15th of May, ’09 : With around 15 students present, at 11:30 a.m. we began, continuing from where we left last day. Though the number of students decreased from the previous day, it was nice to see a few new faces. the students of the ECE Dept. couldn’t join because they had their internals followed by a lab exam.
The day began with videos. Few videos from tv.dgplug.org demonstrating the use of KSnapshot, Okular, PackageKit and a few others were shown. After this Yevlempy ( Harsh Verma ) began the session on basic shell commands. Makghosh gave the students a breifing about the File Heirarchy System. Together with Makghosh, he showed the commonly used shell commands such as cd, cp, ls, mkdir, rm, man, who etc along with the various options. The students tried out the commands on their systems and a few queries that came were dealt with.
Makghosh and Subhodip explained about the file permissions and ownerships, demonstrating the same by creating a test file and changing its permissions, etc. A student asked that why don’t we login as root and they explained the evils of root-login. With everyone satisfied, we moved on with Subhodip explaining wha a repository /mirror is. Then, rtnpro and Subhodip explained yum. With the local mirror at hand, they showed how to install or update a package, search for a package, enable or disable a repository (they explained the contents of the fedora-local.repo file). Rtnpro also showed how to use PackageKit.
Subhodip and Makghosh also set up a local mirror there which would cater to the needs of the students. Then began the session on vi by Dibyanshu. He explained the need of the versatile editor, demonstrated the basics of vi, the various options and commonly used commands. By the end of the session, the students were comfortable with vi. However, as an alternate to vi, gedit and KWrite were also shown.
After a 30 minute break, at around 3:15 p.m. Rtnpro began his session of GCC. The number of students decreased, however, in the following few minutes, more joined in, many of them new faces. The term GCC was explained first and then students were explained its basics. As the session progressed, they wrote their first program in gcc- ”Hello World”. Shortly, they were given an assignment to write a code to print the Fibbonacci series. It took some time and errors, but they executed the code successfully.
The Error-of-the-Day award will go to a girl who began writing the code in C but mixed it up with python (seems she has been practising a lot of python lately). She had compiled the code unsuccessfully and was trying to find what error she had made, still not realising that she had used python in a supposed-to-be C code. 🙂 View the code here. The students did another few assignments.
Makghosh then demonstrated Anjuta IDE. A few students who seemed to be mulling over gcc were quite happy to see Anjuta which has a very nice GUI like the Turbo C++ that they generally use in Windows. Makghosh explained that besides C and C++, Anjuta can also execute Java, Python, Vala,etc. codes. It was past five already.
A Power cut again disrupted the proceedings. However, that did not stop Subhodip from giving the students a sneak peek into Java in near-darkness on a laptop with the stuents surrounding him. Having distributed Fedora 10 DVDs, Fedora 10 FEL Live DVDs, and stickers, we called it a day at 5:45 p.m.
Pics can be found here and here.
Kishan Goyal 