Warm Greetings To The FOSS Community, The Meeting for the month of October 2008 was conducted successfully.
There were 17 people mostly students who attended the meeting. Some brief snapshots from the meeting. Date: 28-09-2008 Time: 2:15pm - 5:30pm Venue: Internet Club, IInd <javascript:;> Floor, AMI Trust Building, Broadway Enclave, Broadway, Ernakulam Attendance : 17 The meeting started at 2.15pm. The first session was an Introduction to Free Software, GNU Movement, Open Source Software, Licenses and GNU/Linux. The main attraction of the meeting was the technical presentation by Zadeek, on Blender, the 3D Animation and Modelling Software. The Open Movie Big Buck Bunny made entirely using Blender was screened, as the speaker was arriving. The session started with a few slides explaining the history of Blender, its advantages, missing features and how it rakes up to the several popular professional 3D applications. The next few minutes were spend explaining some technical terms relating to 3D modelling and animation like "rendering" "perspective and orthographic views", lighting etc.. Zadeek fired up the blender interface and explained the basic elements and the overall layout of the interface, which definitely would seem confusing to a new user, but in reality is one of the most powerful and flexible interfaces among 3D applications. He then moved on to demonstrate the functioning of Blender by creating monkey object (default available in blender) and applying several special effects to it. This included explaining the concept of materials, textures lighting and camera. The excercise in itself gave some idea of the basic working of the application. He talked about several interesting materials like a mirror and glass. A small text object was created and the above materials were applied to it. The different kinds of lighting, applying shadows were discussed next. The speaker then moved to explaining the procedure for a basic animation in blender. He demonstrated this by moving the block of text in a linear fashion and then later rendered it. The audience were enthralled during the entire presentation, although doubts were very few, which was strange considering the larger portion of audience were students. The second presentation of the day was "Software Package Management by Shibin The Presentation started with an explanation of a software package and its evolution from a source code form to a binary form. The process of compiling a source code was discussed. The basic functioning of a package management system formed the next part of the session. Some package management system tools were mentioned. Questions on how to index a dvd & enter the mirror site address containing packages where discussed. Next the session moved onto explain about the powerful suite of Debian Package management tools like apt, dpkg and frontends like aptitude & synaptic package manager. Basic functionalities of these tools like search,install&remove packages were demonstrated. Finally the session concluded with a few words about package converter tool alien and advantages of using package management system. The first of the open movies Elephants Dream was screened after the second presentation. Concluding Session The audience were asked to get the hands dirty with Blender, and a competition to create a logo for ILUG Cochin using Blender was suggested as an exercise. Of course the prize was a surprise. The audience were enlightened about the uppcoming National Free Software Conference. The moderator encouraged the audience to participate in the conference, present projects and technical papers. He explained the importance of the event and how the Free Software community should benefit from this event. A small briefing about the activities of ILUG Cochin and how ILUG Cochin and the Swathanthra Software community needed the active participation from those who came for the meeting was emphasized The meeting concluded up at 5.30pm with the recitation of the National Anthem. Attendees Ajith C Punnoose P J Alexander D'souza Kiran George B Daniel Jacob Deepu Joseph Binny V A G. Venkata Subramahnian Saxan Rappai Kevin Sha Shibin K Reeny Sreenadh Zadeek K Ummar Sanjai K C Sameer Mohammed Thahir Jay Jacob Kurian Mathew Thayyil Thanks to Zadeek and Shibin for handling the wonderful presentations and to Binny for the meeting photos. We thank all the attendees for coming and urge them to put their feedback on the mailing list so we can improve future meetings. And hope the next meeting is bigger and better. Photos and further details of the meeting will be available on the web site soon. Thank You Regards Sameer Mohamed Thahir Co-ordinator (Indian Linux Users Group - Cochin / Kochi Chapter(ILUG-Cochin <javascript:;> )) sameer.thahir at gmail.com Website : www.ilug-cochin.org IRC : #ilugkochi on irc.freenode.net ML : mailinglist at ilug-cochin.org _______________________________________________ Mailinglist mailing list [email protected] http://ilug-cochin.org/mailman/listinfo/mailinglist_ilug-cochin.org
