FOSS Workshop at Seth Jai Parkash Mukand Lal Institute of Engineering and Technology (JMIT)

Date and place

7th (Fri) & 8th (Sat) Nov 2008 [*** rescheduled from the earlier announced dates of 14/15]

A FOSS introductory workshop is being organized to be held at JMIT, Raudaur, for Lecturers/Professors of computer / electronic streams at JMIT and neighboring colleges. Proposed strength is 40 participants, which will also include some student members.

http://openstreetmap.org/?lat=30.03658&lon=77.16087&zoom=17&layers=B000FTF

Report

Day 1

The workshop started with a general introduction to FOSS from Kenneth Gonsalves of NRC-FOSS. After that the participants were divided into two groups for a hands on session on basic linux usage

Satyaakam Goswami, Tarun Dua, Vivek Khurana, Supreet and Ajay Kumar handled one session. The following subjects were covered:

Introduction to linux desktop
Introduction to command line (shell)
Linux user and group model
Linux process handling
EXT3 filesystem layout
Queries on linux and FOSS


After lunch a session on introduction to python by Vivek Khurana was conducted and following topics were covered:

Introduction to python data types.
Python control structures and sample programs.
Python OOP model.
Python package creation and installation.
Using python modules and introduction to most used modules.
Demo of advance capabilities of python like building HTTP server, XML parsing and url parsing.


Day 2

Day 2 was curtailed and there was only one session running from 9 to 2

Ajay Kumar spoke on Sahana FOSS Disaster Management System. The following topics were covered:
Introduction to Sahana
Sahana's history.
Sahana's past deployments.
Problems that Sahana solves.
Installation of Sahana was demonstrated live on Ubuntu 8.04.
Demonstrated modules: Missing Person Registry & Situation Awareness.
Addressed how academia can help contribute to the project in research.
Resources available for reference were shown.
Suggestions on how to setup student groups for development contributions.
Addressed audience queries in the end.

Tarun Dua spoke on Drupal Showed a few sites using Drupal Checklist for installation dependencies Apache, MySQL , PHP and php-mysql yum/apt-get command to install dependencies required by Drupal Setup DNS/hosts file and apache setup with a VirtualHost? for a drupal instance Drupal installation Drupal basic administration including enabling optional modules, setting up the cron job for search index, enabling clean URLs, a new blog post, a new poll etc.

Kenneth Gonsalves spoke on various foss tools. He gave a live demo on how to edit a wiki and how to administer a remote website using ssh and subversion. He also gave a demo on how to set up and use a subversion repository illustrating the common commands. An attempt was made to demonstrate use of IRC, but it was blocked by the firewall - anyway participants were able to watch eminent hackers attempting to get through a firewall!

Feedback

particpants please enter your feedback here

The Drive to Radaur proved to be not so difficult than thought , we reached JMIT exactly at around 9.00AM , all the speakers were standing in front of the Guest house when we entered the College, After we exchanged plesentaries we moved in a group towards the Lab where the sessions were about to take place. after the participants settled down Kenneth gave a birds eye view of FOSS and why we all should be using FOSS some nice comparision between LinkBharnatyam mudras and Link googly were cited as examples comparing them with FOSS way of development and the idea was to communicate about the idea of sharing Free and Open Knowledge. The participants seems to be in agreement to it . Just as the idea sank in the next session on the installation and intro to Desktop started , as Tarun was running late to the venue i was volunteered the ILUGD estyle ;-) to give the next talk ,Tarun as usual arrived JIT (just in time ) to share the effort . We set the participants into two separate area and handled two classes instead of one.

I started in prompto with the intro to the grub then booted the machines ,allowed the participants to play around with the menus in order to discover and find the similarities and differences between the other OS and GNU/Linux. Participants discovered the similarities between the various components of the Desktop OS and were seen making some presentations using Open Office impress, the class was interactive in nature with questions like how can i find a file ? to using the in famous cmd to get a shell , on GNU/Linux they were greeted with terminal . Participants started typing basic commands and were shown how to read the MAN pages. Soon they were typing in commands and discovering some new ones too using TAB completion in BASH shell .

Overall the trip has been rewarding as to made few new friends , started the spark in the few mind to think the FOSS way , i think thats what is being Humans is all about...

-Satya

Objectives

To create an awareness about FOSS and involve the participants in using FOSS tools, entice them to contribute to FOSS development and be associated in the NRCFOSS academic initiative.

Topics

  1. Overview of FOSS philosophy, concepts and methodologies
  1. NRCFOSS activities -- focus on academic initiatives (FOSS Lab Server, FOSS in curriculum)
  1. Intoduction to Linux : Installation and working with desktop / commands
  1. How to use the tools of open source programming : Wiki, mailing lists, IRC
  1. Working on LAMP Platform : Apache Server, MySql/PostgreSql? databases, Python / PHP Scripting Languages
  1. Discussions -- future plans e.g., advanced training, student projects, etc.

Agenda

7th - Day-1


09:00 - 10:00 - Registration and Introduction: Kenneth
10:00 - 11:30 - Introduction to linux (and using it from Windows Desktop)- Tarun
11:30 - 01:00 - Python as programming language: Vivek Khurana
01:00 - 02:00 - Lunch
02:00 - 03:00 - Web development quick and dirty using Django and Python: Supreet Sethi
03:00 - 04:00 - Sahana - A real world FOSS Disaster Management System : Ajay Kumar [shifted to next morning]

8th - Day-2


10:00 - 11:00 - Perl and Regular Expressions: Vivek Khurana/Tarun
11:00 - 12:00 - Postgresql: Open Source Enterprise class database Vivek
12:00 - 01:00 - Drupal: Installation and Usage Tarun
01:00 - 01:45 - Lunch
01:45 - 03:00 - Panel Discussion: Beating the Recession
03:30 - 04:30 - Feedback and Valedictory Function

Faculty

Kenneth Gonsalves, NRCFOSS

Tarun Dua

Satyaakam Goswami

Vivek Khurana

Supreet Sethi

Ajay Kumar

JMIT Contact

Prof Vivek Sharma
AP & HOD CSE
Seth Jai Parkash Mukand Lal Institute of Engineering and Technology (JMIT)
Radaur, Haryana.
about 18km from Yamuna Nagar and 28km from Pipli.)
http://www.jmit.ac.in
9896208215
Email : vivek.radaur@gmail.com

NRCFOSS Contacts

Kenneth Gonsalves <lawgon@au-kbc.org> 9894277627

Dr. S. Srinivasan <srinivasan@au-kbc.org>

Participants

Vivek Sharma -9896208215       AP CSE JMIT

Gaurav Sharma -9896609788      Senior Lect. CSE JMIT

Rakhi Sharma -9254036261       Lect. CSE JMIT

Mamta Nain                     Lect. CSE JMIT

Vikram Verma                   AP CSE JMIT

Manjit Singh                   Lect. CSE JMIT

Vishal Garg                    Lect. CSE JMIT

Sweta                          Lect. CSE JMIT

Sonia Sharma                   Lect. CSE JMIT

Nipun Sharma                   Lect. CSE JMIT

Rohit                          Lect. CSE JMIT

Amit batra                     -do -

Neeru Chauhan                  -do-

Meenakshi                      -do-

Saurabh                        -do-

Mohinder                       -do-

Reen                          -do -

Mr. Jasbir Singh               -do -

Mr. Rohit Bhan                 -do-

Mr. Sumit Mahana               -do

Mr. Ravinder                   -do -

Mr. Krishan                    -do-

Mr. Sumit Goel                 -do-



Vikas Juneja                   Lect. IT JMIT

Prabhat                        -do-

Ravinder Veer                  -do-

Reena                          -do-

Tajinder                        -do-

Atul                          AP MCA TIMT

Sanjay Sehgal                 Lect CSE SJP Damala

Savita Khurana                 Lect. CSE JMIT

Ms. Kirti                      Lect CSE GIMT

Seema                          Lect CSE GMIT

Deepali Gupta                  Lect CSE GMIT

Sonali Puri                    MCA JMIT

Gagan Anand                    MCA JMIT

Shelja Ganesh                  MCA JMIT

Shipra                         MCA JMIT

Sunil Gaurtam                  CSE HEC

Aviral Sharma                  CSE HEC


Participants please sign up here