I’ve been in Pune for almost a month now, but due to the 6 day week schedule at my Practice School 2 station and GSoC hacking, I’ve not had a chance to get in touch with the very active Pune Linux Users Group (PLUG) people.  Thankfully, the guys at Uncode, Free Software User Group at PICT and PLUG got together and decided to organize the MiniDebConf 2010 India at Pune, giving me a chance to meet these guys.  The MiniDebConf details are:

  • Venue: College Of Engineering, Pune.
  • Date: 7th and 8th August.
  • Time: 10 AM to 5 PM.

Being a DebConf, the primary focus is going to be on Debian, even though a sizeable number of participants seem to be Ubuntu users, just like me.  On the first day, Praveen Arimbrathodiyil will be introducing the Debian OS to the participants of the conference.  The next session sees Kartik Mistry and Vikram Vincent giving the conference a more serious turn, focussing on the Developer Toolbox that Debian provides to it’s hackers/users.  Even though I’ve been using Ubuntu for almost three years now, I expect to learn quite a lot here, as I’ve mostly done web development, and never done any desktop/server application development on the system.

The afternoon session will be handled by Kartik Mistry and Onkar Shinde, and will be a full blown workshop on packaging debians.  This is guaranteed to be a very good learning experience, and hopefully, I’ll do better than my half hearted attempts at packaging the G2IP Messenger after this session.  In the evening, a key-signing party, a talk on encryption and the monthly meeting of PLUG are planned.

Come Sunday morning, some of the future plans of the Debian community will be discussed, something that will be a pretty good learning experience for me, as I have absolutely no idea about the directions that Debian is taking, as I’ve never been a part of the community. The rest of the day is dedicated to bug fixing, and will be my first time when I’ll be participating in a coding session attended by a lot of people.

As this is the first proper Linux/Open Source event that I’m purely attending, I’m looking forward to learning and spending some time getting to meet new people, and having a good time.  Do expect some posts on how the event turned out soon on this blog! :smile:

P.S. : For details, visit  http://wiki.debian.org/DebianIndia/MiniDebConf2010