About Me

Hello, I am Kaustav Das Modak, from Kolkata, India. I am a student of Dept of Philosophy, Jadavpur University and a budding web developer of our own young web development group named TwiCore.

Me and Ubuntu

My first experience of GNU/Linux was with Mandriva Spring 2007. I have been using Ubuntu since late 2007 starting with Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon. In the beginning, I was a general user of Ubuntu. At that time, I mainly used it as a dual boot with Windows XP. It took me a year to get adjusted to Ubuntu so that I could leave Windows for good with Ubuntu 8.10. Since then, there has been no looking back.

At present, VirtualBox OSE serves as the only source for proprietary operating systems on my computer. Apart from Ubuntu, other Linux distributions that I use on VirtualBox OSE are Ubuntu Server, Fedora and Mandriva.

Contributions

Owing to my college and work schedule, I have not been able to contribute much to the community. In the short time I have spent using Ubuntu, my contributions include the following:

• I started helping with Ubuntu Bengali translations since Ubuntu 9.10. I am a member of Ubuntu Bengali Translators team.

  • Among the projects I have helped in translating are: Ubuntu packages, Miro, PyChess, Shutter, Exaile, GMail Notifier.

  • You can view my translation activities on my Launchpad translations page.

• I have contributed to some bug comments.

• I have built packages in my Launchpad PPA ppa:kaustav-dasmodak/kido for Ubuntu Lucid, Maverick, Natty and Oneiric.

  • Packages include: font-manager and scim-avro.
  • All the packages are compiled from their respective sources.

Future Plans

• I plan to continue advocating Ubuntu and showing others how they can benefit from using Ubuntu and free and open-source software. I also plan to get involved in Ubuntu development after finishing my college years, particularly in developing tools related to web development.
• I also plan to contribute more to Bengali translations.
• I want to get involved with Ubuntu packaging. Particularly, I want to create and maintain packages that have not yet been introduced in the Ubuntu world. Some of my packaging ideas are:
  • Create a package for Drupal which can be installed by servers or anyone running Apache. Also build updated versions of Drush to include with the package.

Contact

• Email: kaustav.dasmodak@yahoo.co.in / kaustav.dasmodak@twicore.com

• Blog: http://kaustavdm.blogspot.com

• Web: TwiCore

• IM
  • Gtalk: kido.foreva
  • Yahoo: kido_foreva / kaustav.dasmodak

  • Jabber: kaustav@jabber.org