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. -------------------------------------------