Geek with an attitude

That's right! I am leaving Debian Linux for Gentoo . After more than a year, flirting with Woody (stable branch) and then later Sarge (testing branch of Debian), running it since they day I bought by notebook, I decided to make the switch. Now don't get me wrong, I love Debian. The change was motivated buy several reasons, among which... I want to learn Gentoo a bit more extensively. I used it here and there, but now feel its time to goto bed with it. My batteries on the notebook are dying (about 30-45min), so I don't mind the extra stress that a compilation puts on power management anymore. Debian is fast (say compared to RH). Gentoo feels even faster. Gentoo has some cool non-free apps in portage (repository). I'd still be using Debian both at home and office anyways It all started last week as I struggled to download the two Gentoo CDs on our slow, highly congested office network, only to find the packages CD didn't have the proper MD5sums matching. This called...

Finding the auditorium, dubbed "nawa rangahala" meaning "the new hall", wasn't too difficult with Suchetha around. Being an old boy of Royal College, he showed the path while enticing us with his misfit school boy activities. When we go there the presentation had already been setup on another laptop with Power Point. Fortunately there was enough time for me to boot up my linux box and replace it with Koffice. Soon is was time to start the proceedings, and the first item on the agenda was the lighting of the oil lamp. It felt quite weird when I heard my name being called to light the oil lamp. believe or not, I don't recall ever having to do that! After a small introduction to the event by the school's principal, it was time for the BCS presentation. It was agreed that I would operate the transition of slides as Ruwan Mali would gave the presentation. This was going to be tricky indeed, as I soon learned it wasn't easy leaning against the table and ...

Tomorrow will be an exciting day for me. Its the first time I will be talking to a bunch of scouts consisting of school children ranging from about age 8 to 18, on GNU/Linux. I am very excited and at the same time slightly nervous, after all I've never talked to a kids gathering before. Remembering my self, growing up at the age of 8 - 13 back in Michigan, calmed me down and made me feel somewhat comfortable. The event was organized by the British Computer Society , Sri Lankan section (BCS) and I got involved accidentally. Both Ruwan Fonseka and Anuradha Ratnaweera had done most of the ground work for setting up the event on behalf of LKLUG , but were unable to attend due to other commitments. Ruwan had translated part of the presentation that was to be done by Ruwan Mali of the BCS, into Sinhala using a Unicode font. The idea was to display the English slide followed by the Sinhala slide on a GNU/Linux platfor using OpenOffice . Since OpenOffice support for sinhala is inco...