REPORTING: Anything goes... a lighter view of a Goa/India LUG meet
Frederick Noronha
---------------------------------------------------------
It was a meeting with a difference... and not just because of an unexpected
influx by women GNU/Linux enthusiasts and school-teachers... on Saturday,
October 26, at the Panjim LUG in Goa, India.
Panic. People have started turning up, and the Computer Society
of India-Goa (they are generous in lending us their venue for
meetings) office key is nowhere on the scene. Arvind and Animesh
are already working on a 'rescue disk' plan.
"Are there no lights inside?" asked a new member, somewhat concerned.
But chaos has a way of dissipating itself. Inspite of having no
pre-announced plan on what was to be discussed, everything shaped
out surprisingly well. (One must appreciate the contribution of
Alwyn Noronha, no relation of this chronicler, for networking
with half-a-dozen volunteers and GNU/Linux schoolteachers, and
bringing them along for this meeting.)
One round of introductions, starting with a breathless (three flights of
stairs, late for a meeting, and no lift) Ajay Kunkolienkar. He's a final
year B.Sc. student "mostly using GNU/Linux for coding, having just finished
a small Linux cluster for his college project"). Alwyn (claims he is "not a
techie"), Animesh Nerurkar ("that's all"), Aliston (Synapse's hardware
network administrator), Valerian (LIC, the Indian life insurance giant, "is
shifting over to GNU/Linux"), Deepa Govekar, Milan Samant and Anna Rodrigues
(three lady-computer teachers at varied schools, now teaching GNU/Linux to
the kids), Flavia, Kini and Sharon (three lady-volunteers doggedly helping
the schools to keep going... they're from Phil Systems, have helped in the
past too, but this is their first meeting).
Anyone left out can assume the ommission was deliberate. Misuse of
journalistic priviledge, what else...
Founder-member Arvind Yadav; Michael Miranda, a retired IIT engineer now in
Calangute (the beach village, once a hippy haunt in the 'sixties, now
getting to be a concrete jungle); Bijon Saha who heads ETDC-Goa; Yunus
Shaikh (Goa's own exported humanware configuration sent over to Denmark and
who's working on thin clients there); Vijay Gopi of Goa Institute of
Management; Tom 'Soon-Heading-Back-To-Germany' Fernandes and one boring
journalist who scribbles distractingly all the time.
It was Arvind Yadav's idea to get Bijon Saha to evaluate two
distros he had recently tried, Red Hat 8.0 and Mandrake 9.0.
After all, as Saha puts it, he tries to "explore all desktop
distros in GNU/Linux". And, luckily we have the <shameless plug>
www.lincds.com network in Bangalore, made up of two hardworking
engineering students, to supply us the needed CDs at affordable
rates </shameless plug>.
Saha can speak. Some random points from his presentations:
o Release numbers are becoming a 'numbers game', with each distro
trying to outdo the other by speeding up their release-numbers.
o Yet RedHat is fully justified in calling this distro 8.0
o It's install process has changed (to pre-check if CDs are okay)
o Video-card etc is directly detected, making for a smooth install
o GUI is totally different from the pst. KDE/Gnome come in a 'RH' version
o The Verdana font makes the desktop look aesthetically beautiful
o Wine integration is far better; click on an .exe and it understands
o Some minuses: the release size has grown hugely, affecting those
using earlier generation hardware (who doesn't in India?)
o If you click on an MP3 (dropped in favour of Ogg) in KDE, the
software crashes.
o RedHat, now targeting the desktop user, allows for the
username-password not to be entered, if setup in that manner.
("It's not a good idea," ArvindY can be heard protesting.)
o Graphical installer Kpackage is "not included for some reason".
o RedHat should have given the option to stay with the original
KDE/Gnome.
And, on Mandrake 9.0:
o It has no dramatic changes from Mandrake 8.3.
o They've not hacked into KDE/Gnome, to change its appearance as
done by RedHat.
o Eleven window-maker or other desktop environments get installed.
o "It's quite a good distro now."
o Mandrake uses kernel 2.4.19, RedHat 2.4.18. Mandrake offers supermount.
Some debate about the upgrading. (Install in a new partition, if
satisfied with the 'distro', stay with it. There are no restrictive
"piracy" fears lurking around the corner any way.)
Animesh 'Banduji' Nerurkar rounded off the 'war of the distros' by narrating
his experiences with Debian 3.0 aka "Woody". (Animesh: "Debian is not meant
for the *casual* home-user." Yunus: Why not?)
Animesh's point is that Debian offers little customisation, leading
to "very high" reliability. "There are no perl or python-based
scripts to give you a cute install." But it's clearly a neat
organisation of resources. The basic installation goes through
in a few minutes. Then you boot from the hard-disk and add all
your desired apps. "Very neat, very clean, very simple."
But getting xWindows to run was a task. "More so, because for me, it was
very different from RedHat and Mandrake, and I was not used to Debian.
Besides, I have worrysome hardware. Debian gave me a royal headache,
specially since it meant a new set of tools which I was not used to."
Knoppix came to the rescue. It's a one-CD pack that allows you to
run Debian without even installing it on your hard-disk. ("I took
the xWindows config file generated by Knoppix, and dumped it on
the harddisk.") Lo behold, all problems were gone. You can now
guess what is Animesh's favourite distro.
Some further sharing of experiences with Sysphlede Claws (not stable) and
Sysphlede. (ArvindY: "Light, works with older hardware". Overall positive
feedback.)
More feedback on Debian Junior ("wonderful applications, jcompris
helps young kids learn the basics through games and fun... except
one application, everything else works beautifully"), Tux Math,
etc. Unfortunately Tux Paint doesn't work across a network.
Attempts to install in local schools across a LTSP network are
throwing up difficulties.
Queries about Gentoo 1.4. Debate about how the domain should be named for
the Goa Schools Computers Project (one suggestion was
firstname....@schoolinitials-village.gscp.org)
One query from a teacher: AbiWord (earlier release?) simply
sticks when students try to raise the point-size.
Earlier in the day, over the hospitality of Alwyn and Lisa and their teenage
children at the island of Chorao, there was a sharing of ideas to take
GNU/Linux education in schools ahead. Locating applications the
schools/villages would find useful was seen as one critical area. Extending
after-hours facilities is also being looked at closely. E-mail facilities
for schools is another priority. Using the computers not just as a geek's
plaything, but as a tool to gain access to greater information and knowledge
(for all subjects) is increasingly emerging as a priority. Keeping machines
up and running remains a challenging task, what with poor power and many
other problems. Locating and listing suitable GNU/Linux books for teachers
is another issue. (ENDS)
--
Frederick Noronha * Freelance Journalist * Goa * India 832.409490 / 409783
BYTESFORALL www.bytesforall.org * GNU-LINUX http://linuxinindia.pitas.com
Email fr...@bytesforall.org * Mobile +9822 122436 (Goa) * Saligao Goa India
Writing with a difference... on what makes *the* difference
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