[glug-t] Minutes Edited

Here is the edited version of Muthu's minutes. It was basically some typos, 
some reordering and correcting some inaccuracies in the description. The Linux 
device driver session has not been written yet!! Any takers?

-------------------- Minutes ----------------------------------------
GNUcleus, was organized by the GLUG-T to celebrate the 20th
anniversary of the GNU Project. The GNU Project was started by
RMS(Richard M. Stallman) on the 27th of September, 1983. 

GNUcleus was organized at SASTRA college on 27th of September 2003. 
The following is report of what happened on that Saturday. 

On that Saturday morning, we had all assembled at the TIFAC-CORE
conference hall in SASTRA, Thanjavur. The event consisted of guest
lectures from Mr. Sri Krishnan Chitoor & Mr. Bharathi. Both of them
were from Chennai. We also had a presentation on Linux device driver
programming, a quiz contest on Free Software by Vijay, a free software
presentation.

The event was scheduled to begin at 9:00am. But it was delayed partly
because Mr. Sri Krishnan our first speaker had not arrived yet and partly
because we were waiting for the crowd to arrive!! When Mr. Sri Krishnan
arrived at 10:00 am, there were around 35 of us, mostly from NITT and
SASTRA. Many of us went pale at that sight(of the poor crowd). Some
thought logistics had failed somewhere.  

Inaugural Address
----------------
Vijay went on to deliver his inaugural address. He first expressed
regret for the delay, but soon we were listening to the guru speak.  

"20 years ago in the dark ages of 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 GNU a Happy Birthday.

Being a senior person around Mr. Chitoor was asked to say a few
words. Mr. Chitoor Mr. Chitoor first talked about the utility of
GNU/Linux and shared his views that GNU/Linux was something more, than
just 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 for question
on everything they needed to know about GNU/Linux in the market.
    
[Missing LDD talk]
------------------

During the talk Mr. Bharathi had tip toed into the hall and had sat
quietly among the audience. We came to know that he was here only
after he called upon Vijay and introduced himself!!

By the end of the talk the conference hall was full! I guess most of
them were there just to see what we were up to!

Next we had a short tea break at around 11.00am. "HP" [Hewlett
Packkard] had sponsored the snacks & tea. 

Talk on Free software development tools
---------------------------------------
After the break, we had Mr. Chitoor 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 tools for the
porting code across many platforms with various versions of the
libraries. 

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

Releasing T-Shirts & Books & CDs
--------------------------------
Vijay released the new T-Shirt & the printed copy of the book "Free
Software, Free Society". 

We had printed GNU/Linux T-Shirts for the occasion. It had 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 printed copies of the book "Free Software, Free Society;
Collection of essays by Richard Stallman" to be printed, and
distributed during the event. Interested people could get the book
from Manik [manik_d5@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]. 

CDs of GNU/Linux distributions were burnt and sold. We had Mandrake
9.1, Debian GNU/Linux 3.0r0, and Red hat 9.0.  

Time for some 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 fill up/choose/match and the like. Questions were on
Debian GNU/Linux, free software authors & programs. There were some 20
teams writing this. After the prelims, Vijay discussed the answers to
the questions. Later Vijay shortlisted 4 people into the finals. 

I18N & L10N
-----------
Next to follow was Mr. Bharathi's presentation on "I18N & L10N". First
we needed demystification. I18N was Internationalization. L10N was
Localization. Mr Bharathi 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. 


Software Presentation
---------------------
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 walked away with the prizes [7CD pack of
Debian/GNU 3.0r0].

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. 

Quiz Finals
-----------
Finally we had what [aptly too] the Quiz Finals! This was a neat
event, with 5 rounds. The first round was on copyrights and patents,
the second was on history of free software, the third was about free
software hacker(a visual round), the fourth was technical questions
about the GNU/Linux system, and the final was an intra quiz where the
participants quized each other!. 

Muthu and Krishnan bagged the first prize, scoring double the points
than the runner up team. They were given a set of Debian CDs.
Ramasamy and Manik, the runner up team were a given a set of Mandrake
CDs. 

Time to say Thanks & Good Bye
-----------------------------
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
time to say good bye. 

We gLugges Lugged our way back home.

-- 
Free the Code,
Free the User.

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