The University of Guyana, Berbice Campus Tain, Corentyne was the venue for an extended Software Freedom Day activity on Friday 17 October, 2008.

The University administration said yes to the request, arranged by Lenandlar Singh who is a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science. They donated 100 copies of the handout.

Michael Williams, Krsna Gokoel and Michael Dabydeen set up the lab with Ubuntu, Elive and Linux Mint Live CDs. At about 10:10 the first batch of students from Berbice High School came in, followed by staff from the Roadside Baptist Skills Training Centre from Number 68 Village Corentyne. The students started playing around with the Ubuntu desktop and had no problems finding the Internet and other applications for various things.

Len did his presentation on what is open source software and made the presentation more interesting by actually showing an example of source code and the process of compiling to binary, etc. This was important for the students. Len's presentation along with the java and other sources he used can be downloaded below.

Linuxmint is an interesting distro.

The students from New Amsterdam Technical Institute joined us at this time.

Michael Dabydeen did his presentation on Ubuntu as a desktop. The students were interested in an installation, which was not on the agenda, but in the spirit of open source and flexibility, the agenda was easily changed for the good of all.

Some of the students wanted to try the installation at home.
The revolution OS was screened, part of it anyway due to the time constraint.

Malisa' did a presentation on e-learning and Moodle. There were some lecturers and teachers in the audience as well.

Michael Williams did a great presentation on Untangle . He said that it took him him 15 minutes to use Untangled as the firewall for their network and it was intuitive to learn.
Download his presentation from here

Vidyaratha Kissoon used his presentation time on Drupal to look at ways in which people could add content to the internet through blogs and their own websites. There were questions about which free spaces to use and discussion about the dangers of putting information up on the social networking sites.

Thanks to Brian Persaud of GuyanaNet for donating CDs of the TTCSOSSWIN CD, Dominic Sundar, Sebastian Lilly, and Syed Alli who donated and burnt CDs of the various distros.

Dominic Sundar's pictures are here Pictures from Michael Williams and Michael Dabydeen are here

This event was organised by the Guyana Linux Users Group (http://www.glug.org.gy) members in Berbice with the support of DevNet and the University of Guyana Berbice Campus at Tain.