It was on 21 February 2009, that there was a Fedora Activity Day and an Install Fest in Kalyani Govt. Engg. College, Kalyani. It was one of its kind with students craving to register for it. The seminar hall was packed. This was a rare scene. But it indicated that the young students at KGEC are really fired up to bring a change. The seminar started at 11:30 AM. There were around 140 students in the seminar hall. The anchor was Snigdha Deb Mukherjee ( a 2nd year CSE student in KGEC). Then followed the speech delivered by the College Professors. And after that, it was Indranil Das Gupta to address the people out there in the hall. As always, his was an inspiring speech in which he explained how he started using Linux, what was the scenario back then, how the FOSS comunity in India started to come into being and the present scenario of FOSS in India. He also mentioned about people like Sayamindu Das Gupta, Gopal V, Subhodip Biswas, Arindam Ghosh and about their contributions to FOSS. Everyone was thrilled and inspired by his words. Then Indranil Das Gupta left for Kolkata.
Then there was the lunch break. After that, at around 2:15 PM, Arindam Ghosh gave a talk on Introduction to Fedora. It was followed by Subhodip Biswas‘s talk on Myths about Fedora till 4:30 PM. Then started the Install Fest in the Computer Science Laboratory. There were around 55-60 students attending the Install Fest and among them 15 had brought their Laptops for installation and the rest had access to around 15-16 Lab Desktops to do the Fedora 10 installation. Rangeen Basu Roy Chowdhury was showing them how to install Fedora 10 via a projector. Ratnadeep Debnath was helping the students in their places to do the installation and clearing their doubts. After the installation was done, Rangeen gave a brief introduction to Gnome and KDE Desktop environment. It was around 6:30 Pm in the evening and people started leaving. A few guys left back to talk with Rangeen and Ratnadeep. And finally, around 7:00 PM it was finally wrapped up.
It was a great Fedora Activity Day and a great Install Fest. Rangeen played a vital role for arranging this event. Students of KGEC responsible for arranging this Day:
Snigdha Deb Mukherjee, Md. Ekhlaque, Rohit Gupta, Ramendu Bikas, Mukesh Ojha, Guddu Kumar, Mukesh Kumar Singh, Sunil Kumar Koeri and others.
A great job by them!
Although the Install Fest was formally over for the day, but in the RBC Hostel, Rangeen and Ratnadeep were busy doing some new installations and performing the post-installation set up. The offline repo created by Ratnadeep in his pocket hard drive came to great use. The hostelites were shown how to install from the offline repo ( though it was all automated by a few shel scripts written by Ratnadeep) by invoking a shell script. The repo was distributed among a few of them who took the responsibility of distributing it to others and helping them to use it. They were also given the nice informative video tutorials on Fedora and other related applications created by Kushal Das, the “Meet the Gimp” video tutorials and other Linux Documentation Ebooks. Rangeen and Ratnadeep were busy till 2:00 AM in the night helping the guys with their system and helping them with How to start with Fedora and geting them acquainted with the various applications.
Thus ended a long and tiring but a very successful Fedora Activity Day.