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.
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