FORMER GOA BOARD for SSC & HSSC Education chairman Raghuvir Vernekar was waiting for the meeting to get up seat, as was Animesh, Alwyn and Mario. Others walked in somewhere between the appointed hour of 3 pm, scheduled for the launch of a proposed TeX Users Group in Goa.
Normally-silent Alwyn Noronha was in full-bloom, explaining why he opted for TeX. "It's a way of creating documents that wil last over the years. Size of the documents is small. It's typesetting, not wordprocessing. You can get LateX to work with computers ranging from mainframes to Windows. Indexing and table-of-contents are very easy to create. You can even forward refer."
We discussed the ways of creating PDF books. With so much content floating around, perhaps this might be a good idea.
Prof Vernekar gave some ideas of how we could get in touch with Goa school principals (Goa Headmasters' Association) to introduce them to the idea of Free Software for education. One idea is to link up with the principals, teachers associations (AGSSTO, AGSSTA), and the higher secondary principal's forum. Any volunteers?
Rizaplaystation, which was lugged in earlier, was demonstrated with FreEDUC. FN demoed some of the Gcompris games his daughter enjoys. Animesh ran through some other programs on this CD (www.ofset.org).
This was followed by a discussion on the Goa government's approach towards GNU/Linux was discussed, as was whether have Goa's own 'base CD' would help. Albert Gouveia of NIO gave his inputs, as did educationist Dr Anil Seth and Bijon Shaha. Some pointed out that in view of the limited functionality of proprietorial software tools offered to students under the Cyberage scheme, a demand should be made for installing dual-boot systems on the PCs.
Mario@Alienwiz gave an interesting explanation of his plans to create a 'virtual Goa' community game, perhaps aptly titled 'Susegado' (a difficult word to translate, but reflecting the relaxed state of the Goan mind). More about this later.
Everyone adjourned for the customary tea-and-snacks at Navtara restaurant, leading to another session of informal discussions. Randall, a young student, was also present along with his friend from Don Bosco's IT college. Looking forward to seeing more young faces at the LUG. Let's take Free Software to your colleges too... Some plans: o St Xavier's Free Software talk and demo, possibly on 19.7 o Randall is checking out possibilities at Damodar's o Prof Bhat promised to follow up more IT-in-college initiatives