I conducted couple of sessions for the ECE, EEE and EIE department students of Jaya Engineering College, Thiruninravur, Tamil Nadu, today, Saturday, March 24, 2007.

I started off with an introduction to Free/Libre/Open Source Software, taught them examples of Alliance VLSI CAD tools, and embedded GNU/Linux HOWTO. I gave a demo of an embedded development kit. After the sessions, we had an informal discussion with the faculty of EEE, EIE.

After lunch, we had an informal discussion with few students in the FOSS lab about their final year project work. Most of them knew only about Java, as that was what was “prescribed” in the syllabus. But, I gave them an insight on the different domains that they could work on, and possibilities available in the Industry.

The FOSS lab is running Red Hat 9. The systems have 256 MB RAM, so, I asked them to upgrade to a recent distro ASAP. They also are in the process of moving to PHP, MySQL for their website.

Their servers have been obtained from our good friends at DeepRoot, so they can try to setup an internal portal (PHP, mysql) for intra-department communication.

The system administrator in the lab wanted few tips on networking with Red Hat. I showed him how to use scp to transfer files between two Red Hat systems. He was so happy! During summer holidays, Prof. Kumaran wants to do some FOSS camp for the staff. Should be fun, if you guys can help out, and if you are in town.

I would like to thank Prof. Kumaran for his continued support. Special thanks also to Harish for coordinating and organizing the event.