Pawan & I reached SVICC at 12h30 after a long wait at R. Hill bus-stand. Since we were hungry we went directly to the food-court. I ordered a vegetarian Panini but was given a ‘chicken’ one. Oops! I realise that only after the first bite. Thought the day will go bad … I went back & asked them to replace it with a vegetarian one. It seemed that things got messed up at the supplier as all Paninis with the ‘V’ tag were chicken in fact.

A short while later Nirvan. He bought some snacks too & we had a quick lunch. We then proceeded to the NCB stand to meet the team. We had kinda bad experience yesterday and hoped we could meet with the right persons today. Indeed at the NCB stand I met Reza, whom I had liased through emails & phone calls previously. He’s a great guy & seems to be an open source advocate too. I also met Riad from the same team. Well … They both seem to have great ideas when it comes to the promotion of open source & reduction of piracy in the country. I was happy to have met them & we had a lengthy discussion sharing ideas.

They gave me a stand where I could put my laptop. I logged into Linux Mint 16 RC since my openSUSE 13.1 box still needs some fine tuning (apps installation etc). Riad liked the look & feel of Cinnamon 2.0. He in fact asked one of his colleagues to connect the laptop to the wall-mounted wide-screen. We did and … ahaaan … display was awesome! I fired up a couple of applications & opened a video in VLC. I opened my Linuxfest 2013 presentation and showed Riad & Reza Monday’s schedule of talks.

I then approached people walking around & asked them if they knew about Linux or if they would like to see a demo. Many were keen to have a look at this new thing. They were mesmerized by the fact that’s it’s free (as in gratis). Some asked me for my card … which I don’t have obviously :P So, I wrote down my email address on pieces of paper. I also told people about Linux User Group & our weekly meetups. Some students that I met happened to have heard about us already … social network FTW!

Pawan’s cousin Antish joined us a little before 15h00 but unfortunately I had to leave. We had a quick chat, then Nirvan & I left.

Summing-up… Infotech 2013 – Day 2 was a positive one building contacts with like-minded folks. Looking forward for more community work tomorrow.