The LDD on Sunday was a very memorable event. Ms. Jansi introduced
ILUGC and IEEE to the gathering. Sivasankar Chander began the session
with introducing GNU/Linux to the audience, that was followed with my
talk on FSF and GNU. The technical presentations by Raja Subramaniam
and Shakthi Kannan were stunning. Raja Subramaniam gently introduced
programming in the morning, and took the EE students to the very
depths of programming by afternoon. Shakthi gave a broad overview of
many free software tools that could be used to design and test
circuits with superb illustrations. Shakthi, please post the link to
your presentation. Balachander and Bharathi did a live Fedora
installation. Knoppix 3.4 CD's were distributed to the students.
Bharathi also gave a demo on using Knoppix. Saravanan and his team
also gave demos.
IEEE honoured ILUGC, and each of its volunteers on stage with
artful plaques embossed as follows:
<quote>
IEEE GOLD MADRAS SECTION
LINUX WORKSHOP
on 7th November 2004 at IIT Campus, Chennai.
</quote>
IEEE also hosted a sumptuous lunch and tea for us. All the
arrangements for the demo were done with grace and taste. The
students were very enthusiastic about GNU/Linux and ILUGC. Many
wanted to join ILUGC to learn more. Bharathi elaborated on how to join
the mailing list and highlighted its policies. The Demo Day closed
[also opened!] with "The Code".
We also had the privilege of meeting the members of the Faculty at
IIT, who raised many interesting questions touching upon free
software, during the course of the event.
My presentation introducing FSF and GNU is available for download:
http://personal.vsnl.com/ramanraj/FSF_and_GNU.tar.gz
Though I used OO Impress for the talk, I have converted the file for
use with MagicPoint, an X11 based presentation tool. The presentation
file (FSF_and_GNU.mgp) is just text. MagicPoint allows presentation
files to be created quickly with a text editor, building with tag
directives for embedding graphics, grabbing command outputs into foils
for live displays during presentations etc.
Official home page of MagicPoint is: http://www.Mew.org/mgp/
This is far too brief, but I hope Siva, Raja, Shakthi & Bharathi
will elaborate :)
