FOSS

Mukti is the annual FOSS festival organised by the GNU/Linux Users Group of NIT Durgapur. Mukti 2012 was held on 3-5th February 2012. I have attended every Mukti in NIT Durgapur from 2008 to 2011 as a student and this time (in 2012) as a speaker. My talk was on Localization and Transifex. NITDGPLUG, as always, put a lot of effort in making Mukti a grand FOSS event in the region. It was a packed with a plethora of events and had a large number of participants. Mukti serves as a great means to get together people interested in FOSS in the Eastern and North Eastern part of India. It helps newbies get more insight into FOSS. ...

This summer I am working on building a GUI for easy setup of a completely offline Fedora repository as a part of my DGPLUG summer training 2009. This, if successfully implemented, will greatly help us to spread Fedora and FOSS usage in areas where decent internet connections are not available in general. I am being mentored by** mbuf** in this project. He gave a COOL name to this project FedX ...

Today, 13th July, 2009, we ( me , i.e., Ratnadeep Debnath aka rtnpro, Kishan Goyal, Meejanur Rahaman, Harsh Verma, Chandana Boral) led by Indranil Das Gupta and Stephanie Das Gupta, went to West Bengal State University at Barasat, Kolkata. We started at around 10:30 AM from Ruby Hospital, and after a long journey ( changing two buses, then riding on a van, with a few drizzles on the way), we finally reached Barasat University at around 12:30 PM. ...

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. ...

A Fedora Activity Day is going to be conducted by the Linux Users’ Group of Durgapur, DGPLUG in Dr. B. C. Roy Engneering College, Durgapur on 14 May, 2009. The agenda of this FAD is to increase FOSS awareness among the students of BCREC and to introduce them to the wide spectrum of things that they can do in Linux in their day to day life. Fedora is not just an operating system, it is a community comprised of people coming from different walks of life, yet all believing in the foundations of Fedora ...

It has been quite some time I blogged on our ongoing classes. And how are we doing? So far it’s been quite some good experience taking classes in Bijra High School. Hope to make it better and better. Lately, classes were taken in Bijra High School on 4/3/2009 and on 6/3/2009. Let me remember…mmm…what did we do out there on 4th March…I remember now : We were lucky to get the 11:20 B-Zone bus to Kataberia. People who went to Bijra? Ratnadeep (rtnpro), Kishan, Bappi, Meejanur, Harsh ( with his digikam). We reached the school by 12:00 PM. We called the Std. VIII students in groups in the Computer Lab. Bappi and Kishan took charge of the lab. Basically, it was kind of a recapitulation or better introductory class for the Std. VIII students. They were introduced to the OpenOffice Writer and later they had some hands-on with TuxPaint. I and Meejanur went to Std. V to take theory. O Gash! It was some different Std. V than the last time we saw it, full of din and bustle. We started the speak on the topic CPU and its components. Don’t know what happened, was it that we could not communicate the topic nicely or they were in a mood of fun, the class could not continue. We talked on this matter to their teachers and asked for their cooperation to make the students more disciplined. Then it was the half day break. After that, there was the computer lab for the students of Std. VI and I and Bappi went to Std. VII. The students were serious. The class was responsive and inquisitive. I remember them even asking : ...

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. ...