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.

Today S1S2 CSE batch jointly had planned to have a Christmas and Eid celebration at 12.45PM. We have invited all our teachers and other staffs from the CSE department. Due to the function by MATRICS, we are advised to stop our function by 1PM. Being our first function and due to the lack of time, we couldn’t work it out better as we thought. Head of CSE Department Anil sir introduced all the teachers to us. Later we presented Anzab sir, who took Basic Electrical for us with a momentum as he was leaving the college.

The function of MATRICS(MES Association for Technical Research In Computer Science), the association of CSE department in MES started by about 2PM. There were speeches by Principal, Vice Principal, Head of the department and the former Head of the department. The first ever magazine by MATRICS, “THE TECHNIK” was also inaugurated. There was a flash presentation about the contents of the magazine too.

In the last, we had an interactive session on one of my favorite topic “Free Software” with the technical team from focuz Infotech, Kochi led by Hiran Venugopal. It was really informative and helped to clear few of my doubts.

Yesterday, I installed Anjuta IDE in Debian. But, I couldn’t compile the programs properly. I was getting an error that header file is missing. Same was the case with GCC too. So, I asked my sirs about it. They too don’t have any idea about that. Today, after spending more than an hour with it, I found out the error. The libraries which contain the header files needed for compiling programs were not installed properly and only the header files needed for the working of OS were present. After installing it from the Debian DVD, everything was ok.

Also, today we were taken to the computer lab in the college for the first time. The lab had all the systems installed with RedHat enterprise edition. But, the feedback I got from my classmates about the Linux was not impressive. They were asking that all these can be done with Windows too, then why Linux? Hope, we could change this way of thinking through our workshop.

Today, the written exams for first series came to an end. Among the 8 subjects, Maths II and Physics were a bit tough for me. Now only Engineering graphics is left and heard that it will be conducted after the Christmas holidays. Everyone is saying that its better to have series exams everyday so that there won’t be any homeworks…!