Romanian Open Source Education

Overview Booklet
 1 ROSEdu is a community that brings together
people with passion for programming, open-
source software and IT.
About ROSEdu At this point most ROSEdu members are
students at the Automatic Control and
Computers Faculty, University “POLITEHNICA”
of Bucharest. New members are welcome
regardless of their background.

Our belief is that everyone should benefit

from our projects and activities. This is why
everything we create uses an FOSS (Free and
Open Source Software) licensing system. The
copyright nevertheless belongs to the people
taking part at various ROSEdu projects.

Although many of our projects are related to

the university educational environment, other
kinds of projects may be created depending on
the preferences and needs of ROSEdu
members.

For any information regarding ROSEdu please

use the Contact information at the end of this
booklet.

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Overview Booklet – May 2009
 2 ROSEdu consists of volunteers and enthusiasts
passionate about free/open-source software,
open technologies and communities.
Team Started as a community project in the spring
of 2007, ROSEdu is currently working on
becoming a fully-fledged non-profit
organization.

Most ROSEdu members are students at the

Automatic Control and Computers Faculty. At
this point there is no formal status defined,
such that a ROSEdu member is a person with
constant involvement in community activities.

Members of ROSEdu include (but are not

limited to): Alex Eftimie, Andrei Buhaiu, Vlad
Dogaru, Sergiu Iordache, Mihai Maruseac,
Andrei Soare, Lucian Grijincu, Daniel Rosner,
Mihai Dumitrache, Razvan Deaconescu, Lucian
Cojocar, Andrada Georgescu, Alex Juncu, Vali
Priescu.

ROSEdu members value passion about

technology and communities, diversity,
knowledge sharing, on-topic and off-topic
discussions. We enjoy being part of activities
that are both fun and useful.

ROSEdu 4
Overview Booklet – May 2009
 3 ROSEdu coordinates two types of activies:
• open-source development projects

Projects • community development

Most of the projects are focused on easing the

transition to an open-source development
environment (operating system, basic
applications, GUI, development tools).

We are trying to blend as much as possible the

fun/passion/enthusiasm factor with the
usefulness of a project. The development
projects are aimed at solving a particular
problem or optimizing certain aspects of day
to day activities.

Most of our activities take part under the

umbrella of the CS Department. Some projects
(WoUSO, Cspay, vmchecker) have been
integrated in educational or administration
activities of the department.

We are always open to new ideas and value

initiative and involvement. A new interesting
project or activity is welcome as a ROSEdu
project even if it's not coming from a
community member.

ROSEdu 5
Overview Booklet – May 2009
 World of USO
WoUSO (World of USO) is an educational
game targeting students of the Operating
System Usage (OSU) course of the Automatic
Control and Computers faculty. It is meant to
encourage acquiring knowledge in an
educational and competitive mode.
The game, backed-up by an interesting and
captivating context story, is in its second year,
attracting over 100 students in the 2008-2009
academic year. The best students were given
special awards at the end of the competition.
WoUSO is being actively developed and will
continue into the 3rd version. The
technologies used are web specific: PHP,
MySQL, Smarty and XML.
WoUSO is a free open source software and is
distributed under an open source license. It
was awarded the first prize during the
Scientific Student Presentations of 2008.
ROSEdu
Overview Booklet – May 2009
ROSEdu summer of code
ROSEdu Summer of Code is a frame project
whose aim is to give students an alternative
summer internship program. Students and
enthusiasts can be a part of existing or new
ROSEdu projects.
We aim to help the participants become better
programmers and familiarize themselves with
the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software)
development environment and working in a
community.
As it name shows, the development
environment took its inspiration from Google
Summer of Code. Students may apply to one
of the projects presented on the dedicated
site. Development occurs during the summer
holiday but further collaboration is welcome.
This summer (2009) we will continue the
tradition and host RSoCv2. Many of RSoCv1’s
projects year will be included and continued.
Hosted at RSoCv1 (2008 summer):
• Hammerfall – general purpose graphics
engine written in Python
• VMChecker – automated tool for
homework evaluation
• WoUSO – educational game for 1st year
students
• CSpay – administration tool for automating
the creation of salary documents
• Tigus – bar code test generator
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 Hammerfal Graphics Engine CSPay
The Hammerfall project aims at creating a CSPay, one of the first projects developed at
graphics engine using portable and open ROSEdu, is an administration tool used for
source tools. Development and automating the creation of salary documents
implementation technologies include: in University “POLITEHNICA” of Bucharest.
OpenGL, Python, SVN and Trac.
Its main software components were two
The project was launched over an year ago underlying libraries and a set of user interfaces
and was part of the first edition of ROSEdu (CLI and WebUI).
Summer Of Code. This period was used for
CSPay was developed using C, PHP, Python,
establishing the project’s baselines and
and shell scripts. This was our first occasion to
purpose. Development has continued to this
learn how to use revision control systems and
day and Hammerfall will be included in
mailing lists and how to work as a community.
ROSEdu Summer Of Code v2.
The project was part of ROSEdu Summer of
Our team consists of 1st, 2nd and 3rd year
Code during which it was restructured and
students from the Automatic Control and
improved. CSPay is used by university staff at
Computers Faculty, UPB.
the Automatic Control and Computers Faculty.
The current goal is creating a generic graphics
engine that can be used in as many
applications as possible ranging from
simulators to computer games.

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Overview Booklet – May 2009
 Robocheck
Robocheck is a software application designed
to verify the common problems found in
software written by young students.
Its mainly indented as an automated
homework tester for student-developed
software applications. It’s target is
represented by teaching assistants that are
responsible for the verification and evaluation
of student homework, and by students who
want to evaluate and improve their coding
style.
The common software issues that the program
checks for include:
 memory allocation problems
 security vulnerabilities
 static code analysis
 synchronization problems
 bad coding style and commenting
It is based on various Linux utilities designed
to verify different coding problems, and the
final result can be seen as a tool for
performing multiple test suites. The test suites
use tools like valgrind, splint, electric fence or
mcheck.
vmchecker
Automated homework evaluation increases
the assignment quality and educational
experience of the students. This also
encourages students to create better
homework.
vmchecker is a scalable homework evaluating
framework that can be used for a wide range
of courses, enabling the evaluation of
homework that need complete administrative
rights on a system.
vmchecker is used to test homework for
several courses at the Computer Science
department in Politehnica University of
Bucharest: Compiler Course (java homework
for source code translation), Operating
Systems (C/C++ homework using
Linux/Windows syscalls), Operating System
Design (kernel drivers and modules needing
complete access on the system).
vmchecker was awarded the first prize during
the Scientific Student Presentations of 2009.

For the time being, the program only checks C

based homework, but it will be expanded in
the future to support other programming
languages.

The user interface is a command-line

interface, designed to be integrated with other
shell based homework evaluation software.

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Overview Booklet – May 2009
 EDSS
Drawing neat and clean electrical circuits for
educational proposes has always bean a
challenge, as most commercial solutions are
designed for corporate usage.
We decided to build our own Electrical Design
and Simulation Software, custom developed to
meet our demands.
The application is developed in Java, so as to
be as mobile as possible, and was used SVG to
have scalable and flexible drawings.
The first stage of implementation was
included in RSoC 2009. In this first stage, we
built the drawing and model components.
Presently, the application allows the user to
draw basic electric diagrams, save them in SVG
and PDF format, and modify them. The user
has at his disposal an initial library with about
100 basic electrical components.
Currently, we are working on the last details in
the drawing module, and will soon start work
on the simulation modules.
ROSEdu
Overview Booklet – May 2009
Xpresso
Xpresso is a project with the primary goal of
offering an automated tool for drawing logical
circuits starting from a natural or Verliog
description.
The program is intended to design the circuits
while taking into account numerous design
restrictions: types of gates, number of gates,
surface area covered, total cost of physical
implementation, and others.
Xpresso receives on input a description that is
either Verliog based, or algebra formulas
based, and returns an SVG based image of the
actual circuit (with conventional drawn logical
gates).
Within RSoC 2008, Xpresso was developed as
a first version prototype. During RSoC 2009,
based on the previous implementation
experience, the code was mostly rewritten in a
much more scalable and robust version. The
software is developed in Haskell, and uses GTK
for the graphical interface.
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 4 ROSEdu is built around the idea of an active
community assembled from enthusiastic
people, and it is constantly growing and
Events adapting to the reality of the global open
source community.

As one of our primary goals is to promote

open source code and to bring to this
community new people interested in using
and developing open source projects.

One way of achieving this goal is by organizing

various events, either social based, either
centered on promoting open source software
as well as offering hands on support for
installing and initial configuration of operating
systems, developing tools, and other general
use open source projects.

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Overview Booklet – May 2009
 Ubuntu Install Fest
One of the first community events that
ROSEdu organized was Ubuntu Install Fest. We
have coordinated two Ubuntu Install Fests
following the same recipe used by other
Ubuntu Communities.
The main target group were freshmen and
people new to Ubuntu and open-source
technologies, but the initiative was open to
everyone.
Although Ubuntu was the primary distribution
used for installation and configuration, we
provided support for other distributions as
well.
ROSEdu
Overview Booklet – May 2009
Social Thingie
We all need a little R&R every now and then.
ROSEdu Social Thingie is focused on the more
social part of a community.
All work and no play makes John a robotic
programmer, and we don’t want that at
ROSEdu. We want to include as much fun and
passion both in our projects and also other
activities. A little bit of fun is particularly
useful for team building and community
binding.
After two successful editions we decided to
organize Social Thingie events on a regular
basis. So far social activities included bowling,
air hockey and other games we consider fun.
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 CDL
The Open Source Development Course is an 8
week event consisting of various activities
(courses, hackathons, application based
workshops) for students at the University
“Politehnica” of Bucharest. It focuses on useful
open source development tools and working
in an open source community.
At its first year, the course was attended by 16
students (around 80 students applied). It was
divided in two components:
• a course during which theoretical
knowledge about working on a project is
presented
• a workshop where students learn practical
skills of using open-source tools
The course aims at preparing students for their
first experience with free/open-source
applications and communities.
ROSEdu
Overview Booklet – May 2009
Tech talks
ROSEdu Tech Talks sunt o serie de prezentări
despre tehnologii, software și standarde
deschise. La fiecare 10 zile se discută despre
un nou subiect într-o prezentare de
aproximativ 45 minute, urmată de
întrebări despre subiectul respectiv. Toate
prezentările au un caracter practic, fiind
însoțite, unde este posibil, de demonstrații
ale tehnologiei respective. Subiectele sunt
diversificate și include domenii ca
programarea (ex. Preprocesorul C, Biblioteci,
Profiling), controlul versiunii (ex. Git, SVN),
securitate (ex. iptables, OpenSSL), rețelistică
(ex. OpenVPN, SIP, SSH) și virtualizare (ex.
OpenVZ).
Evenimentul este deschis oricui, fară a
necesita o înscriere în prealabil. Fiecare
sesiune este independentă față de celelalte,
astfel încât fiecare participant să participe la
prezentăntările de care este interesat.
Toate prezentările sunt înregistrare spre a fi
distribuite liber pe Internet pentru cei ce nu au
putut fi prezenți fizic la prezentare.
Site-ul evenimentului: http://talks.rosedu.org
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 Eliberatica
ROSEdu a participat în mai 2009 la conferința
legată de tehnologii și comunități Open
Source, cea mai mare de acest gen din estul
Europei, eLiberatica.

Un număr semnificativ de membri ai asociației

au fost prezenți la conferință, cât și la booth-ul
dedicat comunităților legate de Free
Software din România. Acest stand a fost
coordonat de ROSEdu și a găzduit, alături de
noi, Echipa Ubuntu România și Grupul pentru
Software Liber, ambele din Cluj, cât și echipa
Firebird România din Târgul Mureș.

Ecourile comunității nu s-au lăsat așteptate,

ROSEdu fiind considerată atunci una dintre
cele mai active comunități Open Source din
România.

http://www.eliberatica.ro/2009/events/roman
ian-free-software-teams

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Overview Booklet – May 2009
 5 Site
www.rosedu.org
Contact
Mailing list
http://lists.rosedu.org/listinfo/rosedu-general

IRC channel
#rosedu@irc.freenode.net

Trac
http://dev.rosedu.org

Live Contact
"Politehnica" University of Bucharest, EG106c
(IXIA Lab).

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Overview Booklet – May 2009