The fourth meeting of the “Indian Libre User Group” was held successfully
on June 28 2009.
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
Sreenadh Meetings june, meeting, report
