Summary of Q3 - Q4 2007 talks

Dec

The "Ruby on Rails (RoR)" Talk by Venkat of rKnowsys technologies started off with an almost packed audience of 30. Venkat kick started the meet by talking of the architectures of CGI and J2EE and how their drawbacks limited them to a small section of web applications. Then he
introduced the audience to Ruby, the language behind the RoR Web framework. Next he discussed the Model-View-Controller(MVC) based Ruby on Rails and signed off by showing a small demo.

I would like to thank the speaker, Mr. Hasan of the astronomy department, the faculty and research scholars who arranged the meet this month.

Nov

Minutes of the November month meet

Monthly meet of India Linux User Group - Hyderabad Chapter
Date: 25 Nov 2007
Started: 14:00 IST
Venue: Auditorium, Dept of Astronomy, Osmania University

First Talk

Fedora 8 - Freedom is a feature
Speaker : Rahul Sundaram

Rahul started off about how the Fedora project started and the ideologies behind it Then he explained about the different acpects of the project There was also quick look into how the community initiatives led to the opening up of 'properitery' technologies we discussed about what was going on with Fedora and how others can get involved and contribute to it

Second Talk

Localization in KDE
Speaker : Pavithran Shakamuri

Pavithran started about the language barriers fo technologies and reasons and methods ot overcome it He then spoke about how to translate strings and literals to other languages in KDE

Special thanks to all the sponsors and to Dept of Astronomy, Osmania University for hosting the meet

Oct

Monthly meet of India Linux User Group - Hyderabad Chapter
Date: 28 Oct 2007
Started: 14:30 IST
Venue: Auditorium, Dept of Astronomy, Osmania University

This month's meet was at a new place and a new schedule The venue had been moved to the Auditorium of the Dept. of Astronomy, Osmania University (opposite Arts College, beside Dept. of Mathematics and Statistics) and the time also had been changed to the last Sunday afternoon 14:00

First Talk:

Introduction to OpenMoko
By Shakthi Kannan

The speaker started off with an intro to the device and the accessories that came with it - Neo 1973 he also showed the openmoko.org site and its wiki Then we went on to the presentation he mentioned that recommended flavor for working on openmoko is debian or debian based like ubuntu we went on to installing it:

the two ways...

online - add openembedded.org to the apt repository list and install openembedded-seesntials and its dependencies using aptget offline - wget the source and then make setup building the applications:

openmoko can be run in qemu... but then qemu had issues in dev version so we SSHed into the phone and forward the GUI to the PC we tried building a simple "Hello World" app for the Neo. He explained about the basic of building the application and Makefile

Then, the speaker introduced the Autotools we discussed about ipk packaging and bitbake for the openmoko and building using make

we even played a Linkin park track off the phone! got a glimpse of its clear sound and video also tried to check out some of the videos of the phone on youtube but then the site was blocked on the proxy!!!

Also a quick look on the online docs on what can be done with the openmoko on the phone current one even has a terminal to play around with He also mentioned that the phone uses matchbox lightweight window manager and so some features similar to iPhone are also possible to built into it and its very customizable

The next version of Neo and Openmoko should have a better hardware and lot more features.

There are feeds of Neo and OpenMoko on http://scap.linuxtogo.org

Second talk (The last 15 mins):
K C Ramakrishna from rKnowsys Technologies also gave an insight on how to get involved with free-software projects He also briefed about the advantage it has over the other regular oppurtunities

Regards
Cheedu
http://www.cheedhu.name

Sep

we pulled off this months meet as we were goose hunting for a new premises to host our monthly LUG meets, as the old location was heavily congested by traffic and the new flyover constructions.

Aug

This month the group participated MUKT.IN event. http://mukt.in/

July

Hi luggers,

This month we are not having the meet as most of the folks are showing great interest in the barcamp held in Banglalore. If you are guys are interested in attending as well... It is worth looking at the URL mentioned above.

Ok, so see you guys and have a great weekend !!

Thanks to all the folks who voted for the poll.. And those who haven't voted, please do it soon, as the poll is going to be closed by Jul 31st.

Cheers,
Sanjay Sha

Summary of Q2 talks @ ilughyd

June:

Yo Folks,

Welcome to this month's meet.. Here comes June, bringing in showers to solace the Hyluggers... And as we splash into this months agenda, let me thank Virtusa, Arjun Mukherjee, Ramakrishna and Murthy in particular for playing great hosts..

This time we are going to talk about a very unique topic. here it goes..

Topic: SysAdmin - The Firefighter
Speakers: Abrar / Sanjay
Duration: 1.5hrs

He has the power.
He has the expertise.
He can work wonders with machines, and can bring up a zillion servers with his touch.
His life is adventurous, always demanding to be the sheet anchor and the saviour of the company's infrastructure.
Yes a SysAdmin is truly a demigod in today's inevitable IT world.

The speakers will share some real time scenarios and walk through the firefighting skills required.
In the due course of the talk, a number of *nix tools that are used to troubleshoot and fix problems will be introduced.
Later, they will talk about the measures and best practices to safeguard a company's Infrastructure.

All you SysAdmins out there, come join and make this months meet a great success..
Make sure you spread the message about the meet and attend it..

Meeting minutes:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This has been one of the best meets so far. The talk was more inclined towards realistic problems in production environments and how to troubleshoot and fire fight them. Abrar and I have covered various scenarios, like sytem related, network related, and some bits of security hardening.

System Related: We touched upon the basic commands like uptime, top, and digged deep into how the information is gathered such as /proc/uptime, and strace level info etc. Gave them tips on troubleshooting any complex problem with simple techniques, such as log messages checking, dmesg checks and many more. Following which, we talked about hardware troubleshooting bits and unveiled some commands like dmidecode which caught their attention and they were all excited about it.

Network & Security Related: Forking out ou the system related stuff, we delved into the magical bits and bytes.. Introduced the luggers to mii-tool, iptraf, iptables, route, nmap, /proc tweaks, lsof, netstat and many more commands.

Hardening aspects such as honeypot, TBF, syn cookies have been breifly touched as well.

Those of you who wanted some good references, I have a page coming soon which has all the URLs.

Venue: Date and Time: 30th June 2007 Saturday 6:00PM

May:

Welcome to the May Month LUG Meet. It's the hottest month and this month we offer you a nice opportunity to chill out at the meet.

Lined up for this meet are:

1) Install Fest: With summer vacations on, lots of students would be pondering on how to utilize their vacation time productively. Well Folks!!! Drop in at the Install Fest and learn how to install a popular distro and then spend your vacation exploring the wonderful world of the Penguin.

2) Python, A friendly pet: Calling the attention of all hacker wannabes!!! Bored of learning programming languages through perverted examples? Want to learn a programming language through real world applications? Then this session might just be for you! In the first of a series of sessions, the speaker plans to cover the following aspects of Python Programming Language.
i) Features of Python and its "Batteries Included" Philosophy
ii) Regular Expressions

The speaker will discuss the various aspects of the Python programming language as they appear in the applications.

Speaker: Thejaswi Puthraya
Total Duration: 2 hours

Meeting minutes:
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Fantastic festival and great response !!

The python talk was huge hit too.. A lot of HCU folks.. It is a positive sign for sure :)
Thej covered the features, semantics and the beauty of python... His slides speak much more than my notes
here goes the slides http://thejuhyd.blogspot.com/2007/05/python-series-1-at-ilug.html


Venue: Date and Time: 26th May 2007 Saturday 6:00PM

April:

How many of you have Aphrilophobia? Oh well, if you are wondering what is that.. It is the fear of April Fools' Day. Yes, this month has a humorous start and many people must have fallen pray to your gullible acts and hocus pocus spells ;).. Carrying the same fun and excitement, come join to share the Open Source spirit.

This month we are having a talk on Jabber and a short talk on Regular expressions

Topic 1
~~~~~~
What: Chat with Jabber !
Speaker: Srinivasan aka Cheedu
Presentation link: http://www.cheedhu.name/Docs/iLUGHyd-XMPP.pdf
Duration: 1.5hrs
Type of talk: Admin talk
In Cheedu's words: I would discuss in short about the jabber / XMPP and the various jabber servers and clients available.
if possible, show the installation and configuration of one of the chat servers called 'Openfire' (formerly wildfire / jive messenger).

Topic 2
~~~~~~
What: The regex magic !
Speaker: Sanjay Sha
Duration: 45mins
Intended for: programmers and all the lazy people like me ;)
Covers: basics of regular expressions

Meeting Minutes:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
With the World Cup final match coinciding with the monthly LUG Meet, the attendance dipped to 10. But the quality of the talk wasn't affected, Srinivasan aka Cheedhu delivered a talk on "Jabber: A messaging Protocol". He began with a brief yet comprehensive introduction to the protocol before he decided to show a hands on. He setup the OpenFire Chat Server in under 10 minutes!!! Then he configured a client (Gaim) to show a demo. Though the second talk was supposed to be on "Regular Expressions", it had to be postponed as the speaker was unwell. Before calling it a day, feedback on upcoming talks was collected.
The audience at the meet weren't disappointed as they got to see the final match, thanks to rain!!!

Summary of Q1 talks @ ilug hyd

Welcome to Mar 2007 Meet:

As we march on the month of March and enter into April, lets get together and share the spirit of OSS and make this months meet a grand success. I heard that last months talk was a huge HIT. I congratulate and thank everybody who has been involved in making the event a big HIT.

This month we are doing it a little different. Yes, we are giving a break to the theory classes... Its time for some practicals :)

We are having a Linux Install Fest , where we will take you through:
- Basic installation and configuration of Linux (a couple of distros).
- Basic networking setup for SOHO purposes.
- And also showcase some of the really cool features that the "Desktop ready Linux" has.

Here is this Agenda::
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

What: Linux Install Fest !
Duration: 2.5hrs
Date and Time: 31st Mar 2007 Saturday 6:00PM
Intended for: Students, Newbies, Linux users and all.
Covers: Basic installation, configuration of some standard services on Linux, basic networking setup and configuration, and unveil some really cool eye candy stuff which makes you close all the Windows and glue at the computer screen.

Minutes of meeting by Theju:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The March month meet promised a lot for newbies as it was an
Installfest. The meet attendance was 16 with a sizeable number of
newbies from engineering colleges across the city.
After some voting Ubuntu was selected for the installfest as it was
touted as the easiest distro for newbies to install. The installation
took just 6 clicks (about 10 minutes) and the distro was up and
running(a feature that most newbies loved).

Next on schedule was the networking segment where Sanjay and Abrar
showed us how to share an internet connection using IP forwarding. All
it took was three lines of code and both the laptops were sharing the
internet connection. Also they gave an overview of the features of
IPTables.

Welcome to Feb 2007 Meet:

It the shortest and the sweetest month of the year, filled with purity and love. Yes... Its the valentine month - "February". I hope you all had a a great time and I am sure you all must be missing this month for very many special reasons like I do :) So, before we step into March, lets come together and celebrate the spirit of OSS, and make this months meet a grand success.

We are going to have two segments like before. The first segment will be a session and the second will be a BOF. Looking at the mailing list and the type of queries that are coming in from users, we decided to have a BOF session where we will try to discuss some of the selected queries and issues. So all you people out there, with loads of questions... here is a chance to get close and in person with the community experts and learn, share and grow together.

Here is this Agenda::
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Topic: Programming the Shell way !
Speaker Profile: Abrar is an open source advocate and a tech guru. He has rich knowledge and understanding about OSS and its philosophy, and a very wide domain expertise and industry knowledge. He is very up to date with the technologies and the activities that happen in the Open Source world, and a great resource of information. Lets meet him in person and get to know more about him.
Duration: 1.5hrs
Intended for: Students, wanna be Sys Admins, Sys Admins, Linux users and all.
Covers: Basics to advanced magical features of shell scripting, automating tasks like "wake me up at 4:30 in the morning with my fav song", and administrating the system better and many more..

Topic: BOF
Duration: 1hr
Date and Time: 24th Feb 2007 Saturday 6:00PM
Intended for: Everyone
Covers: Some direction on Linux Clusters and howto's, Where to get started with Linux


Minutes of meeting by Theju:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dubbed as the LUG Meet of the shortest (and probably the sweetest) month (February 24,2007) the meet had a few surprises in store. First the meeting attendance sored to 27 and secondly there was a sizeable audience from Virtusa and Hyderabad Central University.

After the customary introduction, the meet began at 6:45 pm with Abrar Kazi, an open source enthusiast explaining the difference beween a system call and library function. Next he discussed the "Onion Diagram" ie how the shell interacts with the Kernel. Abrar delivered a comprehensive talk that touched each and every aspect of Shell scripting. Before concluding the talk he showed us a few scripts like how to build an alarm (that plays MP3's) and a Perl script that requests the router for a new IP every time it is run. Next came the BOF (Birds of a Feather), Shankar of Virtusa who happened to be attending the meet after a long hiatus of 2 years cleared the air around GPL v3, the inadequacies in the Indian educational system that was preventing the desi junta from contributing back to the community and a whole set of other issues tormenting open source communities. It was good to have such a senior member back (Shankar also happens to be the cofounder of ILUG Cal).

On the whole, the February meet was a rocking one.

Welcome to the January 2007 Meet:

This month we've our new moderator taking charge. The moderator wants to share his vision with the community and interact with it by giving a small talk. Also included is a bonanza for the new year, a special screening of the movie "Revolution OS" directed by JTS Moore { http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_OS } ((If time permits, so everyone is requested to come to the meet within the specified time))

Topic: The Zen of Open Source
Duration: 45mins
Date and Time: 27/1/2007 Saturday 6:00PM

Speaker Profile: Sanjay Sha is our new moderator, currently working as a Systems Administrator in Google. He has been using Linux for more than 8yrs and has varied interests from computers to music to meta physics. His hobbies are photography, reading books, cooking and observing nature.

Overview: There is so much buzz in the market about Linux and Open Source. But most of us hardly have a clear understanding of what it is. Over the course of this talk I will cover the Open Source business model,which can form the basis to many aspiring consultants, freelancers and hobby programmers to materialize their skills and efforts to real value.


Venue:
~~~~
Virtusa, 3rd floor, Lifestyle building,
Begumpet, Hyderabad.