IEEE TECHNICAL WORKSHOP

IEEE Delhi Section organized a Technical workshop on “Open Source Software” at Delhi Technical University, New Delhi on 16th - 17th April 2016. Aditya Goswami (16007), Ayush Bansal (16035), Aarushi Madan (16001), Aarusi Tuteja (16002), Bharti Sachdeva (16039), Vishal Sharma (16175), Birender Singh Rawat (16043), Shubham Kumar (16151), Sumit Kumar (16162), from Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Dronacharya College of Engineering, Gurgaon attended the workshop.

The Introductory address was given by Ms. Kirti Gautam, Women in Engineering (WIE) Coordinator, IEEE Delhi Section. Ms. Gautam discussed the need of Open Source Software development.

The speaker of the session, Ms. Tapasweni Pathak, from SAP Labs, India discussed the utility and the need for Open Source Software which introduced the Linux kernel. Ms. Pathak explained the various steps and prerequisites for a good open source project. On 16th April 2016, students learned the basic Linux terminal commands and the theoretical concepts and procedures that are used in the development of project on Github. Ms. Pathak covered various aspects of a project such as documentation, syntax, IDEs, staging, local, remote etc.

The second day comprised of hands-on of all the commands and processes that were discussed on the first day. Ms. Pathak explained that Mutt is a command line based Email client, and is very useful and powerful tool to send and read mails from command line in Unix based systems. Mutt also supports POP and IMAP protocols for receiving mails. It opens with a coloured interface to send email which makes it user friendly to send emails from command line.

Ms. Pathak explained that ‘Git’ status command was used to describe the status of the current repository on github whether it is up to date or not, and ‘gitconfig’ is used to define the details of the user whoever brings a change in the repository, therefore giving the name, email id and other necessary details that required to identify the person who committed the changes in the repository or the project. Also, cd (change directory), git clone etc. were discussed during the workshop and practiced. Later Mutt command was used for mailing purpose. By the end of the day students were familiar with the terminal and how to use it, repository and the use of Github.

The workshop proved to be informative as the students learnt a lot about the various commands of linux. It was a very comprehensive and learning session which exposed the world of open source to the students.

Some Glimpses: