On 15th September, 2009 the Software Freedom Day was celebrated in
The CSI Auditorium,
Computer Society of India, Kolkata Chapter,
5, Elgin Road, 4th Floor,
Kolkata – 700020
The following talks and discussions were planned for the SFD 2009, Kolkata :
A. Mani to speak on “The Fedora Project”
J. P. Mathews to speak on “Using Linux on PCs with limited resources”
Ratnadeep Debnath(me) to speak on “Fedora-12 Highlights”
Snehashish Chakraborty to speak on “RabbitMQ”
From Durgapur, me, Kishan Goyal, Harsh Verma and Bama Charan Kundu had come to Kolkata on 15th September to attend SFD. We reached the CSI auditorium at around 4:30 PM. There we met with A. Mani. We had a small introductory chat with each other. We were given some SFD goodies like badges, balloons, etc. Then we setup Kishan’s notebook for the purpose of presentation and successfully connected it to the projector.
At around 5:00 PM, J. P. Mathews and some people from DPS Technologies India, and Rohit joined us in the SFD’09. Some students ( engineering) also turned up. There were around 12 people attending the event. A. Mani welcomed everyone to the event and then J. P. Mathews said that Snehashish Chakraborty, unfortunately, could not come to the event. Then he distributed leaflets for the new
Sapienza Home PC coming preloaded with Ubuntu GNU/Linux.
Specifications : Intel ATOM Processor 230 @ 1.6 GHz + Intel original MotherBoard, IGB RAM, 160 GB SATA HDD,
17″ TFT Display with in-built speakers, Keyboard and mouse, Optional DVD drives, etc.
Starting from Rs. 14,900 onwards.
Then A. Mani came up with his talk on the Fedora Project. It was quite informative and introduced the attendees to the features of Fedora, the Fedora Community, foundations of Fedora, Open Source. It was followed by me ( rtnpro) talking on what is new Fedora 12. Topics of the talk were General Introduction to Fedora Project, Fedora Release Cycle, features in Fedora 11, things which couldn’t be implemented in Fedora 11, what’s new in Fedora 12, common Fedora 12 bugs, how to contribute to testing. As an example, I mentioned the various opensource projects that the members of DGPLUG has been involved into. I also highlighted the significance of portable repositories, which is of vital importance when internet connection is a constraint. Slide used for the presentation can be found at
Then there was a small break for tea. After that, J. P. Mathews gave his talk on Using Lnux on PCs with limited resources. He also discussed about the Sapienza Home PC, which is very affordable, running on Ubuntu GNU/Linux. Then he also mentioned about Linux being used at schools and educational institutions. LTSP is a good technology to be used for the purpose. He also showed interest in the ongoing Bijra Project of DGPLUG ( using LTSP). Idea of having a local flash storage in the LTSP terminals were also discussed. Open Source virtualization tools were also discussed and compared with VMWare. Mr. Mathews also mentioned a functional programming language named Erlang, and Open ERP frameworks.
This was followed by free media distribution of Fedora 11 DVDs and Ubuntu 9 Live CDs.
The event concluded at around 7:15 PM. The discussions held during the event were very interesting and innovative. This marks a long path to travel. The event was a success with people getting in their head to foster a general understanding of software freedom, and encourage adoption of free software and open standards.