[glug-t] GNUCleus 2003: insider report.

GNucleus's 2003:

GNUcleus 2003 ,was organized to celebrate the 20th anniversary of founding 
the "Project GNU".
Project GNU was started by RMS[Richard M Stallman] on the 27th of September ,20 
years ago.

GNUcleus was organized by the GNU/Linux User Group Trichy, at the SASTRA 
college on 27th of 
September.The following is report of what happened on that Saturday and how.

On that Saturday morning, of 27th September we had all assembled at the TIFAC-
CORE conference
hall in SASTRA,Thanjavur to celebrate the 20 years of freedom that Project GNU 
has come to 
symbolize.There were two guest lectures from Mr.Srikishnan Chitoor & Mr. 
Bharathi ,both of them
who had come all the way from chennai.A quiz competition was planned & 
conducted by Mr.Vijay.
We also had a software presentation by Arun Ponniah,a student from Thiagarajar 
College,Madurai.

The show began at sometime around 10.00am.Meeting was thin.Many of us went pale 
at that sight.
Some thought logistics had failed somewhere.

Introduction & Welcome Address

Vijay invited the chief guest Mr. Chitoor to the dias and as Mr. Bharati 
couldn't arrive earlier
we had to start the proceedings.Vijay went on to deliver his welcome 
address.Vijay expressed that 
he was sad, to see not many people come to this event.But soon we were 
listening to the guru speak.

"20 years ago in the long dark ages there was slavery.." began vijay and 
extolled the many 
virtues of project GNU and explained why it was very important.he welcomed the 
guests and 
the audience.Promising a very entertaining day, vijay concluded by wishing all 
a happy b'day 
to GNU.

Next Mr.Chitoor spoke.He was unprepared for giving the keynote address,as he 
himself said 
during the course of the same.Mr. Chitoor first talked about the utility of 
GNU/Linux and
shared his views that GNU/Linux was something more of academic curiosity.he 
also said that
from a business point of view only costs matter, and philosophy was 
secondary.Not many were
pleased by this I guess.Then he had asked the audience to ask him queries and 
questions on
everything they needed to know about GNU/Linux in the market.
    
Next we had a short tea break at around 11.00am."HP" [Hewlett Packkard] had 
sponsored the 
snacks & tea.

After the break, we had Mr. Shot talk on CVS,AutoConf & AutoMake
He used tools & tutorials from the INTERNET to guide us through the CVS methods 
practiced in 
their organization.We were shown a simulated development environment & how 
people could 
work in open source projects with "check-in" , "check-out" concepts.The demo 
was an interactive,
step-by-step hand guiding one for us all.Autoconf & Automake were quicker I 
felt.They were explained
to be tool for the porting code across many platforms with various versions of 
the libraries.

At the end of his talk Vijaykumar presented Mr.Chitoor with a memento.Next was 
the releasing of
books and T-shirts,with Quiz preliminary round.

Releasing T-Shirts & Books & Cd's

VijayKumar released the new T-Shirt & the printed copy of the book "Free 
Software & Free Society"
brought by out group.

We had made GNU/Linux T-Shirts with a GNU head in front and a relaxing GNU at 
the back,with the 
bold words "celebrating 20 years of freedom" below the picture on the back.A 
neat white colored
T-shirt, you would say.Thanks to Manik & Vijay for the design-to-conception.T-
shirts are still
available.

We had ordered for copies of the book "Free Software,Free Society; a collection 
of essays by RMS"
to be printer, and distributed them to the interested.Interested people could 
get the book from
Manik [manik_d5@xxxxxxxxxxxxx].

Cd's of  GNU/Linux distributions were burned and sold.
We had Mandrake 9.1 ,Debian GNU/Linux,and Red hat 9.0.

FUN:
The quiz prelims was scheduled just before lunch-break, following the 
Lecture.But as we were already 
late we decided to break up & meet after the luncheon.

Lunch break details ? well they were pretty edible things in the only 
ramshackle eateries !exotic.
May be we could describe a lunch ,if we ever had it with RMS ;-)

Soon after the break we had the prelims of the quiz.
It was a written round.We had to write/fill up/choose/match/ the proper 
answers.Question on 
Debian GNU/Linux , free software "authors & programs".There were some 20 teams 
writing this.
Later vijay shortlisted 4 people into the finals.

Next to follow was Mr.Bharathi's presentation on "I18N & L10N".
First we needed demystification.I18N was Internationalization.L10N was 
Localization.
Mr Barathi was a fluent mix of english when it demanded and a casual flow of 
Tamil
for the talk.
        First he explained about the encoding used in the storage transmission 
of 
data in various languages.Then the mechanisms wherein the keyboard is used to 
input
and how it finally comes up onto the screen as an image.Then moving on to the 
concept
of I18N he said how effectively we could use locales and support the several 
languages 
at once.
         Later  a pragmatic example ,he showed us how the characters in Tamil 
like 
"ko" ,and "Na" would be represented as glyphs on the screen.He talked of the 
difficulty
in coding the xinput manager that takes care of keys/pointer .Also he showed us 
how to 
program in C for foreign languages using the gettext function in C.Also the 
various 
intricacies in handling Arabic [R->L language],Tamil [Multi glyph] languages 
were explained.

With a slide show presentation of the various softwares created in the TENET 
group IITM
for multilingual applications from Ind Linux project was also showcased.The 
talk was 
applauded well and Mr.Balaji presented a memento to Mr.Bharathi.

Next we had the software presentation by Mr.Arun Ponniah from TEC,Madurai.He 
had made a software 
called Ginterface.It was a chat program that used TCP/IP sockets & allowed 
someone to communicate.
The key points were the nice GUI,clean code[GPL'ed] and it was already widely 
used in his CSE department.
The project is to be featured in a Linux magazine,he said.Adding that his 
friend would also make a GTK 
port for windows also.Its interesting to note that Mr.Arun belongs to the 
Madurai GLUG.He was the only
competitor & walked away with the prizes [7pack Debian V 3.0  R 0]

Mr.Chitoor took us through a tour of his company's flagship product "Rain Mail" 
intranet server.
He explained many features and nifty points about the product.

Finally we had what [aptly too] the Quiz Finals!
This was a neat event, with 5 rounds and lots of questions on free 
software,free software history,
project GNU,compilers ,free software hackers and personalities,Patents and 
Copyrights.
Finally the winners were spotted & Cd's awarded.

The Vote of Thanks was proposed by Mr.Deepak Barua who co-ordinated the event 
in SASTRA,and helped the guests
all of the time.Now it was good bye.

We gLugges  Lugged our way back home.
Cheers
Muthu.


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