Hello, everyone!

I am Shalom from Hyderabad, India; although I keep telling people that I’m from the internet. I am currently enrolled at the University of Edinburgh for Master of Science (Computer Science) course starting this September. I intend to move to Edinburgh in the month of August, 2016.

My project proposal – Improve One Click Installer – for Google Summer of Code, 2016 has been accepted. Sincere thanks to everyone at openSUSE for giving me the opportunity to work on it. I would like to acknowledge and extend my heartfelt gratitude to my mentors – Antonio Larrosa, and Cornelius Schumacher for their constant support and advice.

The aim of my project is to enhance the current version of one-click installer by adding new and improved features so that the resulting version has a much improved user interface, giving more relevant information, and is easier to use. Proposed changes include-

Porting the application to use Qt5 instead of Qt4

Improving localization

Replacing direct zypper executions with library calls

Handling conflicts and dependencies in the back-end

Better progress interface

Display which repository each package is coming from

I have come across many programmers, but none like my mentors. To be frank, during the course of our conversation we have had, they became my programming heroes along with Dennis Ritchie, Linus Torvalds, and Bill Gates.

One of my mentors, Antonio Larrosa started contributing to the opensource community when he created kmid, a midi/karaoke player for KDE in 1997. My other mentor, Cornelius Schumacher started contributing to free software in 1999. He started contributing to KOrganizer, and eventually took over the maintainership. He is the man behind the Inqlude project.

OpenSUSE has been my primary operating system for the past one year. I love it for a number of reasons. openSUSE makes it easy to choose among different desktop environments: you can choose whichever DE you want from the login screen. It is extremely easy to install third party apps, and not to mention YaST – it is called the best tool any OS ever had. I love openSUSE also because they are among the leading contributors to Linux Kernel. Their Open Build Service (OBS) is not only used for openSUSE but also for Fedora and Ubuntu. This shows how committed they are to the opensource community and hence, my reason to choose openSUSE in Google Summer of Code program.

A little about myself: I am a simple and easy going person but at the same time very focused and enthusiastic about living my passion. I consider myself diverse and interesting. I believe in opensource software movement. Apart from academics, I play Guitar, the Keys, and I occasionally sing. My notable skills are programming, music, ethical hacking (I use this skill to write secure code not for any exploits), and organizing events. Please find the appropriate link below should anyone choose to view my code/progress or have a social conversation.

GitHub – https://github.com/shalomRachapudi

Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/shalom.ray7

Email – shalomray7@gmail.com

I am really very excited about my project and I am sure it will be a rewarding experience as well as a benefit to the community. I am looking forward to seeing great things I will accomplish this summer, and thereafter with openSUSE.