One day Fedora WorkShop at SVCOE Junnar, Pune

After travelling from Nashik to Sahyadri Valley College OF Engineering in the cool climate it was a warm welcome from the College Principal Mr. Sanjay Zope. Though the Workshop was mainly targeted for the Staff, I had a chance to interact with the Third year Computer Engineering students. Before the session begins it was small felicitation from the Chairman Mr. V.R. Divakaran. After the felicitation, Mr.Zope expressed his view towards the open-source philosophy and looked very ambitious to use and promote open source in the Campus. The Campus has all the systems with upgraded Open-Source Software installed on it. With Ubuntu 13.10 running on Desktops.

Session I

After the felicitation, I began the session “Introduction to Open Source and Linux” for Computer Engineering students. I started with the GNU Project and Free Software Foundation. Then I explain the FOSS philosophy. Then I spoke about the Evolution of Linux Kernel by Linus Torvalds and started explaining the various Linux Distros, then I showed the demonstration of the basic Linux commands for File Processing and file editing. Some Sys-Admin commands and network configuration commands. Then there were few questions from students regarding basic network configuration and open source alternatives for few softwares. It was a good experience with students for QA session.

Session II

The Second Session was for college Staff and focused on “using Open Source tools”. I gave the basic introduction and guidelines to use tools like Libre Office, SciLab, Sugar CRM, Thunderbird, GNU Parted, GIMP. Also introduced the how to start for Programming languages for c, c++, Shell and Java on Linux. I also introduced some text editors like vim and Emacs, then I showed the IDEs Compatible on Linux system such as Eclipse, Netbeans, Komodo and Geany. I demonstrated the installation and un-installation of softwares and packages on the Linux system using Command line and GUI package managers like synaptic.

Then there was QA Session where staff asked me the various Open Source alternatives to proprietary softwares like MATLAB, Outlook, Adobe Photoshop etc. I answered the one which I knew most popular. This was a wonderful experience for me as it was my first time to be in front of the College Staff.

Thanks to principal Mr. Sanjay Zope for working with me for the planning and organizing this workshop. Thanks also to the Management, and Faculty of SVCOE for the wonderful hospitality, and their support for the workshop.