It time to go back to your schools with SchoolOS/Ubuntu/Fedora #foss #advocacy

Dear Community,
        This is Narendra Sisodiya, from Freedom House. I am sending this mail which came from my student, Siddarth. I am feeling very proud on him. He has done a very good and remarkable job. He is doing his btech currently. He went back to his old schools with Linux based Operating system. Lets celebrate his success.
         Please write you me what you are doing and what you want to do. Lets create a great momentum of FOSS advocacy. I request everyone of you to go back at your schools and tell them to un-install all pirated version of Software. Install and give demo of Linux based Operating system.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: siddharth srivastava <akssps011@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, May 20, 2010 at 2:31 PM
Subject: hello
To: Narendra Sisodiya <narendra@narendrasisodiya.com>

hello sir

I was not able to reply you regarding the blog entry you asked as my exams are going on. 

Here's a brief of it.

Last month i went to my school to meet my teachers. There I found favourite teacher who taught us Informatics Practices(we had only that option for computers at my school time).

When I entered the Lab, ma'm wasn't there and I just started interacting with the student who were having there class there. The discussion slowly headed towards open source and Linux stuff. It made me wonder that just a name Linux made them excited. Most of them were interested in linux but feared that it's tough and you need to learn too many commands to work on it. Some of them were familiar with Linux(Ubuntu OS in particular) but most of them imagined linux as a black screen with no fantasy options at all.

Till then ma'm had arrived and I told them about the scenario and requested her to allow me to give a small demo. Well, as expected she agreed. Luckily I always keep a live cd in my bag, so in the next hour I presented them with all the features of linux( mostly non technical though) such as synaptic package manager, games, inbuilt open office and most importantly that it is free, virus free, you virtually don't need to buy anything that you need for linux.

Secondly, as the students were quite interested enough and excited they turned the discussion towards  FOSS. After explaining all stuff about FOSS, the most exciting part cams. I presented before them the source code of many softwares (even simple C++ editors) which were written in Java and C++ (I chose these as they are learning these in school it was more appropriate to get them in FOSS).

I installed Ubuntu on 3 PCs myself and asked the students to install on the rest.

My teacher got so impressed(she had used it earlier but wasn't so comfortable) then asked me to do the same for school's office. So next day, I installed it in the office also with ubuntu server on one PC and internetworked them all. Everything is now getting on linux there now. Oh i forgot to mention that principal's office is also on a dual boot with fedora. Well over a month now, no problems at all and most importantly I didn't hear office people complaining that there computer have crashed(the reason I used to hear when I was a student there )

Note: Sirif some data is inappropriate or not of any concern you can cut or modify any of the part if you wish. I have written this to give an idea what i have done (not a very big thing but got a satisfaction that I have done something)

Thanks

 

Siddharth Srivastava

Human Knowledge is for all

Posted via email from LUG@IITD Community Blog