*Fedora 11 Preview Release Party @ Vadodara, India.*

The Fedora 11 Release Party was planned today, 30th May 2009, at BCA department, Faculty of Science, The M. S. University of Baroda in Vadodara for student and VGLUG members. Eventually, the Fedora 11 released was postponed to 2nd June and then 9th June 2009 but we kept the event as it is and used Fedora 11 Preview release. I did not want to postpone this event as I was in the city for short time. So this event turned out to be more like Fedora Install Fest rather than Release Party. :)

We were supposed to start the event at sharp 8 AM as it is summer time and temperature goes above 40 degree Celsius during the day. I reached the place at 8 AM and was the first person to reach the venue. Few students came around 8:15 and we went into the lab to start things up. By 9 AM there were around 20-25 students of BCA department and VGLUG members. It is exam time in the department so there were less students attending the event. I started the presentation of Fedora containing Fedora 11 installation with introduction to some cool new features of Fedora 11. After my presentation Mr. Sham Arsiwala of Electromech, Ahmedabad showed some cool 3-D compiz desktop effects from his Fedora 10 lappy.

I was happy to see that most of the students were using Linux in the college and were preparing for Linux Practical exam in coming few days time. Few students were keen to know how they can contribute to Fedora or any other Open Source project. I showed them http://fedoraproject.org/en/join-fedoraand explained how they can contribute to Fedora. After all this it was time to do some hands on installation of Fedora 11 Preview. I had already setup an NFS share for installation and few students tried to installed on their own.

The students were very much eager to get the Free DVD of Fedora 11 but I was not able to provide them Fedora 11. We provided Fedora 10 DVDs to them just now and promised them to provide Fedora 11 after 2 weeks in my next visit to the city again for some small LUG event. I informed that they can contact local contacts for getting Fedora 11 anytime they want and also showed them following links to get Fedora free media. https://fedoraproject.org/freemedia/FreeMedia-form.html http://www.vglug.info/get-fedora-dvd

I was glad to see interest of students and MSU officials for this event. The department officials want to keep one more event exclusively for students in month of August regarding participation of students in Open Source Projects. I am looking forward for having events in future here as I can see many students are interested in exploring new things.

Check out the photos captured of this event from following link. http://picasaweb.google.com/nirmal.pathak/Fedora11ReleasePartyInVadodara

Have FuN!