FStival'06

September 16th, a big day for the FLOSS guys around the world. When the whole world celebrates it under different names, we celebrate it here in Madurai under the name FStival which means Free Software Festival. FStival is jointly organized by GNU/Linux user group - Madurai and GNU/Linux user group of TCE. It was special to us for two reasons, one it would be the last FStival we organized as students, second due to the presence of most of the seniors or say founders of GLUGOT.

This year FStival was a great success with students from all over Madurai attending the event. The auditorium was packed with a overwhelming crowd of around 350. The chief guest for this year FStival was Mr. Kenneth Gonsalves from NRC - FOSS @ AU-KBC, chennai. Mr. Kenneth, a renowned geek in the FOSS world, gave an inspiring talk on "How FOSS makes you a great programmer". This was followed by the on stage Installation Debian session. Then it was time for XGL to steal the show. With cubes rotating while switching desktops, wobbling windows and menus, XGL looked great.

After all this came the most interesting part, the demo stalls. Thanks to the second year and third year students. They did their job well. They explained about the various tools in GNU/Linux starting from FOSS, Basic commands, Emacs, GCC, GIMP, GTK+ Glade, Games, Live CD & Education tools, Scilab, XGL, Latex, LAMP, Databases, CMS etc. They were also bombarded with a lot many questions from the enthusiastic crowd. It was a tough job indeed, explaining the same thing to more than 300. The CD burning students were kept busy all the time as they continued to receive CDs for burning various distributions. Hats off to all the juniors. The software freedom day ended with the demo stalls closing in the evening. In the mean time Sriram and myself managed to take some snaps of the whole event. Sriram also has a video of XGL demo. We would be publishing them soon in glugot and glug-madurai site.

On sunday it was great to see the software freedom day celebration as a news item in Dinamalar and Dinakaran. Thanks to the press people for spending their valuable time with us.