1. Prior to the event
1.1. Organization
It was about a month of preparation for running the event. Thanks to the support of classmates of the HPC master that accepted to share their knowledge using Linux with supercomputers and all their experiences in the scientific background acquired for years. 1.2. Helpers
Efforts were done to do some decoration work, as well as taking care of the technical part for the event (e.g. copying the ISO images, VirtualBox for macs / Windows, code snippets).
1.3. Publicity
It was needed to have the official authorization to post the advertising related to the event. Thanks to the Edinburgh University Students Association for the help with this.
2. During the event
2.1. Lunch
Speakers and volunteers gathered together at noon to share lunch at Mosque Kitchen 😀
2.2. Talks
As had been planned, the event happened on February 27th, in Appleton Tower Lecture Theatre 4. I started by presenting two free software projects such as Fedora OS project and the Linux UI: GNOME. How Linux was born, the beginning of Fedora and GNOME were also explained, what is GUADEC, and the community of these projects. Then, we installed Fedora 29 in a virtual machine, later Jim Walker installed some applications that students usually used such as Atom, Spotify, and Latex.Python and C were the programming languages chosen for this Linux event. We had a last minute speaker from Red Hat Czech Republic, with only 19 years old Marcel Plch took his plane, came to do a great talk about Python on Fedora and he brought a lot of gifts 🙂Andreas Hadjigeorgiou from Cyprus was in charge of the C programming talk for around an hour. He started by explaining basic concepts like libraries and loops to more complex structures such as arrays, pointers, structs and containing functions.
2.3. Fedora and GNOME party
We shared for an hour a cake and coke. This was sponsored by Fedora and GNOME!
2.4. Picture frame
These are some of the photos we took with the frame. I am glad that I was able to introduce both projects, Fedora and GNOME, that were not well known for some people.
3. After the event
3.1. Thoughts
Attendees were able to express their feelings about this event. We are going to take them into consideration to improve upcoming events. It was great to meet new amazing people.My motivation for doing this event was to retribute what Linux did for me in my personal and professional life. Acknowledge the work of Richard Stallman with his ideology of sharing the code for the benefit of everyone, as well as the Linus Torvalds thought: “Linux succeeded thanks to selfishness and trust”. Special thanks to Fedora and GNOME for sponsoring this part.
3.2. Networking
I would like to thank again to Marcel to travel to Edinburgh, the effort and time he did, were productive to inspire others with his talk! Also thanks to the speakers and volunteers like Andreas, Holly, Jim, Alexey, Javiera, Ana, Ruwaida and Jasmin for the effort and time.I would also like to thank to Alberto Fanjul, I hope we can manage better time and efforts for running an event in Edinburgh. To Leyla Marcelo for the design of the poster, and Alexey Riepenhausen for the videos and professional photos! Thanks to the University of Edinburgh, Fedora, and GNOME for supporting this event.