Geek with an attitude

Its been a long obsession ever since I heard the existence of the x86 port. Unless you've been living under a rock (or an msn umbrella), chances are that you have heard about Apple's decision to dump the powerpc architecture in favor of Intel. You might also have heard that the developer version (was/had been) leaked (by apple?). Anyway, I wanted to get my hands on this baby; not only to satisfy my curiosity, but also to see what the competition was like. Sure the MacOS X is going to slaughter any short or long horn that will come its way, but could it also hurt some desktop GNU/Linux deployments in the short term atleast? Well after a couple of unsuccessful attempts, we (yes we!), managed to convert the dmg image to an iso(dvd) image and then burn it. Unfortunately it turned out that MacOSX refused to install after complaining the hardware wasn't supported. After trying several notebooks and desktops, it was obvious that none of the hardware we could find was supported -- ...

A new distro sweet as Mango was (un)officially launched by our very own Arunan , who is celebrating his B' day today* happens to be one of the youngest Slackers in the LKLUG . The occation, which was held at the newly opened "The Linux Center" or TLC in short, was filled with several LUGers and showered with slices of Mango EVERYWHERE, going fast! Mango is a new distro that is based on Slackware/Vector (do I hear.. long live Slack????), and contains sinhala and tamil localization as well as several useful packages. Though I would have preferred if he had used Debian/Taprobane instead, I guess a slacker will always be a slacker :) (FYI:he has shown interest in a remastered taprobane with a different undisclosed name) Among the Mango there was a very noticable Apple . Anuradha's brother Sanjaya , took out his new Apple iBook, hoping no one would notice (specially with all the mangos' around). But boy was he wrong! For the rest of the evening, the Linux center was ...

So after my unplesent experience with CDMA , and the difficulty of carrying a full fledged phone around all the time (I even took it to Blue waters last week), just to satisfy my online cravings, I decided to take a plunge and upgrade my cell phone. Those who have seen my old cell phone know how ugly it looks, with bits of colors torn from the cover and the keypad virtually erased (well, ok .... most of gadgets end up looking so), wouldn't second guess that it was about time I upgraded. After flirting around with the new Nokia 6230i, I decided she was too expensive for my purse, and decided to go with the next best thing – the SE K700i . Thanks to my friend Asanga and his underground contacts, I managed to get a decent price (I think). Well after charging it for a good 2.5 hrs, which gave me some time to skip through the manual, I got right down to business – with Linux ofcourse. Since my notebook doesn't have inbuilt support for Bluetooth, I used the IR port instead. Irda is...

Just came back from a long day workshop organized as part of the IITC 2005 Conference . Myself, Anuradha and Chamath undertook the almost impossible task of a, "less than a day" workshop, consisting of several integrated interruptions (ie. lunch, tea breaks), to cover a relatively advanced subject, to a relatively inexperienced GNU/Linux user, and still managed to pull it off - somewhat! Now that I'm done patting our selves in the back, I'd like to say that it was extremely fun :) After all, there is really nothing like going under the hood and getting some "machan (grease)", on a Saturday morning tinkering with Linux. For those who missed it, we had a small crowd (that is too small to mention), but made it much easier to managed and give personal attention to each attendee. Here is a summary of tasks we managed to cover: Presentation on the Linux kernel's boot process, from the BIOS all the way upto the runlevels, both during a normal hard drive b...

Just finished watching the 13th episode of the Firefly , to discover, I've run out of episodes :(. About a month back Suchetha handed me a stack of DivX CDs and insisted that I watch it. The pilot episode was a long 2hr show, somewhat weird and not soo interesting. I was expecting something like Star Trek or Andromeda but this was like a space cowboy movie - where have all the aliens gone? But as I watched more episodes, skipping days due to a busy schedule (like flying off to Pakistan for one), I was drawned to the characters (specially to one :), j/k). Each episode was some what connected, but had its unique cinematic style. And now after the 13th and final episode (excluding the pilot), its all over :(. Fox that originally aired it, had pulled the plug! Like many fans , I am left wanting more...But there is a bit more to come, Serenity , the movie named after the ship in firefly, will be released soon on dvd. Till then, perhaps the theme song will remain stuck inside my head. T...