It was 10th May , 7PM and the venue was the famous Jawahar Lal Nehru Circle , Jaipur. Nice place with so much of greenery and crowd. And that’s where we had scheduled our first pre-event build up meeting. I was not expecting much crowd but I was glad to see good amount of students from Jaipur Engineering College and Research Center (where the Event is planned).
We had the following people from the Linux User Group Jaipur:
- Anirudh Singh Shekhawat a.ka. Acedip
- Deependra Singh Shekhawat a.k.a linuxguru
- Himanshu a.k.a extreme-machines
- Jai Pandya a.k.a jaiZ
- Meghraj a.k.a meghraj
- Saras Tripati a.k.a TechnoBrat
Besides these we had the JECRC students which were quite interested in knowing about what exactly we are going to do during this event (FOSJAM).
jaiZ started the meeting with some basic introductory things like what is Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) , the ideology and then what GNU/Linux means. This was very much needed as the volunteer team should know what exactly the philosophy is behind the things we will be discussing during the event.
Their were few questions about GNU/Linux in general. Students were complaining that it was not so easy to use when compared to windows and other things. That’s when I took over with the proceedings and explained to them exactly what GNU/Linux is and whatever they might be thinking about Windows and other proprietary products is all wrong. I gave them some examples in the open source as well told them how people like me are earning their bread and butter because we use open source tools to find security vulnerabilities in Windows machine and consult those to the clients and wherever seem possible help them migrate their server side to Linux.
Meghraj from SKIT Jaipur , a B.Tech 3rd year student had this doubt regarding why is Linux more secured when the code is all open. I thought I had better answer his question but if someone likes to give an answer to the curious audience of this blog , please feel free to comment on this blog post.
Their were people saying that if installation of GNU/Linux is concerned then Windows 7 installation is much better and stream lined compared to GNU/Linux. I told them that how much that Windows 7 will cost if you purchase it as well as how inconsistent that installation will become as time passes by. As everybody knows every windows installation needs to be formatted once in 1 month. I also told them that Vista Ultimate costs like around 14-15k for one license and instead if they use a GNU/Linux distribution like Ubuntu or Fedora for that matter of fact , it won’t cost anything , even both of them can be ordered for free (FreeMedia , Free CD’s) if they don’t have a good internet connection to download that.
As all of them were computer science students I told them how they can actually utilize what ever they have learned in their college or via the free time they given to themselves , in contributing to the open source software community. I gave the example of the project called pidgin and told them that the developer of that cool software is a google employee at the moment.
Afterwards we had this introduction session. I first thought that this session should have been done before we started talking things but later I found this session to be the platform , to know , what the audience felt about the meetup and what exactly do they plan to do after the meetup. Almost all of them were using Ubuntu (8.10 or 9.04) and were quite happy with the meetup , some of them even told their experiences with GNU/Linux so far and said that the first thing they going to do will be having GNU/Linux on their machines. And that was quite a plus point towards the goal on which all are working right now.
People were quite eager to know how to join our google groups and also how to become a member of Linux User Group , Jaipur. I hope we the members of the LUG-J team had answered most of the queries.
We also discussed briefly about how we are going to plan the event and things we are going to discuss during the event. A brief about the speakers was given by me and jaiZ and also a highlight on some of the talks proposed by the speakers. Besides that we told them what exactly does a hackfest means and how we are going to organize a over night hackfest.
The prominent attendee’s from JECRC were
- Mr. Anriudh Kalla - B.E 4th year CSE
- Mr. Avinash - Lecturer (BE 2008 Batch)
- Mr. Gaurav Chaudhary - B.E. 3rd year
Poster development , publicity of the event in every Engineering college at Jaipur and the Website development came out to be the biggest TODO’s and volunteers were assigned for all of these tasks. Besides that we noted down all the participants names and phone numbers so that we can get in touch with them as and when required.
Most of the participants in this meetup are going to have their term exams now so they will be busy with that but they are quite excited about the event and looking forward to it in a positive way. They also promised good audience during the event among their classmates and friends in other colleges.
Overall this meetup was a great one and I hope we see lot of good contributions from among the new joiners to Linux user group , Jaipur.
Posted By: linuxguru
Location: Jaipur
Date: 11/05/2009