The Chronicle reporter arrived first after Kim opened the doors. Dominic and I then arrived, and we opened our laptops. This was going to be the distro demo. Other persons trickled in and we started at 10:15. Gerhard Ramsaroop led an interactive discussion about free and open source software, and the various uses. Questions were asked about how to get policy makers understand the benefits of FOSS. Gerhard talked about the form of FOSS and the different types.

The freebies included CDs donated by Raval Seojattan.

The next presentation was from Darryl Akeung who had set up a server and wireless network. People who had their laptops were encouraged to log into the demo room which Darryl had set up. Darryl went through the various features and components of Dim dim and he talked about the potential for companies - for meetings and customer support. There were questions about stability of Dim dim with the comment being noted that the commercial version was more stable than the free and open source version.

Malisa Richards  presented on behalf of Brainstreet Learning the benefits and challenges of using Open Source software to do business. Moodle was given as an example of a project which has active support and has survived many years. It was noted that many open source projects sometimes lapse, and that could be a problem when considering the use of FOSS. It was noted that since the source code would be available, the software could be maintained by users. There was great discussion about e-learning and about the issues of how to organise content for dialup users. Some other concepts such as blended learning were discussed, and the challenge of managing teachers' times as they worked on the content and also on new forms of pedagogy.

Kevon Adonis presented Joomla! . Kevon manages K3designs and has used Joomla! for many years, He presented the struture of Joomla! and explained its benefits and how the content is managed. He noted some of the limitations which he found with Joomla! but he felt that there was a great deal of flexibility, especially in the template editing. The audience included another Joomla! developper, Christopher lawrence who also contributed to the discussion. Many people were happy for the opportunity to interact with Kevon about using Joomla! as a CMS.

The final presentation was from Michael Dabydeen who talked about Virtualisation as a way to save on resources and optimise costs. It was intended to use Virtualbox to create a virtual machine as part of the demo but there were some problems. The demo was done using VMWare. Persons talked about using Zen to do virtualisation. There was some discussion around different configurations, including thin client configurations.

The audience included persons from the private sector, public sector, education and IT professionals. The interaction was lively and the day was well spent. GLUG is grateful to NCERD, and to Ms Kim Spencer for allowing the venue.

Click here for Pictures of the event, courtesy of Michael Dabydeen, Raval Seojattan and Dominic Sundar.

Kosovo/Guyana

The Kosovo group organising a free software conference uploaded our flyer in their group and thought that Kingston meant Kingston Jamaica. The Kosovars then created this image. They have used Len's presentation from last year in one of their presentations.

Programme for New Amsterdam Technical Institute, Friday 18th September, 2009, 10:00am

• Introduction to FOSS and Software Freedom Day Presented by Ardith Conway, IT Teacher at NATI

• Using Open Office Presented by Anil Mana, an IT enthusiast who has recently started using FOSS

• Virtualization by Michael Dabydeen

• Uses of FOSS in IT based careers by Vidyaratha Kissoon

Programme for NCERD, Battery Road, Kingston

Saturday 19th September, 2009 starting at 9:30am