'LDTP Workshop' Diary (March 26)

[Rakesh 'arky' Ambati]

Hello Friends,

The LDTP Workshop is one of those events I will
certainly cherish for life. First, I would like
mention (and thank) Saranavan Prabu, Thejesh and
Vikram who started from far flung places like Domlur,
Electronics City and Koramangala to be at Kempagowda
Bus Station before 6 AM. Hat's Off guys.

The Journey
-----------
Our journey was quite uneventful except for the irate
passenger shouting at the driver, our friends having
neck ache's at every bump and a driver who's was
either drunk or was surely high on something. I
strongly suspect that the Rajhamsa bus was
bullock-powered not by regular inter-combustion
engine. ;o) When we stopped just outside Mandya for
breakfast, I was so relieved to find my feet finally
back on ground that I hung around the canteen so long
that we almost missed the bus. But, how could the bus
leave without GNU(Head)'s I say ;o) 


On Campus
---------
On reaching SJCE campus I decided to chuck the idea of
a workshop and go placing cricket but the saner
members of our groups suggested that the pitch may
sustain potholes and deep bumps if I lugged my tonnage
around. Darn!.

We met the students from Linux Computer Club-SJCE,.
Sandesh, Osho and they gave us tour of the various
departments labs. We found a printout stating 'No
Closed Source' in big letters taped to the Electronics
Department Computer lab. ;oD I never saw a college
that had TFT monitors and latest computers in almost
all of its labs. SJCE seems to be a very progressive
college I ever seen.

(The photo's of the events will be posted shortly)

The Students
------------

The students of Linux Computer Club-SJCE had been
working for days to convince their faculties to keep
the labs open on sunday and allow them to install
gnu/Linux on the computers so that we could have a
hands-on workshop. Its an event which wouldn't have
been organized without the adamant efforts of these
guys. Thanks Guy, You Rock !!!!!!!!!!!


The Event
----------

We had to start the event quite late around 11:30 and
then we had few students who had come for the event.
The turnout was not great as it was a weekend. Thejesh
started the workshop with his talk on 'FOSS and
student projects', in absence of a good public address
system(the only problem we had) we had rely on the
reach of our vocal chords most of the time.  The good
side of this was it was more fun filled classroom talk
sort-of-event rather unlike the regular events.

Saravana Prabhu took off the Linux Destop Testing
Project(LDTP) workshop with talks on introducing
Software Testing and later a more technical talk on
the architecture of the project. I didn't have much
change to listen to the talk as I was constantly
running to the M-tech lab, trying to understand how
SuSe worked and how to debug the problems with LDTP
setup. After a few hic-up's the LCC-SJCE guys figured
out what the problem and fixed the problem only to
find that the labs had closed before we can move the
workshop to the lab for a hands-on session. Darn! 

Rama Krishna appeared out of nowhere to deliver us
from insanity and gave us a very entertaining talk on
Free Software projects, localization and opportunities
for students in the industry (and other topics I fail
to remember). His informal one-to-one kind of
entertaining talk with great slides (it had Bollywood
heros/heroines dressed like in the Hollywood movie
'The Matrix') and even a  pop quiz's that won few
guy's a Mozilla Project T-Shirts. It left us the
organizers the perpetual back-benchers shouting for
t-shirts too.

(Thejesh and me were cursing ourselves why didn't we
have Rama Krishna start the event with his talk. [He
was delivering another talk that day in NIE])

The day ended with LCC-SJCE guys planning how they
could work to build they club and few suggests were
discussed like having a website,having regular talks,
calling for volunteers and finally working on
projects. The day ended quite late at 3pm and everyone
was excited but no body seems to be either hungry or
ready to left the venue even after the auditorium was
locked. ;o) 

So, we all called it day and LCC-SJCE took us all
(except Rama Krishna who had another appointment) to
cool place for lunch and we had few more fun-filled
hour with myself playing the jester and easy target
for jokes. We left Mysore and sweet joy of breathing
pure oxygen filled air at 4pm.

Guy's let do it once more some other time, shall we ?

Cheers

--arky