The first thing related to todays workshop I heard was that Mahesh is having fever and he won’t be coming and his session will be handled by Shyam. We really missed you Mahesh…

During the starting, there were a few problems with registration of students from ECE, EEE and AEI, as the HOD’s allowed a maximum of 5 per class to participate, but there were more than 15 from some classes willing to participate. And because of that, the participation was more than what we hoped and we had to go in search for more chairs.

Writing down the registration details was another problem. Writing down the name and roll number is not at all convenient(Its from my experience), especially after the students enter the auditorium. So, for next time, its better to find an alternative way for recording attendance, may be it could be computerized(hmm…. Another topic for time pass programming).

Anyway, a few of us including me, lost the first two sessions due to the rush and confusion. So, no comments about the first two sessions. In the introduction, the only thing I heard was “GNU is not UNIX”, not once, but more than thrice. Can someone tell me what was going on there?

Among the other 3 sessions, Hiran’s was the best(According to me). The tool, Inkscape attracted many and some were asking us for Inkscape software CD’s. We somehow managed to convince them that it is included in the Debian and Ubuntu DVD’s and made them buy those. Also, it was new to me that Inkscape could generate XML codes, which will be much helpful during web designing. So, now onwards, I am going to spend some time on it…

The unconference session was also interesting by the participation of students, even though the number reduced to 1/4th of those present during the starting. Everyone really enjoyed the videos shown, especially the animation movie made with blender.

Among the distros for sale, Debain Lenny recorded the most sale and there was hardly a CD of it left after the workshop. The cost was RS 20 per CD and RS 40 per DVD. I wonder why students brought it for that price; even though its available in the digital library.

A few students asked me how to change the interface to Malayalam. I think it was not explained during the workshop. So, here is how to do it in Debian.

1) Downloaad a Malayalam Unicode font. Its available in the SMC wiki.
2) Copy the font to /usr/share/fonts/truetype/. Suppose you downloaded “Meera_04.ttf” and you have it in your desktop, use the command “cp /Desktop/Meera_04.ttf /usr/share/fonts/truetype/”
3) Now, you have to change the permissions of the font file. For that, use the command “chmod a+rwx /usr/share/fonts/truetype/Meera_04.ttf”
4) Take Root Terminal and type: “dpkg-reconfigure locales“. You will get a screen as below:

5) In it, select “ml_IN UTF-8“, using arrow keys and by pressing space, so that a “*” appears on its side. Then press OK. Use ‘Tab’ key to navigate. You will get a screen like this now:

6) Select “ml_IN” and press OK. The locales will be generated.
7) Now restart your system. All the menu’s will be in Malayalam after restart. It can be changed back to English by selecting the Language option in the Login Screen.

Today, I also got a few new distros including Fedora.

3rd semester classes started today. There was nothing special. In the evening, there were a discussion between Shyam and Mahesh on TASM, MASM and NASM. Though I don’t know anything about the topics, me and Sajjad from S3 CSE-B also stayed with them. I stayed in the college lab till 6.45PM for the Debian installation and reached home by 7.45PM.

I created a GDM theme for GNULabs @ MESCE, with the background picture of a field and hills. I also tried using a picture of college, but it looked very wired.

Today was the registration for 3rd semester. All were in a confusion on what has to be done. We weren’t given any clear instructions on what has to be done. Some how, we(Me, Krishnaraj and Aalok) completed the registration by 12PM. A personality development class was scheduled at 1.30PM. So, we had more than an hour to spare and we went to Bharathapuzha. Water had risen a bit more and so, we stayed on the banks itself.

The personality development class was mainly focused on soft skills and how to face an interview. I think its not the right time for such a class and few of my friends also agreed with me. It ‘ll be better to have one more class on the same topic during the starting of S5/S6.

Today evening, I called Mahesh for what we can do to promote free software in college. Mahesh conveyed the glad news that college authorities agreed to change the old RedHat to Debian and the installation works will be done after the classes. So, from tomorrow onwards, I am also going to be with them.

As decided yesterday, I reinstalled Lenny as a fresh installation. It was really time consuming as the DVD drive is not in good working condition, showing read errors. Not only the drive, each and every part of the system is facing problems. I hope I could carry on with it for two more years. When calculating, the system is 3 year, 1 month and 10 days old and only the hard disk has the warranty left.

Taking the case of Lenny, it has changed much from etch. Its visual effects has improved, file permission settings are working better, renders Malayalam better and has GNOME with 80% interface localized to Malayalam. My next step is to try a distro with KDE. I have left out a 7GB for trying out new distros.

First university exam was over today. Engineering Mathematics I was tough and many are in the doubt that whether they will pass. Hope it won’t be the same with others.

MESTECH was amazing, especially the bike stunts. Many has taken videos and photos of the event and I’ll be uploading some soon. The exhibition of bikes were also good. Bikes which costs more than 20 lakhs were present in the exhibition.

I also attended a class by Kiranchand on Web Hosting. It helped me to know beyond what I could study with the free hosting services, like the admin panel of CPanel, etc.

There were many competitions which I could participate, like quiz, debugging, web designing, etc. It was really a loss for me.

Today, from Shyam, I got the testing version of Debian Lenny DVD. I upgraded etch to Lenny. It looks nice and is working, but still there are a few compatibility problems with the softwares. So, most probably, I’ll be reinstalling it tomorrow.

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Photos are added later, taken by Najeeb in his Nokia N70