[Fsf-friends] GNUBeLUG... another report from Belgaum

[Frederick Noronha (FN)]

URL   :  http://www.geocities.com/tonysingh4u/gnubelug.txt

   Minutes of GNU Be LUG Meet In an engineering college in Belgaum,
   called GIT, there are a few students who felt strongly about Free
   Software and its ideology. They wanted to eductae people around them
   and wanted to spread the message as we at Mumbai do. They took an
   obvious step, formed a formal LUG(ilug-belgaum@yahoogroups.com) about
   6 months ago, and started introducing people to a new option. But they
   wanted to hold a big event, and event where they could have a larger
   number of people know of the option. So, they (Ashutosh Naik, Rohan,
   Rahul, Sanket Patil just to name a few) started to concieve this event
   which i'll describe in this article. Saturday, March 29th 2003, I and
   Bhaskar Ghosh another member of the Mumbai LUG reached the Belgaum bus
   station and called up the volunteers to pick us up. In no time they
   were there and I could notice the similar air of friendlyness that i'v
   always noticed with the Mumbai Luggerz. We quickly got fresh in a
   hotel wher we were put up and reached the college. The first look at
   the college made our jaws drop. We could notice lovely posters and
   banners al over the place with our own tux and GNU on them. Once in
   the lecture hall, we were introduced to all the the luggers of belgaum
   and we quickly looked over the arrangements that were loveley. The
   crowd started coming in and in no time we had main hall jampacked with
   around 150 minds, but this is not it. There was another hall arranged
   for the event and all the proceedings in the main hall were being
   streamed thru a web cam and displayed in the second hall. The first
   talk for the day was by Ashutosh Naik ofGIT who spoke about THE
   philosophy. He had er good presentation compiled which gave the taste
   of everything RMS talks about in his talks. So what if we didnt have
   RMS for the event, atleast we had a local RMS to take his place:).
   During the talk i was doing some face reading and noticed that the
   audience was a highly participating one and wanted to participate
   more. After Ashotosh's talk we had a very fruitful question answer
   session with people asking a lot about the differences of Free
   software and the Open Source Movements. We went on with some trivia
   for the audience and giving away of Knoppix CDs. I tried to make that
   very interactive from then on, and took things trevor ishtyle. Next
   speaker was Bhaskar Ghosh from DYPCOET kolhapur who did the
   installation of RH8 with specific stress on points like partitioning.

   He, actually went there as audience and wanted to use this as an
   opportunity to meet the luggers, but ended up speaking because due to
   some reasons Mr Dinesh Shah could'nt make it. After a quick snack
   break. we then had Rahul Iyer of GIT, belgaum talk about Kernel
   Modules. This talk was very informative and I must say that the LUG at
   belgaum is lucky to have a true kernel hacker with them right from its
   inception. Some more trivia and a few more knoppix CDs followed and
   then it was my turn. I was talking about using GNU/Linux for day to
   day use. 

   As a part of that I also demoed knoppix and IndLinux. I could
   here a similar sigh from the audience that i heard at GNUnify, Pune,
   when they saw Gedit with hindi menus. I also got it across that the
   students sitting out there could actually contribute to this project.
   That was the end of the first days proceedings and we were again taken
   for a few snacks. Late in the evening a mini bus arrived at the hotel.
   We had a big contingent coming down from Goa for the event. I could
   see familiar faces like Fredrick Noronha, Dr. Anil Seth, Arvind Yadav
   etc and there were a few people i didnt know but got to know soon like
   Dr Gurunandan Bhat, Mr Dsouza, Amitay, Allwyn Noronha(no he is not
   FN's brother). Over dinner there was a lot of interaction and people
   were eating less and talking more. It was almost 11:30 by we finished
   dinner and a few people wanted to sleep, but a few people thought
   otherwise. FN made it a point to have Arvind Yadav and me otherwise we
   would have chatted all night and been drowsy the next day. Soon Trevor
   Warren and Warren Noronha from Bombay joiined the bandwangon(yes!
   another noronha. 

   There was jokes of establising a noronha lug out
   there. lol) The next day was opened by FN who spoke about the status
   of the movement in India. I remember him stating that how we take the
   movement forward would make or break the movement, this made me feel
   more responsible. Next to speak was Dr. Anil Seth, an educationist as
   of now. He had compiled a very good analysis on "why GNU/Linux?". a
   new thing i noticed in his talk was that after he made the advantage
   clear he also touched an important point. he stated "What if I am
   wrong? you cant be trusting anyone like that. You still dont have
   anything to lose". The stage was then taken by the Trevor Warren who
   was speaking about Embedded Linux. Well we all know that Trevor gets
   to the stage, he is always amidst the audience. He and Warren Noronha
   demoed a few interesting Embedded equipment including a PDA and a box
   with a 512MB flas, a 486 processor and a wireless NIC that they had
   deployed on top of buses for the Karnatak Govt. We had the very
   knowledgable Dr. Bhat from Synapse Goa speak about SOAP and web
   services just before lunch. I have noticed this common thing when
   IITians talk, they have a fair amount of humour in their talks and
   thus make their highly technical talks the most engrossong ones.I have
   to add over here that Dr Bhat is the person who wrote the tex module
   of emacs and still he is the most humble man i have ever met. The last
   talk of the day was by Arvind Yadav from Goa who covered a lot of
   technical topics including .NET's counterpart in Free Software and a
   little more on the partitioning when dual boot systems are to be done
   up. His was a more of a question answer session and I was amazed atthe
   amount of questions that were pouring on. The last leg was a panel
   discussion where all the speaker were on the stage and one mic was
   always in the audience. Various topics were discussed including
   technical and topics related to ideaology and how could a i miss
   "making a living from free software". Bhaskar and I, the die hard fans
   of RMS spoke a lot about him and how the GNU project went about during
   this session. 

   One more thing worth mentioning is that we had almost
   200 copies of LFY march given away in the two days, which were
   sponsored by Mr. Rahul Chopra,editor LFY and we are very thankful to
   him for that. That apart we also had 87 copies of the knoppix CDs
   either sold or given away as prizes for trivia. 2 days of brain
   storming, almost 10 speakers, 200 magazines going out and almost 75
   CDs of knoppix sold and an amazing amount of interaction with the
   audience of almost 250. How would one sum this all up? The only
   adjective that come to my mind is FRUITFUL, very very FRUITFUL. 

   ^^^^^ LINKS ilug-belgaum@yahoogroups.com ilug-goa@yahoogroups.com
   fred@bytesforall.org(FN) guru@plusthought.org (Dr Gurunandan Bhat)
   GNUrpreet singh gnurpreet@softhome.net
   -------------------------------------------- Copyleft 2003 gurpreet.
   Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
   under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, version 1.1 or
   later. -------------------------------------------