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

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

Mandrake was the first Linux distro that I tried and liked a lot. It was a newbie friendly enough distro back then and I still hear (and read) about it these days. Although now it is called Mandriva. LinuxCrunch talks about the 20 new features of Mandriva 2010.

New design for the installer.
Live upgrade
Moblin desktop
Guest accounts
3G features request
Better wireless support
Easier wifi key setup
Better boot time
Better rpmdrake start up speed
Urpmi media auto configuration
Better user information in rpmdrake
Better Drakguard
Better krandr
OpenOffice.org 3.1 and KDE 4 integration
gcc 4.4
Improved diskdrake
GNOME 2.28
KDE 4.3.2
Nepomuk integration
Plymouth boot splash

I really liked it that the installer of Mandrake give us …read more

Some people I know are closed-minded when it comes to using free and open source software. All of its flaws are magnified. None of the good things seem to stick in their minds. Well, maybe an application or two will be an exception. But I do encounter those who keep blaming the software for crashing or complain about the behavior of these applications. We’re all human, and it could be the lack of familiarity with these applications that make us feel very uncomfortable.
Having to learn about new software happens to us, whether it’s proprietary or …read more

If you’ve been wondering where to get free audiobooks the legal way, then it’s time to check out LibriVox. The audiobooks here are available in mp3 or ogg formats so you could easily download them to your own computer and listen to them. And the nice thing about this is that there’s a collective team of people who volunteer to read these books aloud so that we could enjoy listening to them for free. You might not be getting the latest commercial books in audio format but these books are within the public domain already so that’s …read more

Ubuntu Karmic Koala’s about to be released and I was wondering if I should upgrade or stick with Jaunty Jackalope. Phoronix released an article about Ubuntu 9.10 performance on netbooks. It looks like that there is a perceived improvement with the disk-intensive tasks because of the switch to the EXT4 filesystem. Those who are using SSDs on their netbooks might especially want to take advantage of that. For the upcoming release I am actually waiting for the Ubuntu 9.10 Moblin Remix. I am using the Ubuntu UMPC one right now but the Moblin user interface …read more

Free and open source software are available for everyone but I think that schools will be the ones to benefit the most. After all, it means the following for them:

less pressure on the instructors and students as well
tools they could play around with and not be too afraid to make mistakes
there are tools that could be fitted within her budget

It is awesome to read case studies that show us that installing Linux on their school computers, etc. It is never easy to just switch. (Is proprietary software an addiction? A habit? Sounds like it sometimes.) In any …read more

Ever wondered how you can manage your computer’s power so that it’s being used efficiently? This is something I think laptop users would be very concerned about so as to conserve battery time. You don’t want your computer to keep on using power while you’re away right? And of course a hassle-free experience will be ideal. Amazingly enough a research group has thought of a plan: by using sonar. What would be used for this experience is your computer’s mic and speakers.
Their plan:
The group developed software that, when the user is not using the mouse …read more