foss

Contributing to FOSS is always giving back in the form of satisfaction, new friends, nice job with good pay, great community, knowledge, social responsibility and more.

Now, it starts to give Free College Education too.

Kumaran, is one of our ILUGC [ Indian Linux Users Group - Chennai ] Member.
We can say that one of the youngest members.
Yes. He is studying his +2.

He is a FOSS fan for years. He completed his RHCE few years back and spreading FOSS
in his school by teaching other students and staff.

He attends the LUG meets regularly and gave a talk on "Ubuntu 11.04 features".
He rolled out his own fedora fork as "KumOS".

He was invited to give a talk on Software Freedom Day celebrations to Jaya Engineering College, Chennai.
Impressed by his talk and activities, Jaya Engineering College Chairman offered him a free 4 year Engineering Education in the college.

Here, Raman, writes up to the list on this.

Happy news. ILUGC child(??) prodigy Kumaran (now a +2 student) delivered a lecture in the above celebration.

Impressed by his work, the Chairman of Jaya Engineering College Prof.Kanakaraj during his valedictory address, offered him a free seat - free for all the four years- if he chooses to join this college.

On behalf of ILUGC I wish to thank the Chairman, faculty and Jayafoss club for this offer.

http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/pipermail/ilugc/2011-September/067627.html

Kumaran's Reply:

First of all a big thank you... Yes FOSS is good... :-)

Actually my given topic for the speech at Jaya Engineering College was for creating a Fedora remix, but I couldn't do that because all the students were 1st years who didn't know anything about Linux.

So I proceeded to talk to them about the history of Free Software and why they should use GNU/Linux.

My thanks to the college chairman for offering me a seat..

But IMHO, the most important person for helping Jaya Engineering College is Kumaran Sir, the HOD of CSC dept.

So a big thanks to him too for helping to bring the college to this level.... :-)

http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/pipermail/ilugc/2011-September/067637.html

Wishes for the young FOSS contributor Kumaran.

Thanks for Jaya FOSS Club, HOD Kumaran sir and the Chairman.

Last Sunday, Jan 30, 2011 visited Pondicherry (Puduvai) for a seminar on Free Open Source Software at Ocean Academy, Puduvai.

It is a computer training center and arranging free seminars on various topic once in two months.
My friend Prasath, requested to give talk on FOSS there. I accepted for it and the day came.

Puduvai is 3 hr journey in bus from kanchipuram. Started early morning and reached there around 9.

The Ocean Academy is run by young, energetic professionals and they are much interested in providing quality training.

They arranged sessions as two batches, around 80 students each batch.

Showed them the slides here.
http://www.slideshare.net/tshrinivasan/presentations

It is a mixed crowd, as some students dont know anything about linux and some students were playing around with ubuntu in their laptop.

But, the history, GNU, GPL, Distro, FOSS concepts, ILUGC are new to all.
They all were much interested in knowing all these and raised a lot of questions.
I requested all of them to do their final projects by themself and in open source technologies.

The feedbacks were so interesting to read as all are interested to learn linux and ready to contribute for open source projects.

In the evening, discussed with prasath, prasanna venkadesh and prakash with some more students.
Suggested them to start a Linux Users Group in Puduvai.

The team is so energetic and they started it immediately.

Here is the blog: https://puduvailug.wordpress.com/

Stated a mailing list too: http://www.freelists.org/list/puduvailug

Join the mailing list and encourage their activities.

Hoping to see more activities and contributions from PuduvaiLUG.

Thanks for OCEAN Academy Team for providing such a nice opportunity.

Minutes of Meeting - Jan 8, 2011

The first meeting of the new year 2011 was on Jan 8, 2011
with 26 participants.

Kumaran, The youngest RHCE holder, started his presentation
on how he migrated his father's LAW office into FOSS.
He explained the issues he faced on changing the systems and people.

Here are the slides.
http://j.mp/foss-at-law-office

---

Senthil Kumar, explained his expereinces with Android Programing.
Then he moved to the open source project he is contributing.
"Keryx"  is a offline package downloader for ubuntu systems.
It is used to bring the packages with all dependencies to the non-internet
connected machines.

The project needs more volunteers to add more features like support for fedora,
arch, slackware, suse and other distros.

Join and contribute:
http://keryxproject.org/
https://launchpad.net/keryx

Slides are here:
http://j.mp/keryx-demo-at-ilugc

---

The Open Source Movie "Sintel" is displayed.
I (Shrinivasan) explained about Blender and the open movie projects.

Movie link:
www.sintel.org

---

2010 achievements:
I narrated on our achievements on 2010.

 
2337 members
8921 emails
2708 threads
69 zero reply queries
174 one day one app mails
111 tips
71 job posts
A new list for tamil
12 meetings
39 FOSS events in various colleges
30 FOSS Labs by Baskar Selvaraj
New website
New wiki
Project lists and Mentors for students
New IRC Channel
New Office Boy
Software Freedom Day celebrations
Meet with ILUGC Founder Prabhu
Stalls in OSI Days events
Most Active and Helpful LUG In India - by LFY

Slides:
http://j.mp/ilugc-at-2010

---

We discussed about the activities to do in the year 2011.
The participants gave many action items like more meetings, handsons and trainings.

Thanks for all the members and FOSS contributors.
Let us hope for more activities this year.

The snaps are here.
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=48359&id=133359730009404

ILUGC Monthly Meet (January 8 th):-
==============================

Time : Sat January 8 , 2010 (3.00 - 5.30 PM)

Venue: Classroom No 6,
Areo Space Engineering,
Near Gajendra Circle,
IIT Madras.

Link for the Map: http://bit.ly/iit-aero

1.
Topic : FOSS is the boss in Law Office - A Erode based Law Office
switches and stays with FOSS

Speaker: Kumaran R
Duration : 45 min

About the Speaker : (In his words)

I am Studying in Class XI at Bhavan's Rajaji Vidyashram, Chennai.

To start with, my interest in computers made me finish my MCP
(Microsoft Certified Professional) exam in SQL Server at the age of 10
years, making me one of the world's youngest MCPs. Within a short time
I was taken up by FOSS. As per my mentor's guidance I also made it to
RHCE (Redhat Certified Engineer) Certification at the age of 12. Its
five years since I am active with FOSS, admiring the joys of using it.
After coming to Chennai - I have also been attracted to ILUGC (Indian
Linux Users Group, Chennai) and now I am an active member, waiting for
the monthly meetings.

With a deep urge to promote FOSS - Wherever I go I make it a point
to talk, install and try to convert people to use FOSS. I think for a
beginner it's a good start for having converted 30 of my friends and
class-mates in my school and also my computer teacher to FOSS. I think
and hope to convert my school to FOSS as well. The Yi (Young Indians)
Net of Bhavan's gave me an opportunity to use FOSS (Drupal for
web-site designing and GIMP for Poster and Banner making). In the
Design for Change contest, in which our school was one of the top 20,
in the country, out of 900 schools, I designed the presentation with
Open Office.org. (One of the reasons for getting the top 20 is that
ours was the only school in the country that used open format i.e.
.odp for the presentation)

The Hindu wrote about me when I was in my 7th standard. There was
also an article about me in Linux For You in the July edition of the
year 2006.

My talk will be It is about how I opened the doors of FOSS in my
dad's office and led them away from Windows.

2.
FOSS Contributor of the Month:

Project: Keryx

Keryx is a free and open source tool for easily managing packages on offline
Debian based computers including support for Ubuntu and Linux Mint. It
provides an easy graphical interface to help install and upgrade software.
To know more, http://keryxproject.org/

Duration : 45 Mins

About the Speaker :

Senthil Kumar mostly known online as " webrsk ".
An open source enthusiastic and skilled in Web and Mobile technologies.
Developer of Keryx project and Ubuntu - Tour.

3.
Movie Time:

Movie: Sintel
A computer animated short film created with Blender and released under
a creative commons license. Official site, offering full quality free
downloads of the film.
Site: http://www.sintel.org
Duration : 15 min

4.
Topic : ILUGC at 2010
Speaker: T Shrinivasan
Duration : 15 min

A review about the activities and achievements of ILUGC in 2010.
and a discussion about the roadmap for 2011.

5.
General group discussions on any queries, events etc.
CDs/DVDs can be shared on prior request.

Announce this to all your friends, social network sites etc.
All are welcome. Entry Free.

The Last meeting of this year is so interesting with a mix of talks on Cloud Computing, Language Computing and GUI programming.

Yogesh explored the basics of Cloud Computing.

He explained about the following.

• What is cloud?
• Why we need it?
• Resource As A Service
• Public, Private, hybrid clouds
• Scalability
• Elasticity
• Bursting
• How Time Magazine spent only 240$ instead of 1/2 million dollars using clouds?
• HybridFox - Firefox Addon for cloud
• Eucalyptus -  The Open Source Cloud
• OpenStack - Another Open Source Cloud

The slides are available here
http://www.slideshare.net/ilugc/floss-cloud

----
FOSS Contributor of the Month, Santhosh Thottingal
came up with talk on the "Project Silpa"

Silpa, is a web framework and library written in Python
for Language Processing in Indian Languages.
It has 78 modules.
Provides JSON Based RPC services.
Can be connected with any application.

He executed the local demo and explored the following

• The web interface
• The Modules for python
• Guessing the typed Language
• Encoding Converter
• Approximate Search
• Syllabalize
• Indic Soundex
• Webfonts
• Comparing text documents for similarities

You can test yourself at the project site: http://smc.org.in/silpa/

Project Silpa is contributing to MediaWiki and wikipedia
to convert the articles in Indian languages to PDF and to publish wikibooks.

The Indic Language Processing has to improve a lot and it needs your contributions.
Please contact Santhosh, If you wish to work on this project.
http://thottingal.in/blog/about/

----

Karthikeyan explained about the GUI Programming in C

• The history of GTK
• GTK+
• Binding for other languages like python,ruby,php etc
• The GTK+ stack
• The GTK+ Widget Hierarchy
• Hello world Programs - Live demo
• Demo for Window
• Demo for PopUp
• Demo for Table
• Demo for expander
• Links to Read

Slides are here
http://www.slideshare.net/ilugc/basics-of-gtkilugc

----

In the QA Session, Raghavan from SRM expressed his wish on doing a project in linux kernel
and requested for mentorship.

Sudharsan and others explained the process of getting into kernel programming and contributing.

The ideas are here.

• Decide the finite task to do
• look in the bugtracker of kernel.org
• look for the feature requests
• find the mentors in irc
• read the presentation of Shakthi Kannan
• http://www.shakthimaan.com/downloads/glv/presentations/i-want-2-do-proje...
• Fix the driver for Fingerprint reader in laptops
• Be patient and keep on learning
• Start working rather then searching for mentors
• Use Internet to learn the things yourself

The sessions were interactive and interesting.

We had 40 participants from Jaya Engg College, SRM University, Bharath Engg College, Sree Sastha Engg College, Velammal, MNMJ Engg College, MIT and Industries like Indian Railways, CollabNet, SlashProg, SS4U, CDAC, Serendio, Real Image, Corent Tech, Wipro, CSS Corp, TNQ, Aspire Solutions.

Thanks for making the last meet of the year as more interesting.

Some snaps are here.

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=44572&id=133359730009404

ILUGC Monthly Meet (December 11 th):-
==============================

Time : Sat December 11 , 2010 (3.00 - 5.30 PM)

Venue: Classroom No 6,
Areo Space Engineering,
Near Gajendra Circle,
IIT Madras.

Link for the Map: http://bit.ly/iit-aero

1.
Topic: Cloud Computing using FOSS
Speaker: Yogesh
Duration : 45 min

Yogesh is one of the authors of the Book "Eucalyptus Beginners Guide Uec"
He shares his experiences and experiments in implementing a Cloud Computing Infrastructure in CSS Corporation.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/42134189/Book-Eucalyptus-Beginners-Guide-Uec-E...
http://cssoss.wordpress.com/

2. FOSS Contributor of the Month:

Project - Introduction to Silpa

Silpa, Swathanthra Indian Language Processing Applications is a web
platform to host the free(dom) software language processing
applications easily. It is a web framework and a set of applications
for processing Indian Languages in many ways. Or in other words, it is
a platform for porting existing and upcoming language processing
applications to the web. Silpa can also be used as a python library or
as a webservice from other applications.
To know more, http://silpa.smc.org.in/

http://silpa.smc.org.in/

Contributor : Santhosh Thottingal
Duration : 45 hr

Santhosh is contributing to Linguistic Projects like Silpa, dhvani.
He explains about the Silpa Projects and his contributions.

3.
Basic GUI designing using GTK+ with 'C'

http://zetcode.com/tutorials/gtktutorial/

Speaker : Karthick

Karthik is from CDAC, working on BOSS Linux Development.
He explores the GUI Desktop application development in C

Duration : 45 min

4.
General group discussions on any queries, events etc.
CDs/DVDs can be shared on prior request.

Announce this to all your friends, social network sites etc.
All are welcome. Entry Free.

Last Friday, Dec 3, We had a workshop on Gnu/Linux at
SRK Engineering College, Poonamalee, Chennai.

We had around 30 participants from vatious colleges and organizations.
College provided the LAB with redhat machines for the practice.

Arun Eapen, from RedHat
http://people.redhat.com/aeapen/
gave intro about the FOSS History and its growth.
Then, he moved to explained the concepts of "Visualization".

Using the "virt-manager" in the computers, he demonstrated on how to install another OS inside a host.
Participants explored the "virt-manager" and the hands on session was interesting to all of them.

I showed a demo of ubuntu desktop, multimedia, office applications, and other alternate applications.

Raman trained on the shell commands and linux file system architecture.
Then, he moved on "Perl" Training.
It was so interesting to see the participants learning perl with much interest.
Myself and Dhilip were helping them to practise.

Due to less time, I missed the handson training on Python.
Just showed a slideshow about Python.
http://www.slideshare.net/arulalan/python-an-intro

Ended with the talk on "Indian Linux Users Group, Chennai" [ http://ilugc.in ]

The feedback from the audience is delightful for all.
they want more workshops like this.
Let us plan and do more.

Thanks for Safia, Sathya Sai, Munisamy, Muthu and other college staff for the
excellent hosting, food, travel, lab arrangements and the efforts.

The interest on FOSS shown by the college management is so great.
Hoping for more sessions in the college.

Thanks for Arun Eapen, Raman and Dhilip for making this event a good start for the upcoming events.

Some snaps are here.
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=44078&id=133359730009404

There are lakhs of Computer Students coming out of colleges every year.
Most students buy projects or they do the same old railway
registration/library management etc.

On the other side, there are tons of open source projects waiting for contribution.
Let us encourage students to contribute to FOSS projects.

Please add here, if you need any open source project for your own need
or refer some open source project that need contribution with links.

http://wiki.ilugc.in/index.php?title=Projects_List

For any student, to do some project in the open source world, he/she
needs to learn some basic things like

Linux Installation
Connecting with internet
Joining Mailing lists
Creating filters for mailing lists
Mailing list guidelines
IRC tools and Joining in Channels
Choosing a suitable Project
Learning the language like c,c++,Python,Perl,Ruby,LAMP,
Web,Java technologies
Revision Control Systems like svn, git
Documenting the code

and more.

Though they can learn by themself, if we mentor them in the initial
stages of the FOSS contributions,
Their progress will be quicker and they will get more interest to contribute.

Please add your details here.
http://wiki.ilugc.in/index.php?title=Projects_Mentors

We can help students from get in the project and till they start
discussing with main stream project developers.

we can mentor them by online media like mail,chat,irc etc.

We can share these links to the college students so that they can choose
their projects and mentors and start contributing.

To post to this list, send your email to:
ilugc.tamil@ae.iitm.ac.in

Join the mailing list at:
http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc.tamil

We had a nice meeting in IITM.

Arulalan gave his talk on "Introduction to Latex".
He explained on how he prepared his College Project Report using Latex.

Raji could not attend the meeting.
Postponed the Django talk to next month meet.

Balakrishnan from kanchilug explained how they
brought the "Ubuntu manual in Tamil"

Discussed about the following.

1. Summer Workshop

1.1 Should create a web based form in ilugc.in
for talk registration and participant registration.

It will be easier to fill the details than wiki.

1.2 Need Place for conducting Workshops.

IITM
NRC-FOSS
LinuxPert Systems
Lynus Academy
Jaya Engg College
Anna University
Science Center, kotturpuram

SRM University - vadapalani
Easwari Engg College, Porur
A.M.Jain college, Meenanbakkam
Loyola College

Are some nice places for workshops.
Need volunteers to contact these to organise workshop there.

Please collaborate with us if you have any contacts with above mentioned
organizations or any other place in chennai for conducting
Workshops, Events, LDD,SFDs, Foss Conferences etc.

1.3 Until we get a place for summer workshop, we postponed all the workshops.
We need to get a place as soon as possible.

2. Monthly Meetings

2.1 Need to get more physical people in the monthly meetings.
2.2 Meetings should be announced at least 1 week before. No Last
minute announcements
2.3 Minimum three topics. Should include a student talk, for
beginners, for experts.
2.4 There may a series of talk every month.
ex : session on Linux administration that covers LPI/RHCE syllabus
/ PHP/ Perl/ Python etc

2.5 Should Invite the speakers individually
2.6 Announce the upcoming/planned talks in wiki or site
2.7 how to bring more people to monthly meets? - Need more ideas

3. FossConf 2010

3.1 Need a place. Any college should organize the event.
Jaya engg is interested. SSN also would be interested.
3.2 Should contact Arts & Science colleges also.
3.3 We can have the event on August-September month for 2 days
3.4 Need Physical Volunteers
3.5 If not possible in chennai, then we can contact south india
colleges like mepco.

4 Workshop on "Doing Business with FOSS"

4.1 I am discussing with some entrepreneurs, who are doing business with FOSS.
They agreed to give talk on such a workshop.
4.2 Birla Planetarium will be nice place for such a workshop.
Will contact them and announce it soon.

5 Adopting Students

5.1 Should adopt a college or group of students and train them continuously
5.2 Have to conduct series of sessions on various topics for them
5.3 We can train them for GSoc like competitions
5.4 Have to make them to contribute to FOSS

Participants : 16

Some snaps are here:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=23279&id=133359730009404&ref=pb