ILUG-Cochin

Indeed it was encouraging to see almost 20- 25 people coming for the
first IRC meeting. As there was no agenda as such, what was experienced
was total chaos, discussions on various topics and various aspects,
Although many where unhappy at the lack of a definitive agenda, indeed
it was a chance for many to try out IRC for the first time and to discuss
things online. We hope that the coming meetings ( 3rd sunday of every month)
will see better participation and collaboration with a fixed agenda and objective.

Date : 21.06.2009
Time : 4.15pm – 6pm
Attendance : 20-25

The attendees were from various fields including professionals, freelancers,
the media, etc..

The meeting concluded on ILUG Cochin starting a campaign, more discussions on this
would happen at the official meeting on 28/06/2009 and the next IRC meeting.

The next IRC meeting agenda would be “Campaign to promote Free Software in Kerala”.
( as voted by majority).

Indeed for people who were eager but unable to attend the official meetings at broadway,
the IRC meeting was indeed a very good experience ( from the feedback ).

Hope the next meeting is more exciting.

Transcript of June 2009 Meeting

Sameer Meetings free software, irc, june, meeting, online

All India Radio interviewed Jay Jacob of ILUG Cochin in a one hour programme involving other ILUG Cochin Members as well. Here are the details.

Organized by All India Radio
Programme : Surabhi,
Subject : Swathanthra Software: Digital logathe Jandhipathya Prakhyapanam
Date : 10/06/2009
Time : 3pm – 4pm.
Files: Low Quality Ogg Audio( 5.3 MB]

Pour in your comments on the programme.

Sameer Activities air, audio, event, ilug, interview, ogg

Warm Greetings To The FOSS Community,

The Meeting for the month of February 2009 was conducted successfully.

Report in “The Hindu”

The turnout at the meeting was pretty impressive compared to the last few months. The interesting thing was that, the people who came were from varied fields:

- Teachers
- Journalists
- Students
- Hardware Vendors and Service Providers
- Neurosurgeon, Psychiatrist
- System Administrators
- Accountant
- Programmers
- Vigilance
- Business Manger

The Meeting agenda was planned in accordance with the ongoing initiative to bring the teachers closer to the Free Software Community.

This time we had a better turnout with 4 teachers attending the meeting. Two of them were master trainers in the district. There were also two other people related to educational sector, one providing support to the teachers and the other a computer lab in charge.

Following is a brief snapshot of the meeting.

Date : 22-02-2009
Time : 2:15pm – 6.00pm
Venue : Internet Club, II^nd Floor, AMI Trust Building
Broadway Enclave, Broadway, Ernakulam
Attendance : 30

- The first session as usual was an Introduction to Free Software, GNU Movement, Open Source Software, Licenses and GNU/Linux Distributions.

- There were lot of questions from among the audience, especially on the License.

“Debian GNU/Linux v5.0 Lenny”

- The release of Lenny has been one of the most anticipated events in the Free Software World, and we started our meeting with a brief discussion about the Debian Project, its goals and how it was a true community project. The discussion was interesting because it was centered around GNU/Linux Distributions.

- The presentation used was the one from Jaldhar H Vyas, an Official Debian developer.

http://people.debian.org/~jaldhar/talks/

- After the presentation many among the audience were eager to install Debian Lenny on their personal machines, for which we had a couple of DVD Sets available.

- Since many people were new to GNU/Linux, we decided to do a parallel session on Debian Installation.

Agenda: How the community can come closer to Teachers and students?

- The discussion moved into top gear with teachers, students, hardware vendors and managers come together to discuss, how the Free Software community can embrace the Teachers and students.

- Many people proposed solutions, but the implementation was difficult, due to the politics involved in the educational sector and the lack of vision among the teachers.

- The teachers explained that the basic technical issues faced in schools, were the major hurdle that was preventing the teachers from gaining confidence to use Free Software.

- The teachers also emphasized the lack of proper knowledge among the top level trainers. The direct impact was that the knowledge was almost nil when it finally reached the students.

- This was a major hurdle for students to think out of the box with Free Software and teachers to properly guide them.

- Many also criticized the syllabus which was just another conventional model one.

One person commented that if the school IT syllabus could be formulated through collaboration over the Internet with people from the Free Software Community and Teaching community. The same was suggested for Textbook content

Problems faced by teachers :

- Lack of core knowledge, apart from basic operating knowledge.

- Lack of support for common hardware problems.

- Lack of interaction with community.

- Lack of time for teaching IT and Free Software Subjects.

- Lack of knowledge on the possibilities of Free Software.

- How to effectively teach Free Software ( not just as an alternative).

How the community can help

- Conduct training sessions

- Brainstorming with people from community and teachers.

- Build community based support centres.

- Involve teachers and students in all Free Software community activities.

- Build up a suitable syllabus for the curriculum.

- Create suitable content for textbooks.

- Initiate formation of high school groups.

- Try to improvise the teaching methods used for IT.

Some immediate action items were listed as follows

ACTION ITEMS:

- Involve more teachers interested in collaborating with the Free Software Community.

- Vacation classes for students and teachers, in the model of “Swathanthra Software Sangamam”

- More interaction of teachers with ILUG Cochin and thereby finding solutions for their own problems.

Everyone moved on to have Tea and snacks.

After the tea break, it was time for the technical presentation

- Teachers are not introduced to Command Line tools.

This makes it very difficult for them to understand the core working and also makes them crippled to handle situations where the problem requires more than a “few clicks”.

Technical Presentation: Command Line Utilities by Sameer

The session started of with discussing about the basic GNU/Linux Filesystem.

- Different directories were explained

- The significance of the contents of the directories and their relevance for users were explained.

- Device Files and Names of common devices were explained.

- FHS was mentioned.

Next the session moved onto command line Utilities

- fdisk

- mkfs.ext3

- tar

- gzip.gunzip

- bzip2.bunzip2

- mount,umount

- Questions like formatting USB Disks to using the apt-get tool in Debian were raised.

Conclusion

-The meeting concluded with the teachers expressing their support to realize the action items mentioned above.

The plans to change the name of the group was also mentioned.

The meeting concluded at 6.00pm.

- As usual, there were tons of questions being fired from different locations as soon as the meeting got over. Many of them were answered personally for the person in question. Although not everyone got his answer, they returned with the hope of finding it through the Mailing List.

We thank the following teachers who spend their valuable time for our initiative.

- V.K.Nizar

- Sanal Kumar

- Jayadevan

- Antony

We thank all the attendees for coming and urge them to put their feedback on the mailing list so we can improve future meetings.

And hope the next meeting is bigger and better.

Attendees

Roshin Roy

Sunil Kumar A U

Siby P Varkey

R Satheesh

Dr. Tharun Krishna

A X Antony

Arun Aravind

Rahul R Kumar

Shaun Thomas

Jennings Joseph

Johny Thomas

Sanal Kumar

Rajesh V

Azad N

Dileep A Z

Kevin Sha

G Venkata Subrahmanian

S Anandan

Akbar Ali

V K Nizar

C S Jayadevan

Binny V A

Shibin K Reeny

Kurian Mathew Thayyil

Ajith C

Sujiv

Sreenadh

Sameer

Jay Jacob

Sanjai

Sameer Meetings

The ILUG Stall at the National Conference was a grand success,
simply because we were the only stall with the theme “Freedom”
emphasizing the core values of Free Software unlike most of the other
stalls at the exhibition.

Of Course it is debatable question as to the presence of stalls
from fertilizers to fisheries at the exhibition, but of
course it was a very great opportunity to explain to them the
core values of this social movement.

Also considering the fact that there were lot of proprietary software
being exhibited in several stalls. We raised our voice against these
stalls, providing our help to replace it with Free Software. Some agreed
while others were reluctant.

The stall was put up from 13th after bringing in the machines the
previous day night. But it wasnt until 14th afternoon that the
stall reached full fledged functioning. Although we had been
given a small space at the conference, we made best use of it, by
displaying very good and relevant information about Free Software
and the GNU movement thereby keeping our stall always filled with people.

We had 4 machines setup to display various applications. One of
them was used to give a demo of the Installation process of the
Debian and Gnewsense DVDs and CDs we were distributing.

Ours was a stall, were anyone could just walkin and try
their hands at any of the applications, this helped people to
get a feel of what Free Software was. Again this is considering
the fact that 90% of all the visitors were either new to Free
Software or had just started using it.

In order to meet the expenses for the stall we had distributed Debian
GNU/Linux DVDs and Gnewsense CDs for a price. While we never forced anyone
to pay the original price, we explicitly told them to pay whatever they
like the minimum being the cost of the DVDs. While for CDs several were
given free of cost to the people who visited, especially students and
those who could not afford.

The first day saw very few people visiting the stall. The second
day turned out to be more crowded with people turning out in
moderate numbers. There were students, parents, freelance developers
and teachers turning up at our stall to understand what exactly
free software meant. The most important achievement was we being
able to clear up several of the misconceptions.

The hard copies of RMS Essays we had put up for a price were also
purchased by a few.

The first day of the conference had a big rush at the exhibition
venue with the delegates pouring in as well.

A couple of us had attended a session by Nagarjuna (gnowledge.org),
FSF India Chairman. After the speech we caught up with him and guided him
to a second venue to devliver his next speech. Nagarjuna came to the
exhibition late and visited our stall.

Although there have been discussions offline about our plans to change
the group Name, nothing has been discussed on the list yet. We made use of
the occasion when Nagarjuna visited us and requested him to correct our
name for us on our banner. He accepted our request and as per our initial
plans he corrected our name on the banner to “Indian Libre User Group”.

He also spend some time with ILUG Cochin Members, SNGIST College students
and MES College students. He also discussed a few points about the
“Business model of Free Software” with Mr Unais Mohammed” from KSEB.

We also had the FSUG Bangalore coming to put up their stall at the
venue. It was also a stall of the Ambedkar Community Computer Center, were
a handicapped boy Mani was selling pictures made by him using Free
Software(GIMP).

We had a great time with the students and faculty of SNGIST College,
Manjaly and MES College of Engg, Kuttipuram sharing their knowledge with
us.

Sunday was a day of action in every way. There were two sessions by
ILUG on the day. “Significance of Free Software on Mobile Platforms”
was handled by Sameer and an Open Forum Discussion on “Significance of
Free Software Groups in Society”.

The first talk focussed on the growing importance of Operating Systems
on Mobile Phones and how Free Software was the apt choice for Mobile
platforms as well. “OpenMoko” was used as a reference.

The Open Forum discussion was focussed more on helping 3 groups to help
form User Groups in their colleges. SNGIST Manjaly, Paravur. KKTM
Kodungaloor, and CUSAT. The dicussion saw several of the participants
pouring out ideas to start groups in these colleges. CUSAT already having
a Free Software group, just needed to get it up an running again.

A group of people belonging to the Free Software Community including
students had also done a protest against the main sponsor Novell, ILUG
Cochin also pledged their support by putting up posters of “BoyCott
Novell” in the stall.Some friends of the members of ILUG Cochin had come
in and handed over posters and volunteered to stick them in the stall. At
the same moment the organizers were rushing towards our stall to remove
the posters as Novell had objected to it. The rough behaviour from the
organizers were a matter of concern, especially the seizure of the cameras
carrying the pictures of the brawl.

The series of events that happened was bad in terms of the organizers
taking an unnecessary tough stand on the matter and not lending an ear to
the actual facts.

We were happy to raise our voice and protest with the
Free Software community opposing the likes of forces like Novell. Indeed
it was good to see a resistance in a programme of such magnitude like the
National Conference. Although there is no doubt to the fact that the
conference did its job, bringing people from all walks of life and ILUG
Cochin did the job telling people the principles behind it, the opposition
against Novell has also increased the significance and importance of the
event thereby bringing about a lot of questions into the community which
would not have been raised otherwise.

The stall was dismantled by 5.00pm at the end of the exhibition and
everyone left for home after an eventful day and 4 days of hard work.

Thanks to Binny and Sreenadh for spending all 4 days in the stall from
day to night.

Thanks to Shibin, Kevin Sha, Anil, IB Manoj for helping with the
functioning of the stall.

Thanks to the students and faculty of SNGIST Manjaly for helping us out
with the stall and taking care of it in our absence.

Thanks to

Nagarjuna G for spending a great time with us.

All the people who visited the stall.

And of course the organizers of the National Conference for having
provided us an opportunity to put up the stall

Unfortunately senior members like Jay Jacob and Balakrishan Sir
were unable to make it to the conference.

Sameer Activities CUSAT, ernakulam, free software, ilug, kochi, National Free Software Conference, nfm2008

From August 1997 ILUG Cochin has been working for the cause of Freedom in the field of Software by promoting Free Software. Contrary to the hype and glamour, ILUG has been promoting this cause in a truthful, transparent and the most effective manner. ILUG believes its major aim in this regard is Free Software awareness. And therefore the attempt to create this awareness is reflected in all of ILUGs activities. Be it a stall for promotion or a seminar or presentation the core concept of Freedom always exists in the activities of ILUG. And it is because of this concept and strong foundation ILUG has been able to successfully move forward into its 10th year.

It has been a cumulative effort of the millions of supporters and developers throughout the world, India, Kerala and Kochi that has helped boost this concept and help spread the message along with ILUG’s success. ILUG has been able to help thousands of people regain their freedom and choose the right path and this has helped create a chain reaction propagating our message to the nook and corner of Kerala.

ILUG Cochin has been involved in a host of activities from the day it was formed. Some of the major activities which have formed the backbone of its success are described below…

Seminars, Presentations, Demonstrations And Stalls

These are the foundation of ILUGs objective of spreading Free Software Awareness. ILUG has been conducting various seminars, classes and doing demonstrations all throughout Kerala. ILUG has been part of several popular IT events and has been able to effectively make a mark in all the programmes it has participated. More importance has been given to conducting these activities in educational institutions as these are the cradle of information in society. And therefore ILUG has been able to make its mark among the students and academicians as a community information and resource centre.

ILUG has taken great pain to instill the concept of a community into the field of software and education.We believe that we have been able to create some impact in this regard.
Stalls and exhibitions are a new addition to ILUG’s activities. In events that focus on the software industry, ILUG puts forward its ideas and objectives making an impact in the form of a candle in the dark. And indeed it has borne its fruits because of the various massive responses we have got for such events. ILUG hopes to get more chances in the future to spread its message in the form of such related events which can help provide a big stage.

Training

Although awareness forms the building block, providing information is the next most important thing. Surprisingly ILUG has not been behind in imparting quality education to the people of Kerala. ILUG firmly believes that money should don’t hinder the path to gaining quality education. And hence we have conceived a community based training model that provides the students freedom and creates a wonderful learning environment that brings out the best in them. This concept of ours has enabled us to help hundreds of people gain knowledge and help them attain their goals in their careers.

We firmly believe that the people whom we have trained will be a boon to the free software community and the society as a whole, like children learning from their parents these people have learned from us and have moved forward to spread our message.

Solutions and Support

As the final step in the implementation stage ILUG also provides services to people,organizations and institutions for converting to free software and implementing it effectively. While providing the solution we make sure that satisfaction is guaranteed, thereby providing support. Unlike a commercial initiative we make sure that along with the transparent solution we also provide the much needed training to these people. As mentioned above money does not form a criteria when it comes to providing service for those people who are willing to show the world that the concept of freedom has do marvels. Again these people help us in turn by being real examples of our success.

Sameer Activities ernakulam, free software, gnu/linux, ilug, kerala, kochi, linux, lug