Google Summer of Code as a student

[Joseph Adams]

Hello, I'm Joey Adams, and I'm interested in participating as a
student in Google Summer of Code with X.Org.  I hope to learn how to
develop for and contribute to Xorg, and GSoC is just the thing to get
me started.

I'm particularly interested in working in the area of drivers, though
working anywhere on Xorg will be just as rad.  I envision buying a new
computer with a video card that needs attention, then spending my
summer unlocking its (and my) potential.

I'd like to discuss what would be a good project.  I'm leaning toward
picking up a recent nvidia card and doing one of the items mentioned
at http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/ToDo .


Primary reasons I'm interested in Google Summer of Code with X.Org
(not necessarily in order):

Power
Money
C
Community

Power- Coming through Google Summer of Code successfully should give
me a much more intimate understanding of the X.Org internals.  Having
this will enable me to improve the drivers I want to use, which will
help out others as well.

Money- Who doesn't want $4,500? :)  Money will be a major motivation
for me, as it will help me get a car and a faster computer, both of
which I sorely need :)

C- Ever since I learned C, I have not been very inclined to learn
scripting languages like Python, Perl, PHP, etc.  They're not fast.  C
is fast :)  Unfortunately for me, a lot of major upstream projects are
using the three Ps.  I should probably learn them, but I suppose the
C-less years of my youth (Hypertalk, Visual Basic 5, TI-BASIC) were
too much for me :)  The fact that Xorg is in C increments my desire to
work with it.

Community- I'm not very active as a contributor in any specific
programming community.  Learning X and becoming a regular contributor
would be really neat.


My X background:

No real programming successes, yet.  I have had multiple forays into
the code, but nothing major has come of it.  I tried to get the Cirrus
7543 chipset on my really old Pentium 1 laptop to work on a recent
Xorg (support for it was dropped in XFree86 4 after stuff got
reorganized) by looking at the XFree86 3 driver and shotgun-changing a
more current version.  I succeeded in getting the gray background and
cursor, but it freezes after that.  I really didn't know what I was
doing.  I also looked into speeding up a Radeon 9250 card on my PC,
but I was clueless.

I bought an eMac G4 late last year to test PowerPC stuff, and X didn't
work.  I shot an e-mail to this list, and Alex Deucher came to the
rescue (see http://www.mail-archive.com/xorg@lists.freedesktop.org/msg02854.html
to read the unabridged epic).  He asked me to do tests with the
connector table.  In the end, it worked fantastically.  Plus, I
learned I could set my eMac's monitor to arbitrary resolutions (e.g.
1920x1200, well beyond the advertised 1280x960) using custom modelines
generated with gtf.


Thanks for reading my rambling :)  Hopefully it gives any potential
mentors a better idea of what I know.