The past week having worked till 01h00 I wasn’t in good shape to attend Linkbynet Openday. I pinged others informing I’ll come directly to PR School of Management & Education (PRSME) for the Linux Meetup.
Neha, Darshinee and Pawan had been to the Openday in the morning. I heard they got lost around in Quatre Bornes while looking for PRSME. Ahaan! We have Google Maps for such situations folks.
Natasha & Avinash on the other hand were waiting for me at UoM. I met them a little before noon and we moved to PR School of Management & Education. By then the lost penguins had found their way & they were sitting in the cozy conference room. A quick introduction & we started talking about Linkbynet Openday; how it happened etc. It was interesting to note a lot had changed there. Natasha & Avinash didn’t stay for long.
Other geeks joined us gradually. In all these folks showed up today : Avinash Seetaram, Natasha Fokeer, Pawan Babooram, Neha Gunnoo, Darshini Seeburn, Abdallah Yashir, Avinash Mayaram, Nitin Bachraz, Hasvin, Yuram Venkatiah, Nitin Mutkawoa & me.
Nitin Mutkawoa was the last to join us & he lost his way too while bringing Pizza & Coke for us. Oh! Hunger was almost killing me.
####Which topics were on menu?
Earlier on the facebook event page I published the topics as still brewing. Well, today when we started discussions there were 2 things I tossed on table.
####How can we (Mauritians) help & contribute to openSUSE or other FOSS projects?
Around 3 years ago I joined the openSUSE project as an ambassador. I told folks how it all started and what are the different channels through which we can help the project; like marketing (advocacy), content writing (wiki/blog), graphic design, and development (bug-reporting, coding etc). We don’t need to be experts but simply be passionate by stuffs in which we’re skilled.
Those who wish to connect & help the openSUSE team can ping me any time or send your query to the corresponding mailing list.
####Cinnamon 2.0 running on openSUSE 13.1 RC2
Since the past few days I was hacking around to get Cinnamon work on openSUSE 13.1. It’s now working. I demoed a Cinnamon session with the Void theme.
To install Cinnamon on openSUSE 13.1, do as follows:
sudo zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/X11:/Cinnamon:/Factory/openSUSE_13.1 Cinnamon
sudo zypper ref Cinnamon
sudo zypper in -t pattern "Cinnamon Desktop Environment"
Yuram has been learning new stuffs too. He showed us how he’s been using vmstat and free commands to get details about memory usage on Solaris & RHEL servers at our workplace. He nicely explained us about swap usage. Hope to see more of it showing up on his blog. We also had some ps and dmesg fun!
Hasvin came for the first. He introduced himself and told us about his graphic designing work. It would be nice to see him showcasing his graphic genius in the coming meetups.
Nitin Bachraz gave us some insight on recruitment of Unix/Linux engineers. He shared some tips that should boost the confidence of freshers. He emphasized on stress management & gave us examples on how things should be dealt within the work environment. It was also great to have a Database Administrator among us today. Yes, Abdallah is a DBA at Spoon Consulting. He shared some of his experiences as both a DBA & coder. Nitin Mutkawoa shared the news of Blackout OS, an upcoming Linux distro for pen-testers.
Pawan asked us about the use of echo command. He found it a bit silly that a command just returns the argument you passed it. His doubt was cleared when we showed him the usage of echo in a Bash script :) I was happy though to see that Pawan has progressed in his Linux learning. He’s become quite comfortable with the command line & he surprised us when he answered Yuram about using top to analyze CPU & memory usage. Good going little penguin!
In the end, we all had our fun time with geek chats & pizza munching.
Photos, courtesy of Pawan Babooram.
We thank Shaleena Callichurn, CEO of PRSME, for providing the facility to hold our Linux meetup. We also thank Rishen Armoogum for his presentation on PRSME’s aim & research programs.