Snaps from SFD Celebrations

Sunday Sep 28, 2008

Software Freedom Day 2008

Thursday Sep 25, 2008

Software freedom day was all planned out in about 10 days time and I had designed and printed out posters from Sun. We had planned the following technical sessions for that day:

VirtualBox

LAMP/SAMP

GIMP

Games

We had online registrations and a huge number of students had registered with us. But the weather was not on our side and a record braking heavy rainfall took place on 19th and 20th September. We were also skeptical about the participation that we would get due to such a harsh weather. We finally managed a participation of about 85 students. Some of the participants had even come from neighbouring colleges and other departments of Panjab University. We had set up an on-the-spot registration desk, where the students who actually turned up registered themselves and collected a copy of the days itinerary along with handouts on the following:

OpenSolaris

VirtualBox

MySQL

Netbeans

Lustre

Glassfish

Sun Student Datasheet

LAMP/SAMP

Open Source Gaming

For the initial period their was a power failure owing to the heavy rainfall. But soon the power was restored and we started with out sessions. I took the initial session on Introduction and the students were introduced about the Spirit of Software Freedom Day, and why we celebrated it. The role Sun plays in the world of Free and Open Source. Also an introduction to OpenSolaris was given to the students where the interesting features of this operating system was explained to them.







This was followed by a session cum demonstration of VirtualBox by Ekansh Anand. He neatly explained the meaning of VirtualMachine and how it all works. Sumit Kalra helped him out in demonstrating the technology.



In the following LAMP/SAMP stack for web development was explained to the students. Varun Mitra started off with a brief description on the Internet Connectivity, basic techniques for web development including static pages and Web Servers. I completed the session explaining to the students about the apache configuration, php programming, MySQL database, phpMyadmin, Xampp installation package and finally the Netbeans 6.5 IDE for php development.



Anmol Batra gave the next session explaining students about GIMP and also demonstrated a few interesting manipulations that can be easily tackled by GIMP.



After this session, the students were served hot coffee and pakodas which was certainly enjoyable owing to a cold and wet weather.

The final session for the day was taken by Ayush Joshi. Ayush is an avid gamer and his presentation busted the myth that there are no Games on Linux/Solaris. His presentation was divided in to three parts. In the first part he showed how to play common Windows based games on Linux using Wine/Play-on-linux and inside VM like VirtualBox. In the next part various Open Source Games like Battle For Wesnoth, Bos Wars, Free Civ, Nexiuz, Open Arena, LinCity, Quake III etc. were demonstrated. The final part showed them how to get into open source games development taking Battle For Wesnoth and OpenCity as example. Karan Choudhary helped out Ayush to demonstrate all the games.







Throughout the day we had a busy Installation Desk. Vikas Ruhela was responsible for the installations, and probably he had been the busiest of all. Many students bought their laptops for their installation and plenty of them carried Pen-Drives to take the setup files. Also our Labs were open the entire day and even after the session in the evening. Ritesh Kushwaha and Karan Choudhary were helping out the students in the Lab.











Along with all the above mentioned names, I would also like to thank Rupak Banerjee for his all round contribution.

All in all Software Freedom Day was well celebrated in my college and it was really fun. Hope to organize such events regularly at my college.

Software Freedom Day Celebrations

Monday Sep 15, 2008

To visit team page: Click Here.

For more details and registration: http://opensource.uiet.co.in/sfd/

New term, delayed blogging...

Sunday Aug 31, 2008

My new term as the Sun Campus Ambassador began a couple of months ago, but due to unavoidable circumstances I could not get back to blogging. But now I am all set and ready to post new experiences.

I have already started well in this new sessions. I have a fresh and enthusiastic team working with me and the new batch of first year students are particularly interested in the technologies. This month 4 sessions have been conducted and each of the sessions have had a good participation. I have plenty of new events planned, watch out this section in the future.

I have my first set of sessional exams tomorrow and as usual I am unwilling to study. Digital Signal Processing and E-Commerce is obviously not as interesting as Solaris or Java or all the latest technologies in the industry.....

Firefox Download Day

Sunday Jun 01, 2008

A new mission for the Firefox Community: Set a Guinness Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours.

And considering it is such a wonderful browser, I am sure we all can help them out.

The official launch date for Firefox3 is not finalized yet, but it would soon be. But for the time being we can pledge to download the software on that day itself.