dgplug Fedora Activity Day @ BCREC – Day 1

14th of May, ’09 : Day – 1 of the Fedora Activity Day  (FAD) conducted by the Linux Users’ Group of Durgapur, dgplug, in Dr. B.C. Roy Engineering College, BCREC, was quite an eventful one. 🙂

The programme began at 12 noon with makghosh giving an introduction to Fedora Project to some 25 students who had assembled there. The students comprised mostly of the 2nd year students of BCREC while a handful of 1st and 3rd years were also there.

His presentation was appreciated by all and it was followed by  the session “Myths about Linux – busted with Fedora .” by KishanGoyal and Subhodip. The general misconceptions that people have regarding Linux installation, configuration and usabilty were looked into. The Students came up with some questions and they were dealt with.

One of them stated that he has been using Fedora for quite some time now and he liked it , but still he had to shift to Windows as Wifi was not working in his laptop. He was adviced to  use Ndiswrapper  and configure his Wireless adapter ( A Broadcom  model) properly. Another guy who had unsuccessfully tried installing Fedora had come with his laptop and his problem was solved too.

After this there was a session on artwork by Amrita, Arpita and Debashree who explained the basics of Inkscape, drew a scenery to demonstrate the use of various tools and options, and also showed the students some of their works. After the session, Subhodip suggested that now, since they know how to use Inkscape, they can utilise their inter-semester break to earn some cash by designing wedding cards. 😀

This was followed by an introduction to KDE and Gnome by Rtnpro, Sunny_slls and sherry151. KDE found liking among the students who seemed to be impressed by its looks and features  and that all the 30 PCs of the lab were running Fedora 10 FEL  Live DVDs helped further. Sherry151 (Rangeen Basu Roy Chowdhury) showed them how to play  audio and video files. It was now 2:10 p.m. and everyone agreed to be back after a 40-minute break.

The programme resumed at 3 p.m. with sherry151 speaking about the IRC. Another few students joined us. Airtel Mobile Office being  internet connection  used, IRC clients like X-Chat, ChatZilla, etc. were not working and so, mibbit was used. The students were explained the use of IRC, shown how to join a channel, told about the etiquette they should maintain,etc. mbuf, shrink and roshan08 waved to the students.

Just as sherry151 was began his session on FEL, a power cut played the spoilsport! 😦 However, that did not dent his spirits and he went on with the students now surrounding him. Also, all the laptops present there were given to the students. Rangeen spoke about various the apps present lke Octave, KTechLab, etc.; drew a few simulations, showed some that were prepared beforehand, and even asked a student to create one.  About an hour into the session, electricity was back and everyone quickly switched on the PCs. They had not even boot when the power cut spoiled it all for the second time, damn! He also told the students various wasys by which they could contribute to FEL  like documentation, writing tutorials, etc. Sherry151’s session was very interesting and some students from the ECE Dept. turned up exclusively for that session.

It was about 4:30 p.m. and power supply had not resumed. Having consulted the students, it was decided that the rest of the sessions would be taken the next day, i.e. 15th of May, ’09.

Pics can be found here and here.