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Had a workshop for the IT teachers of the Baroda High School, a group of 4 schools today. The teachers loved openSUSE, were swept off their seat looking at some of the Compiz effects(at least I am sure they liked fishes in the bowl).

Don’t they all look happy with their openSUSE DVDs?

Next on their agenda is set up all their labs to run LTSP with a ton of openSUSE-Edu applications.

The Maharaja Sayajirao Univeristy’s three day tech fiesta ended today, we participated as “Workshop Sponsors” did a marathon 5 hour workshop and a lecture.

Estimated 5000 students from engineering colleges from all over India participated with tons of activities such as RC car racing, Acrobot cars doing stunts, treasure hunt where one of the tasks was to find “Go openSUSE” stickers, and many lectures, workshops and presentations.

Students who participated in the workshop were Linux users for over a year so it was fun working with them. The lecture on Sunday morning saw sparce attendence of about 20 students, no surprise as there was a concert on Saturday night by pop band Euphoria. The students for the lecture had never used Linux and the persentation I had,  openSUSE setup you’ll love  was exactly targeted towards them.

All the FootPrints presentations are available here.

Goodies to give out at the stall we had were openSUSE 11.1 PromoDVDs, stuffed Geekos, Geeko keychains. We also ran an install-fest throughout the three days installing 11.1 on many student’s laptops.

BTW, our participation was all thanks to Harshal Pandya,  Kshitij Shah and the Team FP.

Starting tomorrow I will be at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda’s national level tech-fest: Foot Prints 2009.

Over 5000 students from engineering colleges from all over India are expected. There are many workshops, quizzes, exhibition, talks and also a grand performance by popular music band Euphoria scheduled.

The home page of the event is here: http://msu-footprints.org/

Details of the workshop I will be leading at the event here:
http://msu-footprints.org/kaleidoscope.html

We will be distributing openSUSE 11.1 PromoDVDs from the stall we have at the venue for three days.

If any of you are coming to Baroda in next three days do drop in at the MSU “Techo” faculty to say hello.

The 5 days of VCCI exhibition is now over, here are some pictures from the event.

Thanks again Novell for sponsoring the stall, and sending us tons of stuff to give away to the visitors.

Next in the queue is MS Universities Footprints techfest, I would be leading a workshop and we have a stall there for three days too.

We had a lot of fun

We would be taking part in this year’s VCCI mega exhibition 12-16 Feb 2009, our stall no is E Dome, D-19. We would of course be distributing openSUSE 11.1 DVDs that Martin Lasarsch has kindly sent for the event. Our participation at VCCI is sponsored by Novell

I would also be conducting a workshop at MSU Footprints Tech Fest: http://msu-footprints.org/ . The details of the worksop and other activities is here: http://msu-footprints.org/kaleidoscope.html

It is a marathon 5 hour track covering the following:

• Introduction to Open Source world & GNU/Linux.
• Compiz Fusion - Transforming your desktop with amazing effects.
• Virtualization - Running Multiple Operating Systems Simultaneously.
• KIWI-LTSP - Using your Old PC at the speed of your new Hardware.
• Creating “Your Own” Operating system using KIWI - A step-by-step process to assemble your own operating system, with softwares of your choice, that you can take home.

We also have a stall running openSUSE “InstallFest”, promoting Linux and FOSS at the Tech Fest venue.

With this post I invite all of you to visit us at both the events if you happen to be in this part of the world.

Looking forward to seeing you all there.

On the initiative of Ankit Nevatia, currently a Master in Computer Applications student at G H Patel P G Department of Computer Science & Technology(GDCST), and alumni of C P Patel & F H Shah Commerce College(CFCC) we had workshops at these institutions on 23 Jan .

I enjoyed both the sessions, especially with the MCA and Bio-Informatics students of GDCST college, they were bright and quite receptive to the technologies that were presented to them. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the Head of the Department Professor Dr D B Choksi was a recepiant of Young Indian Scientist Award and Mr J V Smart, a Lecturer there was pursuing a PhD: developing a new knowledge based programming language, no surprise that the students were quite smart too

I also liked the enthusiasm and welcoming spirit of Ms Mona Joshi from CFCC who co-ordinated the workshop there.

Hope the students had as much fun as I did

Last three days(24 - 26 Jan 09) we’ve been busy with Baroda “Information Technology” Association exhibition.

After not getting any reply from Novell and being allocated stall almost at the end of the show, I had canceled the booking, luckily, Denish Makadiya, a glass fibre manufacturer by profession and passionate believer in open source philosophy got in touch with me with a great news that he had a stall booked little upstream and wishes to promote Free Software

Here are few pictures from the show:

BITA09

We distributed tons of openSUSE, Mint, Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora DVDs/CDs. Akash, Priyanka, Jinita - the MSU BCA proj-uron students team, Kishorbhai, Chiragbhai and Denishbhai’s family and Sham helped burn the disks. All the artwork was created by Biswa on Inkscape with a little help from Niyor and Shushobhita.

We also did a Linux distribution knowledge survey, some respondents got most of the answers right, while some were quite off the mark. Here is the picture of responses. Could most people’s choice of free DVD be the result of me wearing openSUSE cap and a laptop running it there?

I, along with Kartik Mistry would be leading two workshops/presentation/sessions at Sardar Patel University colleges.

We start at 11.30 am at the G H Patel P G Department of Computer Science & Technology and 3.00 pm at the C P Patel & F H Shah Commerce College on 23 Jan 2008.

We will be showcasing the latest GUI enhancements from Compiz Fusion and KDE4 projects and various FOSS  development tools available on Linux platform.

Drop in for an evening celebrating the release of openSUSE 11.1. if you or your friends are in or around Vadodara on Saturday 20 December, 6 pm.

Here are the ideas of what you should look forward to that evening.

RSVP here.