA, then twitter may suspend your account for violation of their rules. To make sure your account is not suspended, follow the tips

  • Along with replying on AoA page, open your twitter account and tweet something frequently.
  • It will be better if the tweets you are posting from twitter have variety, like personal tweets (without links or hashtags), images etc.
  • Click on @Connect, next to Home button link on top bar, which will take you to https://twitter.com/i/connect, here you will see if you have got any reply back from users whom you have replied from AoA page. If needed, reply them back for anything needed.
  • On AoA page, try to use personalized replies instead of provided replies. Provided replies contains few links, and if you will send same set of links to people then twitter will think its some spam.

To keep quality in AoA, make sure that you are not posting duplicate replies on any tweet. Keep refreshing the page (manually or by clicking on “Refresh” button near ‘Sign Out’ button on the top), if someone else has already replied, try to avoid spamming that users account.

If you have any other queries, kindly comment below. Thanks for reading the article

Restore Windows Booloader using command line at boot time

If due to any reason you lost your boot system, you can restore window’s bootloader using windows CD or bootable pendrive. You may need this to do if you had linux grub earlier which you uninstalled now, or due to damage to bootloader.

Follow these steps to restore MBR (Master Boot Loader) for Windows Bootloader

  1. First of all insert Windows CD / bootable pendrive in your computer and start it. (follow my another post if you need to know how to make your pendrive bootable manually)
  2. Now go to Command line at boot time
    • In windows 7, select ‘Repair your computer’ >’Startup Recovery Option’ > ‘Command Line’
    • In windows 8, select ‘Repair your computer’ > ‘Troubleshoot’ > ‘Advance Options’ > ‘Command Line’
  3. Now give following commands
      • bootrec /fixmbr
      • bootrec /fixboot
      • bootrec /scanos

Update firefox on Linux

Updating Firefox in Windows OS is quite easy, you can find out all ways on Mozilla Support page https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/update-firefox-latest-version

But to update Firefox on Linux environment above mentioned ways doesn’t work.

 

Update Firefox on Ubuntu OS :

Just two commands on the terminal are enough –

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install firefox

 

Update Firefox on Other OS :

All OS which supports yum need following commands –

# yum update
# yum update firefox