Bangalore/BMSCE

Welcome to BMS College of Engineering FOSS Community (BMSLUG) page! We have a Mailing list in Yahoo and a community in orkut.

We participated the Software Freedom Day 06 celebrations of Bangalore FOSS Community and hosted Debian Conclave 06.

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
2. Praveen.A
3. Aanjhan.R
4. Sujith Haridasan
5. Nithin.R
6. Akshay Narayan
7. Mallikarjun
8. Sharada
9. Nethravathi
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

Debian Conclave 06

On 29th Sunday of October.

See Debian Concalve page for more details and registration.

Software Freedom Day 06

The event was on 16th September 2006. We started at 9.30am.

Blogs

1. 16th September 2006 , Software Freedom Day @BMSCE by Netravathi B
2. Tuxmaniac @ BMS, Bangalore on SFD by Aanjhan R
3. Software Freedom Day 06 by Praveen A
4. Akshay

Sessions

• Revolution OS (video)
• Free Software Philosophy -- by Aanjhan R, Praveen A
• Discussion/FAQ on FOSS (motivation, benefits, challenges, student contributors) -- Praveen A, Aanjhan, Srikanth, Dinesh, Dilip V
• Demo of AIGLX and GNU/Linux on ipod -- Aanjhan R
• SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop/Server 10 - Rajababu Gorjala, Technology Sales Specialist - Linux Impact,Novell Inc.
• Future plans for BMS FOSS Community/Upcoming events/BoFs - Praveen A, Aanjhan, Srikanth, Dinesh, Dilip V

Co-Ordinators

1. Praveen A - pravi -dot- a -at- gmail -dot- com
2. Aanjhan R - aanjhan -at- gmail -dot- com
3. Anish Jacob - anishblogs -at- gmail -dot- com
4. Akshay Narayan - akshay-dot-jrao-at-yahoo-dot-co-dot-in
5. Sharadha M - sharadha -dot- bmsce at- gmail -dot- com
6. Netravathi B - netra -dot- b86 -at- gmail -dot- com

FOSS Day 05

On 24th September 2005 the FOSS Community Bangalore conducted a seminar on FOSS. The speakers were Dilip V, Praveen A, Thejesh GN, Pradyumna Sampath

Dilip and Praveen introduced FOSS and the advantages of FOSS. Pradyumna Sampath gave a demo of glade and gtk programming. It was followed by a talk on FOSS Tools and advantages specific to students. The event was organised in association with Protocol, Computer club of BMSCE.

Read on the blogs on the seminar

• FOSS Day at BMSCE by Praveen A
• FOSS and College Projects by Thejesh GN
• A Day with a difference by Dilip V