The meeting for the month of January 2009 conducted successfully.
There were 17 people who attended the meeting.
The meeting started at 2.30 pm with the self introduction of the attendees.
The meeting focused mainly on teachers. But there were only two teachers present.
As usual there was a discussion about Free Software Movement, GNU Movement and Open source for those who are new to free software community. This helped the audience clearly understand the difference between Free Software and Open Source Software. There was a discussion on the history of Free Software movement.
Next we discussed about the various Free Software License – GPL, LGPL etc. There was a question from one of the audience about the necessity of licensing a software. One of the volunteer presented there gave him a clear idea about software license.
The proposed agenda was “The power of command line”. Most teachers are familiar with GUI tools. So the session aimed at giving an introduction to command line interface.
Agenda: The power of command line
An introduction to shell was given. The significance of shell was discussed. A good knowledge in command line interface can help the user to automate his work and thus he can efficiently use his pc. The audience were curious to know how a shell works. How it execute commands given by the user. The speaker explained with examples how a shell works.
The shell explained was BASH, Bourne Again SHell. In this session the speaker explained the virtual terminals available in GNU/Linux and how it can be accessed.
The first command discussed was “cd”. The speaker explained the how to use this command in different ways with enough examples. Here are some of them.
cd – change directory
cd – running this command without specifying any parameter will change the present working directory to the user’s home directory. ie if the current user is now at the location /mnt/drive_1 and his username is student, using this command the user can reach /home/student.
All command receives path information in two ways. One is absolute path and the other is relative path. In absolute path method the complete path information is given as the parameter of the command.
Eg: cd /home/student/directory_1
In relative path method the path information is given with relative to the present working directory.
Eg: if the user is at /media he can change the present working to a directory “test” inside /media as follows.
cd test
The next command discussed was ls. This command is used to display the contents of a directory.
eg: ls /mnt/drive_2
ls my_dir
The following commands were also discussed with sufficient examples.
pwd:
To display the present working directory.
mkdir:
To create a directory.
Eg: mkdir /home/user/test
mkdir sample
File handling commands:
touch:
To create a file.
Eg:
touch testfile
cat:
To display the contents of a file.
eg: cat /etc/fstab
rm:
To remove a file or a directory
To remove a file “rm filename”
Eg: rm testfile
To remove a directory “rm -r directory_name”
Eg: rm -vR sample
cp:
To copy files or directories
Eg:
cp testfile /mnt/my_dir
This will copy the file testfile to /mnt/my_dir
cp -r directory /mnt/my_dir
Copy the files and directories inside “directory” to /mnt/my_dir
less:
To display the contents of a file or the result of a command in pagewise.
Eg: less testfile
grep:
To print lines matching a pattern
Eg: cat /etc/fstab | grep “hda9″ (case sensitive)
cat /etc/fstab | grep -i “hda9″ (case insensitive)
Finally the speaker explained how to use man and info for getting
help on commands.
There was a small tea break. Attendees used this time to interact each other.
After the break there was a small session on basic funtionality of GUI wrapper program. In this session the speaker explained how to burn cds from command line. The tool used was cdrecord. He explained how to use it and the parameters the user can pass to it for burning cds at various speeds.
Shell scripting:
The last session was an introduction to shell scripting. The session covered on how to write script for doing jobs in command line easier. The speaker explained the scripting with an example. Although it was a bit difficult to understand by beginners it encouraged some people to ask doubts regarding difference between scripting and programming.
Conclusion:
The meeting ended with the following conclusions. It is very important to form small groups in schools with teachers and students for learning more about Free Software. Most of the problems faced by teachers can be solved within this group. There was a request from teachers to conduct classes in schools and also asked for including session for teachers in the next meeting. They also requested to conduct vacation class for students.
The meeting wound up at 6.15 pm.
Thanks to Sameer, Binny, Shibin and Kurian for their presentation.
We thank all the attendees for making this meeting a successfull event.
And hope the next meeting is bigger and better.
Attendees:
Sunil Kumar A U
Sanal Kumar
Arun Aravind
Rahul R Kumar
Rahul P
Navneet Sagar
Muhamed Sabir
Azad N
Binny V A
Sreenadh
Shibin K Reeny
Varun Das P M
Jay Jacob
Cilda Lawrence
K C Sanjai
Aith C
Kevin Sha
Sreenadh Meetings free software, gnu/linux, ilug, January 2009, teachers