Geek with an attitude

The Sahana project , a large scale disaster/relief management software developed soon after the Asian Tsunami and subsequently used during several other disasters, has won an award titled "2006 social benefit award", from the Free Software Foundation (FSF) . I myself feel proud and fortunate to have been involved with this project during its inception, and wish it will continue to be useful during unfortunate times. At the same time, I wish, there would be a less need for the deployment of Sahana, as a result of lesser number of devastation disasters. I think those now directly involved with the project wish for the same thing. More info (with pics at): Sahana wins the 2006 social benefit award Anuradha Weeraman's Photo Blog

Inspired by my favorite Linux podcast, " The Linux Action Shooooooooow " (thats how its pronounced), where each week Chris would talk about some new cool gadget that supposedly runs Linux. On the same spirit, I'd like to announce, the above. I managed to install Linux on my somewhat recent 30GB video ipod. While ipodlinux has been around for quite some time now, the newer 5.5G (Generation) ipods weren't supported. Well all that has changed as of late February 2007. Installation was quite easy , and I didn't even have to backup my data and repartition anything. Installation was actually quite easy due to the fact I had a Macpod (an ipod formatted using iTunes on running on my Mac Mini's OSX) which had put an hfsplus file system. Since hfsplus was a UNIX file system (POSIX compliant), I could just install Linux over it. In contrast, for the majority of people that are running their ipod on FAT32, the process is slightly more complicated, required a separate ex...

Last weekend, we had our first FOSSEd on wheels event in Kandy . It was organized by the faculty of science, University of Peradeniya and was held on the 3rd and 4th (Sat & Sun) of March. Since I had other commitments, I was only able to attend the event on the 3rd. I did a small presentation on deciding to choose a GNU/Linux distribution, a task that can be quite overwhelming, considering the hundreds of distributions out there . Nevertheless, I think I pulled it off by recommending they initially just try the Ubuntu distro , that was distributed to them at the event. Just to make things a little bit easier, I demoed a live Ubuntu installation (using VMPlayer), which took only a little more than 15 minutes. There was good balance in the number of attendees from universities, schools and a few from the industry who participated by asking questions as the event progressed. All in all, I thought it was one of the best FOSSEd events we had in a while. Check out the following links fo...