August 2008 Meeting – Details
Date: 24-08-2008
Time: 2:30pm – 6:30pm
Venue: Internet Club, IInd Floor, AMI Trust Building,
Broadway Enclave, Broadway, Ernakulam
Attendance : 15
The meeting started of late waiting for people to arrive.
The first session was the discussion on the agenda topic.
Agenda : Nurturing Young Minds using the Concept of Free Software
The discussion started with the moderator, giving an idea of what Free Software is and how it has brought about a concept formed on truth and freedom.
Then the discussion went on talking about independent thinking. The significance of independent thinking and the effects of what happens when some entity tries to control your thinking were discussed in the light of several examples, mainly proprietary software. The audience agreed on the fact that independent thinking leads to greater productivity and development.
Also How Self learning and development was achieved with the help of free software community was discussed. The fact that the mind gets involved in a lot of activities and gets into work with a lot of developers and groups will benefit the individual.
Similarly, the aspects of community learning and community development was also discussed.
The discussions slightly drifted from the topic, to discuss how free software has helped create a community around ILUG Cochin over the last 11 years. Since the 11th year was a very important landmark for ILUG Cochin, the points that were being discussed revolved around what was the future activities of ILUG Cochin.
There was the customary introduction, in between.
The discussion concluded with the possible way of attaining the above goals in best and effective manner. The role of a teacher in an educational institution in a school/college is very significant where a child will start learning the very concept of sharing. The attendees also agreed on the importance of teaching ethical values in every field, in the present day were moral and ethical values are deteriorating at home, school and society.Especially in the field of Information Technology and Computer Science, talking about ethical values was very important, especially explaining the concepts of Licenses, patents etc..
The discussions went on till 4:00 pm.
11th year
Kurian had bought a cake for the 11th year, ( venkat bought it last time) and we moved to the cake cutting session. The Plum Cake was tasty and enjoyed by everyone with tea.
GNU/Linux Booting Sequence by Sameer at 4:45pm
The intention of the session, was to help users to troubleshoot their PCs, when the booting issues occur. The simple objective, was to give them an idea at a very high level, and so that, they can atleast point out at what stage the machine has problems.
The sessions started with explaining about the basic PC booting sequence, starting from CPU Reset to control going to the MBR. There were lot of questions in between.
The speaker talked about Boot Loader, MBR,PBR. Since the topic was a bit confusing for new users,there were lot of questions. Once interesting question was how the boot loader could access the hard disk(raw access).
The speaker continued with the explanation of what a kernel is, what are modules and how the kernel loads into memory and what happens next.
The sequence went on smooth, although the attendees got confused and sometimes bored by the underlying technical details, but the presentation got on the right track after few minutes. The booting sequence in user land, was very interesting for several. The final step of a display manager and getty loading was also explained. Once the session had completed, there was a volley of questions many concerning the Initial RamDisk.
The speaker cleared all questions and doubts before winding up the session, although it was almost 6:15pm.
The session was fruitful for many of the attendees who wanted to know about the different levels of booting.
Many questions which were out of scope of the presentation were skipped.
The concluding session saw Jay Jacob, encouraging the audience to start contirubting to FOSS projects, because it was one dark area for ILUG Cochin.
He also asked people working with small hobby Free Software projects to complete them and release them into the community.
In the light of the Free Software related meeting( organized by IT Mission of kerala) attended by JJ, he assured everyone that funds for projects would never be an issue, once the idea was concrete. He also referred to the Governments plan to hold a Free Software International seminar and asked the members to showcase their skills.
The meeting wound up by 6:30pm.
Thanks to Kurian for the cake. Sreenadh for organization.
Thanks to Madhu for the snaps and video.
Thanks to Ajith, Shibin and Nitish for the arrangements.
Thanks to Venkat and Binny for the snaps.
We thank all the attendees for coming and request all to put in their feedback for the meeting on the Mailing List or my email so we can improve future meetings.
Hope the next meeting is bigger and better
Attendees
Aji Aype
Shibin K Reeny
Ajith C
Nitish Kumar
Kevin Sha
Rajagopal V
Fr. V.V. Thomas
K.Ashok Shenoy
Kurian Mathew Thayil
Binny V.A.
Madhu K.K
Sreenadh
G.Venkata Subramahnian
Sameer Mohammed Thahir
Jay Jacob
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