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.

Post from: New Linux User

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 were focused discussions, activities and parties practically every single day. During the day, we’ were quite busy with the various discussions and activities that deal with open source communities and tools that we need for managing information, migration, broadcasting information and growing a community. The diverse backgrounds of the participants also make it even cooler because of the way that everyone will interact and perspectives and experiences are shared.

One of the things I learned from camp is that even introverts can be a little bit more social once they have an environment where they can somehow be themselves. Introducing myself to people at camp wasn’t exactly the easiest thing to do but my geeky shirts were a starting point in some cases. Or my interest in localization led me to interesting people who shared what they do in Cambodia and Bangladesh. This for me is a precious lesson on interacting with others in the community. This is face to face interaction, not online. And it is better than just knowing someone via email. You could see the faces of the people behind the project/s and that takes the whole community-bonding experience to a different level. For me, you could not be as impersonal about a project anymore when you encounter such awesome people from different projects who are very passionate about open source.

For those who were just new to Linux and the entire open source philosophy, they looked even more excited after camp because they have so many things to share with others. It makes them want to experience the same environment at the source camp in their own country too. People who make things happen are simply that awesome!

For those who want to see the Asia Source 3 Wiki, it’s now online.

Post from: New Linux User

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, MySQL and PHP to test applications locally on their machines, this is fine. But for those who don’t, then I don’t see the reason to download something like WordPress. And my co-worker pointed that out too.

What are possible solutions?

On Linux, there are several. If you’re using Ubuntu, you could get Tomboy by default. Each note could have the date of the day as a title and then you could file everything together. One downside of Tomboy is that the notes are saved as text files but with mark-up that might not be friendly to read.

There’s also ZimWiki. I know I wrote about how to use ZimWiki to write your masterpiece. But seriously though, you could also use this in a different way. Like blogging on your very own laptop. You could treat local blogging like writing your own novel and you could customize the organization of your notes. And it should be fairly easy enough to have a bunch of links on your pane because you could make the name of the month as a section and put a summary when the month is over. Then you could still have each page as a day in that month.

And then there’s always Emacs Planner-el. Not everyone is comfortable with Emacs, but for me, this is still one of the best ways to record what happened during the day.

These are just three tools I could think of at the moment. If you’ve got other ideas, then let me know. I am sure others would also want to learn about this topic.

Post from: New Linux User

Reaching out to ask for help could be intimidating because it might make you feel a bit insignificant. But what is life without other people being with you to experience things? As cliche as it may sound, no man is an island. For that matter, maybe you don’t necessarily have to be the type to broadcast to the entire world that you are a new Linux user. But just one or a few people with you in this makes the experience fun as you learn new commands. And who knows? The terminal might feel like a better place to deal with commands. Feeling like a wizard chanting a spell? Maybe that’s the thrill of the command line for some people. Others might be more of the type to find good things in new shiny packages — new applications that are useful, something more than they imagined.

Old Linux users might not feel as enthusiastic about the community before. Why? Because there are those who keep on conducting flame wars in community mailing lists. That or they’ve come to hate the “RTFM”/”RTM”-like replies to newbies. Or maybe they’ve gotten tired of reading newbie emails. Well, it might sound like those questions are being popped over and over and over again so I guess it’s hard to blame them for losing interest in those community mailing lists and forums. Oh and there’s also the problem with sexist remarks. Women sometimes have difficulties dealing with those issues. But there are times that it does turn women off from the community.

However, it is interesting to note that despite such issues that might be around not so new Linux users, there are friendships that do form among them. And it goes beyond the mailing list or forums. And sometimes those friendships lead to collaborations online and offline. There’s still discussions that do happen as time goes by. Which isn’t a bad thing and it could help as they continue to grow in terms of their personal development and their skills in using Linux and free and open source software.

I do hope that in the coming years, I’d see richer interactions among people in the community. I mean, I might not be as active in the local Linux community but I still have those friendships that I have developed over the years and it still keeps me interested in the technologies and the projects that are happening here. It’s just that I can’t help but hope for more so that the community will keep on growing.

Post from: New Linux User

• 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 quite interested in the tracks they have signed up for and as early as now they have many questions. And there are also many interesting stories from them as they share why they are interested in FOSS and why they will be participating at the camp.

The next five days will be packed with activities that aims to empower each participants so that they have knowledge and practical skills. Whether it’s all about managing their information online or offline, collaboratively or what; whether it’s people learning something new about Linux there’s an opportuity for everyone who has an open mind and an attitude to learn.

I am looking forward to an awesome camp at Asia Source 3.

Post from: New Linux User

It’s the combination of the hardware you have with whatever you’re installing. Whether it’s any particular Linux distribution or maybe even Windows, there’d be times that you will hit some snags. Some inconveniences might be greater than others. You can not always tell. (This is also based on my personal experience.)

There will be times that everything is going to work out of the box. Seriously fine and dandy and happy. Right? I get those times. But there are moments that there are unexpected kinks. It could affect the sound card, it could be the video card. It could be something else like wifi. There are those sweet moments that I know people are happy about, including myself.

I’ve read the acronym YMMV on a mailing list and I wondered what it was all about. And someone just explained it to me that sometimes people don’t have the same experiences when it comes to installing things or trying out new applications. It often grounds me to the reality that not everything about x distro will be all bad or all good. That’s why even if I do read that x distro (in this case Ubuntu 9.10) isn’t quite as perfect, I still would give it a try once I can. After all, I do read good stuff about it too.

No distro is perfect. Exaggerated reports or isolated cases will not be very helpful either in assessing these things. So just keep in mind, YMMV for each time that you want to use something.

Post from: New Linux User

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 nifty to me. It also is said to be designed so that one could easily call other applications when needed. For example, image editing tools that will enhance your pictures. Or maybe viewing it using Firefox.

If you take a look at page about using Phraymd

you will see interesting features. For me, one of the interesting features is to be able to select a bunch of pictures and not lose that selection if I move to another image.

Phraymd is also looking for people to use it and test it. It will be great if you could test it and give feedback. Of course, giving good feedback and not something too general might not be very helpful. Be specific about the your feedback especially when it comes to bugs so that the development of Phraymd will be better. There is a user group for Phraymd here so sign-up and be a part of it if you believe in this project.

For those who want to try Phraymd, read this guide on installing and running Phraymd.

Post from: New Linux User

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 I try Solang.

The feature list as written by Santanu several months ago. I am thinking this would be applicable for Solang on Karmic.

• Paginated views for memory and speed efficiency (in git already)
• Icon zooming in browser view (in git already)
• Undoable delete feature for tags and photos (partially in git)
• Undoable basic editing (flip/rotate/scale) (underway)
• Batch editing of pictures (hopefully) (TBD)
• An importer from flickr (Underway)
• A basic exporter that exports selected photos to a directory (hopefully through a basic editing pipeline) (TBD)

It looks interesting especially with the screenshots on this blog entry about compiling Solang in Ubuntu.

Solang is one of the applications I want to try once I upgrade to Karmic Koala because I am still trying to find which application works best for me. At least when it comes to managing a photo collection offline. I’ve settled for Postr when it comes to importing photos since I mainly use Flickr rather than Picasa or Photobucket. If I uploaded images to other online image sharing sites then I might be sold on using F-spot. And I find F-spot a bit slow even if it is useful. Hopefully Solang will be a better option. If not Solang, there’s also Phraymd to take a look at.

Post from: New Linux User

Not everyone might be able to appreciate these things especially new
Linux users but reading about them at the very least gives us a better
idea of how development happens, who are some of the key people in the
community, what might be happening in the coming days for us.

Not everyone might be developing software in the free and open source
community. But those who do have a great impact on Linux as we get to
use it. The kernel might seem to be a very intimidating thing to most
newbies. But the kernel is an important part of the Linux distros we
use and love. The very performance of these distros on our respective
computers have a relationship with how developers improve the kernel.
We might not understand all the processing being done by the CPUs and
how the kernel interacts with it but these names make it possible for
us to have something that we could use everyday for our work and play.

I suppose those who are more into technical details and hacking would
be able to appreciate the talks and training tracks in Linux Kongress.
Be sure to check out the
Linux Kongress 2009 page for other information.

Linux kernel developers deserve our appreciation for all their hard
work and time. After all, they’re part of the group that make Linux
become better and better each time.

Post from: New Linux User

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 practical for me to start looking for the rest of the world’s blog entries and screenshots. The Debian Admin blog has a 37 screenshots. You get to see the different aspects of Karmic so this is a good set. It also gives you a better idea of how things work in Karmic now, at least have a general idea. Also there are chances that other loco’s have probably pushed through with their release parties for Karmic already. Yes, I am envious that almost everyone has the latest Ubuntu release.

Because of that forgotten charger everything else could gloat to me about not having Ubuntu Karmic yet. Thankfully not everyone in the community thinks that way so I don’t feel so bad.

Others have given tips on what should be done first to your machine after installing Karmic Koala. One of them is to select download mirrors and set them up for your future needs. After all, you never know when these things will be handy. There’s also setting up folder sharing. This is especially for those who rely on shared files within the office network. One more thing you should do: synchronize time with atomic clocks. Just so you won’t find yourself in a different timezone all of a sudden. Great right?

Enjoy Ubuntu Karmic Koala!

Post from: New Linux User