• An installfest spanning two days for those yet to find a foothold in the linux world. The distro to be installed is Fedora 10 Cambridge.
• A user’s day which would consist of sessions taken by various LUG members on different softwares like office suites, productivity tools etc. available on the linux platform that’d help the new users in making the transition from Windows to Linux.
• Another couple of days have been devoted to Developer’s Day which would be about getting interested programmers started off with development in the Linux environment. It’s no secret that Linux is the development environment of choice around the world because of it’s open nature and no self-respecting programmer in Manipal would want to miss out on these two days!
• Finally, the last day would be a Hackathon to bring out the hacker in the participating coders. They’d be trying to make a firefox extension for a certain web service which would be decided on the spot. Needless to say, it’d be fun. The choice of the software to be hacked on remains flexible though and the enthusiasm and the coding expertise of the participants will also be taken into account

Do checkout the event wiki page for further details.

These are the awesome posters that have been put up around Manipal for the Open Week promotion and kudos to Sheeladitya for the awesome work

Python Workshop Poster

LUG Manipal is organising a workshop on Python, which is a dynamic object-oriented programming language that can be used for many kinds of software development. It runs on Windows, Linux/Unix, Mac OS X, OS/2, Amiga, Palm Handhelds, and Nokia mobile phones. It comes with extensive standard libraries, and can be learned in a few days.
The workshop requires no prerequisites, even knowledge of C is not required, it is aimed at people interested in beginning programming with Python.
There is no charge for the workshop and no registration is required, everyone is invited.
People using Windows are requested to Install the Following Software before coming to the workshop
1) Python 2.6.1 from here
2) Notepad++ from here

Note: These will also be distributed on the first day of the workshop, If you are not able to install/download them you can get them there…

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

The quality of a webserver depends on how many connections it can handle at any time. Some sites like google and yahoo have millions of people accessing it at a specific instant. If the webserver cannot cope with so many connections and crashes, this situation is more commonly called as “Server Down”. A webserver should be robust so that it can take up all heavy traffic loads, it should even have minimum downtime or in other words- If you restart the server following some changes to its configurations, it should restart immediately otherwise many users may find their page time out after waiting for long.

Let us now have a look at the world’s most famous and reliable webserver- Apache. It is an Open Source and Free software. It is a flagship product of Apache Software Foundation (ASF). At the beginning Apache was started as a small web server, as it grew up it began taking more Open Source Projects. Since now the load has became so much Apache Serve Foundation was formed to coordinate the activities. Other famous softwares under ASF are Apache Tomcat (for running Java Servelets), Apache Ant (tool for automating software build) and Lenya (Content Management System). We shall now restrict ourself to Apache HTTP Server which is more commonly called Apache Webserver.

Apache’s latest version is 2.2.6 . At present 2.2.4 version is more widespread but installing the latest stable version is always recommended. If you want to test Apache you can get a development or Beta version, but for development work always use a stable version. You can get Apache from http://httpd.apache.org/ Installation on windows is a Next>Next> process. Installing on Linux is far easier, use you package manager to get the package. The package name is usually apache2 on most of the linux distros.

One more point! Bare installation of Apache wont open more than static HTML pages. If you want to use it properly, you need a proper dynamic programming language like PHP, Python, Ruby etc. These languages can be integrated with Apache closely. Speaking frankly, PHP delivers best performance on Apache.

There are many rivals of Apache like Microsoft’s IIS which is giving it a tough competition. Even under this scenario Apache does not hide its weakness if any. Bugs found if any are put up on the public bug tracker which everyone can check. This methodology instills a sense of confidence in people who use Apache for commercial and production purposes. Apache is a community project, its not only the core developers but even the volunteers who find bugs and fix them due to public bug tracker. Summing all, it is a great example of how people can cooperate to create the best technology and software.