–Excerpts of the meeting by Prahlad C

After transforming Auxilium School wadala to Linux, ILUG BOM had an excellent meeting with teachers and students on 14th Oct 2017 at DBIT-Kurla.

Though good number of teachers have registered for the meet but due to heavy rains many haven’t dared to take risk and some due to personal reasons. No problem, there is always a second time.

The meet started with the introduction of everyone including the new comers. few were completely new to Linux. They showed lot of interest in learning Linux.

Mr. Joe Steve c ms and softwares, in short, why and what of Linux. He highlighted the need for FOSS and how it should be, in the reach of common man as it is community driven. Replying to Shashwat’s (a student of 12th standard) question, the difference between hackers and crackers Joe narrated an interesting story on hackers and also mentioned why that word was coined.

Mr. Rajeev unpacked his bundle of knowledge and explained the Linux Fedora starting from installation of the OS which is customized for schools and school teachers. He dealt with most of the applications which are useful to teachers such as tuxpaint, tuxmath, Unicode for devanagari script etc. Most interestingly he made an impeccable explanation of Libre office giving importance to Libre Writer, Libre calc and Libre impress which are far better than their counterpart softwares like Office word, Excel sheet and Power Point Presentation of MS Office. Mr. Rajeev cleared the doubts of teachers in a lucid language. At the end of his session Mr. Rajeev gifted everyone with a bootable DVD of Fedora.

Next, Mr. Raghavendra Kamath a professional artist, perspicuously (with clarity and lucidity) explained GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) to everyone’s understanding. He emphasized on the tools that are available in GIMP starting from types of brushes of different thickness, different colors, different pallets etc. He demonstrated multilingual text usage in GIMP especially combination of two letters in Marathi or Hindi, to be precise Devanagari script. He beautifully showed with ease that how one can touch, cut, crop and change the complexion of the an image and also warned, public of it’s misuse.

Mrs. Sarita Mulay a representative of Shishuvan School of Matunga offered us a pleasant chance to meet the teachers of her School and demonstrate Linux starting from installation, to use of all applications which are beneficial to teachers but only when school reopens after Diwali Vacation. She also assured us of place in her School for our future meet ups.

At the end all dispersed with a sense of gratitude and achieving some thing new. All of them (new entrants) showed interest in continuing with us in the journey of Linux and also to help us in our mission.