For those of you who missed it , the meeting commenced at CAMP by around 2

Initially Easwar gave a presentation advocating GNU Linux to newbies. His target audience were newbies presently using Windows. He had two presentations. One highlighting the benefits of GNU Linux over windows and the other one demonstrating the installation procedure. He used Ubuntu for all his illustrations.

Easwar plans to hold a Ubuntu Install fest at his college. He plans to give a presentation about Linux and also offer to install Ubuntu for anyone whose interested. Anyone wanting to help him in this can contact him directly.

Easwar's presentation was discussed and it received inputs from everyone. Arun and Vikram had prior experience in advocating Open Source Software to people so they shared some of their experiences with everyone.

Next everyone was introduced to Ms. Chanditta. She works for an organization that regularly holds workshops training people in Open Source Software. She is basically from the Media Industry and plans to open an institute in which she plans to incorporate Open Source Software.

Although she is going to post her plans on the Mailing List shortly, she is currently looking for volunteers. She requires people who might be interested in teaching or helping out in her workshops. They hold workshops providing guidance about OSS to teachers , both from educational institutions as well as NGOs.

Arun then spoke about his recent experience in converting a customer to OSS and the resistance he faced while doing that. He finally managed to convince the customer after a Live Demo. Different methods of spreading Linux were then discussed by everyone.

Vikram spoke about his projects in wireless technology. He has also recently launched an initiative called PPP. This initiative hopes to build a legal framework for protection of personal privacy. Presently India does not have any such framework ; this was evident in the Aarushi Talwar case.

Krishnakant then spoke about his experiences in converting people to Linux. He also spoke about the presentations he gave and the questions he was asked regarding Linux. He discussed certain projects he was involved in. He also shared a great story about the Open Source Community. He described how a Firefox add-on was created within 36 hours based on his request to the community. He is going to blog about this experience in detail shortly.

Minutes for the meeting.

The GNU/Linux Users Group of Mumbai held its June GLUG meet on 18th June 2005 at MET College, Bandra. This meet was attended by about 60 people, mostly students of C-DAC local center. This time we experimented with a saturday meet, which got good response. Following talks and discussions were held.

• DTrace: Dynamic tracing mechanism on Solaris 10 - by Sameer

Sameer statred the meet with his presentation on dynamic tracing using DTrace on Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris. DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework for the Solaris Operating Environment. DTrace provides a powerful infrastructure to permit administrators, developers, and service personnel to concisely answer arbitrary questions about the behavior of the operating system and user programs. Presentation slides are available here

• Gaming in SuSE Linux - by Rajeev

Rajeev brought in his gaming machine (was it a computer?) to demo the latest games available for GNU/Linux platform. He explained the various technologies being used currently in the gaming industry like OpenGL, OpenAL, Cedega etc. Viewers were spellbound to see the demos of Doom3, Unreal 2004, CounterStrike. Presentation slides are available here

The meet ended with a treat from Derwyn at Barista :) Sorry for those who didn't come. We'll keep the next meet at Barista!!

The GNU/Linux Users Group of Mumbai held its May GLUG meet on 22nd May 2005 at 3PM at the DEP auditorium of the Kanwal Rekhi School of IT (KReSIT), IIT Bombay.

• Eclipse, an IDE - by Ankur Goel

May GLUG meet on Eclipse attracted around 40 participants in Mumbai + 5 people from the Nagpur remote center of IIT Bombay's Distance Education Center. Zaheer Tavadi of IBM gave an overview of IBM's interest in open source and Ankur Goel of IBM gave an introduction to Eclipse.

• Open Source Development Labs - by Tom Hanrahan

Eclipse talk was followed by a pleasant surprise. We had Tom Hanrahan, Engineering Director and Sean Madian, HR and Economic Development Director of Open Source Development Labs, home to Linus Torvalds. Tom and Sean are in India to get inputs and feedback on what role OSDL can play in India.

The GNU/Linux Users Group of Mumbai held its March GLUG meet on 13th March 2005 at HBCSE, Mankhurd. This meet was attended by about 20 people coming from all over the city.

• GNU Hurd Architecture - by Anurag.

Anurag talked about the Microkernel architecture of the GNU Hurd Operating System, and the differences between the Monolithic architecture of various other Unix like kernels.

• Installing Debian GNU/Hurd

After a brief tea break, we started up with installation of Debian GNU/Hurd on Erle's laptop. After about an hour and a couple of hacks, we were successfully able to get it installed. Presentation slides are available here.

The GNU/Linux Users Group of Mumbai held its January GLUG meet on 9th January 2005 at Netcore Solutions, Lower Parel. This meet was attended by about 30 people coming from all over the city. Philip, Kiran paid a surprise visit at the meet. This meet also saw us giving a farewell to Karunakar.

• Open Source Architecture - by Satish Mohan.

Satish Mohan from RedHat talked about the OpenSource architecture and the development work being carried out by RedHat in various areas. He talked about the GFS filesystem and redhat's RHN service which enables centralized management.

• Farewell to Karunakar G.

This meet also saw us giving a farewell to the stalwart of Indic Computing and Indian language localization, Indlinux.org project. Karunakar has played a tremendous role in resolving the technical issues around Indian language computing and his expertise has been sought by FLOSS localization groups in Nepal, Bhutan and other countries. Venky, Nagarjuna, Neerav shared their experiences with Karunakar and managed Karunakar to speak a few words. We will sorely miss him and wish him the best for his future plans.

Python Programming - by Steve

Steve Fernandes from Ensim specially came down form Pune to give a talk on Python. Python is an upcoming language which is being considered by many as an ideal programming language which a beginner and people from non-programming background can start with. Python, which was originally developed by scientists and mathematicians has many inherent advantages that makes it favored for a lot of applications. Python is used in a large number of places like redhat's config tools as well as complex and heavy applications like GNU Mailman. A Python program flows like poetry, hence it is easy to read and self documenting.

Mono - by Amish

Amish Munshi from Novell gave a talk on Mono. Mono is being very agressively developed and is soon going to reach its 2.0 version in mid 2005. Amish started with the basics of .Net platform, howto write-compile programs using Mono and howto host ASP.NET applications with Apache. Amish has written a nice document explaining procdures invloved in configuring Mono with Apache. Click here to download the document.

The GNU/Linux Users Group of Mumbai held its November GLUG meet at Netcore Solutions premises at lower parel on 21st Novmber 2004. This meet was attended by about 20 people coming from all over the city (mostly western) Following discussions and talks were conducted.

• Community Building Software - by Veer Bothra

Veer talked about the relevence and importance of community building software in todays context. From the era when internet became accessible to the common person, to today's world there has been a lot of change in how people have tried to made communities on the net. From Yahoo! Geocities in those days to Blogs and Ryze of today, the central aim has been same. "To empower the common man with the power to express freely" (and create content for the respective sites unknowingly!). Veer talked about the in and out of community building software and their importance.

• Semantic Web - by Nagarjuna

Nagarjuna talked about his vision of the semantic web computing model. He gave update about Gnowledge project aimed to create a new framework of semantic computing.

The October Mumbai GNU/Linux users group meet was held at KReSIT, IIT - Bombay. First speaker for this meet was Rajesh Jain of Indiaworld fame. He was followed by a talk on Resty by Mitul Limbani and Sandeep from Enterux Solutions.

Rajesh Jain is a technology visionary who started Indiaworld, one of the first portals in India before the Internet was a familar name in India. The sale of Indiaworld to Satyam in 1999 for Rs 500 crore sparked off the startup/venture capital boom in India. Post-Indiaworld, Jain has set up Netcore, an enterprise solutions company, focused on messaging, collaboration and security software, based on Free/Open Source Software. Netcore Solutions Rajesh Jain talked about his new affordable computing architecture based on thin clients to deliver localized content to Indian masses. A hard core blogger and a visonary, his talk was one of the best we had in the near past.

Next talk was on PHP - Resty by Sandeep. Resty is an inhouse solution developed by Enterux which builds upon the PHP architecture.

The September meet of Mumbai GNU/Linux Users Group was held at IIT Bombay. Mr. Subramaniam Vutha and Ms. Nappinai from the Technology Law Forum presented an excellent talk on "Open Source Software and Intellectual Property Rights". This topic was so controversial and debatable that we fell short of time, thanks to our speakers. Everybody benefited from the talks in some way or the other.