The Linux Users’ Group of Durgapur, i.e, DGPLUG conducted a Fedora Activity Day in Dr. B. C. Roy Engineering College, Durgapur. Though it was planned to be a 1 day FAD, it got extended to one more day, i.e, 15th May 2009. The people working for this FAD to happen are Harsh Verma, Kishan Goyal, me , i.e, Ratnadeep Debnath (rtnpro), Subhodip Biswas, Arindam Ghosh, Meejanur Rahaman, Dibyanshu Jaiswal. Also, we had Rangeen Basu Roy Chowdhury with us. And also Arpita, Amrita, Debashree were there to talk on Inkscape. There was also with us Sunny Sharma, another FOSS enthusiast.
The event began at 12:00 PM in the Computer Science Department Lab No. 207 of BCREC. Projector and other necessary things were arranged beforehand by the DGPLUG volunteers working for the event. The Lab computers ran on Live Fedora Electronic Lab DVD, and a few ran on FEL Live USB. Around 25 students from various Departments like CSE, IT and ECE participated in the event. The event began with Arindam Ghosh talking on the Fedora Project. It was followed by Kishan Goyal speaking on “Myths about Linux busted with Fedora”. In between, whenever needed, Subhodip Biswas elucidated some of the topics being discussed. This was followed by a presentation on Inkscape by Amrita, Arpita and Debashree and a hands-on session on Inkscape. This was followed by me, Rangeen and Sunny giving a demo of KDE to the participants. It was around 2:10 that the 1st session ended. Then there was a break.
It was around 3:00 PM that we resumed the session. Rangeen then started with the introduction of IRC to the participants and soon Arindam and Subhodip joined the discussion. An Airtel Mobile Office Connection was arranged for the purpose. Since Airtel does not allow IRC clients like ChatZilla, X-Chat, etc. we had to use www.mibbit.com for the purpose. The participants were shown how to use the IRC. Shrink (Shreyank Gupta), Roshan08, mbuf (Shakthi Kannan) were online that time and took part in the live demo of IRC. The particiapnts were told about IRC ettiquetes.
It was followed by Rangeen’s session on Fedora Electronic Lab. Rangeen prepared some cool slides for the purpose which made the students interested in the topic. He showed them various cool FEL tools and did some small exercises on them with the students. The session was great except for the unepected power cuts that disturbed the session. Finally the FAD Day 1 was wrapped up at 4:30 PM. The participants were very enthusiastic. It was announced that the 15th May is going to be a day long session on Programming ( c, java, etc.) using FOSS tools.
After the session enden, Rangeen left for Bankura. We went back to our mess happy and exhausted.
Pictures of today’s eventw will be uploaded soon.