Hi guys,
Sending in the minutes of the meeting held on 13th July. I put in as much as I could remember, please fill in if I missed anything.
First thing to mention is the HUGE turnout for the meet ... the entire KReSIT classroom was filled with people, which means the attendance was roughly in the neighbourhood of 60. And on top of that, if you see faces like Philip, Trevor, Dinesh, Manish, and Terrence in the same meet, you /know/ its BIG!
The meeting started out with a session on KDE/Qt programming by Amish Munshi. He talked about the set of tools that go into building a KDE application, with a quick tour of the documentation. Overall impression was the simplicity with which one can build apps the KDE way.
After that, though not officially on the agenda, Trevor jumped in with a screeing of "The Code", featuring a lot of the prominent personalities from the FLOSS community. The movie is pretty interesting, and highly recommended for people who aim to convert techies into the FLOSS philosophy. The movie really gives a flavour of the community as a whole and how good software gets done in the Open Source way. An interesting part is where the movie highlights the difference between Open Source and Free Software through their prime advocates ESR and RMS respectively.
The next talk was Prof. Jitendra Shah, about the on the ongoing effort on localisation of GNU/Linux for India. He mentioned a website which intends to keep track of the translation efforts and a short introduction to how a non-techie can help in translation. http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~swapnil/indictrans/
Karunakar also demonstrated the IndLinux (Milan) CD based no a re-mastered Morphix CD. The CD has a number of partially completed Indian locales to use normal applications. Answering a doubt raised by Trevor, Karunakar explained that all the work being done in the localisation is already being merged into the mainstream repositories. This means that the new releases of most distros will have built-in Indian Locale support. Debian Sid (unstable) for example, already has Indian Locale support since it is based on bleeding edge package versions.
Finally there as a call for volunteers and planning help from SameerDS for a GNU/Linux workshop to be conducted in the IITB Distance Education Program. Such a workshop will be conducted in KReSIT premises, to be attended by participants in 5 different cities over the DEP telecom network. The popular suggestion was to hold this talk for PC Vendors, since they are the best medium to take GNU/Linux to bigger masses such as SOHO users and individuals. The workshop will primarily be a series of talks, to be held on Sunday, 24th of August.
Unfortunately, the topic for the venue of the next meet did not come up, which will have to be decided on the List now.
Sameer.