The meeting of the “Indian Libre User Group” was held on May 23rd 2010 successfully.(4th Sunday of Every Month)

Following is a brief snapshot of the meeting.

Date: 23-05-2010
Time: 2:15pm – 5.30pm
Venue: Internet Club, IInd Floor, AMI Trust Building,
Broadway Enclave, Broadway, Ernakulam
Attendance : 27

2.15pm

- Customary Introduction
- People shared their experience with Free Software.

2.20pm

• Introduction to Free Software
• History of the GNU Movement
• Licenses – GNU GPL, LGPL, Concept of Copyleft
• Open Source Software and its Difference with Free Software.
• Other Licenses and Operating Systems like BSD.

Agenda : Community Based Learning Centers,

• Discussions started with moderator explaining the concept of a Free Software Community Based Learning Center (CBLC).
• Although the audience were confused initially on the idea of CBLC, they were able to understand the crux of it through examples.
• Since the discussion was as usual a brainstorming, there was no plan/ blueprint to implement.
• Several people shared the experiences with Free Software and teaching and excercising the four freedoms.
• The discussion had drifted to a serious topic of lack of contribution to the Free Software Movement.
• The 2nd and 4th Freedom (Freedom to study and modify ) was not being excercised by the majority.
• Many people pointed out the lack of Development/ Contribution groups or communities, also many people pointed out lack of initiatives in User Groups.
• The discussion was wound up with many people planning to give a thought to building the next generation Free Software community, from children with their energy and to imbibe the culture of contribution by equipping them with knowledge.
• A case study of the “Free Learning Institute” as a CBLC was taken up and discussed in brief.

4.15 pm
Tea Break

4.30pm
Technical Presentation : Basics of Shell Scripting

• Introduction to Bourne Again Shell
• Explained the working principle of a shell using a small C Program.
• Gave an introduction to built-in Environment variables and user-defined Environment
  Variables.
• Discussed about the following commands, which are good for daily use.
  top, ps, links, elinks, lynx, mplayer for playing vcd,dvd, and audio cd, extracting audio-cd files,
  vcd and dvd using mplayer, virtual console,
• Audience responded by asking several questions
• Because of the late start of the presentation the actual topic could not be reached, hence the rest of this presentation would be continued at the next meeting

5.35pm
Conclusion

• The usually short concluding session last almost half an hour.
• IB Manoj of the Free Learning Institute, explained the aims, objectives and future plans of the Free Learning Institute.
• Suraj Kenoth invited all to the Swathanthra Malayalam Computing Camp being held at the Free Learning Institute on 24,25 May.
• Jay Jacob announced a small Development/ Contribution Kickstart camp on 29/05/2010 from 2pm onwards at ILUG Meeting Venue.
• Few people volunteered to take technical presentations for the month of June.
• The Malayalam translated interface of tux paint screen shots were shown to the attendees.
• All people who volunteered for the Meeting were thanked.
• Everyone was requested to exchange feedbacks with the meeting volunteers.

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

Next meeting : 27/06/2010

Attendees

1. Sreenadh
2. Jos Collin
3. Lentin Joseph
4. Praseed Pai K.T
5. Thomas V Vettical
6. Nishanth A I
7. Avin M Antony
8. Nighil Thomas
9. Nirmal
10. Paresh Palicha
11. Raju Ramdas
12. George John
13. Faisal P P
14. Harshad P A
15. Sinu John
16. Prasanth S
17. Kevin Sha
18. Manoj Kumar I B
19. Harikrishnan T R
20. Manu Ram
21. Deepak S P
22. Jigu E V
23. Sujiv
24. Thomas M Vazhapilly
25. Saju George
26. Jay Jacob
27. Sameer

Website : www.ilug-cochin.org
IRC : #ilugkochi on irc.freenode.net
ML : mailinglist at ilug-cochin.org

Photos

may 2010 meeting

may 2010 meeting

may 2010 meeting

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

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

Date: 24-04-2009
Time: 2:00pm – 5:30pm
Venue: Internet Club, IInd Floor,
AMI Trust Building,
Broadway Enclave,
Broadway, Ernakulam
Attendance : 24

Agenda: Community Based Curriculum ( 2nd round )

The continuation of the previous meeting discussion, started slowly as many of the people who attended the last meetings could not make it this time.

The objective of the initiative “Community based Curriculum” was explained. The intent of the discussion of the present meeting was explained and everyone began discussing about what was needed for a strong foundation for IT/ Computer Science curriculum in schools.

Few important points from the meeting were captured:
- Students need to gain information handling skills
- Secure computing skills
- Application/ Hardware testing.
- Collaboration skills.

The action items were as follows :
- Define a foundation for a curriculum or rather build a base ( a set of objectives) for a curriculum/ syllabus.
- Create a wiki with a draft of the important points discussed forming a foundation.
- Make the initiative a core project for ilug cochin and the swathanthra software community.
- Formed a core action team to coordinate the activities for the initiative.
- Arrange a meeting once the wiki is setup, before next ILUG Cochin Meeting
- Continue the discussions in the next meeting.

Technical Presentation – Bash Scripting by Kurian

The basics of the command line were explained to the attendees. Bash scripting was explained through simple programs :
- Backup program
- Program to download streaming videos and store them to disk in free software formats.

The conditional loops and basic elements were explained through the above programs.

Conclusion :
The meeting ended with sreenadh describing the experience with students at Thodupuzha during the vacation class. The meeting concluded by reiterating the plan to realize the “Community based curriculum” by ILUG Cochin. The coordination team for the initiative was formed as follows after many of the attendees volunteered :

.VK Nizar
.KS Ravi
.Sanal Kumar
.Kevin Sha
.Rahul
.Sameer
.Jay Jacob

Attendees:

VK Nizar
KS Ravi
Sanal Kumar
Kevin Sha
Rahul
Sameer
Jay Jacob
Sreekanth T R
Arun Aravind
Kurian Mathew Thayyil
Saju T Abraham
Vinod Chandran R
Manu Ram
Harikrishnan T R
Renith M
Sreenadh
Venkat
John Peter

Report in The Hindu

Press Club, Ernakulam had organized a workshop on Free Software for the people working in Newspapers and other Media ILUG Cochin was invited to handle the workshop by the Press Club, Ernakulam. This in fact was due to the good relationship maintained by the group with the people in the Media.

Free Software Movement by Jay Jacob

The session started by talking about the Freedoms that form the foundation for principles of Free Software. The speaker explained with examples the concept of Free Software and how the community worked together to create technology for the benefit of mankind.

The talk turned towards the history of the Free Software movement and about Richard Mathew Stallman, the founder of the GNU Movement. The speaker then explained the series of events that lead to the birth of GNU/Linux.

The importance of Freedom was explained by comparing the situation to “India’s Struggle for Freedom. The audience were subscribing well to the important aspect of the speech.

The talk then explained the basic copyright concept and how the copyleft concept created by the Free Software movement helped protect the Freedom of users.

As the talk was winding up, lot of questions we raised, especially on Licenses, copyright, sharing and distributing free software for money. The ambiguity in the term Free as in Freedom was also clarified.

Demonstration of a Free Software Operating System : Debian GNU/Linux by Sreenadh

The demonstration started with the basic login screen of the OS. The speaker touched upon the basic aspects of a Free Software Desktop Environment . He explained the fundamental concepts behind a Desktop Environment He then proceeded to explain a few basic applications for daily use belonging to the following categories:

Internet

Iceweasal, Pidgin,Empathy

Multimedia

VLC, Totem, Kino

Office/ Productivity

Openoffice, Abiword

Desktop Publishing

Scribus

Graphics

Inkscape, GIMP

There were lot of questions on using Malayalam with OpenOffice. The speaker explained the answers in a very efficient manner, thereby satisfying the audience queries.

Free Software in Schools and Malayalam Computing by Sanal Kumar Sir

Sanal Kumar sir touched upon the importance and relevance of teaching Free Software in Schools. He talked extensively about the present level of implementation and the problems faced. He delved deep into how the community can find solutions for the issues faced and how they can effectively work with the teachers to improve the present curriculum so that it can bring out the true power of Free Software.

The speaker next explained the importance of the Malayalam language and how free software and projects like “Swathanthra malayalam computing” have enabled the language to reach leaps and bounds. The talk also touched upon the possibilities of Malayalam blogging and how the Internet was a new arena that was allowing the language to expand its horizon.

Concluding Session

The concluding session saw Sameer finally explaining the name change of the group and the vision and future of the group. The press club secretary thanked the ILUG Cochin Members for their cooperation with the Media and concluded the session.

ILUG Cochin thanks Anand Haridas of “The Hindu” for having taken the initiative to bring the Free Software Community closer to the Media by conducting this event, and hope that more events of this nature happen in the future.

Participated ILUG Cochin Members

• Sreenadh
• Binny V A
• Jay Jacob
• Sanal Kumar
• Kevin Sha
• Sameer Mohamed Thahir
• Hari
• Bilal
• Prinson

• Date : 23/09/2007
• Time : 2:30 pm
• Location : Jays Internet Club, Broadway, Kochi, Kerala

The Meeting started late because heavy rains prevented the attendees
from reaching early.
Before the meeting started the Members talked about the group
and the free Software community in general. This was for
the purpose of a newspaper reporter who had come
to participate in the meeting and do a writeup on the same.

One member expressed his view for the purpose of the
reporter that the existing FOSS implementation of the
Kerala government should not be seen as a political
initiative ( although it may/may not be in reality ) but it is
actually important concept that needs to be implemented
at the educational level in order to facilitate the
spread of knowledge in the IT field.

Introduction and Agenda

The Meeting as usual started of with the customary Self Introduction.
During this One of the attendees talked about how he started his
FOSS journey by implementing it in a school and how he overcame the difficulties .

One of the members commented that the Agenda Needed to have been GNU GPL v3.

The Moderator started the talk on Agenda.by briefing about the actual purpose of the GPL
and how it relates with Free Software.
How it helps protect the Freedoms of Free Software users, through a legal
binding knows as the license.

How the GPL v2 was designed for a time when there was no Linux Kernel
or a totally Free OS and how things were totally different back then.

How a new version of the GPL was necessary now.The main imortant aspect of the GPL v2 was the copyleft.
The concept of Copyleft was briefly explained.

The following important differences of v2 and v3 were
highlighted:

• Use of term propagate and convey instead of copy and distribute
  for the purpose of internationalization.
• Inclusion of two more licenses as compatible with gpl- apache and eclipse license.
• Clauses opposing tivoization of free software. Hence software used with tivo cannot be gpl v3 compatible.

  One member raised a question about nokia and motorola hardware platforms using linux
  and whether the phenomena can be described as tivoization.

• The patent clause in the gplv3 that reflected the microsoft novell deal.
  protecting users in such situations.( successor to the liberty and death clause of gplv2.).
• Clauses against treacherous computing.
• Clause stating source code will only be provided on network.
• Clause relating to termination of license.
• Protecting users freedoms from anticircumvention laws like DRM and EUCD.

One of the members, highlighted the fact how certain
drmd dvds were not playable with free software multimedia players
and how gplv3 tackles software that deals with drm

To conclude the moderator asked the other members two questions relating to the agenda:

Should the linux kernel adopt gplv3?

The members discussed on the topic although no conclusion was reached.

One member commented that the developers are given more responsibility in the gplv3 in order to protect the freedoms of users.

Another member commented that the software should not control the platform on which it works.

Will the gplv3 still help make better quality software?

A few members commented that irrespective of the gpl version the quality standards will remain uncompromised.

One member spoke out on how the gplv3 will become a long
term protection for free software developers, especially in terms of patents.

Presentation

After the conclusion of the agenda discussion, a video showing RMS talking at the launch of the
gplv3 was screened.

After the tea session there was a class on “basics of python” by Balakrishnan Sir.

The class started of with the History of Python.
The class covered the following aspects of the language:

• Builtin Data types
• Numbers
• Strings
• Sequence lists
• Tuples
• Dictionary
• String Manipulation

The concepts were demonstrated using a basic program.

Sir also showed us how we could access the python help from the python shell or by running pydoc and using a web browser.

The class was received well by everyone
even though most of the attendees were not having a programming
background.

Concluding Session

In the concluding session, as usual members were asked for their
valuable suggestions and feedback, with regard to the GPL v3 discussion one member suggested we have a brief follow up to the same in the next meeting apart from the Agenda.

Also the members were asked to try out some programs in python, and ask doubts on the ML or in the next meeting.

The members were also asked to volunteer for conducting the demo/presentation in the next week. Reju Rajeev came forward and volunteered to do a demo of a GNU/Solaris installation.

The meeting concluded by 5:45 pm.

Attendees

• Jay Jacob
• M Balakrishna Pillai
• G Venkata Subramanian
• Binny V A
• Reju Rajeev
• Sameer Mohamed Thahir
• Tharun Varghese
• ArunKumar
• Muhammed Sabir
• Vineeth TV
• Sreenadh H
• Sumeran

References

Agenda

• GPL 3 License
• RMS Speech Transcript
• Difference between GPL 2 and GPL 3

Python

• Python Documentation

Meeting Photos