Talk at MA College

Published on: 2006-3-4

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Talk at MA College

2006-03-04T23:14:00

Travelled to M.A.College of Engg, Kothamangalam yesterday to give a talk on Linux. The idea was to introduce students to the great possibilites for fun, excitement and enlightenment offered by the GNU/Linux OS. I dislike all forms of travelling - but somehow or other found enough energy to take 3 buses and reach the place tugging along my heavy pre-historic laptop and a Linksys WRT54G (for demonstration purpose). The students of the college were very enthusiastic - they had formed a group called `Conzole' and planned to bring about a magazine (covering GNU/Linux, free software and other tech stuff) regularly - the first issue itself was very well designed and had some good articles (Google Hacking, Python etc). Coming to the talk, it was an absolute disaster. The audience was mostly interested in getting a tutorial style introduction to Linux while I tried to present a `wide-angle' view of the GNU/Linux landscape ... I switched track in the middle when I realized that I was getting nowhere - but then it was too late to do anything useful. Towards the end, I gave a demo of my Linksys router as a good example of a mass market product exploiting the power of GNU/Linux, but that too wasn't very effective. All in all, I was very disappointed by the way I handled things ... maybe, better luck next time!