Pardus' Google Summer of Code Experience
Thursday, October 30, 2008
For Pardus' first year in Google Summer of Code™, it was not a surprise for us that most of our applications were from Turkey, since Pardus is the most well known Linux distribution in our country. But as nearly every review about the project mentions, we are working on our global awareness, and we hope to get more international applications in the coming years.
This year we had 17 student applications and 5 students were accepted to the program; four of them completed their projects successfully.
Cihangir Besiktas, worked on adding Internet sharing capability to Pardus' network manager application. The project's aim was to make an Internet connected box to act as a gateway to its internal network so that other boxes in the network can connect to Internet. By only selecting the interface that is connected to Internet and the interface that Internet is going to be shared to, everything can be done automatically by the network manager. All the work done by Cihangir has been integrated into the network manager and is now part of the latest release of Pardus. Cihangir kept a blog about his project and documented his work.
Isbaran Akcayir, worked on adding 802.1x support to Pardus' network manager application. 802.1x provides authentication to devices attached to a LAN port and it is based on Extensible Authentication Protocol. Although it is possible to connect to the network with wpa_supplicant package from the console, Isbaran added a frontend into Pardus' network manager for easy configuration and connection to 802.1x networks. The work done by Isbaran is integrated into network manager and now is part of the latest release of Pardus.
Mehmet Ozan Kabak, worked on a common notification manager to be used by Pardus' manager applications. This project was inspired by the Growl application for Mac. Mehmet successfully completed his project which has become a qt4 based, skinnable notification management system working on dbus. He kept a blog while developing and documented his project. The latest release of Pardus is KDE3 based, so it is not possible right now to integrate Mehmet's work. But with the next release of Pardus, hopefully it will.
Türker Sezer, worked on an easy to use wizard base Pardus CD/DVD/USB distribution media creator GUI application. Pardus does not provide a package selection screen in its installation program YALI. So his project would allow anyone to create a customized Pardus distribution. He completed his project successfully Also while developing his own project, he helped us to fix our live CD creation problems in our own application. He is going to be working on his project. After fixing some layout and usability problems, he is going to package his application and it will become installable from Pardus repositories.
Our first year was beneficial for us and we hope also for our students. Congratulations to all of them and their mentors!
