I was thinking about writing about the workshop and I wrote a bit about it. Then, I saw Shyam’s mail and he has written a report much better than mine. So, I am posting it here(with a little bit formatting and editing) instead of mine…

We started the inaugural ceremony by 10:00am. Raju sir started by welcoming all to the workshop. Col.Induchudan sir, HOD of IT department was our chief guest. He did the formal inauguration of the workshop. Later Raju sir invited Jinesh to give an introduction about the workshop. Jinesh briefly explained what the workshop is all about. He started the workshop with an introduction and then handed over to me, to take an introductory session on how Malayalam is handled on computer(the user level things) and some very basics about Unicode.

The previous day, We a team of free software fans[FSFs?], including Mahesh, and first year CSE guys Manu, Krishna Raj, Vishnu, Savanan and myself was in the lab till 7:00-7:30pm installing the Malayalam locale, and the essential softwares in all computers. Thanks to the teachers at IT lab, they have been so helpful in setting that up. We saw, how interesting it would be if we could team up and hack every night in the lab… It was a new joy for us.

So with those installations, it was very easy for me to show the participants how it worked. But those are just user level hacks, every man with some common sense could study himself, with some time. We did that to show the students who are yet to start, that these things are so easy and its there for making our life easier:-). We showed them, the default inscript method of inputing Malayalam, the difference between lalitha and the usual keymap. Swanalekha was shown and finally ended up with tuxtype.

After this introduction the workshop changed to its second phase, explaining what we can do in this area as Engineers. How we can make a career around language technology, what all are oppurtunities around language technology that usually are not taken seriously while considering our career options. He explained about what
localisation(l10n) and internationalisation(i18n) is all about and the community efforts in this area.

There were some time left after Jinesh’s workshop, so I took a brief session on IRC. Which is one of the must-know kind of thing for an engineering student. Where almost every free software projects are discussed and where we get quality help, provided we behave well;-) [To add a lill thing to that- People, I am alone at our home #mes-fsf;-). So while being online, just try to be there at #mes-fsf. Its as easy as clicking this link and clicking connect there]

The workshop ended with the valedictory function which was chaired by our Director, Dr. K.P Mohammed sir. He wished all the best for our ventures and said that the idea to make use of the lunch time is good.

Thus the second activity of GNU Labs got to an end successfully. Raghesh sir’s and Raju sir’s strong support is what enables us to cover our disabilities and shortcomings in organising such functions and we will try to improve through activities.

Special thanks to all who attended and we hope, you people become active in the near future, that we together can move to more meaningfull activities than mere workshops like, if you people got interested in localisation, we can very well start a localisation group and start localising KDE who’s Malayalam status is quite low. Remember, you just wanna know Malayalam and absolutely no programming skill is required, you just want to know, how to edit a text in a computer… believe me!:-)

So we just had a good start and lets together go forward to build a better future.

Shyam’s original report can be found here. He just forgot to tell about the code of Swanalekha, which was very interesting to read with the comments in Malayalam. Its a good example on how to make code interesting to read.

Today was the college sports day. Since the series exams are near, most have gone home and hence the participation was less. I went to the college to attend the mechanical workshop scheduled in the afternoon section, but I was disappointed to hear that there was no workshop today. Its not because of my fond for mechanical workshop; its because I am one section behind everyone, due to some leaves. So, I and Krishnaraj went to help Shyam and Mahesh to configure the systems for tomorrow’s workshop related to localization of softwares and its importance, organized by the GNU Lab @ MESCE. The workshop is conducted by Jinesh K, a former student of MESCE. The exact topic is “Opportunities and challenges of Localization/Internationalization in Personal Computing”. We installed Malayalam locales and some softwares related to Malayalam developed by SMC.

I have been wondering how to install Malayalam language in Debian and enabling the menus in Malayalam. Today, I came to know how to do it and much more regarding mounting drives, network drives, apt-get, Synaptic Package manager, .sh extension files, etc. The lab chosen for the workshop was the Multi-Core computing lab of IT department and most of the systems have Debian installed. Also, the staff in the lab helped us a lot by installing Debian in the systems which don’t have it and in mounting the drives and placing our files in server.

We were in the lab till around 8 O’ clock. Vishnu and Savanan from S1S2 CSE-B also came to help us.

There was a meeting during noon in our college to discuss about the future activities of GNU Lab at MES CE. It could be considered as the first official one. Raju sir, Raghesh sir and a few students including Shyam and Mahesh were present. The participation in the meeting was less as the study leave for university exams for second and third years starts today.

The current active topics were discussed and Raju sir suggested to go through the previous years Google Summer of Code topics to get more for the GNU Lab. Other suggestion were to have the college labs open 24 hours and to provide the root password for students, so that they could do much more. Raju sir himself supported us by quoting IIT’s and NIT as examples and said that the authorities here are not much encouraging and the college could develop in these aspects only with their help. He also suggested few ideas to overcome such situations. I am a bit disappointed too, that the conclusion of the meeting was to give first years works like to introduce or work with a particular software or topic. I think there might be talented ones who could do much beyond that and the selection criteria should not be based on year or semester wise.

Today, I went to the college just to attend the meeting of GNU lab. Mails were sent to the groups inviting all to participate. At first, the time was fixed as 10AM, but later shifted to 3PM. I was eager to see all who are there in the GNU Lab at the initial stage, but disappointed on seeing only Mahesh and Fahad there. We three went to the shore of Nila to discuss about the activities. Thus, we had our first meeting of GNU Lab in the shore of Nila, sitting in the sand. There wasn’t much to discuss and we just made a rough idea of what has to be done. Priority was given to the GNU Lab Website and a college based Debian distro, which includes all that a college student need and surely Compiz and good themes to amaze all. We also decided to conduct a meeting every 2 weeks, even though we doubt about the participation. The meeting lasted for only an hour and we all returned home.

Today was the closing of college for Christmas holidays. There were rumors that classes will be let off at noon, but classes continued up to 3.30PM. The last two periods were spend by singing songs and by anthaksharis, with the permission from the teachers. It was really fun and can be called as “College Days”.

The MES-FSF group had a meeting today at 1PM to discuss about the activities and topics for exhibition. As usual, there were small clashes with ideas. It was almost fixed to conduct the exhibition on 11th January 2008 and we all have to submit the report for it during our next meeting on 31st this month. A few new students from S4 EC too joined us and now we are a good team of about 20 members. I also heard a good news that discussions are going on to setup a Debian repository in MES.

I also bought the GPRS recharge card today as my mother gave me the permission [but not the money 🙁 ]. Now waiting for it to be active.