Hi all, This month's meet-up didn't have any agenda so didn't know how it would go.
So people started trickling in and we had stuff happening by 16:30 Amit had bought a Samsung FP700 sans a power cable so we couldn't see it in action. Zoyd also bought a similar gadget and karunakar or somebody made Wi-Fi work on it. [rant] Frankly speaking I feel very disappointed when I see devices like that. Keyboard are way way smaller than my fingers and dunno about touch-screen typing or stuff like that. Also very over-priced, both of them within the 20k range. I for one wouldn't go for these ultraportables at that price point. They completely miss the bus. I would rather have had the OLPC which is a remarkable machine if I had that kinda cash and it would be very worthwhile for me atleast. [/rant] Anyways, getting back to the meet, Amit had a bad bad day. He came up with two ideas and wanted to throw it to the community which we all tore apart to shreds with various perspectives. a. The first suggestion/idea of Amit was to have a "Live CD" for students so they could learn programming using it and what tools should go in this one. We had huge arguments as to the merits and why he wants to do it and who's it aimed for and how practical the whole thing is. b. The second suggestion/idea which Amit came up with is having pre-built binaries like what xampp.org provides with the idea it could be "LAPJ" Linux+Apache+Python+Java or LAPR (using Ruby therein) and provide it as a package. While again the idea is cool, right from issues of hosting (as to where would u host it?) to how would the maintainable the whole thing be for all of these are very huge and complex projects . There have been many initiatives taken similar to xampp.org For e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMP_Packages and seeing the kind of stuff there is, Amit said the others don't come to the level of XAMPP in his understanding. The second was who the audience was, if its web-development then that wouldn't stand. Dexter (who's into web-development professionally) gave couple of life-experiences which tell it wouldn't stand in the professional field. If its for students to just try out what the experience of the whole bundle is ok . But again how to maintain is going to be an issue with various distros and various places people keep or do stuff. Also in web-servers there are quite a few alternatives which could have taken place, so number of forks could be created but all of it needs time, money and efforts. There was another person who was from BSNL who came in his capacity as an individual. And he raised a query when a customer asks for support from BSNL for his internal modem or broadband modem or whatever it is how do should could they support it? Or what forum or which way can they be helped. We tried giving various solutions but all of them are short-term solutions. The long-term solution is that they would need to train maybe 3-4 engineers who understand the tools and some mechanics behind it and can trouble-shoot the process. All in all a very engaging meet I would say, learnt and shared a lot, had a roaring time. Till when we meet next. Lightsaber down ;) -- Regards, Shirish Agarwal This email is licensed under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ 065C 6D79 A68C E7EA 52B3 8D70 950D 53FB 729A 8B17 -- ______________________________________________________________________ Pune GNU/Linux Users Group Mailing List: (plug-mail@plug.org.in) List Information: http://plug.org.in/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/plug-mail Send 'help' to [EMAIL PROTECTED] for mailing instructions.
