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SFD 2009 Procession Inauguration

ILUG Cochin conducted a peaceful procession on 26th September 2009 at Marine Drive, Ernakulam to Celebrate Software Freedom Day 2009. The procession was inaugurated by Manu Zacharia, Consultant to the Cyber Cell of Kochi City Police, at 4.45pm. There were 14 people in the procession. The procession started from Ernakulam Broadway and proceeded towards Ernakulam Boat Jetty. From there the procession moved on to Menaka. We put body posters.  The procession stood there for half an hour.Some people came to us and asked us what was happening. We gave them Free Software handouts and gave awareness about Free Software. Next we walked to the Marine Drive Walkway. There we met lot of people. We stood at “China Net” Bridge for some time. Lot of people came to us and talked to us. A few of us went to the Southern end of the walkway and after some time they came back. After that we moved to “Rainbow Bridge”. It was time to wind up. After taking a few more photos we wound up at 7pm.

We had a great interaction with the public. We can say that the procession was successful. We hope, next year the procession would be much bigger and better with lot of people.

Participants:

Harikrishnan
Manu
Sameer
Kevin
Venkat
Abhilash
Althaf
Azad
Sreekanth
Zaheer
Sanal Kumar
Antony
Sreenadh
Faizal

Photos:

The following events are planned

Free Software Awareness Campaign on the Street

Date       : 26/09/2009, Saturday
Time       : 4.30pm – 7.30pm.
Venue      : Marine Drive, Ernakulam
Activities : Assembling in Busy areas on Marine Drive and Menaka and Jetty.
with placards and Body posters.
- Distributing Pamphlets and Brochures about Free Software
and ILUG Cochin.

ILUG Cochin Regular Meeting, 13th year special.Date: 27/09/2009, Sunday
Time: 9.00am – 5.30pm.

Venue:
Jay’s Internet Club
IInd Floor, AMI Trust Bldg,
Broadway Enclave
Broadway,
Kochi-682031
i.e. Behind Allappat Super Shoppe,On top of SBT Treasury wing,

Schedule:

9.00   : Welcome
9.20   : Free Software and the Future
9.50   : ILUG Cochin and its activities
10.10  : Tea
10.20  : Technical presentations
11.45  : Troubleshooting Free Software Issues ( strategy and dealing with
common problems )
12.30  : Lunch
1.30   : Technical Presentations
2.30   : Charting ILUG Cochin 13th year activities and plans
3.30   : 13th year celebration – Cake cutting, group Photo, Tea
4.15   : Technical Presentations
5.15   : Conclusion

Technical Presentations:
- Introduction to the Command Line
- Python Programming Primer
- Free Software for Web Development
- Magic of Inkscape, a vector graphics based drawing tool
- Free Software Content Management Systems
- Malayalam Computing in GNU/Linux

Presentations will be scheduled as per time, availability, convenience of
speakers.

Following will be conducted throughout the day

9.00 – 17.00
Install Booth:
Bring your machines and install your Free Software Distribution
of Choice.

Free Software Clinic:
Bring your machines with configuration or hardware
compatibility issues, we can try to help.

Career@Free Software:
Counseling and tips for a bright career with Free Software.

Free Software Applications for All !!
- We can help you with the various Free Software applications available,
and also looking for the alternatives.

Contact:

Sreenadh    : 9747173432
Sameer      : 9995717112
Hari        : 9495927003
Manu        : 9447372554
Venkat      : 9895191363
Kevin       : 9474311544
Jay jacob   : 9447111771
Sanal Kumar : 9496449969

0484 2374862    ( Venue )
0484 4025077    ( Venue )

contact {at} ilug-cochin {dot} org

A Map showing the venue is available at :
http://www.ilug-cochin.org/content/view/31/

ILUG Cochin put a stall on 18th and 19th September 2009, at Qbit ’09, the technical fest conducted by the Department of Computer Science, MA College of Engineering, Kothamanagalam. The stall was very active with students. We got lot of visitors and we helped them to clear their queries regarding FOSS. We could also help them to solve some technical doubts.

On the second day, there was a session by Jay Jacob. The session titled “Introduction to Free Software” was a very good one. Most of the attendees were schools students from the nearby School.

There was also a preview of the Open Movie “Big Buck Bunny”. After the session the audience had an interaction with the speaker.

Team:

Harikrishnan
Manu ( Second Day )
Lenin ( First Day )
Sreenadh
Jay Jacob

ILUG Cochin has participated in the Software Freedom Day 2009 Celebrations held at Rajagiri College of Social Sciences, Kalamasserry, Ernakulam. We were also one of the organizers of the event. It was a one day program. We have also put a stall at the venue which helped students and other people to clear their doubts, both technical and non-technical, about Free Software. There were seminars, exhibitions, technical talks. The seminar, “Introduction to Free Software” by Sreenadh and “FOSS in Web development” by Binny were some of them.

The event inspired some of the students at Rajagiri to start a Free Software User Group. There were students from VHSS Irimpanam who have put a stall for “Malayalam Computing” and also exhibited different Computer Hardware. There were also some students from GTHSS and they exhibited “WordPress”, a Free Software application for blogging.

Team:

Venkat
Kevin
Manu
Sreenadh
Hari
Jay Jacob
Lenin

Photos:

Jay Jacob

ILUG Stall

Stall

Stall

introduction to free software - sreenadh

Free Software in web development - Binny

ILUG Cochin has been invited to put a stall in the Cyber Safe 2009, an annual event conducted by the Kochi City Police as part of the Information Security Day. Its a 3 day program starting from 6th August. The exhibition is on 8th Saturday, August 2009.

The theme of the stall will be “Security with Freedom”. There will be an install Fest and installation on demand.  There will be demonstration of Free Software desktop applications as well as demonstration of server implementations like content filtering. Above all an awareness about FOSS will be given to the visitors.

More details about the event are given in the following website.

http://www.informationsecurityday.com/cybersafe/index.html

Your can read a report on ILUG Cochin’s participation in the last year event.

http://www.ilug-cochin.org/activities/exhibition_on_information_security_2008_by_kochi_city_police_details

Date : 19.07.2009
Time : 4:00pm – 6:00pm
Attendance : 20

The attendees included professionals, freelancers and students.Initially meeting started of with an introduction session, where most of the them introduced, then the agenda was announced, though it took some time to get people to talk in full spirit, it was interesting towards the last 45mins, we spoke of how Hardware vendors be educated regarding free software, how the people can influence the hardware vendors with demand for free software, etc it would be better if you skim through the transcript that would be uploaded soon.

The next IRC meeting agenda would be “Campaign to promote Free Software in Kerala”.  Part[2] “How to  Educate the Schools and colleges about Free Software”( as voted by majority).

The transcript of the meeting, will be available soon as someone uploads it. A mail will come in this regard.

Hope the next meeting is more exciting, let us look forward to the next Sunday official meeting, Agenda mail will come out soon.

Transcript of July 2009 Meeting

Following is a brief snapshot of the meeting.

Date: 28-06-2009
Time: 2:15pm – 5.30pm
Venue: Internet Club, IInd Floor, AMI Trust Building,
Broadway Enclave, Broadway, Ernakulam
Attendance : 18

The meeting turnout was less than the usual average, probably the monsoons could have been the reason. But as always, the smaller group was effective in churning very good brainstorming sessions.

The meeting started of a bit late at 2.30pm with the customary self introduction.

Sreenadh explained the basic concepts of Free Software and the GNU Movement. Licenses and Open Source Software were also discussed.

- Agenda was based on the “strengthening the campaign for Free Software”
by ILUG Cochin.

- Sameer talked about the history of ILUG Cochin and its role till date in the spread of Free Software in Kerala.

- The recent initiative by ILUG Cochin to bring teachers closer to the Free Software community was discussed upon, with the teachers among the audience expressing their opinion on the outcome of the initiative. The discussion slowly drifted to the aspect of convenience vs Freedom.

The point receiving emphasis was the aspect of lack of technical contribution from the community towards various Free Software Projects.

- Sreeraj R, who is a valued contributor to the Icarus compiler project, shared his experience on contributing his time and energy for the Free Software Project. The discussion was wound up for tea.

After tea and bananas the audience moved on to attend the session by Sanal Kumar on Malayalam Computing. Following can give a glimpse on the session:

- A brief history of malayalam computing.
- Swathanthra malayalam computing and its activities.
- How far malayalam computing has gone……Email, chatting,blogging wiki
- Malayalam Wikipedia crossing 10,000 articles
- Malayalam keymaps – phonetic and Non- phonetic(inscript)
- Advantages of inscript.
- Logic of inscript keyboard.
- Step by Step on enabling Inscript in Debian
- Development of Swathanthra Malayalam Computing
- Dhvani text to Audio conversion and its installation, Malayalam text to Ogg
- Intoducing Malayalam screen saver and malayalam login screen
- An upcoming one Ktav slang converter introduced( This was fun ).

Keyboard layout for Malayalam Inscript on A4 were distributed among the audience.

Venkat took a brief session on using Latex with Malayalam.
- Concept of as text preprocessor.
- Advantages of Latex over other applications.
- Installation of the malayalam preprocessor from sarovar.org
- Preparation of the document using phonetic representation.
- Compilation to pdf format.

Conclusion

Continuing the agenda, Sameer explained how everyone could contribute to the Free Software movement, the example of Swathanthra Malayalam Computing was used to explain how simple contribution can be. From reporting bugs to programming were explained in brief.

The contact numbers, Email ids, Mailing List Subscription, Post meeting activities, all of these were shared with the attendees. Feedback forms were collected.

The meeting concluded by thanking the people who helped conduct the meeting and all the attendees.

The meeting concluded at 6.00pm.

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 on 26/07/2009 is bigger and better.

Photos and Details of the meeting will be available on the web site soon.

Attendees
Sanjai
Sreenadh
Sanal Kumar M R
K S Ravi
Kevin Sha
G Venkata Subrahmanian
Sameer
Jay Jacob
Binny V A
Shambhu
Hari
Althaf
Sreekanth
Thomas
Rasal
Sreeraj
Lenin
Sinu John

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRC

1. How can I use IRC on my machine.?

You need an IRC Client ( A program that connects to the IRC Servers). Every client follows guidelines form RFC2812 (basic rules that define how to communicate between client and server) if you are interested go through it, you will understand irc clients better.

• Select the IRC server from the list
• Decide your nick name ( just like your username for an email id )
• [optional] register your nick
• Connect
• Select / Join your channel

These are most popular clients available for IRC,

• Xchat – gtk+ gui available in most platforms  (http://www.xchat.org/download)
• Irssi – tui ncurses based not a good one for noobies. Available in most platforms  (http://irssi.org/download)
• Pidgin – multi protocol chat client. Available in most platforms  (http://www.pidgin.im/download/)
• Konversation – Available for KDE
• Mibbit – Web based available online (no installation )

<--!>

• – WebChatWeb based FreeNode Client available online (no installation )

1.1 Instructions for using IRC with various clients.

1.1.1 Xchat

The screenshots below will guide to using the particular client for IRC communication.

From the next window in the [join channel] type #ilugkochi then [OK] well now your in #ilugkochi channel. You can type in messages in the Main Window, so whoever is present can see it.

Xchat Registering you nick name (optional)

You will need a :

• Unique NickName
• A password
• Valid email id

Now at the bottom of the xchat client there is typing space  a kind of long bar.
Here is where the IRC Servers accept commands from you.

Type the following

[/msg nickserv nickname password foo@foo.com ]

eg: /msg nickserv lovely 1244556 lovely@foo.com

Caution must be taken that there is no space before “/msg”.

Here you are telling the nick name server ( the guy who takes care of all the nicknames ) that
you want to register lovely as a nickname with 124456 as the password and you have an email
id with lovely@foo.com. In IRC you interact with the servers through commands. Just think of it as
an online command line.

if you have done it properly you will get a message like this

>nickserv< register 1244556 lovely@foo.com
-NickServ- An email containing nickname activation instructions has been sent to lovely@foo.com
-NickServ- If you do not complete registration within one day, your nickname will expire.
-NickServ- lovely is now registered to lovely@foo.com, with the password 1244556.
-NickServ-
-NickServ- freenode is a service of Peer-Directed Projects Center, a
-NickServ- not-for-profit organisation registered in England and Wales.
-NickServ- For frequently-asked questions about the network, please see the
-NickServ- FAQ page (http://freenode.net/faq.shtml). Should you wish to
-NickServ- support the PDPC you can contribute to our current fundraiser at
-NickServ- http://freenode.net/pdpc_donations.shtml.

[/msg nickserv identify yournick password]

eg: /msg nickserv identify lovely 1244556

well this is bit inconvenient always identify with the above sequence of command, each time you join the
channel,in order to automate this process follow the steps below.

click [Edit]

in the nickserv password provide your password  and click the check box auto connect to this network at startup.

Now you are ready for action in the channel.

1.1.2 Pidgin

Setting up Pidgin for the first time (this all only needs to be done once):

1. Open up the Pidgin accounts window.

2. Click add account

3. Enter nickname & click save

4. Set you status to online

5. From Buddies menu select “Join a chat”

6. Select your IRC account and type channel name. (Eg: #ilugkochi) and click join.

‘ACCOUNTS‘ in the title bar at the top. If you have a ‘BUDDY LIST‘? window and cannot find an ‘Accounts‘ window, go to the ‘ACCOUNTS‘ menu? and select ‘ADD/EDIT‘.

The procedure for registering is the same as in Xchat (the same commands of course ).

Warning: Never use IRC, Browse the Web or do anything in the Graphical Environment as the SuperUser or “root”!

More info regarding IRC, IRC practises, ettiquette
www.irc-help.org.
IRC Resources
http://irchelp.org/irchelp/irctutorial.html

Authors:

Althaf Backer (althafkbacker [at] gmail [dot] com)
Sameer Mohamed Thahir (sameer.thahir [at] gmail [dot] com)
Harikrishnan (hari.jain2000 [at] gmail [dot] com )
Sreenadh H (sreenadh1987 [at] gmail [dot] com)