Last weekend I visited Thanjavur with Arun and Srishti. We were invited in SASTRA University for a two days Linux workshop. The college is situated between Thanjavur and Trichy, closer to Thanjavur. They are very strict with discipline, clothes, timings for hostel and most of the things which I found superficial but that is just my personal opinion. I was initially asked to talk about Linux kernel and I was astonished. Students in Indian colleges don’t usually have basic Linux skills, kernel was something way beyond the reach. Till date, I am not sure if I understand kernel well enough to talk about it. We created a talk schedule comprising of some basic talks on Linux, python, git, vim, django and similar topics and handed it over to the organizers from SASTRA.
We reached there on Sat, 4 Feb after 6-7 hours of bus journey on bumpy roads. I hardly slept for 2-3 hours, same for Arun. We had two classrooms full of students. Arun picked one and started with Introduction of FOSS and Linux while I took the other one and started with Python Introduction. Srishti talked about Qt after that. The day went by and we had talks on Vim, Emacs, Python, Qt, RPM packaging by Arun, Srishti and me. As my initial expectation, the level of Linux awareness was not much. I guess that is the problem with most of the colleges in India.
Day two started with me talking about the basics of DNS and Load balancing and Arun talking about Django. We dialed down things to the beginner level and tried to explain things in as simple form as we could. I was kinda skeptical about both of my talks, Load Balancing as well as Puppet, because these are fairly advanced topics but students kept their patience which I should appreciate. I asked them to configure a puppet master on the spot and all of them were able to do the same after an hour of debugging session. We closed on a good note (I hope) and some fun moments.
We visited a temple afterwards, a huge temple. I still fail to understand why would they spend so much time, resources and money to build a temple but i guess faith is something which is beyond my understanding. A few non-linux points about this workshop:
- We saw a doll which Arun loved. The doll, made up of wood, i think, swings its head.
- Srishti likes to click photographs even when food is at stake.
- Arun has replaced pink slippers with yellow ones.
- Food at SASTRA canteen is far better than what we had in my college canteen (Birla Institute of Technology).
