ILUG-Cochin Minutes.

[Raghavendra Bhat <ragu@xxxxxxxx>]

Hello all,


Here are the minutes for the just concluded meeting of ILUG Cochin held
on Sunday, June 20th. In all ways, this event was a milestone for us
with an attendance of 22 ppl - the highest ever !

The turnout was tremendous! Surprisingly, none of them have heard of
ILUG before. They were urged to get on the mailing list so that they can
keep in touch with the Linux community as well as go through the
archives (3 cheers to Thaths) and RTFM before posting.	Most of the ppl
left somewhat midway during the afternoon, probably due to hunger
strikes. CUSAT students have cooperated to try and shift the venue to
their campus as there was a little(putting it mildly) space constraints
in the present location primarily due to the unexpected high turn out !

A special thanx once again to Thaths(Sudhakar Chandrasekharan), Manoj
Srivastava and all the guys at ILUG-Chennai for providing Slink CDs.
Read on the minutes.
	
- --Shanu
	
				Minutes
				~~~~~~~  

The meeting began at 11:30 a.m.,late by half an hour as scheduled. There
was a formal introduction by all. After this, a small talk by Ragu was
made on the gurus behind the development of Linux and the Linux
community; namely, Linus Torvalds, Richard M. Stallman, The X Consortium
and GPL. Once the newbies became comfortable, there was a bombardment of
questions by them. Most of them were from the group of B-Tech students
from CUSAT (Cochin University of Science and Technology). Their queries
were answered by myself, Ragu, JJ and Commander Balaji in tandem. Some
of them were...

- - Linux pronunciation.
- - The meaning of the term GNU,GPL.
- - Differences between the various distributions.
- - The Future of Linux
- - Linux and Viruses
- - Software equivalents of win32 available on Linux.
- - The ever growing popularity of Linux.
- - X Windows, KDE and Gnome.
- - MC - File Manager

As part of the agenda, the installation demonstration of Debian 2.1 was
carried out by myself with assistance from Ragu and JJ. Our first try
was on an AMD K6/166 as this was the fastest machine available. However,
we had to use a different machine due to partitioning constraints -
there was no provision for creating a Linux native partition below the
1024 cylinder with out destroying the vfat partition. We decided to use
a different machine instead.

This was a Pentium/90. Installation went along smoothly with a summary
at each stage of install...

- - Booting from the CD-ROM
- - Disk partitioning and Linux naming conventions (hda,fd0,tty etc).
- - Lilo - Do's and Do-not's
- - Base install
- - DPKG basic commands
- - A tour of MC - Midnight Commander
- - Configuring the network card


We were unable to fire up X due to video card problems and decided to
abandon it. Instead we compiled the kernel. We started by explaining
bzip2, gzip, tar and patch file concepts and how to deal with them.  The
kernel used was the latest stable release 2.2.9. While it was compiling,
I spoke about kernel development... 

- - The major and minor revisions.
- - Who releases the kernel ?
- - Kmod - dynamic loading/unloading of modules.
- - Stable/Unstable releases.
- - Where to get the kernel source ?
- - Frame buffer consoles

The kernel was compiled and installed. The audience was amazed by the
fact that there was only one system reboot during the entire
installation procedure !
 
Thats it...end of minutes. Thanx 4 reading!
 
- ----------------------------------------------------------------==(SHANU)==--
  Shanker Balan                           Debian/GNU Linux 2.1
  St. Alberts College
  Cochin

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