Join it ASAP so that you can get updates regarding any event, any worthy news related to FOSS or just anything which you want to share with the follow FOSS enthusiasts. You can contribute to it by

• Become a Fan of LUG Manipal
• Discuss anything useful on Discussion tab of the Fan page
• Post links related to anything FOSS which do affect the larger community
• Create Events and invite them to attend it.
• If you took any photos during any of the LUG Meet/Workshop/Meetings, do upload them on the Fan Page’s album.

Lastly you can promote LUG Manipal by adding this badge on your website. The HTML Code for the same can be found out from here

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://static.ak.connect.facebook.com/js/api_lib/v0.4/FeatureLoader.js.php/en_GB”>

</script><script type=”text/javascript”>FB.init(“f83ca3350173b99bf34091c463dce8b0″);</script>

<fb:fan profile_id=”146702001478″ stream=”" connections=”10″ width=”300″>

</fb:fan><div style=”font-size:8px; padding-left:10px”>

<a href=”http://www.facebook.com/pages/Manipal-India/Linux-Users-Group-Manipal/146702001478″>

Linux User’s Group, Manipal on Facebook</a>

We start off with just one mailing list which is dedicated solely to the purpose of discussion. You can discuss doubts, new technology, future events or literaly anything which comes under discussion.

LUG Manipal Discussion List

You can even check out our page at our blog dedicated to it.

Before leaving, Happy New Year! May your coming year be great.

I am really pleased to tell you that we celebrated the first anniversary of LUG Manipal on 31st of October. As you might expect, it was without any pomp and glory, but wishing each other of the hard work they undertook to make the group and the FOSS philosophy to the general public.

Rewinding my memory back exactly one year, I remember that how Harish S.V., a Reader in Computer Science department and a distinguished faculty of Computer Science department helped us from starting to the end in forming this Group. He talked to all the higher authorities to cross the so called policies and rules of the college/ University.

In the letter which we had written to the authorities, clearly says that LUG Manipal is a non-profit organization and does not need any kind of financial help from the college nor do we collect any money from the students. The exact line which was written is as follows

We would like to clarify a few points with regard to this USER’s GROUP. First of all, this is not a club and it does not intend to collect any kind of membership fees from any student of any branch. Also we do not seek any kind of financial help from the college for running the USER’s GROUP. The GROUP will NOT have any office bearers, but only volunteers We only expect the college to facilitate meetings of the USER’S GROUP by providing Lecture Halls to hold Periodic meetings.

Additionally we would like to thank Racked Hosting, the sponsor of LUG Manipal for helping us out for covering any financial help that we need. The help is not in form of money or cash, but in form of resources. The official announcement on RH Site

If you have time, take the pain to visit these areas of LUG

• LUG Manipal Wiki
• LUG Manipal Forums
• Planet LUG Manipal

The workshop started on 1st of September, it was really heartening to see such a huge turnout. The first years were the most enthusiastic to pursue the workshop as they sensed strong content in our presentation. The total turnout was around 240, which is more than expected in any technical event held in MIT. MobiVision has set a history and should be written down in golden letters. The workshop is of 5 days and the batch is divided into two. One part is being handled by Python on Series 60 people and other by Android people.

The workshop will teach people two mobile platforms- Python on Series 60 and Android which uses Java. Android is a new software stack released by Open Handset Alliance which is led by Google. Python is a language which has a port for Symbian 60 phones. We did face a lot of problems in getting rooms for holding the workshops, but somehow managed it.

Android Section:

The first day was dedicated to Java tutorials and Installation of the softwares due to which progress was quite slow. It could have been better if Vista didn’t give problems with its authorization concepts (which were copied from Unix but implemented badly). The second day, we started them with  basics of Android programming and as usual software installation continued. The problem with Android is that we first need JRE or JDK to get the JVM running. Then Eclipse has to be copied which runs on JVM. Then Android SDK has to be installed and the Android Developer Plugin has to be installed in Eclipse. All these took a lot of time.

Many people were having problems running Android Emulator and Eclipse. These were called today at 4PM at Innovation Center so as to get the problems fixed at the earliest. Due to Ganesh Chaturthi college was closed and no workshop today. We hope to teach them a lot in next 3 days left in the workshop.

Symbian Section:

Symbian people were lucky to face the Vista problems the first day itself. They started with scripting on the second day with Loops, Conditional statements. Symbian Emulator is available only for Windows unlike Android Emulator. They even plan to install Python on the S60 phones which people may bring in next class. The people were quite attentive and picked up everything very easily. They still have 3 more days to go and hope by that time we may have many bonds lurking around in MIT Campus.

If people really take interest in Symbian and join Nokia Forums, they could earn lots of name and fame as most of the excellent developers do contribute and share code at that place. It would be a status symbol for our college to have so many developers

To learn Linux you don’t need pen-copy and other stationary at your disposal. Just a cool mind, bubbling with confidence. Get a cup of coffee, sit back and relax. The plane is about to take off!

Learning Linux isn’t getting some specifications. Its a complete Operating system, which has user friendly GUI and has some great OS concepts for the geeks. The former part is not a big deal as its similar to learning windows, the latter part needs to be covered.

Before getting started please read these two FAQ:   FAQ 1 and FAQ 2

1) Get to know about the other distros: Do you know any other distros apart from the distro you are using? Say if you are using Ubuntu, do you know about other famous and friendly distros which are making as much news? Other great distros include Fedora, OpenSuse, PCLinuxOS and some examples of geeky ones are Gentoo, Slackware. Leave these geeky ones if your taste doesn’t match. Be a n00b till you feel free to break out to the wider world.

• List of Distros
• Comparison of Linux Distributions

2) Know about the history of the distro you are using: It may look foolish! What do I have to do with older versions? This is a nice way to know about the trend which your distro is following. What are the features they expect to include in their future releases. What mindset these distros follow while releasing their new versions. What is the release cycle of your distro? What is the next release date? Isn’t it useful? Think twice!

3) Learn about the different desktop Environment: There are many desktop environments available out there which include GNOME,KDE, XFCE. What are their features? What are the specialties? What are their requirements? Which one is lighter, which one heavy? I have hundreds of question to ask, you might be having much more!

4) What is a Kernel: Quite basic but a big geeky question! I have heard people looking at each other’s face when this question is asked and then they look at me. In Layman’s language, we can explain it as a heart of OS. Compare it with engine of a car, where kernel is engine, gasoline is external power, mouse as driving wheel. Oh wait! My explanation is becoming too dumb! There is not just Linux kernel available, search for GNU Hurd and many more kernels available, out of which Linux is most popular. Hey did I mention that Linux is just a kernel, the whole OS is called a “Linux based distro” or simply GNU/Linux.

5) Linux File System: You should learn about the filesystem tree of Linux, how different partitions are mounted/accessed. Did you know that each device connected to the computer is represented by a file, each disk, partition are also represented by a file. These are called special files. Even directories are files, they are infact a file which point to an array of files. Where are all the configuration files stored? Its in /etc. Where are partitions mounted to be accessed (Ans: /media). Where are all the installed software’s executables go? (Ans: /usr) Where are all the device files stored? (Ans: /dev)

6) Permissions: This is one of the biggest hurdles for a newbie coming from windows world. According to him, this one is the most annoying feature at the beginning until he/she learns why is it actually needed. It contributes a lot to the security enjoyed by Linux boxes. You can make a file read-only for others, writable for the whole world or give the write permissions to some limited people by forming a group. Fine tune your policies as you like, nobody gonna stop you anytime.

• Linux File Permission Guide
• Changing File Permissions

7) Root User: If God who holds unchallenged powers exists, then why cant we apply the natural law to this beautiful OS too? There can be many users whose powers are at par with root user,but never equal! Heard about sudo? It’s used by non-root users.This is a keyword to be prefixed before those commands which require root access like installation,network configuration. For this the user must be in sudoers list (by default most users are in this list)

• The Sudo Manual
• What is Sudo in a n00b language

8 ) The different Applications for Linux: Who says that there are shortage for applications/softwares for Linux. Bring him to me, rest I will take care Coming to the point, I can say that there are thousands and lakhs of softwares available all of which are in the repositories. Now what is repositories? Hope you have already checked out the FAQ’s Link given at the start of this article. You don’t need to hunt them down and install, just an apt-get or yum is self sufficient.

• Applications available for Linux
• Some Applications available for both Windows and Linux (some examples)

9) Package Management: This is one topic which I would speak less and ask you to work on more. This is one of those topics which had unlimited theories and similar crap to waste time by writing in the blog. Trying it out hands on would be the best way of learning. Basically there are two types of Package Managers, Debain based which uses APT and Red Hat based which uses YUM. Both are good and provides you alternatives in case you arn’t satisfied with one. I think I have said enough of package management. A Linux software doesn’t come packages as one single exe file. Many different packages constitute an application. Don’t worry about which all packages you need to download, this is the place where package manager comes into play. It resolves all dependencies which are required for installing some simplest to complex software. For more knowledge Click Here

These topics are just pointers for “How to Start? Where to start from?”. It isn’t a complete reference, remember “Google is your Friend”

Wait for another blog post, you would be able to gulp down the second one only if you read this and did tried out yourself most of the things.

Have Fun Mates!

The details of the Competition are:

Venue: NLH 104

Date: 7th April

Time: 6 PM

For more details of the events please visit the link http://phpcompi.lugmanipal.org

Check the Wiki Page: PHP Competition

Prizes are sponsored by Racked Hosting LLC

The content material for this workshop will be basic HTML for getting a start to web programming. The basics of this tagged language can be learnt at W3Schools. We will then advance to the basics of server side and client side scripting and the differences between them. Client side scripting has been put in Module 2 (next workshop) of the whole web design workshop from LUG Manipal.

PHP is the choice of language for Server side Web Design. Those who don’t know much about this language better pay attention. People usually ask “What is PHP? Is it as powerful as ASP?”. Well! Its much more powerful than ASP frankly. You need to know both the languages before comparing them and just making guesses is a bad habit. To make you feel comortable, we would like to tell you that it is one of the most widely deployed technology of these times. Some of the most famous places where its used is Wikipedia, WordPress (most famous blogging software), most of the Content Management System. Even Google and Yahoo make use of PHP for their pages.

Now turning to MySQL, this is the most widely deployed database software which has more than 5,000 downloads per day as the statistics revealed by MySQL AB. Being the world’s most famous Open Source Database, its bound to be quite attractive. Being a very lightweight database software, its easy to install even on desktops. People usually have a bad experience after installing Oracle as their systems get badly screwed up with reguard to speed. Its very small in size (some 150-200MB) instead of Oracle which is of some 2GB.

The scripting will be done on Apache Web Server, its the world unchallenged king when it come to server deployments, covering some 70%of the webservers. Lightweight, extensibility , great features make it the no 1 choice of web developers all over the world.

More Details of the workshop is:

• Venue: NLH 204

• Time: 5:30PM

• Starts: 25th March Tuesday to 28th March, Friday

References:

Get the Official PHP Manual from its website.

Get the Official MySQL Manual from its website.

Check the LUG Manipal Wiki Page for this Event

The people who will be conducting the workshop are:

1. Anomit Ghosh ( 2nd Year)
2. Manish Sinha ( 3nd Year)
3. Ankur Srivastava ( 1st Year)
4. Shashank Shekhar ( 1st Year)
5. Nitin Abhishek ( 2nd Year)

The first three people will take the responsibility for the first day and the last two for the second. On Saturday we expect our sponsor- Swaroop Hegde to be present at the venue to give share with a few words on what he feels on the future prospects of this group.

For More Info, check these links

• About this Workshop
• Topics to be covered in the workshop
• A Report on First Install Fest

The Wiki’s URL is http://wiki.lugmanipal.org

At present I have put up FAQ’s and Upcoming Section for People who want to know deeply about the events. Previous events are also aggregated so that people who missed out can derive out of it.

I end up my post here, hoping for your reponse. This is not a monologue but a mutual talk or discussion. Comment back and we will see how much you are sincere

We had collected DVD’s from all of them who wanted to get fedora installed on their laptops. Why we choose Fedora? Nice question! This is due to the fact that the Xserver driver for ATI graphics cards provided to first years had bugs. The graphical interface would never come up. Nothing to blame Linux in it, it just incorporated the drivers which it is provided. To get the graphical interface running we had a script that installs a driver from a third-party software provider. The Driver would be put up soon as possible. Hope all of you have it on your C: drive. The driver is in the folder called “script”.

We had collected some 47 DVD’s from people, burnt Fedora and returned them today for installation. We had some 30 Ubuntu CD’s which we too tried to distribute, but as it was late, all people didnt get it. We have lots of pics too, please dont mind, it from Mobile Camera. Bear with us.

Keep checking this site usually, we will roll out lots of nice information,HOWtos and “Tips and Tricks”. Spare out some time to read the earlier posts and comment as you feel.

Pre-Install Fest Pics

Main Installation day Pics