Debian Meet Oct 28
By Suneetha

The Debian Project is an association of individuals who have made common cause to create a free operating system. The Debian evangelists in India are organizing a 2011 edition of their MiniDebConf India. The events will focus on bringing new people up to speed on contributing to Debian by making existing Debian contributors into mentors.

The MiniDebConf 2011 is being held in 4 venues across India; it has already been held at Kuttipuram in Kerala and in Pune and the venues at Mangalore and Ahmedabad are the ones coming in. MiniDebConf 2011 publicity guy and techie Pavithran spoke to Techgoss on the last year’s and this year’s endeavours.

Techgoss (TG): How widely is Debian software used in India?
Pavithran (P): Well, Debian is a GNU/Linux distribution and it has derivatives used like Linuxmint, Ubuntu and CDAC's BOSS Linux. We could put the Debian and its derivatives share to be around 60 % of GNU/Linux users. But a recent global survey says that Debian as it is by default is used by around 12 %. I definitely can’t put a count on the number of users.

TG: What is the idea behind the conference?
P: Debconf the main event is a yearly conference where many Debian developers, contributors and enthusiasts come together to talk about the current state of projects, new development, the next cool thing in technology and obviously to hang out with peers.

In India, which has few Debian developers staying in the country ( 4-5) the main purpose of the event is to bring more people into Debian development or also to contribute to the Debian project . Hence the students would be introduced to the Debian project and the main part hence forth would be packaging the source code as .deb files ( deb are installable files like exe 's ) .  Last time, the event was held at COEP Pune and brought out some 4 packages by 4 students from the audience.

Other minor goals would be to increase Debian usage, bug reporting and contribute to Debian in other simple ways by helping out the next student on how to do things on Debian .

TG: Pl tell us more about the previous conferences including the years
P: Last year was the only MiniDebConf and was the first event in India. The details are available at this link

TG: What all goes in organizing the conferences in 4 cities?
P: First would be to find some student volunteers or a faculty volunteer who could make things happen in the college. We would be needing labs for the workshops, projector, and auditorium access. There is a need to take care of the accommodation.

TG: - What lessons have you learnt for your future conferences?
P: Day 1 of last year and this year became a bit tricky with lot of random users coming with different levels of awareness of Debian. We should learn of a way to satisfy the audience and be interesting for all of them to retain them. We would also like to have a better presence of Local LUG (Linux user group) people, which in turn means marketing the event early with posters and schedule.

(The Mangalore event, to be held on Oct 28 – 30, 2011, will be one of the largest Debian developer meets.  The organizers are working to invite 1-2 international speakers)