Bangalore/BMSCE/Basic Installation Workshop

A Report Of the BASIC INSTALLATION SESSION - 24/03/2007

Date:24/03/2007 Venue:I.S.E Lab, BMSCE

The event started as scheduled at 2 P.M on 24th March. Around 50 students mainly from 2nd and 3rd year Computer Science and Information Science and a couple of 1st year students from Mechanical Engineering had assembled for the session. It was a pretty good number and was beyond our expectations. Then we had a brief discussion of the philosophy of free software. People asked very good questions which were mainly answered by Praveen, Aanjhan and Sujith and even, we the members of BMSLUG answered few questions. The following topics were discussed briefly:

Differences between Free Software and Open Source Software. Why should we use, support and promote free Software? Why Free Software is important for the Free Software Community? Why Free Software is necessary for a Professional? Why is it important for End-Users? Free Software does not mean Free of Cost but it means Freedom. The four levels of Freedom(Summary of GNU's General Public License). Why proprietary Softwares are dangerous not only in the public software domain but also in Custom Software Industry(In the sense, what happens if the company which developed a software for us closes or what if they start asking huge amount of money for further development)? Why there are so many GNU/Linux Distributions?

All the questions were answered and we felt that the students who had come were satisfied and convinced.

Later we started with the installation session. We had planned to install Ubuntu Dapper Drake and Debian Etch mainly. We divided the entire crowd into several groups and each group was handled by one of the members of BMSLUG and also Praveen, Aanjhan and Sujith. All the points that should be noted during installation like creating partitions and selecting them, uses of creating swap partitions were clearly explained. After the installation procedure was complete we configured AIGLX-Beryl on few systems. Aanjhan and Praveen demonstrated few of the 100s of features of Beryl. Aanjhan demonstrated many of the themes and plugins which he had installed on his laptop. Few of them were surprised but most of them were really shocked to see those features, that too working smoothly on pretty old systems with 256MB RAM. Most of them told us that they were only partially convinced to use GNU/Linux till then and after seeing Beryl they were totally convinced and they wanted to use GNU/Linux on that day itself.

Akshay spoke about why it is important to work on projects rather than being text book oriented. He also told us that doing things practically will definitely help us during placements. He also spoke about Google Summer of Code 2007, and he along with Aanjhan and Praveen convinced us to participate in Summer of Code.

Finally Aanjhan spoke about Ubuntu-India and he also proposed to have an Ubuntu-Conference in B.M.S.C.E to which most of us agreed. Later Praveen spoke about Debian-India and the session concluded at about 5 P.M

Thanks to following people for making this event a huge success:

1. Entire Information Science and Engineering Laboratory Staff and Shri Guruprasad, H.O.D Information Science and Engineering for provinding the necessary support for organizing this event and for providing the I.S.E Lab and

1. Praveen A
2. Aanjhan.R
3. Sujith Haridasan
4. Nithin.R
5. Akshay Narayan
6. Madhusudan C S
7. Mallikarjun
8. Sharada
9. Netravathi B
10. Nishanth.M.S
11. Prashant
12. Harsha
13. Puneeth Bhat
14. Pulkith Bhuwalka
15. Naveen Kumar.B
16. Krishna Bharadhwaj
17. Ishesh Murarka
18. Santosh G Vattam
19. Subramaniam.S