Volunteer tasks

The mukt.in team has now decided to put a few tasks up for grabs. Since we are in the initial stage of organization, our tasks will be limited to working on promotion and of course design. We are looking at a few alternatives to loopbox to host our site and UnixPod ( an excellent free shell provider ) seems to be a very good contender.

Our first task includes design of a CMS which henceforth shall host everything related to the event. Those interested can speak up in #mukt.in, please do remember that the organizers of mukt.in are extremely busy at the moment and an immediate response is not guaranteed.

Those prepared to talk to officials across possible event venues, do talk to us in our irc channel ( #mukt.in on the freenode server ).

On behalf of the mukt.in team, goodbye !

makeover

Hello everyone,

We have decided to give our website mukt.in a very fresh new look. Our orange and light-green combination has of course struck a cord with everyone and will continue, but we want to focus more on the promotion of the event. Our designers have begun working on this and here is an example of what is to come. Do tell us what you think in our IRC channel, #mukt.in on the Freenode server

mukt.in date finalised.

We have finally decided when the next mukt.in is going to be held – May 24th 2008 !

This decision was taken at the meeting of the Twin Cities Linux Group – ILugHyd. The decision about the venue is yet to be taken. Pavithran S. said at the meeting, “OU seems to be a pretty good candidate as they have allowed ILugHyd to carry out its activities of promoting the use of Linux and FOSS without any hindrance.”

This in no way means that we have finalised the venue. Our choice of a venue is based on the following points:

1. The venue should be easily accessible to those in Hyderabad.
2. The venue should present adequate facilities for the event to run without hurdles. These facilities include a live internet connection, continuous power supply through the course of the event and at a large room.
3. The venue should be neat (the OU building where ILugHyd conducts its meetings is under renovation. We are sure that this work shall be done by May

The mukt.in team is now working hard to find speakers for the event. Those interested should drop in at #mukt.in on Freenode.

For updates keep visiting this blog !

Shriphani Palakodety,
mukt.in

mukt.in’s goals.

As the sole blogger for mukt.in, I take it upon myself to explain to everyone out there the concept behind mukt.in.

We do not aim to be Hyderabad’s foss.in. Sorry if we let you down there. There are far too many events that target the open source community. Almost all the LUGs and SIGs here have an event. If you want to rub your shoulders with the individuals who are regular users of open source software and are part of the team, we suggest you go to those places. mukt.in is an event that brings complete newbies to open source software together and introduces it to them.

People do ask me once in a while about the location we chose for mukt.in 1. Well it was a government institute. It didn’t have a lot of things to boast about. But isn’t this institute the right place for us to start? We aim to bring newbies to open source. If we did go to Hyderabad’s best college, it would have a been a step away from our goal. At mukt.in 1, Thyagu told people about ruby on rails, theju taught a bit about svn and pavi about translation and localisation. They did showcase open source software very well. In my opinion, we might not have made it to the front page (or for that matter any page) of the local papers, but we did introduce people to open source software, showed them that Linux is not intimidating and looks better than windows, showed them the ease with which they can install linux, taught them about ROR. We did what we aimed to do and the people at the insti. were awed by the power and appeal of open source software.

We are soon going to announce the venue and the date. Keep reading this blog for more details.

Arkhit made some cool logos for mukt.in 2. Have a look at them here.

MUKT.IN returns !

We are back, the entire gang is here to spread awareness about FOSS. And this time we promise to make a bigger impression. There is going to be more hacking, more installfests, more discussions, more geeks and whatnot !

Drop by at our IRC channel #mukt.in on irc.freenode.net to give us suggestions and so on.

Day 3

Today was a day geared towards developers. After having finished our section on FOSS for the masses over the last few days, we decided to introduce Linux to the Developer.

The session began with an introduction to Subversion ( svn ) by Thejasvi. Thejasvi was a successful candidate at the Google Summer of Code and worked on server-side validation. He explained how to check-out ( co ) code from a subversion repository and moved to explaining how svn differs from CVS.

Then Pavithran S., who works at the National Resource Center for Free and Open Source Software and contributes extensively to KDE-Telugu explained what he did and how he translated. Tools like gettext were introduced to the public and a live exhibit of gettext saving the unicode strings of a po file were displayed.  Pavithan was on a mission to recruit translators for KDE-Telugu as the project doesn’t have enough people in it. Support KDE-Telugu folks !

Mr. Thyagarajan (we call him thyagu on IRC ), the Ruby on Rails expert, delved a bit into the MVC concept. The star attraction of his presentation was that he put unicode strings in the templates and produced a working application in Telugu. Ruby’s CRUD interface and the ease with which applications could be made were shown. As usual, Mr. Thyagu’s excellent delivery earned him a superb round of applause.

Then came the give-aways. We had lots of stickers to give away and by the end of the event they were all finished !

Thus ended version 1 of mukt.in. We are going to conduct this event once again. For all those who made it to the event and made it a success, the mukt.in team extends its thanks and wishes that the event did contribute to people’s knowledge. Goodbye till next time !

Day 2

A post on the Installfest ! Let me quickly interate over the events of the day. We kicked off with the most famous distro (at mukt.in) – Ubuntu. Ravi (calls himself neenaoffline and also happens to be the chief photographer) and I kicked off with the talk and after a hiccup (which involved a few dirty lines being spilt on the screen, such as “SQUASHFS Error” and so on), we managed to install Ubuntu on my laptop (specially screwed yesterday for the installfest !). After this, the two of us went to a corner with some other folks who were intrigued by the installation processes and we tried every distro in Krish’s personal collection ! Can you believe it, 20 distros. Right from Ubuntu to the “fastest” linux – Yoper. It was fun and to top it all, my “historic” (as described by those at the event) laptop was the one we were installing those distros on. Some of the best distros we encountered (based on what the people thought about the ease with which the distro could be installed, the presence of a GUI installation method and of course, how good the distro looked) were:

• Dreamlinux – A mac lookalike. Comes with XFCE as the default desktop manager and looks awesome (especially the dock). We had a few problems locating the “install to hard-disk” option but it worked out fine.
• Fedora – Decent and easy to follow instructions.
• Suse – Hats off to Novell. Superb looks and it supports everything including my wireless very well

The event then included a detailed explanation of the installation process of Fedora. The best part is that Superkiddo explained everything including using LVM to manage incontiguous devices. Superb day and for those who couldn’t make it, we have lots of exciting stuff lined up for tomorrow.

Day 1.

I, Shriphani take utmost pleasure in describing how the event began. An introductory speech by the Principal of the Government Institute of Electronics was full of references to open source software. His son, an IITB grad first introduced him to open source software.

Pavithran, also known as pavi on IRC, delivered the first speech of the day. His speech was mainly for developers. Pavi stated various open source licenses like the Apache license and the Mozilla public license and spoke a bit on the advantages and the disadvantages each license posed.

Srikrishna Das, the key coordinator went on to elaborate on what Pavithran mentioned. The speech on the philosophy behind Free and Open Source Software went on for about an hour.

Atul Jha from Delhi then spoke on the Linux philosophy again. His speech was ridden with extreme animation. Probably the most energetic speaker of the day.

The guest of honor for the day, Mr. Raju Alluri from Sun Microsystems began his talk on solaris

Mr. Raju speaking about OpenSolaris.

Mr. Raju showed us solaris in action and mentioned the reason behind Sun’s decision to make Solaris Open Source.

Mr. Raju told the crowd about Opensolaris bounties. Each contribution gets a Tshirt (go get there). You can read Mr. Raju’s blog here

We then went to have lunch. I don’t think what happened there deserves to be written here.

After lunch, the crowd gathered in the hall again for the last leg of day 1. Krish took over and then began a session on “Linux on the desktop”. Krish’s presentation was amazing. He has a whole lot of distributions with him and he showed the crowd the specialities that each distribution had. Krish also showed compiz in action and the crowd was watching with wide eyes.

Day 1 of mukt.in began with a bang. And we are happy that it went that way. Goodbye till the installfest tomorrow !

mukt.in is up again.

After a slight intervention, in the form of a crash and loss of data, the mukt website is up again. The event is all set to kick off tomorrow. Be there without fail.

The countdown begins !!

mukt.in is just 3 days away. Everyone is invited. Be sure that you spread the word around. Details of the event are of course available on the site. To help you locate the campus of the Government Institute of Electronics, we have provided a map for you.
Be sure to come.