Debayan’s Weblog

It gives me immense pleasure to announce that Linux Users’ Group along with SUN club NIT Durgapur shall organise a 3 day install fest at the Students’ Activity Center on the 25th, 26th and 27th of September. This will be the first edition of this event. As per plan, there shall be 4-5 stalls inside the SAC. Each stall will specialise in one distribution. We plan to support openSUSE, Fedora, Mandriva and Ubuntu. Other than that SUN Club will occupy one booth for opensolaris enthusiasts. We plan to provide monitors, keyboards and mice and expect the participant to bring along their CPU cabinets or laptops alongwith. We are mulling over plans to provide transport for bringing in CPU cabinets, but it is still in the planning phase.

Each booth will house a installation server and will host a repository for the respective distro and carry the distro image. We shall use ethernet switches and install through the lan. People who want us to install through discs may avail of DVDs too. We expect to get around 3-4 projectors for the event. Plans are to project ongoing installations on screen and a dedicated projector to play Linux Videos or sponsor videos (if we find any ).

There will be on-the-spot quizzes and participants shall win goodies on correct replies. For that we need as many goodies as possible.

Being first timers at this, I would request you to advise me on how to do this properly. What things should be taken care of and what things generally go wrong. Most importantly, please tell me how we can get goodies such as stickers, posters, DVDs etc. A T-Shirt or two would not hurt at all .

Everyone is invited. I especially expect participation from B.C.Roy engineering college. Will go there personally and invite people some time soon.

Things are looking good for us now. We plan to Linux-ize all labs soon. A central repository will serve the redhat based machines in the college labs and all currently used software shall be replaced with opensource alternatives. That is the plan. And i am pretty optimistic about the execution part. Also, last but not the least, the WB Govt has identified our college as a nodal resource center for fostering the spread of opensource in the state. We are aware of the lack of success that these nodal centers have met with in the past, and we shall keep it mind. Dont Worry .