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