2014, and we had our first LUGM meetup. Nadim & I discussed it earlier on facebook and he proceeded with the event page creation. Didn’t know how many people might show up, so we set the location place to be Pizza Perfect. By Wednesday we had more than 20 people coming, I thus contacted Pizza Perfect & asked them to reserve three tables.

Saturday comes & the day starts by me waking up late, nothing new. The bus to P. Louis was slow on the road but I could not complain. I instead continued listening to some Coke Studio music I downloaded the day before. Nadim & Kamal called me, I informed them I was on the way.

I reached Pizza Perfect around 12h30 I think, didn’t check the time. As I was walking towards the entrance I met Nayar, inside Nadim & Yasir were already having lunch. We were still discussing about how to arrange the tables and geeks started showing up. Woohoooo! 2014 LUG Meetup starts well.

###Who made it today?

Nadim Attari, Karsten Schwegmann, Yannick Labonne, Radha Chamburn, Jules (Cr0p) Giovanni, Avinash Mayaram, Nitin Mutkawoa, Kamal Shewnarain, Yasir Auleear, Kishan Bhugul, Yunus Aumeeruddy, Shamsher Khudurun, Ibraahim Atchia, Azra Futloo, Pritvi Jheengut, Nirvan Pagooah, Irfaan Coonjah, Ajay Ramjatan, Nayar Joolfoo and Ish Sookun.

That makes us 20 attendees for 2014’s first LUGM meetup.

While some were still on way, others were munching burger, having pizza & shooting sporadic topics. Oh wait… Nadim did a formal introduction of LUGM, then somewhere I hijacked his speech, started talking LUGM, took a leap to induction in companies, went through the hell of dress code policies, security policies regarding cloud services & how to bypass them and finally I landed somewhere I don’t recall. A nice ride indeed, however I wonder how many followed.

Nadim gives a brief intro of LUGM.

Azra brought her laptop as she was having issues installing OpenNebula on Ubuntu. I told her I’ll have a look. Didn’t know she installed it on VMware (which I don’t like) and Windows 8, I guess by the look. Anyway, I had a quickie at her first VM, everything seemed rightly done (according to the official manual). The real heck was coming with the Hypervisor. Unfortunately, we were having Internet connection issues. Though the VM was on NAT, it wouldn’t get any connection. I was a bit lazy to troubleshoot further & of course the Windows interface kinda discouraged me. Instead, I told her I’ll setup the Hypervisor in VirtualBox and send her the VDI. I already installed OpenNebula while testing earlier. Just needed to finish a couple of settings to get it to work.

Next, I shot the topic of the day: Corsair Hackers Reboot

I asked Pritvi to do an introduction. He explained the meaning of Corsair (as in Corsair Pirates) and how it aligns with Installfests that we intend to do this year. Discussion was getting a good flow & I proposed we organize it within Bagatelle Mall for increased public visibility. Well, visibility would be guaranteed but other issues could crop up; like getting the support/approval from Bagatelle Mall management, power outlets etc. If we pulled in computer shops as partners there still could be some conflict-of-interest. At that time, Mr. Madhub, an entrepreneur himself, and owner of Fortune Way Shopping Mall (Centre de Flacq) overheard our discussion. He was interested with the whole idea and offered us a 10,000 sq.ft Hall at Fortune Way Shopping Mall, where we can organize the event. Sounded nice, besides Flacq houses a huge population of IT Users & students.

Pritvi, the mastermind behind Corsair Hackers Reboot.

Cr0p, Jules.

Ajay continued discussing a couple of stuffs with Mr. Madhub while I was munching my pizza & making GNU noise. In today’s agenda I had mentioned something about gears to donate. Actually, this idea was brewing up since last year when I realised how much un-used computer gear I had (processors, hard drives, keyboards etc). Thought I could donate them to folks badly needing those. Then I said why not sharing this idea with LUGM folks, if others have un-used gears too, we could instead build a whole system loaded with GNU\Linux and donate the same. Many liked the idea and Kishan volunteered to formalize the whole thing.

Kishan (front), Yunus, Nayar, while Ajay explains.

Some left early and by 15h30 the rest of us continued with brainstorming for Corsair Hackers Reboot event. We listed things to be done and activities that could be taken up by each of us. The event picture was getting clearer in our minds. Great, seems like we gonna have fun time ahead.

We paused shortly after 16h00. It was time to go home.

Photos, courtesy of Yasir Auleear.