Linux Festival 2004
It was a Diwali that came too soon. The festive mood and spirit at LF
2004 was more dynamic than the energy levels on Diwali:) I wore my new
FSF-India T-Shirts, packed up my new crackers, err... distros, and
landed at Asan Memorial School to take part in the fire works. As I
walked into the auditorium, I was greeted by Bharati, who was busy
putting up the ILUGC banners. Raman and Bharati worked with the
volunteers, organizing and putting everything in its place, and soon
the stage was set for a dazzling show, inspite of the intermittent and
unpredictable power supply.
Volunteers took their positions around the hall, and started various
demos on installing and using various programs.
Hariram and Senthil showed Zha Linux, from where it is possible for
someone who knows _only_ Tamil to use OpenOffice, Mozilla and several
KDE applications. Those of us familiar with the manual Tamil
typewriter keyboard layout have been accomodated, and it provides for
exchange of email in Tamil. The visitors had the privilege of shaking
hands with the developers themselves that included Hari, Senthil and
Bharti, who have taken the lead in providing continuity for one of the
oldest ancient languages that is yet youthful and active.
Raman had a couple of machines loaded with games and educational free
software that attracted large crowds of kids and college
students. Many kids tried playing the games, and were soon hooked,
more anxious about their scores by now.
Senthil Kumar and his team were very excited about various distros and
the discussion there was exactly like how we discuss crakers on
Diwali, from the good old red [hat] fort, luxmi vedi [Slackware], to
the new ones that hit the market recently [Gentoo, Knoppix etc]. They
quickly fired up these various distros in succession from their
workstations, and I could hear the loud cheers two tables away!
Anand Saha and his team showed Samba installation, and gave indepth
information on configuring Gnu/Linux systems. Saha patiently and
elaborately answered to questions from the visitors, which I should
say was enlightening for me also, as I was almost next to him most of
the time. Praveen and Saravanan were there everywhere, fixing up
things.
The only mistake in LF2004 was probably me. The systems available for
the show were low, I volunteered to take to the show, an old PII that
I retired two years ago, which fortunately got a new lease of life
from the skilled hands of Manohar and Saravanan, the hardware
engineers around there. It was soon up and running but I had to
install SuSE 7.0 from scratch, that went on until lunch. Two guys
from a college in Sriperumbudur were interested in PHP and PostgreSQL,
for their project, and they kept me busy while my installation was
going on. Only after lunch, I could install PostgreSQL, and Raman
created a test table giving SQL commands and put my system to demo
use. This system was at runlevel 2 throught the show.
Sivasankar Chander was meanwhile on the stage, arranging the
multimedia projection system. Soon RedHat lit up the projector
screen, and Sivasankar Chander did a live Red Hat installation and
showed the audience the simple steps involved in installing and
running one of the most commonly used Gnu/Linux distributions.
Bharati joined Sivasankar to answer queries on installing Red Hat.
There was also another multimedia show at the end opposite to the
stage by one of our friends. Soft spoken Venki from Collabnet
explained about server tools to visitors. Sridhar showed Gentoo and
other distros. There were plenty of posters, including the ones by
Vijay, that explained terms like GPL and copyleft. The recent book by
RMS -"Free Software, Free Society", was available at the entrance for
people to pick and read. By lunch time, the visitors must have had a
lot of input about what free software is all about, and I hope that
the 300+/- who visited the Festival, could share our enthusiasm and
start using Gnu/Linux.
Lunch was a set of pipping hot puris and cold curd rice. After lunch,
the activites continued. By 5.00 PM Sivasankar screened the movie,
The Code, using zine. With that, the first day of LF2004, came to a
close.
What is a Diwali without sweets? I should say that I found every
volunteer at LF2004 sweeter than the sweetest gulab jamoon, jangri,
halwa or ladoo I had in my life:) It was a very pleasant day for me,
having met Raman and Bharati, the key duos behind the
event. Mr. Milind of Wisden CrickInfo spared 6 monitors for the show
which met an important need for the show. Sivasankar, Saha,
Saravanan, Manohar, Senthi, and every other volunteer, all joined
together making a fine impressive show. There were also several minor
debates in circles about giving a formal organisational shape to
ILUGC, so that more such events could be organised in the future in a
better way.
I hope that more feedback can come, covering the many things that I
might have missed writing here :)
