KanchiLUG – Kanchi Linux User Group, celebrated the Ubuntu Linux 9.10 Karmic Koala Release on Last Sunday, November 29, 2009 with a small release party.
KanchiLUG – a small group of energetic young students, is doing wonderful activities that all LUGs do. Inspired by ChennaiLUG, we conduct regular meetings, discuss in mailing list, share CD/DVDs, Take classes, Give Talks to colleges, Participate in FOSS events.
We spend our beautiful evenings of all Sundays in LUG Meets. Initially, we used to meet in the green gardens of Temples. Sooner, we needed a place with electricity to show demos. Some students came with their laptop to have live demonstrations of various FOSS tools.
We approached many schools. Atlast, we got a tuition center donated. It is a great place with ambient environment like house, with electricity. We have crossed 35 weekly meetings there. 
We all use Ubuntu Linux for all our activities. We installed ubuntu linux in our colleges and friends machines. We came to know that Ubuntu Community is conducting “Ubuntu Release Party” all over the world. Yes. It is the time to join with the community to celebrate the release of wonderful linux distribution Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala.
We discussed about this. Talks blended into actions. The theme of this party is to introduce Ubuntu to the public and newbies. We requested all our members to bring atleast one new user to the party.
Date and place were hard to decide. As November month is making us busy with semester exams, we planned to have the party on November 29, 2009 3.00 – 5.00 pm.
Place? Kanchipuram is a big city with many schools, colleges and public halls. We approached all resources with our references. Mr. Jothi, volunteered to arrange a hall in PTVS school.
Mr.Saravanan donated his LCD projector to make the show. Wow. It was a great news. Poster was prepared and circulated in the mailing list. We invited school/college students and Government officers.
We planned the events and talks. Volunteers picked up their roles in the show and prepared well.
The Party day dawn. Everyone was thrilled as this is our very first public show. We are not big public speakers. Filled with fear, we scared each other. But still, we decided to show our best.
One team went to arrange the hall. Fixed the projector, Pasted banners and posters on the hall and made a dark room for clear visibility of the projected screen.
Other team arranged for Tea and snacks. Ubuntu-tam team helped us by giving bunch of ubuntu Cds to make the show.
The clock showed 3.00 pm. The hall got only known faces. Will we get new faces? Yes. Slowly we got the crowd. Around 3.20, the hall is filled with 55 members. The crowd had guys, girls, students, public, businessmen. For our surprise, Mr.Thyagarajan, from Chennai Linux User Group, entered the hall.
Priya, started her compiring at 3.30 pm. The show started.
Selvamani gave introductory talk. He explained about Linux, Ubuntu and the release party.
Logesh explained about Free Open Source Software, the need of FOSS, the history of Linux, GNU, GPL and the advantages and powers we get from using Linux.
Rajkumar came up with the Graphical User Interface show. Audience showed their “Wow” on seeing the compiz animations. He demonstrated MySQL, Gimp, OpenOffice, 3D games.
This show impressed the people and they started to realise that Linux is more user friendly.
Balakrishnan explained the History of Ubuntu. He narrated the Ubuntu release cycle, version-name conventions.
Praveen spoke about the community support to the Linux. He explained about the mailing lists, IRC, forums and Linux User Groups. He shared his thoughts on how easy is to get support for linux.
Audience used to keep on listening to the talks. One team provided them tea and snacks to get some refreshment.
Dhasthageer demonstrated the Ubuntu Installation. From Bios, LiveCD, Install screen, the 7 steps, Dual Boot, Partitioning, Adding user, Sudo, to Complete Installation. People cant believe that Ubuntu Installed in 10 Mins. But we showed the wonder.
Here, Mr.Thyagarajan, came up with his “Stellarium demo”. Stellarium is a astronomical software which can show the sky, all the planets, all the universe. He demonstrated with various objects in the universe. He explained how Free Open Source Software can be helpful to the school and college students to learn the things practically.
He requested students to participate in various open source projects and explained how contributing to community will increase their knowledge and job opportunities.
He showed the irritating expired messages in Antivirus software in Windows and suggested to be free from all killing irritations by using Linux.
He released the “Ubuntu 9.10 Cd” and Rajkumar received that copy.
Shrinivasan, (ya… It’s me) handled the Q/A session. We got many questions from the audience. The Alternate softwares to famous commercial softwares, Business Model of Free Software, Custom application development, Getting Local Support, The Job Opportunities are the areas he answered.
It was pleasure when he told that KanchiLUG is the first team to celebrate Ubuntu 9.10 release party in India.
He thanked the audience and the KanchiLUG Team.
We announced the upcoming FOSS expo in the December month and requested the audience to participate in the events, meetings and mailing list.
Rajkumar and Dhasthageer shared their mobile no to the audience and requested to call them for getting support.
We had a stall to sell Ubuntu Cds and had a decent sale. All the sale amount is given to Ubuntu-Tam team for its various activities.
The show ended on 6.00 pm. We had a wonderful evening. Thanks for the donations for the hall, projector and snacks.
We realised that each small effort can do wonders, when shared. Yes. This is how the GNU/Linux Lives.
Here are some more snaps : http://picasaweb.google.com/tshrinivasan/KanchiLUGUbuntuReleaseParty#
We blog our activities at http://kanchilug.wordpress.com
Join our mailing list at http://www.freelists.org/list/kanchilug
Shrinivasan
Posted by tarulalan 
Posted by tarulalan 
Posted by tarulalan 
