Debian Women Offers Building Packages from Source Tutorial

May 2nd, 2011

Are you enthusiastic about Debian and thinking about contributing? We want to guide you in the basics.

We are convinced that there are a lot of people out there that want to get involved with Free Software but don't know where to start. For Debian, the most common task you'll do as a contributor is rebuilding a package.

The Debian Women project, in collaboration with the OpenHatch project, will be holding an IRC event to help people who want to compile their first Debian package from source, and apply their first patch.

The event

On Saturday May 7th, two tutorial sessions will be held on #debian-women on irc.debian.org to help people rebuild a package for the first time.

The earlier session, suggested for those who live in Oceania, Asia, Africa and Europe, will be held at 11:00 UTC. The later session, suggested for those who live in the Americas, will be held at 22:00 UTC.

You can find out the exact time in your timezone by using this timezone converter.

There will be people available to answer questions and generally help out with any difficulties that might arise all along the day.

Intended audience

This event is aimed to anyone who wants to rebuild a Debian package for the first time, it's a simple task that doesn't require any previous knowledge, only a working installation of Debian (or Ubuntu, or other Debian-derived system). We want to particularly encourage women who want to get involved, to take their first steps in contributing to Free Software, but everybody is welcome.

More about IRC

IRC is a real-time chat system you can use to get in touch with members of the Debian community. You can connect to IRC through lots of different clients, including xchat, pidgin and konversation.

About Debian Women

The Debian Women Project seeks to balance and diversify the Debian Project by actively engaging with interested women and encouraging them to become more involved with Debian.

About OpenHatch

OpenHatch is an open source community aiming to help newcomers find their way into free software projects. It works towards this goal through on-line and outreach events. This event is a reappropriation of the OpenHatch Build it events.