On 12/12/06, Roshan wrote:

Hello List,

I haven't been able to prepare the write up of the meet for now, due to the problems expressed earlier. I hope to solve that problem as soon as possible and post the write up on the wiki.

Well, if you don't mind, let the temporary member chip in!

Since I am here for the holidays, I wanted to visit HBCSE for the LUG meet on Sunday, December 10th. I realized that I would be late, and rushed to the venue and reached there at 4:15 PM (15 mins past the scheduled start) only to realize that the speakers themselves hadn't made it to the venue yet! Looks like all LUG meets begin late. But really, you must consider an alternate location; though HBCSE is excellent on all other counts, the location is a big minus! Anyway, regular attendees would know best.

Well, finally, Kartik Mistry began his talk at about 4:40 PM, talking about the basics of making Debian packages. He introduced the "deb" format, and mentioned it's merits and demerits vs. RPM etc., and walked us through a couple of examples on how to create debs for various packages. He briefly mentioned how to use the various tools assisting the Debian package maintainer, such as debhelper and devscripts, and also went through a full-fledged example of "Debianizing" a package from scratch. Finally, he also talked about the procedure for getting your packages into Debian GNU/Linux and Ubuntu, and emphasized that for acceptance, quality of the package was very important. He also mentioned that after one manages to get some experience in packaging and contributes to Debian, he/she can apply to become a Debian developer, but the time taken for acceptance may span upto years.

This was followed by the tea break. Post tea, Krishnakant Mane introduced screenreaders and how computing could be enabled for the visually impaired. Then, there were many hiccups in getting Orca to work on the computer which which was being used (Anurag's?). After frantic attempts to get things working, a switch of computer set things right. Krishnakant described the various features built into Orca which enabled persons to know with ease the description of each Window, widget and it's property, state etc. He showed us how the way the computer spoke out description helped him understand what Window he was in, and what actions he needed to take. He also showed us an example of a text editor, where he could customize the way what he spoke was echoed out by him; it can be word by word, or letter by letter, so that mistakes could be corrected then and there. He wound up his talk mentioning that they had plans of getting these features in Indian languages as well, citing that the lack of ISCII compliant fonts was the stumbling block in quickly finishing that task.

I guess the above is to the best of my understanding, please make corrections/additions wherever necessary. Thanks for the great talks!

Kumar