18Mar2007
From GLUG-BOM
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GLUG Meet Sunday, March 18 2007
Time: 2:00 pm
Venue: NetMagic Solutions - Data Centre Conference Room - Goregaon
Talks
Who said it isnt RMS?
Minutes of the Meet
1. Anurag P - Xen Modified Linux kernel
He started with a small introduction on Xen Hypervisor and getting started with a debian guest. He demonstrated how to get a base guest working on an ubuntu system running on xen enabled kernel.
2. Kenneth G - Activities of NRCFOSS, AU-KBC Chennai
NRCFOSS is the National Resource Centre for Free / Open Source Software located at AU-KBC Centre in Madras Institute of Technology.
Their initial attempts to spread FOSS among a wider audience began at Anna Universtiy in Chennai and was successful.
They encourage student projects and spread something that is fundamental to the industry by introducing FOSS based electives to universities / institutions. After being successful in Chennai, for this, they have already approached colleges (engineering) in West Bengal, Rajasthan, whose responses have been reasonably good and showing paths of progress. Ofcourse, there have been consistent feedback and interest shown by students at those institutions.
The organization aims to understand and support the community's effort through contribution as a bottom-up approach, where the ideas and skill power flows from the community.
For students, interested in pursuing projects in FOSS, can get details about NRCFOSS from its website, http://www.nrcfosshelpline.in/web/
Their emphasis is on consistency and symbiosis. This means that the organization expects quality and consistency in their supported areas and that there are efforts from both the sides, the organization and the supported party. Similar to saying "Do haat se taali bajti hai"
3. Krishnakant M - An Introduction to Programming in Python
Python is quite an old programming language, and to one's surprise, older than Java. Apart from this, a lot from the community consider Python to be easier than most of the older languages. The presenter of this topic is highly impressed by this language and demonstrated a set of its features.
Python features include, but not limit to the following beginner's language, Clean syntax, huge library, easier string operations, fast prototyping features, Object Oriented nature of Python, the self keyword, simple for web, flexibility. The community members however expressed their view (most of them) as a language good, for teaching a programming lanaguage. There were discussions about memory management in Python.
Guess what, the stereotype helloworld program is reduced to a sequence of 17 characters, plus two white spaces ;)
>>>print "Hello World" Hello World
Apart from the talks, as always expected, BoF's are always a subset of GLUG's. Inevitable :)
Discussion about what the community thinks about NRCFOSS's offering elective, as opposed to self-learning; Bash Scritping; Software services, web portals of government organizations; Compiling programs on Turbo C++ 3.0 IDE; Syllabus the Mumbai University offers with regards to learning C / C++ with Turbo C++ 3.0 common for Undergraduate to Postgraduate to engineering; the motive behind learning Computer Science and not "Applications"; the role of Mathematics; the open source implementation of SAP, ERP5; Lisp; KDE libraries and apps ported to Windows; Structured Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP)
Ofcourse, three cheers for Dhawal - for hosting the GLUG meet. :)
The meet was attended by 16 people coming from all over the city
