Due to hardware issues on my netbook I ended up using my old machine and I installed Ubuntu 9.10 aka Karmic Koala. My old machine is a Lenovo C3000 N100 so as you can see, it’s beginning to age. But no Karmic Koala didn’t give me headaches the way I had other issues in the past.

What’s the initial impression that I got from using Karmic Koala?

• It’s shiny!
  Seriously. I found the new GNOME quite shiny. It’s a whole lot more polished compared to the older GNOME releases. It really looks clean and whoever passed by my desk would comment at how clean and professional looking it is. Tsk, them of little faith~! But I also like the choices of desktop backgrounds that came with it because they looked great even with an extended monitor. The stretched versions look decent.
• It’s pretty fast. In terms of boot-up time and going to a virtual terminal. It feels like it’s so instantaneous. Which is neat when I need the virtual terminal — this happens to me when my desktop hangs and I want to look for the processes that might be causing that.
• Hardware support is much better. I used to have so many issues on this machine. It used to be that wifi and sound would always come up as issues. Well, bluetooth too. I’ve been using it again and everything seems to be better supported. The driver for the Broadcom wifi card to work had to be downloaded first but that was fine. That seems to be the only driver that I had to get somewhere else. Sound was working perfectly fine when I tried it. That for me is awesome as I cannot work without music.

Now I don’t regret installing Karmic Koala on this baby. It doesn’t feel so old using Karmic Koala. At the same time, I really think that the release good overall. Well, I still have time to evaluate it but it does leave a good first impression on me.

Asia Source 3 is over but the spirit of the camp will still be alive. This is one thing that I could see from the Facebook and Twitter updates of everyone. There are people who miss camp already and there are those who are now asking more things about free and open source software. For me, that is something encouraging and heart-warming.
As a first time facilitator and participant, Asia Source 3 was a learning experience. It was not the typical workshop or conference as it was 6 day camp for us. There …read more

A co-worker just asked me earlier: What blogging software should he use on his desktop?
I could not answer the question right away. Part of me was thinking that he could have answeed that quite easily. But not really. One of the first things he asked is: “Is WordPress a light enough solution?”
It is indeed worth noting that WordPress is fairly light. The download from the website is never bloated. Just several MB. Here’s the catch though: It runs on Apache and you need MySQL and PHP as well. For those who are using Apache, …read more

One thing that old and new Linux users might sometimes forget is the community. For newbies, it’s the fear of the unknown territory that might make it feel like something so difficult. That or they feel it’s an adventure they could take. All by themselves, that is. But if you think about it, venturing into the unknown world of Linux and the free and open source software movement is much better with like-minded people who want to experience these things. It could be one heck of an adventure or one long boring ride into the …read more

Asia Source 3 gathers people to have 5 days of camp fun dealing with free and open source software. There are 4 tracks in this year’s Asia Source camp.

Managing your information
Migration
Broadcasting your information
Community building

Participants shall be joining in a track to interact with fellow participants in order to learn something new from each other. Whatever they learn from this camp will hopefully be very helpful for them when they go back to work in their respective organizations.
I was able to talk with some of the participants here and they have different backgrounds and needs. But they are …read more

I’m currently out of town and just reading about Ubuntu Karmic experiences left and right. Some are pretty comprehensive compared to others. Steve Rosenberg of http://www.indiesocal.com who wrote about the Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade. There were snags in the upgrade especially when it came to X.org but he was able to fix it too. There’s also this thing on the Register about how terrible Ubuntu 9.10 is. But I guess it all boils down to one thing when it comes to any operating system: YMMV. Your mileage may vary.
It’s the combination of the hardware you …read more

If you’re looking for a photo collection tool that is highly focused on helping you manage your photos then Phraymd could be thing that will help you. F-spot covers a whole lot more when it comes to managing photo collections with all those features such as editing your photos so that they could rotated, etc. But Phraymd seems to be more focused on your metadata.
The design philosophy of Phraymd includes the following:

The user interface must not be a blocker.
It keeps the metadata in the images.
There is a database that keeps track of data for faster searching.

It looks really …read more

Are you looking for a photo manager? Then Solang might be an alternative you’d like to check out. Not everyone’s happy about F-spot even if it is full of features. We all have our preferences and it’s not an essentially bad thing to search for options.
Solang seems to have a problem with Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope so those who want to use it already might be better off with upgrading to Karmic Koala first. There’s a PPA for Solang but those who are not familiar with it might be turned off. I personally plan to upgrade before …read more

Ever heard about the Linux Kongress? It’s a venue for Linux kernel
developers to talk about the things that they research on and work on.
It is an annual event, organized by the German Unix Users Group. This
year it was held in Dresden, Germany from October 27-30. Ted T’so,
Felix von Leitner and Andi Kleen were all in this year’s Linux
Kongress. They highlighted some of the key things in kernel
development. Talks included topics like the GNU Compiler Collection
(GCC) as well as how multi-core systems are powerful.
Not everyone might be able to appreciate these things especially new
Linux users but reading …read more

It’s too late when I realized that I didn’t have my netbook’s charger and so I can’t really upgrade my netbook this weekend. It’s not good. Argh. And just when I had plenty of time to upgrade and fix something if ever something gets broken.
So yeah, everybody seems to have Ubuntu 9.10 or Karmic Koala already. Well, except for me. Tsk. Next time I will check my things before leaving a building, just to be sure this doesn’t happen again.
Back to business.
And everyone but me has Karmic Koala. By this time it’s more …read more