The ESKAY Factor: pages from an open book

It was Software Freedom Day Celebrations at NIT Trichy. And how better could the day have been!! For the first time, Sun Club of NIT Trichy and GLUG-T, The Linux User Group joined hands to conduct the event. We had organized a workshop on cloud computing and Linux/Opensolaris Install Festival.

The way we publicized the event requires a special mention. The hall was confirmed only on the penultimate day, and so we could not put up posters earlier. I designed a poster in a hurry and asked my friends to put them up at strategic places inside the college. And then we sent an SMS to more than 200 students - to all those who had attended our earlier workshops. I had asked the students to register by sending a reply to my number, providing their names and roll numbers, just to have an approximate idea about how many students might be attending the event. This proved to be really effective, and I received about 40 replies in the next two hours. We had a participation of more than 60 students, with participants from B. Tech, M. Tech and CA branches. The hall was nearly full. More importantly, it was full of energy and enthusiasm.

I had to do a night-out to prepare the slides and learn as much as I could about Cloud Computing. And in the end, the presentation came out well, even though most of the information was taken from various sites, videos and other sources.

We asked the students to register at the registration desk and gave them OpenSolaris CD's, data sheets and Linux Mint CD's. We then went ahead with discussion on Cloud Computing. I talked about various concepts related to cloud computing. Aswin also chipped in a few important points in between. We also discussed about virtualization and Project Kenai. We kept the students busy and interested by occasionally asking questions and giving away gifts to those who answered.

After the discussion, we went ahead with Linux / Opensolaris Install Fest where we provided installation advice. We also provided the participants VirtualBox installation files, for those who were interested to try out the operating systems but did not want to really install on the hard disk. Special Thanks to Jithin and his GLUG-T team for guiding the students regarding the Linux Installation. Some students had various problems with their Linux/opensolaris installations. A few of them we solved on the spot, whereas the others, we had promised to look into and inform the solutions as soon as possible.

And finally, the Sun Club of NITT is formed with 20 enthusiastic students interested in learning and developing open source technologies. The club has been formed with the support of Sun Microsystems. I am presiding over the club as President with Aswin assisting me as Vice President. Prof. N. Ramasubramanian, HOD, Dept. Of CSE is the Faculty Advisor.

The Club Logo was designed by Sharadh. It has an ‘O’ in green and an ‘S’ in black. They represent ‘Open Source’. The empty block in the centre also denotes that it is really open, for the community to explore, innovate and develop.

Students were inducted into the club based on a written test. The question paper was set by me and Aswin. It had four sections – aptitude, basic computers, algorithms and java. Most questions were picked from good sources including CAT papers, SCJP sample papers, etc. The test duration was 90 minutes.

The inductions went on very well. Room CSE301 was arranged to conduct the test. 75 students registered for the written test –a very good number considering the fact that the club is a newly formed one.

And then came the huge task of paper evaluation. I learnt a lot of new ideas while evaluating the papers. Innovative ideas and ingenious solutions to questions which I had previously considered to be having only a single approach to a solution. The marks were tabulated and 18 students were selected.

The first formal meeting was held. The students were divided into 5 teams:

• Core Java
• Java ME
• Netbeans and MySQL
• Opensolaris
• Web designing

Each team is now working on a separate project apart from assisting during workshops and other events.

It is great to see a new club emerging in NIT Trichy. A community of members interested in learning and developing open source technologies…

“Human knowledge belongs to the world”