Hello Everyone, It's been a while since I've written to share some of what's been going on "behind the scenes" in the Etherboot Project.
In this message I would like to focus on our Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2010 participation. For those who are new to our project, we have participated in Google Summer of code every summer since 2006, so this year is our 5th consecutive participation. Over the years we have had the pleasure of mentoring many talented students, and several of them have continued to work with us, long after their formal GSoC student participation. You can read about our 2010 GSoC projects here: http://etherboot.org/wiki/soc/2010/start We also have a great group of mentors working with our students this summer and I want to heartily thank everyone who is helping with mentoring this summer! The way that GSoC works is that Google provides funding for students to work with selected FOSS organizations, which Google calls "mentoring organizations". We applied to be a mentoring organization for GSoC 2010, and we were accepted. Students then applied to work with our organization with projects that they believe they can complete during the 12 week GSoC coding time frame. We carefully evaluate those who apply, and request from Google the number of slots we would like, based on our capacity to mentor and the number of student candidates we wish to accept. This year we are fortunate to have Piotr JaroszyĆski, Guo-Fu Tseng, and Andrei Faur working with us. They are now just over 4 weeks into the 12 week GSoC coding period and are making good progress on their GSoC projects. You can follow their work on their journals, notes, and git repositories which are on the our GSoC 2010 main page referenced above. We have had code contributions already to the main gPXE branch from all of our students, and we look forward to many more commits from them. A lot of the interaction that happens between Etherboot Project developers and our GSoC students and the community in general is now happening on our IRC channels, mainly the #etherboot on irc.freenode.net. This has its good and not-so-good points, but overall it has proven to be quite useful. Debugging interactively in real time has proven very popular, and people seem to enjoy conversing about network booting and figuring out how to use gPXE to boot their particular configuration of hardware and software. A lot of what was previously done on lists like gpxe@etherboot.org is now done on IRC. I do encourage people on IRC to post to our mailing lists, since a lot of people are not regular IRC users, and even if they are, they might be AFK (away from keyboard) when something of interest comes through. So that's what's going on with GSoC. We're having a nice time as mentors, and we look forward to more great GSoC coding and community building. / Marty / _______________________________________________ gPXE mailing list gPXE@etherboot.org http://etherboot.org/mailman/listinfo/gpxe