Hello all,

The Information Technology association, an association of students, faculty and staff of KReSIT had organised a two-day workshop on GNU/Linux on the 26th and 27th of October. The venue was the impressive KReSIT auditorium.

The publicity campaign was mainly concentrated inside the IIT campus. In the week before the workshop, posters had been sent to various colleges in Mumbai. The registrations which had been sluggish (and had got quite a few of us worried) picked up in the last 3 days. More than 100 participants had to be turned down.

After about 3 weeks of hectic preparations, the big day arrived. The start couldn't have been better. Dr. Nagarjuna gave a fantastic talk on Free Software and the history of GNU/Linux. This was followed by sessions on installation, GUI, command-line and shell programming and programming environment conducted by students at KReSIT. All the slides were created in latex and presented using the pdfscreen package ;-)

The entire workshop was recorded and transmitted live to remote centers of the Distance Education Programme being conducted at KReSIT. Enthusiatic people who had turned up on that day were allowed to sit in the local "remote" classroom at KReSIT and watch the proceedings.

At the end of the day, a 2 hour lab session was arranged for all the participants. (That's about 200 people - 2 per computer). Accounts for all the participants were created on a single machine (A Compaq ML 530 running Red Hat 7.3). Initially, there were logging-in delays as all the people started their sessions almost simultanueously. This smoothened out after a few minutes and the "exercises" began in earnest. Almost the entire student population of KReSIT had volunteered for the lab management (held at 6 different rooms in the KReSIT building).

The second day started with a superb talk on networking and security by Prof. Siva Kumar, head of the Compute Center at IIT Bombay. He showed live examples from the setup at the IIT firewalls. This was followed by various sessions on system adminstration, LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), mail, DNS etc.

After this an open QA session ensued where various doubts were cleared. The proceedings in the auditorium were concluded by an inspiring talk by Dr. D.B. Phatak, head of KReSIT. Day 2 lab sessions were held at the end of the day.

An important learning: We felt that it might have made more sense to organise a workshop only for beginners. (a seperate one for experienced people). Because, all thru the 2 days, questions on installations, partitioning, X server problems, Windows interoperability etc continued. It was a mistake on our part to attempt to teach such a broad spectrum - from initiation to services management in just 2 days.

Anyway, looking at the fantastic response we got (inspite of the moderately high fees), the Linux scene looks encouraging.

Website: http://www.it.iitb.ac.in/~ita/gnulinux Email: ita@it.iitb.ac.in

- Chetan