Hi,
I am studying MBA at I2IT, Pune. We are going to have an annual event @ my college. I and some of my friends want to include one event for Linux. However we not very familiar with Linux. So, please suggest some themes and ideas which we can use for( & at) the event.

Thanks.

Well, I'm not good at themes, but you might google around for Software Freedom Day. There's generally good ideas for events on that day that you could probably use.

Personally, in college our LUG handed out OpenCD's for Windows (OpenDisc is the current preference). And then we'd also have live CD's to give away. We used Knoppix since that was the best at the time, but now you could choose from any number like PCLinuxOS, Ubuntu, etc.

A good thing for your booth would be to setup a few machines with linux and let people see what you can do with a machine. One of the machines should be semi high end so that you could run Compiz Fusion (an eye candy 3-D desktop). Be sure to have internet access to show people other capabilities.

Other than that, to be credible, you're going to have to spend some time getting to know linux or finding someone proficient to help you out.

Thanks,
We do have a lot of machines running on Linux. Though we'll have to configure Compiz/Beryl, I dont think that will take long. And yes its also a good idea to hand out open cds for windows. And can u please describe how was the LUG event conducted in ur college.

Gosh it was several years ago now... Hmm. I was mostly just a gopher (i.e. got lunch, more CD's, etc.) because I was pretty green then and had just started with linux.

I think it was during one of the football (American version) home game Fridays. The LUG put out flyers in all the math, science and engineering buildings, as well as the student union building, a couple weeks in advance and one of the guys worked for the school paper so he wrote up an editorial. We setup a couple booths on the main walkways of campus and I think there were a couple of half hour open presentations (each repeated a few times during the day, maybe three times?) in one of the auditoriums near our student union building. One presentation was on the use of linux as a general desktop (difference between linux and Windows, internet browsers, email apps, office apps, IRC, a few games, etc) and one more geared toward using linux for scientific/engineering applications, parallel computing, programming, computations, etc. I think there were a couple of by sign up only demonstrations on specific software packages like R for statistics, BRL-CAD, etc. I forget which ones ended up with enough sign ups to have a presentation. Now a days you might be able to do something on computer forensics or data recovery (System Rescue CD, foremost and/or photorec, using testdisk, setting up a samba share using a live CD to recover data from a borked Windows box, etc).

Our computer science and information technology people were key in helping us make sure we had all the audio visual and networking connections we needed available.

Wow...
There are so many things which we can actually do and they will be real fun. We could really demonstrate R for statistics and even some of the Open Source ERP softwares. Data recovery is also a good topic which we can cover.
I am also trying to get the help of our computer science dept. but right now they have exams....
So, I just wanted to prepare a good list of ideas which we can discuss amongst ourselves and then implement into a successful event.

Once again thanks a lot.....

Another thought is data backup. Amanda, Backuppc, etc would be good candidates.

Interesting. The OP is in Pune, India, and you mention Amanda as a backup program that could be demoed. It turns out that Zmanda has headquarters in California but also in Pune, India. They might be willing to send someone over to do demos and take questions. You can find their contact information here http://www.zmanda.com/contact.html

Thank you, everyone for these ideas.