A technical college in Dakshina Kannada is the venue for an ongoing meet on Debian, a Linux-based operating system. The college has no “direct contributor” or developers in Debian. That precisely is the reason why one alumnus thought the locale for a three-day meet on the subject, titled Mini DebConf Mangalore, should be the NMAM Institute of Technology (NMAMIT) in Nitte, Karkala, about 60 km from Mangalore.
Vasudev Kamath, an alumnus of the college, who now works on the Debian platform in a company in Bangalore, said he helped organise the event in his alma mater as he wanted developers to come together and spread awareness on Debian among students who had not had any exposure to it.
He said he first became acquainted with Debian after attending a Linux Habba in Bangalore, where he got to know about the open source community.
Objective
The aim of the mini-Debian conference, which began on Friday, is to bring about more awareness on Debian in India. It is a smaller version of the Debian developers' conference.
It is organised by the Debian community in a particular region while the conferences have enthusiasts from all geographies, said Pavithran Sakamuri, who works on OpenStreetMap (a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world) and is a Debian contributor.
Debian is a free operating system, consisting of programmes and utilities that make a computer work. It is based on a kernel of Linux. The meet included discussions on free software, Debian, its philosophy, design, merits and how to become a Debian developer.
The meet was also attended by Jonas Smedegaard and Christian ‘bubulle' Perrier, two international Debian developers.
About 110 people participated in the meet.
