twincling team excels at the Linux Workshop

The twincling team conducted the Linux Workshop at Osmania University on Saturday, Feb 19, 2005.

It was a well attended event with about 85 participants from various colleges of Hyderabad.

The event planning committee of twincling had earlier taken the decision of presenting the Open Source value proposition as a theme for this event.

The talk on multibooting/GRUB was given by Namita Iyer and Ganesh B, both twincling members. The speakers presented the concept of booting, how the hard disk is understood (CHS, LBA modes) and the Master Boot Record (MBR). A detailed discussion was undertaken along with a lot of diagrams to ensure that the participants have first hand knowledge.

GRUB (Grand Unified Boot loader) was discussed next in detail. Namita discussed the various features of GRUB which included talking about network booting, remote booting. Ganesh extended the discussion further by talking about the various stages in GRUB namely stage 1, stage 1.5 and stage 2.

After the talk, the workshop was conducted where the participants did hands on using 'qemu' emulator booting FreeDOS and Damn Small Linux. The participants were visibly excited while trying out the program.

The entire twincling team of Sashidhar Kalagara, Martin Samuel, Namita Iyer and Saifi Khan worked with the participants and assisted them to get the GRUB commands right and boot up FreeDOS and Damn Small Linux. Ganesh the workshop lead was in his best 'tinker' elements and enthralled the audience.

Many of the participants tried out the various applications shipped with DSL (Damn Small Linux). In fact, some of the participants were comfortably playing games!

Based on the suggestion by OU/CSE Org Committee, Saifi undertook a short interactive discussion with the participants on 'Linux and OpenSource myths'. He talked about the practical concept behind Free Software and how it creates an ecosystem for multiple parties to develop software. He also talked about Open Source code security that is talked about a lot in popular press and the various opportunities. The concept of 'collaborative software' development was highlighted.

The participants asked many questions and also live polls were conducted on popular ideas about Free/Open software.

The final talk of the day was on the LAMP platform, A Linux web solution. This talk was given by Saifi Khan, a twincling team member.

Saifi highlighted the 'Services opportunity' over the development platform and the kernel. The Open Source software developers are interested in developing infrastructure services that are built on free and open standards. This helps in designing sophisticated service architectures that are both interoperable and integrable.

A keypoint of the talk was that 'Service Oriented Architectures have a pattern'. This powerful idea was demonstrated using the web (apache) server and the persistence (MySQL) server architectures.

The next important idea was that 'Server-Side scriptability' is a key enabler for better integration and rapid application development. The audience was introduced to the capabilities of PHP, Apache, MySQL and Linux.

LAMP based website management, content management, forum software were mentioned by way of illustration. It was also highlighted that L is (Linux, *BSD), A is(Apache), M is (MySQL, msql, PostgreSQL) and P is (PERL, Python or PHP).
So, the developers have a lot of choice and opportunities for developiing service oriented solutions.

Finally, the vote of thanks was tendered.

A lot of participants came up and raised queries with the twincling speakers. Many were seen exchanging contact information. The participants took home with them knoppix 3.7 distro, of which more than 75 copies were stamped by the twincling team members.

The twincling team is very pleased with the successful execution of the Linux Workshop.

multiple distros and value creation for customers

The Linux system software space is characterized by multiple distributions or distros!

Some of the distros are:
YES
DeMuDi
Devil
Litrix
Redhat
Mandrake
Slackware
Debian
Ubuntu
PCQLinux
Yoper
Knoppix
Xandros
Linspire
etc. etc.

So, the question is, why do we have so many distros ?
Maybe a better question would be 'what makes a distro unique' ?

After all the distro guys just don't make up a distro, so that they have some fun and are through.

A distro
'targets' a customer segment,
'solves' a particular set of problems/issues
'envisions' what a customer would appreciate
'imagines' the relationship between the system and the user
'selects' the Linux packages that are put together to deliver value
'localizes' the interface for a given group or community and
'delivers' an .iso image burnt on a CD/DVD for the enduser

Since the various Linux developer folks are focussed on solving problems based
on some or all of these factors, there is immense creation of value for the customer
and an attendant evolution of the market place.

The customer gets to pick and choose packaged solution offerings based on her/his requirements and situations. The customer may begin with one distro and then move over to some other distro
depending on the evolution of her/his needs.

The creation of a 'market place' or 'bazaar' is essential, since that helps push up the quality of the software thats delivered to the customer. It is in these market/mindshare gains of the distros that the cummulative growth of Linux systems is achieved.

There is also "healthy" competition among the distro developers since all are seeking more market share (read customers) and mindshare (read customers).

Its the customer that matters and it is for the customer that we create value.

Welcome to the 'prgamatic' Linux and Open Source market place!

Linux Workshop

The OU/Linux Workshop is scheduled to be held on
Feb 19 (Saturday) from 1000 - 1400hrs.

The plan for the Linux Workshop as worked out by 'twincling'
is as follows:

Proposed Plan:
To present the Linux/open source value proposition weaved
in a theme.

Infrastructure for (W)orkshop:
. distros (knoppix, Fedora Core-3)
. workshop mc. P4/128Mb/20Gb (40 machines)
. distros as take aways
. Linux quiz
. Linux written material

The core team at 'twincling' has planned the event in a very
interesting manner and please do make it a point to attend it.

Everybody is welcome to take a look at the archives of 'twincling'
to see how we are working, our planning, our efforts and most
important our committment to make the OU/Linux Workshop a great
success.

TWINCLING Society

Hi:

TWINCLING Society is a professionally managed Linux Society in Hyderabad, AP, India.

The core team has envisioned a business plan to create and establish Hyderabad's first professionally managed Linux society that works with the various stake holders (students, business, linux enthusiasts, corporates) to deliver value through talks, events, software development and value based resource initiatives.

The blog will update the visitor on the various events, initiatives and knowledge based activities!

Welcome to TWINCLING Society