[fedora-india] Fedora event @ SRM tech fest

Fedora GNU/Linux Event @ SRM: An event named Linux Lingo was organised today as a part of SRM University’s tech fest, Aarush 2009. Myself and Mr. Ramadoss from NRCFOSS, Fedora Ambassasador conducted the event. Ramadoss introduced the students to the philosophy of free software and Stallman’s crusade against the imposition of proprietary software. He delved into the GNU philosophy and gave several examples to emphasise the concept. He then talked about the open source community following which we demonstrated a Fedora 11 installation. We got a volunteer to install the operating system. The audience had several doubts about the install process, and we resolved them. For the fun of it we tried to install in Hindi once, but reverted to English finally. After the demonstration, I spoke about the software available in Fedora, and then about a few basic command line utilities. It was followed by a talk on bash scripting. The day ended with our answering a few questions from the students about open source, real IT revolution and choice of software. Over a hundred students participated in the event and were introduced to the free software movement. We thank the coordinators of the event, Shiv Deepak, Vipul Jain, Anisha Kaul and Prakhar Agarwal for the enthusiasm they showed in organising this event. -- Salvadesswaran Srinivasan, SSN College of Engineering