22Jun2008

From GLUG-BOM

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GLUG Meet Sunday, 22 June 2008

Time :- 14:00 - 18:00 hours

Venue :- Camputer.org, 23, Surya Kiran, Opp. Bombay Blue Restaurant, 14th Road, Bandra (W). Mumbai.

Attendance :- The meeting was attended by 16 FOSS enthusiasts from all over Mumbai.

Talks :-

1. Discussion "Spreading GNU/Linux" to end users and corporates and how to overcome reluctant people
2. Easwar Hariharan - Discussion Propaganda for Linux-suggestions and criticism
3. Round of Introductions
4. Chhandita Mukherjee - End user experience of FOSS user and challenges
5. Krishnakant Mane - Demo session of screen reader, orca

Minutes :-

• The meeting was started with discussion of on-field experience of members on migration of people and corporates to using FOSS. People came forward with their examples of spreading Linux amongst friends, relatives and business organisations. They discussed about their case studies, challenges, things that clicked and things to be aware of. Some of the favourite FOSS applications on windows like firefox, gimp, VLC were brought to the fore and how they ease the process of migration from Windows to Linux. Scenarios were brought forward where staunch opponents were converted once they were convinced that their work could be done with equal ease on the new platform. How service providers and hardware vendors can propogate Linux and their difficulties were discussed.

• Easwar had prepared a slide show on propaganda for Linux amongst the novices. Some of the points he covered were "explanation on GNU/Linux in layman's terms, why GNU/Linux, advantages of GNU/Linux, Linux Distributions, some popular distributions, Mind Share of Linux, why Linux doesn't need anti-virus, Linux installation, Linux on Windows - WUBI, Screenshots of WUBI installation, how to dual boot Linux with Windows, screenshots of Ubuntu installation process, install fests" challenges and strategies,

• Being a small group of 16 attendees, and by now everyone had settled down it was decided to have a round of Introductions. All the 16 people in the room introduced themselves in brief. This got people interacting and many questions were raised and answered.

• Continuing with the previous section, where the last person to introduce herself was Chhandita Mukherjee, who works with Comet Media. She briefed the attendees on the problems faced by non-techie groups like theirs like lack of contacts with Linux Enthusiasts, elitist attitudes from some sections, problems with finding volunteers, their needs and programmes as to implementation of FOSS in their working groups.

• It was already 17:00 hours, our scheduled winding up time but Krishnakant Mane wanted to give a small presentation on screen reader for the blind people, orca. He put up a demonstration of orca and explained it's advantages over proprietary softwares like Jaws, which costs tens of thousands of Rupees. Fast paced and customer oriented approach of FOSS developers compared to proprietary vendors. He presented some examples of orca is better integrated with other applications on Linux. Then he put forth a demonstration of a Firefox extension which would show all the URL's in the page and how to search for the specfic results, how to navigate to the URL without clicking on it.

By the end of the presentation, it was already nearing 17:30 so the host served everyone with coffee and people formed their own small groups and started having their discussions in groups of 2-3 people while enjoying their tea.

Thanks to Mr. Sanjay for being a wonderful host.