I'm sorry, there are just too many points to quote every where, I can
only place topic headers
Sentilraja's Experience
-----------------------
I think Sentilraja's approach is fully valid. It takes a lot of will to
get somebody doing something. True, the guy wasn't overly enthusiastic
at first, but honestly, if he were enthusiastic, he'd have started on it
already. Bringing in something that he'd *like* to do with it was a
great way IMHO.
?
I also find that the approach of personally guiding somebody through the
ropes is the norm for introducing people to Linux. It's very troublesome
to go install Linux on my classmates computers, but even harder is to
keep with them through getting used to things on the Linux side. Lately
I've realized that I've gotten very esoteric with my computing habits; I
use Vim nearly exclusively, a not so well known distro, ArchLinux, I
drop to the shell for nearly everything. I found that all of this puts
off a lot of my friends who are overwhelmed by the black terminals and
me typing so much.
My part-solution was to install Compiz-Fusion on a few of their
computers (always gets them), install their codecs (yes, this isn't
Free, but I can't do anything about mp3's dominance in the music
market), before hand so they can at least make do. I just hope that as
they use it, they'll gradually come to understand the concepts of
Freedom. Some people like the change, some people don't.
?Jobs/Placements
----------------
About jobs and placements, I agree that getting a FOSS-related job is
hard via the campus placements, and generally happens only if you've
already been involved, and approach an existing company (igalia, novell,
Red Hat, OpenedHand). For this to happen, awareness of FOSS companies
has to increase.
I've met a very interesting set of people in the GSoC community, many of
which weren't so much into FOSS before the project (but now are
genuinely interested). I credit this to Google's extremely open approach
to the project. You're forced to learn how to learn from the internet,
man pages, etc. (which is not something most college students do). This
is something that is a prerequisite *and* motivator for open source.
Personally, I became involved with FOSS because I could learnt how to do
it on my own, without any investment in books/courses.
I would also like to mention a friend who is working doing an intern in
a embedded devices company (using Linux as their OS). She was introduced
by a senior friend who started the company, and is now porting code onto
the ARM architecture. She's shown a *lot* of enthusiasm to learn more
about linux and I felt really happy to see that. (Moral: Friends are
great to pull into open source).
I've found Shakthi Kannan's presentations on the topics very good, and I
hope he comes to IIT to give such a presentation some time :-P. One good
thing that IIT has, is that several Deparment Computing Facilites (DCF)
run entirely on Linux. I managed to convert someone by SSH-ing into his
deparment account and helping him upload/retrieve his assignment :-P.
Also, being in the CS department, we use gcc as the offical compiler, a
further impetus to use Linux. If an institute uses these kind of tools,
the students will try and migrate. Few students will put themselves
through the trouble of learning how to use gcc, etc. when they need to
submit Borland TurboC++ compatible code (which is notorious for it's
lack of standards compliance).
Also, a lot of people are put off by the lack of GUI tools, which in
fact isn't so lacking. Pranesh Srinivasan, a second year, told me that
most of the students use GEdit to write their projects! Suggesting
Anjuta as and IDE would definitely help people. Now a days, there is
almost always a gui for everything. Most of us may not use them, but it
would certainly help if we kept them in mind when advising friends (as I
oft fail to do).
Remembering Tags, etc.
----------------------
As for remembering tags, etc. I still look up w3c for all the smallest
things, and grep the Gtk documentation to clarify function call
parameters. And I've been doing both extremely enthusiastically for the
past 2 months nearly non-stop. Some people can remember things well,
others, well, remember how to find them out...
Cheers!
--
Arun Tejasvi Chaganty (vimzard)
GNOME GSoC Student
Blog: http://arunchaganty.wordpress.com
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