[PLUG] Motivating students to setup Web servers to share data

[Abhijit Bhopatkar]

>> Our discussion regarding helping students to setup Web
>> servers at their
>> home pc's to share data is still at halt. I m talking
>> this with regards to
>> the discussion we had at PLUG meeting in Gnunify, Apologies
>> that I could not
>> attend the PLUG meeting on 7th March otherwise we could
>> have had a proper
>> discussion.
>
> I may be completely out of context here, but what sort of 'data-sharing' is being talked about? Perhaps, FTP servers may be setup if it is about sharing 'files'. However, I do fear that it may end up being the next napster sharing only 'my-fav-mp3-song'.
>
> A webserver would rather prove useful if it is knowledge sharing on a CMS hosted website.
>
> Apache is known to be the best on any distribution and you would have to know which 'student' has / may have opted for a PUBLIC IP. (very rare, though). Or there are options for no-ip.com which should help in these cases.


OK lets get everybody in context,

Abhishek is leading a linux user group at MIT, we met him at GNunify
and had some discussions about problems he faces in promoting stuff...

The brief of the discussions was that, we need to provide some
insentive to people in order to make them interested in linux. (Compiz
desktop cube provided that for couple of days and attracted many
eyeballs for a while.)

The idea  was suggested to have small group of linux users put up a
local computer website on their home machines. All very easily done in
most linux distros out of the box.
The important point is to make it simple enough to a newbee and have a
coolness factor associated with it.

Abhishek,

It will be a good idea to try installing apache on your distro and get
no-ip.com domain setup. Try these things on your pc, its should not be
difficult, any problems and we are always here to help.

May be you can make it to next meeting and we can discuss further.

BAIN