I conducted a one-day Free(/Open Source) Software workshop for Department of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Hyderabad, Gachibowli, Hyderabad in association with IEEE Student Chapter, Hyderabad, on Saturday, October 27, 2007.

Students were mostly from the Masters’ programme. The forenoon sessions included technical discussions/presentations - system, embedded, device driver concepts; Linux device drivers; introduction to OpenMoko: build, development for OpenMoko; demo of Neo1973.

The afternoon sessions were non-technical discussions - i-want-2-do-project.tell-me-wat-2-do, mailing list guidelines, Free Software communication guidelines, and brainstorming sessions.

More than half of the faculty from the University have done their MS/PhDs abroad. The university and the faculty have the freedom to implement whatever they like, which is cool.

The labs use Fedora/Red Hat/SuSE distributions. They run their own mail+web servers, and use NFS. There are few professors who give assignments with Makefiles, gdb, Linux kernel compilation, but, they are just starting, and experimenting with these. It was announced that INR 20,000 will be alloted each year for Free/Open Source events.

If anyone is interested in working with this team, contact me offline, and I shall provide the contacts.

Thanks to Dr. Vineet, Prof. Anupama, Dr. Madhav Negi (IEEE), Dr. Atul Negi for their help, coordination in planning this workshop.

Few photos are available in my /gallery.

Feedback/criticisms/suggestions on the presentations welcome, as always.