I conducted an “Introduction to FLOSS” workshop today, Monday, July 31, 2006 at MNM Jain Engineering College, Thorappakkam, Tamil Nadu, India.

I would like to thank Prashant Mohan (ILUGC), Vidhya Shankar (student), Assitant Professor Muthu Sundar (Assistant Professor, CSE) for taking the initiative.

I discussed career opporunities with FLOSS, introduced the GNU/Linux desktop, and played the movie, “The Revolution OS”.

IBM has started doing some good projects using GNU/Linux with the college.

Prof. Muthu Sundar is already in touch with NRCFOSS, and is planning to get more students to work on FLOSS projects with them.

The photos taken during the “Introduction to FLOSS” workshop held today, Saturday, July 22, 2006 at Jaya Engineering College, Thiruninravur, Tamil Nadu, India can be viewed from my /gallery.

It was an introductory session with talks on career opportunities with FLOSS, Free/Libre Open Source Software, and the GNU/Linux desktop.

I would like to thank Prof. Kumaran, HOD, CSD for taking the initiative and following it up. Thanks also to Harish for his correspondence and help.

There were about 200 students during the workshop, and they are very eager to learn using FLOSS. They already have a FLOSS lab setup. The ILUGC mailing list has been provided to them for technical support.

They are planning for an LDD for August 18, 19, 2006 (Friday, Saturday) - will be confirmed by them. It will be open to the public and will be primarily useful to the schools, colleges in and around Thiruninravur, and Chennai.

To those new colleges/schools who haven’t had a taste of FLOSS, I shall provide them with the contact of NRCFOSS, so they can take it further - with support from ILUGC too.

I gave an introductory session on Quilt on Saturday, April 22, 2006 at 1500 IST at CSD, #320, IIT, Madras.

Quilt is a tool to manage patches in project code development/documentation. The tutorial session was filled with illustrative examples on how to use quilt. The tutorial and the code samples that I had written are released under the GNU Free Documentation License.

Thanks to Ashok Raj (Intel), Thomas Petazzoni (Enix), and Jordan (AMD) for their feedback regarding the tutorial.

The photos (more than 120) taken during the two-day FOSS Exhibit held on March 25-26, 2006 organized by ILUGC, and NRC-FOSS at Arunai Engineering College, Thiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu are available in my /gallery.

I would like to thank the management, faculty of Arunai Engineering College (AEC) for their wonderful support. My hearty congratulations to the students for their valiant efforts in this event.

Special thanks to our fellow ILUGC and NRC-FOSS folks, and Dr. Srinivasan for taking the initiative. We had a very good time :)

A brief summary of the events and the fun we had:

Day I : Saturday, March 25, 2006

Team I began on Saturday, March 25, 2006 morning by 0500 IST. I was picked up first, then Suman (Triplicane), Dr. Srinivasan (Saidapet), Aanjhan and Parthan (Kathibara junction), Raman and Bhaskar (Tambaram). Aanjhan came by bus from Bangalore to Chennai, the previous night, and joined Parthan in the morning.

We did break for breakfast. We got back in the Toyota Qualis after breakfast and were about to leave when we realized that Suman was not there. We found him in the hotel.

We arrived at around 0830 IST in the morning. After a formal inauguration, Raman began the day’s proceedings with introduction to FLOSS, followed by Fedora Core installation. Team 2a arrived and were introduced to the audience. They moved to the labs to train the students. After installation demo, I discussed about career opportunities with FLOSS. Meanwhile Team 2b, Asokan and Thyagurajan, had arrived and introduced themselves. Suman gave an introduction on Qt programming. We had lunch between 1300-1400.

Post-lunch session began with an excellent presentation by Asokan Pichai on shell scripting and the power of scripting. Thyagurajan gave a talk on GLAMP after Asokan’s talk. Tea break was at 1530 IST. Two folks from Sun Microsystems, Bangalore had come, Arindam and Moinak. So we had to give them some time for a session. They gave a demo of Opensolaris and wanted more developers for the same.

Aanjhan spoke on how students can contribute to FLOSS. At 1700 we moved to the labs to help the other teams who were training students. We finally left at 1900 to the hotel. When we reached the hotel, one of the students told us that we had left someone behind. Guess who? Suman. Nevertheless, he was dropped to the hotel.

We had good dinner, and in Room #203, Saravanan, Raman, Parthan and myself had good discussions about FLOSS and ILUGC activities. We hit the sack only at midnight.

Day II, Sunday, March 26, 2006

Many folks visited the temple in the morning, and then went to the college to help in the stalls. Preparations were in full-swing with students helping in setting up the stalls, putting up banners, etc. Team III arrived in the morning.

The auditorium session began around 1000. Audience were school students, college students, and the general public. I introduced them to FLOSS, showed the *nix desktop environment, software that they can use with GNU/Linux etc.

The chief guest, M. R. Rajagopalan, Director, C-DAC, Chennai inaugurated the stalls. They along with the college management and administration folks then came to the auditorium for a quick inauguration session. Lunch was at 1330. The stalls were bustling with activity.

We resumed sessions in the auditorium at 1500 and Moinak introduced folks on Bellenix and OpenSolaris. Arindam then began talking about core kernel hacking to newbies, and continued on and on and on till 1700, and most of them left for the stalls. I was happy they moved to the stalls as they were to close by 1700. We didn’t have time to play The.Code.linux or have a Q&A discussion session (interactive, like in day one).

There was a big thanks-giving at the end of the day to all volunteers, and we departed at 1800.

Overall, I was overwhelmed by the enthusiasm of the AEC students, and given a chance, I would go there again.

The photos taken during the “Introduction to FLOSS” workshop at SSN College of Engineering, SSN Nagar, Tamil Nadu, India, today, Saturday, March 18, 2006 are available in my /gallery.

Thanks to the Management, SSN College of Engineering, Dr. Aravindhan (HOD, CSD), Prof. Balasubramanian (Lecturer, CSD), and to students and faculty/staff of SSN College of Engineering. Thanks also to Naren who has been coordinating this event for the past three weeks.

Vijay Kumar began the day’s proceedings with an introduction to Free Software. I then conducted the “Careers with GNU/Linux” presentation. Joe Steeve handled installation of Fedora Core. We had lunch between 1130 and 1230 IST. Ashwin began the afternoon session with his talk on “Squid, GLAMP, ntop”. Vijay then gave an introduction to GUI programming with GTK. Sujith, from NRC-FOSS, followed with his presentation on Scilab and GNU Octave. I then gave a demo of “Multimedia on GNU/Linux” and played the the demo video of xgl/opengl.

The audience were from different departments, and we had good interactive sessions. SSN folks are very keen on *nix environments, and are interested in many follow-up sessions. Suggestions were provided to start a user group within campus so students can participate.

Thanks to Vijay Kumar, Joe Steeve, Naren, Ashwin, Sujith for their company and participation. I had a great time!

The final day of “Bharatham 2006” on Saturday March 12, 2006 at Federal Institute of Science and Technology, Angamaly, Kochi, Kerala was cancelled due to a fatal accident, the previous night, to students from a nearby college. After the cultural festival on Friday night, the students had left in their car at around 2230 IST. They didn’t have control of the car at one turning near a small bridge, skidded across, and drowned in the river. The doors were locked and had got jammed. Out of five students, only one managed to escape. A tragedy to all students, faculty, friends in and around Angamaly.

Since I had come all the way, they just wanted me to conduct an informal session to the faculty and few students who were there. I spoke on Free Software and GNU/Linux. As a mark of respect to the loss of life, I didn’t take any photographs.

I spent the remaining time with the students there, and got to know more about Free Software activities in Kerala, right from Calicut, to Palghat, Trichur, Angamaly, Kochin, Kollam, Thiruvananthapuram.

Pramode is the inspiration in Government Engineering College, Trichur and other places in Kerala.

Space Kerala promote Free Software and do good work in promoting the same to schools, colleges, NGOs throughout Kerala.

Thanks to Sumod (final year, ICE) for coordinating with me for the past three weeks, and for the hospitality offered.

We want to collaborate more with our folks in Kerala and will organize more workshops in future.

I would like to thank Kongu LUG, management, Prof. Jayapathi, HOD, CSE department, staff and students of Kongu Engineering College (KEC) for the opportunity to conduct a one-day “GNU Embedded/VLSI” workshop at Kongu Engineering College, Perundurai, Erode on Saturday, March 4, 2006.

The VHDL code examples and Embedded HOWTO presentations are available.

I spent about an hour and a half with the students in the morning in their RMS laboratory (0900 to 1030 IST). The morning session was on “Embedded GNU/Linux labs HOWTO” (1030 to 1230 IST). Lunch was between 1230 and 1400 IST. The afternoon session was on “Alliance VLSI CAD tools” (1400 to 1600 IST).

KEC have started an FM studio (90.4 MHz) for listeners in and around (10 km radius) Erode. So, they caught me by surprise and conducted an interview. The questions were on Free Software, higher education, GNU/Linux community work etc. They were using soundforge as suggested by the management. I had told them about Audacity and how I use it on GNU/Linux for sound recording/editing etc. I have asked for a copy of the same, if possible, so I can upload it. It should be aired on March 13, 2006, sometime between 1630 to 1930 IST in Erode.

Special thanks to Vijay Anand, final year, CSD for working with me for the past couple of weeks in coordinating the event.

The photos taken during the presentation can be viewed from my /gallery.

The code examples and presentation slides used during the GNU Embedded/VLSI workshop on Saturday, February 25, 2006 at Central Lecture Theater, IIT-M are available at Embedded HOWTO.

I would like to thank Dr. Nitin, EE, IIT-M for working with us for the past one month in planning this event, and for providing us with the needed support.

Thanks to Kumar Appaiah for coordinating the event. Thanks also to Aanjhan and Bharathi for their talks and presence.

The photos taken can be viewed from my /gallery.

I would like to thank the team of “Tuxedo 2005”, Sri Jayachamarajendra College of Engineering, Mysore, Karnataka, India for the opportunity and hospitality offered during the two-day workshop held between November 12-13, 2005.

Thanks to Joy, Chairman, IEEE-SJCE Student Branch for working with me for the past one month (answering all my queries :), and the student volunteers for taking good care of us, and doing the needful during the occasion. Special thanks to Dr. C. R. Venugopal (IITB), who has taken so much initiative, and continues to motivate SJCE students into FLOSS. Thanks to Aanjhan, Ramanraj and Bharathi for their talks and company.

SJCE, has Dr. C. R. Venugopal (CRV), Coordinator IIPC, Staff Advisor, IEEE, who has guided students in the past and continues to guide them with FLOSS. Under his guidance they have done projects on RTOS, minix and GNU/Linux.

HP, Bangalore selects students from SJCE to do their Free Software projects. This is only for final year students. As usual, I insisted working on Free Software projects during their course. CRV also works closely with Texas Instruments, Bangalore in getting projects for their students so they can get hands-on experience.

Bharathi began day one (Saturday) with a session on “GNU, FSF”. In the afternoon, Ramanraj spoke about “CALPP and AI”. The quiz prelims and finals were conducted the same day.

Aanjhan spoke about “Embedded GNU/Linux” on day two (Sunday). They had a “virtual treasure hunt” contest for students on Sunday. I spoke on “Careers with GNU/Linux” and “Free Software for Engineers” in the afternoon. We screened the movie Revolution OS in the evening.

We have decided to have more collaboration between Chennai and Mysore LUGS, and probably conduct lot of contests for students to make them do practical stuff and get hands-on experience. We can plan install fests, hack fests, coding contests etc.

The photos taken during Tuxedo 2005 can be viewed from my /gallery.

I would like to thank Prof. Raja Prabhu, Prof. Bhaskar, Krishnaswamy (EEE), Prasanna (EEE) from Crescent Engineering College, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India for the opportunity to conduct a GNU/Linux workshop for their IEEE Chapter on Saturday, October 22, 2005 at their college premises.

The workshop had two sessions. The Alliance VLSI CAD tools with GNU/Linux session was meant to get students started on VHDL, and to introduce them to Alliance VLSI CAD tools. The Embedded GNU/Linux Labs HOWTO presentation was on how to get started on setting up GNU/Linux labs for embedded, hardware and VLSI.

Few photos taken during the workshop are available in my /gallery.