ILUG-Cochin

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

• Date : 14^th March 2009, 2.15pm – 4.15pm
• Venue : Press Club Ernakulam
• Attendance : ~25
• Audience : Journalists, Reporters, Press Academy Students,
  Free Software Community Members

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

Binny V A Activities Cochin, meeting, press, programme, report