Geek with an attitude

Motivation Ubuntu has become a popular GNU/Linux distributions and has introduced many new users to the world of GNU/Linux and FOSS. Nevertheless, some felt that new users migrating would find it difficult not being able to perform certain functions such as play DVDs, listening to mp3 etc., even though the platform supports these functions. Getting these packages installed might not be trivial for some newbies even though much of the details has been well documented at http://ubuntuguide.org . Easy Ubuntu was an attempt to provide a user-friendly front end that made it very easy to install several key packages that were missing in Ubuntu due to possible legal reasons. Unfortunately, the current stable version of Easy Ubuntu doesn’t support an offline mode. The development versions seemed to have a work-in-progress implementation for an offline mode, but that doesn’t seem to support the same user friendly GUI that is available during the network install. EasyER Ubuntu (pronounced Easi...

Last Saturday, 16th of September, the Sri Lankan team geared up to celebrate the Software Freedom Day (SFD) . As part of the day's events, it was decided to have them in popular hangout locations. After some debate, the locations were realized as be that of Majestic City, Crescat and Excel World. While we managed to secure the Crescat lobby by paying the reasonably quoted amount in advace, the quote from Excel World seemed too pricey, given the nature of the event. As Majestic City had already been secured (through Epsi computers), it was decided to drop Excel World as a location at the last minute, despite the pre-marketing brochures already mentioning otherwise. For the moment it seemed as if the management of Excel World, did not see any value in us having the event for the low price we asked. What follows is the story of how things took a completely different turn, at the last moment and how the three different managements of the three different locations affected us. Crescat ...

Software Freedom Day is a global effort to promote the use of Free and Open Source software. Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. Its a matter of the users freedom to run, copy, distribute, study,change an improve the software. As part of the celebrations we are having two events at two locations: Majestic City lobby We will have some cool, sleek notebooks running Free & Open Source software both on Windows and GNU/Linux. Come see the new GNU/Linux desktops in action and how running FOSS can save you money while preserving your rights! Crescat lobby This event is all about power computing. We'll have powerful gaming machines and servers running optimized versions of GNU/Linux that will make games screammmmm! See how the Linux system can be optimized specifically for your hardware even if its an old Pentium 1. Ready to see how deep the Rabbit hole goes? Well bring along your desktop or notebook and learn how to get GNU/Linux installed on it. There will be FREE GNU/...

My good friend Iranga, had taken this photo (on his way to SL from UK) of the Linux kernel booting on the on-flight personal entertainment system of a First Choice Airline . So I guess, First Choice has chosen GNU/Linux as its first choice! Iranga told me that once the kernel booted it loaded a kiosk like interface. But if the airline itself ran on the Linux kernel? or any other commmon OS? Reminds me of this joke... http://www.webaugur.com/bibliotheca/field_stock/os-airlines.html