Mail from ILUG-BOM list (Non-Digest Mode)
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ISAAC is an IEEE-TSEC techfest held annually around October. This year,
one event was a Linux seminar.
The organisers approached me to help with the seminar, and I suggested
contacting ILUG-BOM. He made the initial contact, being a LUG member.
Response was enthusiastic, Mayuresh Kathe (MK) and Dr. Nagarjuna (NG)
expressed immediate interest. Other people suggested were Kishore
Bhagwath, Philip Tellis, and Dinesh Shah. As it turned out, only MK and NG
were able to show and that was sufficient.
The infrastructure provided consisted of an LCD projector hooked up to my
computer (special request by IEEE-TSEC, I don't normally let my comp out
of the house), one of the bigger classrooms, and plenty of volunteers.
Two sessions (with same content, for different sets of people) were
scheduled on 2000-10-01. One was to start at 0945 and run nominally till
about 1300, with the next 1500 to about 1800. Unfortunately, a cascade of
delays caused us to start at 1030 and we had to cut it a little short.
In the morning session, NG started with a history of GNU and Linux. He
spoke of Open Source in detail. One hopes the neo-engineers absorbed the
concepts! MK then compared many major operating systems (Windows, Linux,
MacOS) on points such as the kernel, Multi-tasking and threading, UI, etc.
Linux came out tops at 6 points, with Windows at 5. MK also spoke in
general terms about other operating systems like BSD and BeOS.
MK's hardware comparison spurred me to show a listing of the device files
for hard disks in /dev. An impessively large list scrolled on the screen.
To quote myself and MK, "Those were just the IDE devices. Here's SCSI...
::scroll::"
We demonstrated the security of Linux by showing how the demo user
'lindemo' was unable to access cnb's home directory :-)
Having gauged the audience mood, the second session was livelier with a
greater demo of the commands and applications. Also it was discovered that
despite staroffice being installed, many apps including emacs, xfig, and
staroffice presentations (or whatever the powerpoint-analogue is called)
were not installed. We installed emacs and xfig, and a viewer from NG's
CD. In the process, we were able to demonstrate many more commands. The
audience got a good laugh when I accidentally typed my password on the
screen for all to see! It has since been changed.
NG's xfig demos invoked a lot of ooh's and aah's from the audience. His
explanation of emacs showed the possibilities of that program and invoked
many questions.
When MK was comparing OSs based on multitasking ability, someone mentioned
that Windows also multitasks. We put that one down by doing
# ps ax
# ps ax|wc
and showing the system log. One might also have shown the dnet client's
logs as it was running the whole time. Recommendation: Next time we do a
demo, show the SETI@Home client's graphical output.
Most of the demo was in X, but the people got several glimpses of the
command line as well as the Matrix screensaver. They also got some music
from the Realplayer installation and a look at how the Windows partition
is completely accessible from Linux.
As for programming, between us we knew Python (NG), C (MK), and Perl (me).
We demonstrated Hello world in all three languages, but with Perl I showed
the output in a browser just to show the possibility. PHP4, while
available, remained undemonstrated due to time constraints.
The audience interest lay mainly with compatibility with existing windows
apps. Which is why we showed the ease of accessing Windows partitions.
They also wanted to know about installation and upgrade, which we could
not demonstrate on the live machine, but MK did a good job explaining it.
Lunch was provided between the sessions, and some of the facilities were
shown (off) to MK and NG. In particular, we visited the library (modest by
IIT and TIFR standards) and computer labs.
On behalf of IEEE-TSEC, I would like to publicly thank Dr. Nagrajuna G.
and Mauyresh Kathe for this demonstration and lecture.
Corrections and additions welcome, especially comments by MK and NG.
--
Satya. <URL:http://satya.virtualave.net/>
US-bound grad students! For pre-apps, see <URL:http://quickapps.cjb.net/>
My other sig is a 4000 line perl program.
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