 Okay, so the last session before lunch will be by Shirish about his experience with Damian. Hi everybody, I was thinking I'll be talking to newbies, so I didn't prepare any slides, I didn't prepare anything, and now I guess I'm in a problem because it's all experienced DDs out here whom I'm addressing. So I'm probably not going to say anything which you guys do not really know, but still just sharing as a user or as somebody who by circumstances got involved into Debian how that whole thing happened. So I'll start off right from the beginning as a, I'm a product of a single mother when I was like probably about six, seven years of age, I got sick and got admitted to a hospital and there, my mother is a working mother, so for her she didn't have much time to look after me, so the only thing which was there for me to pass my time there was comics and English comics and I didn't know English at that point in time, but I had to force myself and Mandarin, the magician was one of my favorite cartoon characters and I just went on from there once I got hooked to it and then I read everything like Mills and Boone and what on and on, 10 years go by and then in India on 91 we had some financial difficulties on the economy side and India decided to open up, till that time we didn't know that there is something called the outside world, it was a very isolated sort of an environment, we were like, we call Russia as the iron curtain, we also had an Indian curtain till that time, so in 91 when the war happened with Iraq, America and Iraq, so that was the first time satellite television came to India and we came to know that there is something called satellite television and there is another world out there, so around the same time there was a sort of a movement to having internet in India, but the government of the day at that point in time was not really sure as to are Indians capable of understanding what internet is as governments do, so they were being cautious, so what they did was they they gave access to few educational institutes by the name of Urnet, E-R-N-E-T, so if you go to some of the allied institutions in India, that if there was a time machine if you would go back, you would find that only few IITs which we call as the Indian Institute of Technologies, they used to have it and few other more institutions, I was, this was around my 10th, in India we have something like KG, upper KG, 1 to 10 and then you have this 3 art sciences and engineering and something like these courses, so I was in my 10th around that time and this was my 10th holidays, so a friend of mine was, there is a private education institute by the name of N-I-I-T and N-I-I-T had this something called the computer drone, so he sort of gave me access with his car that you could go and I could browse something called the internet and I had absolutely no clue what this internet thing was all about, so we went there, we saw it, we explored it, we downloaded a lot of games, we saw a bit of porn, it was like really being awake to this whole other world, we had something called the use net which was there at that point in time, so it was just understanding that and it was really, for the first time we could understand that there is no censorship and it was a shocker to me at that point in time because in India we are used to having censorship in our press, even today, there is lot the press cannot talk about, for example if a politician is having an affair that will not be in the press even today, so there are a lot of things which the press does not speak about. Now what happened was, now jump, I will jump to around 95 when they started giving access to people which we call as shell access, if some of you, I am sure some of you would be using internet at that point in time and we had the 64kbps board modems where it will make some silly sounds and then you will get connected to the internet and it was like 45 minutes we used to try and try and try and then we will get connected to the net and that connection would be there only for 15 minutes or 20 minutes and then we have to do the whole thing again and again but still, that's 15-20 minutes were really nice for us because we actually could see what's happening somewhere outside. Now what happened was I had around a similar time I bought my first computer and it was an MS Windows machine and obviously as a teenager I was fond of games and porn and everything. Now what used to happen is every month or two down the line, my machine would crash, there would be a virus or something or the other and it would crash and I used to be so frustrated because I felt like I was going down in a circle all the time you know like there is no way out and this used to really bug me out. Then around the same time what happened was there were these magazines which used to, which had started coming up in India. One of the magazines was called PCQuest. I don't know how many of you, some of you might know that magazine. At that point what they were doing is they were starting to give away. One second, am I going too fast? No, okay, sorry because I tend to be fast sometimes. So what happened was they were giving this free series along with a magazine and there was something called PCQuest, PCQuest Linux and the only thing is that a friend of mine told me that hey, I know you have problems with your PC and it keeps crashing all the time and I'm an agarwal and agarwal are known to be, we like good deals. So what they said to me was okay your machine is crashing, there is this magazine which has just come out, you buy the magazine and you get a free CD along with it and that free CD is supposed to have no viruses. So even if you go to one upon side or if you download a game or something or the other your machine will not crash. So in that greed or whatnot I went and I bought that. The first time I tried to install it, it was a total failure. It took me a while to understand the dynamics of it because you're not really from a C colon, D colon kind of a world to go into a slash root and that whole understanding that takes time. So what I used to do is like I would try to install it when it crashed and I will obviously come to some point where I could not go further. Then I will revert back to my windows and then it happened two, three times but I finally managed to break through the learning curve and install Linux on my machine. Once I did that okay I got a bare bones desktop and I was I didn't know where to go from here because even if you've got a desktop networking used to be an issue at those point in time. So it took me a lot of time to get those networking drivers and things done and I was still not happy because the looks were not so great and I was really missing my windows desktop. So I think for the next three or four years I kept hopping from one distribution to the other hoping to find something which would resemble my workflow. Finally I came to something called Ubuntu which happened I think about 2004 or 2005. This is where I finally felt that I'm at peace and now I can really explore things. Now what happens is when you are running any distribution at some point in time you are going to encounter bugs. So and when you encounter bugs sometimes you feel like reporting that bug and getting it fixed. So if it's something which really was pissing me off I would go and try to file a bug and I do not really want to say that Ubuntu is bad but their workflow somewhere is like this that okay we can make a note of the problem that you have but this will be only fixed in the next release and they would say okay if you want to test a release then you have to go to the alpha and download that whole thing and then see if your bug got fixed or not and that was very annoying for me because if I do go to an alpha level Ubuntu installation I would have bugs of other things. So it was again a never ending story because if one bug got fixed there would be 10 more which was there which would get exposed and I was not really happy with that situation. At the same time I also saw that Ubuntu was following some policies which were not really in tune with what I had thought of as free software at that point in time but also become to become slightly more ethically aware of the things which were happening around me. So I had no recourse but to try it and dump it. I think I tried Woody at that point in time Woody installation but even there I got a hitch because I think at the very end of the installation in Woody I think it asked for a Mac ID of your network card and I was not really sure what the Mac ID of I think it's the next release or something where those things were fixed and I was able to have a Debian installation. The best thing about Debian which I have found till date is I file a bug and people are there people some people respond quickly some people might not respond quickly but usually the bug is fixed in where it is for example if a file a bug in testing it'll be fixed in testing. If a file a bug in stable it'll be fixed in stable so I don't really have to jump through loops to get my bugs fixed. So that is where I actually started playing and then I realized that okay one thing which I felt we are lacking quite a bit is that documentation which now I do not want to criticize or say something but I really feel Moin Moin is not the really the way to go media wiki is a far better wiki environment simply for the fact that on Moin Moin you have to put the whole page and you have to edit the whole page while in media wiki I could just take a snapshot I could just make a section and write my two lines to it so I do not I do not feel like I can bug up the page or I can really mess it up so while I could not do that and I do not really have the capability or the drive for that but I would wish somebody would take it up but what I did at my own end because I have a very forgetful nature so I just started putting it on my blog okay this is what happened with me and this is how I fixed it in the hope that other people would also find it useful and use that as a resource while I was doing that I also got connected with a lot of people who were having similar issues and similar problems and we felt that an outreach activity was needed so the last four five years we have been just going around the country wherever any institution calls us and whatnot and we would have a mini-depth connet so we'll go there and we'll share with people whatever we know about Debian some nowadays it's it's kind of Linux have become mainstream so people think it's it's what we do is more for jobs and stuff like that but our focus is entirely somewhat different so but we try to kind of do whatever we can so that's all about it from my end if people have any questions are there any questions or comments or everybody wants to go oh you like to get more involved with Debian I said I hope to I mean of course there is this dream that we do have a Debian FN India I do not really because I have been seeing the kind of work that people have been doing here and I think we'll really need to get to get more organized far more organized than what we do in mini-depth connex because the most that we do when we organize a mini-depth connex it's we hardly require about 10 or 15 days but I guess for a depth connex to do it's I think a year-round activity that needs to be done to have depth connex my idea of coming here was basically to see if I can learn from people who are organizing depth connex and take some of that wisdom home as to how we would if we were to ever to do that how we do that and yes I would like to be involved more in documentation and marketing expect of it because I think we sell ourselves very very poorly so that is one part I hope that we can do something about also there are bits in Debian installer which as far as it's a very good installer it does a lot of great work but again UI is an issue there I believe a bit so those are the things which I do not really have again skill sets there but I do know what needs to be fixed there or at least I have some ideas that's it yeah thank you all is there any other questions sorry before you okay then let's thank this Chirish again