[gPXE] GSoC 2010 update

[Marty Connor]

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 Jaroszyński, 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 at 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 /