An event that is held by Wrox Publishers.
RMS was there, so that counts for something.
As is now usual for events being held by Linux India in Bangalore, almost everything starts at a LUG meeting. In a prev ious LUG meeting Deepak Thomas from Oracle had given us an overview of the plans for Bang!inux. However, that was one w hole month ago. This event set new records - the LUG that decided plans was a mere few days from the actual event. At t his crucial LUG meeting, discussions remained incomplete for a lack of information. But, all was not yet done. As Gopi solemnly intoned that version changes are a part of life, most of the LUG wondered if he had a stroke of the sun. It tu rns out that Atuls birthday (== version change, aha now you see the light)was the very next day, and our redoubtable co ordinator Jessie had managed to spring a cake and some cartloads(what a number!) of candles to do the needful. Yeah, we cut a cake and sang Happy Birthday at a LUG meeting - now how often does that happen? Everything apart, Atul was seen muttering away "someone is going to fry for this.....".
The actual event was scheduled to start on February 26th, so the LUG decided to assemble on Friday 25th at IISc. While the major ity of the LUG actually started work on 25th, for a smaller group from the LUG, work begun on the 24th. Why? Apart from so many other accidental accidents that were sprung on Linux India by the organizers, the exhibition actually started on 25th afternoon, and not 26th morning. The LUG resources were stretched as machines were obtained, fixed and fresh in stalls were put into place. Different distributions, applications, conflicts of existent and not existent hardware, all of these were sorted out in one grueling night of work. The Suse folks made an appearance here and spent some time wit h the LUG when all this crazy work was going on. This was the first of a series of interactions that Bang!inux facilitated between Linux India and the various distributions of Linux.
The Friday dawned, bright and sunny. The LUG strolled in eventually to realize that this event was going to be no IT.CO M. Unlike the previous experience, were LI was the center of all eyes, the LI stall was perched in a remote corner of t he Tata auditorium. Well, the organizers were kind enough to give us a stall, so we tried to get to work. Only to reali ze that we had no stall! Nothing was setup. At this point, the junior members of the LUG gave up arguing with the event managers and called in the heavy duty troops. Atul himself was at his verbose and combative best. The situation was no w steadily deteriorating into a petty ego hassle. The organizers had planned for every stall to have X area. Unfortunat ely, we knew from IT.COM that the crowds at the LI stall would be unmanageable. So, we'd *very* politely asked for the stall to be increased to as much space as it was possible. The folks doing the work on the other hand just didn't want to help. Probably they felt that we were throwing our weight around. Probably they were harassed. Probably they had no idea what kind of a volunteer organization LI was? Lots of probably, but lots of stupidity as well. As a final counters troke, Kalyan and Madhu were dispatched to obtain the necessary tools to set the stall up ourselves. This we did with a lacrity and returned with 4 Allen keys (all required) and one *LARGE* hammer (totally unrequired, just for the impressi on...bad pun, but hey...). The minute we looked like we were going to do it ourselves, they backed down and started on work. But, the incident left a sour taste in the mouth - obviously there were lots of things going wrong.
The work still in progress, we left to Coffee Board in IISc to have some lunch. Once lunch was finished, the LUG troope d back to move the machines into place. Still, things were not working out. We were an electric connection and one tabl e short. Jessie promptly sent out the troops to source some more material. Kalyan the astute genius found a "empty and unused" table. So the LUG discreetly "borrowed" the table. Machines and monitors were juggled around assigned and re-as signed places. It was now time for the inauguration of the event, time which the LUG used to continue to set up the sta ll. The stall of LI was situated just next to the auditorium that we had permission to use. So, the LUG piled into the auditorium to plan and thrash out the plans for the stall. After some discussion the sections of Development, Gaming, O ffice, Server, Multimedia and Installs were decided. Work was still in progress as the sky decided to open up. Apart fr om juggling from preventing rain from reaching the machines, Madhu was trying to connect the last install machine, when he felt a nasty 240V shock. Minutes later, the entire power supply to the Linux India stall blew up. Gulp. It turns ou t that the electrical connections had got *wet* and all hell was breaking loose. So, to avoid further problems, LI deci ded to rely on the auditorium's power rather than anything else. And for the rest of the seminar we worked off a line t hat we drew from the auditorium to the stall.
Incidentally, it should be added here that the crowds were still pouring into the stall and the beleaguered LUG folks w ere still answering questions while working on setting up the systems. Some folks from the LUG were even asked to sit a round in the auditorium to increase space for movement! From queries of "What is this Linux?" to "Where do I get the bi naries...." the ILUGers handled, answered and impressed the crowds. The whole spirit of the stall was that if someone w anted so see something working - it would be demonstrated. From simple installs to complicated compiles, everything was taken in a free relaxed way. The spirit of learning was still very much in the air.
In order to add some more colour to our stall, the ILUGers walked around the distribution stalls and got posters of var ious distributions to put up in the stall. In addition GT Enterprises also volunteered some of their distribution poste rs to add some spice to our stall. When finally everything wound down, it was 9pm. Another discussion lead to some more arrangement of the machines and some redistribution of the ILUG folks to the Redhat and Suse stalls.
The next day began with a redistribution of the machines. The crowds flowed with the tides of the talks that were going
on. If there was a corporate session, more often than not, the crowds tended to increase! This day was reserved for be
ginner track, so once this was done, we had a great many people asking us for GNU/Linux as if it was the panacea to eve
rything! The projector from CDAC that Sachin Garg so kindly provides us for us had arrived. We could now start out seri
es of lectures. The final lineup of talks included the following
14:30 Corporate Linux Kishore Bhargava
15:30 Stress test on Linux Mahendra
15:45 Install session Kalyan A. Verma
16:30 Programming in Linux Hanish Menon
17:30 Remote diskless boot Hanish Menon
Kishore's often hypnotic and amazing presentation had the audience in a complete daze. Considering he had just flown in
from Delhi on the morning flight, that was incredible effort. The crowds slowly built up until we had the auditorium c
ompletely full. Mahendra's talk centered around abusing the poor install machine by making it do impossible stuff. The
crowd was quite zapped with the stuff that he was most comfortable with doing. Next Kalyan set off on install tour with
occasional deviations from Sushanth and others on the finer points of a RedHat install. After this we were treated to
an amazing and comprehensive presentation from Hanish which seemed to last for almost ever. It seems there is almost no
thing that Hanish cannot speak on Linux with a large element of authority. It was a fantastic experience to just watch
the expressions on the faces of the crowd.
In addition to the main talks there were many sidelights occurring simultaneously. The Development machine was actually running off a SiS6215C card, so that attracted some unfair attention. At one point of time, there was just some plain text on the screen and a visitor wondered what development was being demonstrated. Only to be told that Hanish was comp iling KDevelop first, so the visitor had to come by later to test it! The main server running on Suse 6.3 - which was t o be our link via a dialup line refused to function, until it was scripted into submission. This lead to some major hai r pulling before it could get set up. Shanu spent some frustrating moments trying to setup Quake 3 on a machine and nea rly gave up on various distributions (no names here, note!) before something eventually worked out. By the time it was late evening, the LUG had setup its customary graphics + network stress test. Yes, yet another Quake session was on. With Shanu in Bangalore and in full force, it seemed that there would be no looking back. This session however was not destined to last for very long as the exhibition closed at 7pm. Most of the LUG rushed home to get a g ood night's sleep while some of the LUG folks headed off to the party organized by SCO called Tarantella Night. Well, f rom some rock to a neat laser show, it gave the LUG some time to let their hair down.
The last day started rainy and quiet. Soaked and damp ILUGers trailed in and took advantage of the lull in the crowds t
o play some more Quake. Slowly the crowds did begin to build up, but still nowhere near expectations thanks to the bad
weather. Thanks to lots of confusion
A quiet and calm Simon Cozens (/bin/perl/ emblazoned on his card!) wandered into the LI stall. He'd lost his presentati on and needed to recreate it. Fortunately, Kartik was demonstrating just that - a Star Office demo via the Sun which wa s working off the server. We slotted him in and he set to work. He was able to work and finish up inspite of all the no ise and crowds around him - which is very surprising. The rest of the day meandered its way through. Finally, later t hat evening we persuaded Marc Zugsmith from TurboLinux to setup a cluster for us. We promised him all the resources tha t he required. He valiantly tried, but much on the lines of Khader (and a certain Debian install, remember!) promised t hat the next time, he would get it all right. Eventually, the LUG got together in the auditorium and spent some time ch atting with him. We fired some questions at him, got some answers and some more questions as well. The late evening was spent in discussing various topics with Marc who is by avocation a sysad and therefore a source of information for nea rly all of us.
The stall started to wind down around 6. Machines were switched off and dismembered to CPUs, cables, and monitors. Jess ie sent the ILUgers into a panic when she checked off 12 machines while the count was actually only 9. She had checked off a music system, and a switch as 'systems', and was thoroughly apologetic. Cars were brought to the front and machin es loaded up according to final destinations which narrowed down to Malleshwaram 18th Cross!! While all of us feared th at she would get lost, Jessie too eventually reached safely. There was another minor session at Atul's place of griping and relief that everything was over.
In toto, the conference was not a complete and overwhelming success as IT.COM was, but there were many things that we g ained from it. First and foremost the LUG was able to interact with the representatives of the various distributions di rectly which helped us to a great deal. All the distributions including Suse, RedHat, TurboLinux and Caldera were most kind and helpful. They directly offered their support and gave us boxes and CD's to use. Thanks should be added here to the representatives of Caldera and Suse for the complete support that they gave us when we required particular applica tions.
The second real gain that we obtained from this conference was that confidence that we can organize an event by ourselv es, with very little corporate support. Except for the NetInfinity 7000 server kindly provided to us by IBM (and Khader , who lugged it around!), all the other machines were personal ones. This tremendous show of strength and support is enough to cheer and enthuse anyone associated with the Linux India movement. In addition, support from all over India was most heartening. Dr. Gurunandan Bhat who came from Goa took precious time from his schedule to be with us. Kishore Bha rgava who flew in from Delhi with his irrepressible presence, and never-failing humor always placed things in a better light. Shanu who ran in from Cochin who always makes time for whatever needs to be done. Many thanks to everyone else w ho could make it there as well. The cooperative and volunteer spirit of the LI stall makes it fun to be in and a part o f.
Finally, the greatest gain was in terms of the overall increase in terms of general awareness of Linux (or should that be GNU/Linux....?). The people who walked through the stalls will hopefully translate into users of Linux, supporters o f Linux and hopefully members of Linux India. Amen to that.
List of ILUGers at Bang!inux
Atul Chitnis, Gopi Garge, Avinash Shenoy, Hanish Menon, Madhu 'Gandalf' M K, Naim Kazi, KD, Jessica Prabhakar, Kalyan V
A, Sushanth S, Kartik, Anand, Prajwal K, Ram, Vijayan S, S Khader V, Sharat C, Mahendra, Nandu
Visiting ILUGers
Gurunandan Bhat (Goa), Kishore Bhargava (Delhi), Shanu (Cochin).
© 1978-2007 Madhu M Kurup.
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