My 6 year old son’s pc (running Ubuntu) was getting a bit ’sluggish’. Of course that is expected when you got an (old) Intel Pentium III machine with around 256MB RAM. Ubuntu was actually ok and I was just lazy to install other distro then. My 8 years old daughter had been asking for her own PC and it just so happen we got another old Pentium III machine with more or less the same specs lying around the house accumulating dust (and my significant other’s wrath .
And so I have a good excuse to start feeling old-skoolish. After looking at puppy linux and zenwalk, i went ahead with zenwalk, which is a slackware based distro. The installer reminded me of the nostalgic past when the keyboard is your best friend (and patience was with everyone!). So at the end of the day, I got a modern distro on 2 old machines. At one point I had to use the command line to go to run level 3 and rerun videoconfig. Now how many folks out there get to use the command line when installing linux these days ?
I also went out and got a BENQ 18.5 inch "world’s first LED Monitor" and a pink optical mouse to make the experience worthwhile . And yes, I’m fully aware that the monitor costs more than the value of the 2nd hand Pentium III computers themselves.
Zenwalk gives you xfce as the default desktop. Iceweasel with flash support is also provided by default. The rest of the applications is in the repository (can use netpkg), but really my kids only need the browser and flash plus the Internet for their day to day activities.
Setelah bertahun-tahun menggunakan Debian, hari ini saya membuat keputusan untuk memasang Ubuntu 9.04 edisi Dekstop pada komputer riba Dell Latitude X1. Setakat ini nampaknya semua aplikasi yang saya perlukan (antaranya Skype) berjalan seperti yang dijangka. Setting untuk rangkaian, paparan dan lain-lainnya juga tidak mengecewakan.
Instalasi default hanya memerlukan kurang dari 2.5 GB. Memang handal!
Tahniah kepada semua yang terlibat: penganjur, penceramah, peserta, sukarelawan, penyedia makanan dan lain-lain, . Walaupun saya sempat singgah buat beberapa ketika, nampaknya semua berjalan dengan lancar. Kali ni, geng-geng 3boss sertai conference ni atas tiket organisasi tempat bekerja masing-masing
Nostalgia
Seingat saya, Conference open source di Malaysia yang saya sertai buat kali pertama (sebagai penceramah bebas) adalah National Open Source Conference and Exhibition pada tahun 2002 anjuran UPSI & Mimos. Di persidangan ini saya jumpa Shaiful Jahari setelah lama hampir 7-8 tahun tak jumpa. Saya masih ingat En. Azuddin (HUSM) yang menggunakan Koffice di atas Slackware ketika itu.
Kemudian pada tahun berikutnya ( Disember 2003), di Open Source @ Schools. Saya berjumpa saudara Sebol dan Colin Charles buat kali pertama di seminar ini. Dalam bulan Ogos tahun yang sama Mimos menganjurkan Free and Open Source Conference 2003 (fosscon 2003). Malangnya pada hari yang sama salah seorang anak kembar kami meninggal dunia pada hari yang sama. Saya ingat lagi sehari sebelum Fosscon 2003, saya dan saudara Najmi pergi ke Sheraton.
Pada tahun 2004, seingat saya tiada seminar atau persidangan open source yang saya hadiri melainkan KICT Open Source Day 2004 di Universiti Islam Antarabangsa. Saya berkesempatan memberi ceramah tentang penggunaan Linux dalam aktiviti pembelajaran seharian. Kemudian saya sempat menjadi bidan terjun untuk sesi ‘Membangunkan Aplikasi Web di atas Linux’. Shakir, y0muds (pada ketika itu masih belajar) pun sempat mengendalikan ‘live demo’ pada sesi keselamatan Shaiful Jahari. Mana agaknya pergi pelajar-pelajar KICT, IIUM yang menganjurkan Open Source Day 2004
Banyak lagi aktiviti-aktiviti yang saya dan kawan-kawan terlibat antara 2005 hingga sekarang. Apa yang saya perhatikan di acara-acara open source sebelum ini ialah sikap positif dan tidak ‘poyo’ kalangan mereka yang suka berkongsi pengalaman, masa, tenaga serta membantu orang lain dalam memperkenalkan open source kepada masyarakat. Semoga Tuhan membalas jasa anda semua!
So one day the XO went bonkers and had problems connecting to my wireless access points. After going through everything that is googleable on this topic, I finally admit defeat and went to the nearest computer shop. The no-name-brand-RM-15 USB ethernet adapter did the trick and worked flawlesly! I was told by Mohd Lazim (aka Mythrage) OLPC Malaysia to ditch Fedora and install Debian instead
In case you haven’t figure it out, the blue object is the USB ethernet adapter
A naughty attempt to install Powermanga on the XO. Half way there!
Safiyyah, 7 and new owner of the XO, pWn1ng the box for fun and profit
I haven’t been upgrading the Debian packages on my Dell Latitude X1 notebook regularly of late because of the sexy Macbook . The whole exercise took roughly 5 hours to complete, no thanks to all the junk I installed on the lappy. The machine feels better and faster now I think
I ‘won’ the OLPC XO at the recent Foss.MY 2008 just in time for my eldest son 8th birthday. The only problem was that it came without an adapter. So I finally had the time yesterday to get one of those made in China ‘Universal’ power adapter for notebooks, thanks to the OLPC wiki and some pictures at flickr.
Initially my son thought that the Xo was one of those kiddie laptops so he wasn’t that excited. Anyhoo, after booting it up and connecting the Xo to our wireless lan, he was convinced that this is a Linux box with a strange cute interface.
And thus we spent a couple of hours, going through some of the applications and figuring out how the desktop environment, Sugar, works. From the initial experience, it seems that I got to spend some time reading the official wiki. I can see already some good applications for learning programming like Scratch and Pippy. Also there’s a browser for playing flash games reading wikipedia and sending emails. Sound and all the other thingies worked as expected.
Size-wise, the XO is suitable for kids. It is also quite durable or ‘dropable’. I got Jihad to do all the typing as the keyboard was a tad too small for my hands.The hardware specs might be a bit at the low end for doing multiple things at the same time, but sufficient for the educational activities intended for kids 8-12 years old.
Comparing OLPC XO vs Dell Latitude X1
I’ll post some more stuff on our adventure on the XO in the future. w00t.
I’m sure by now most attendees have blogged about their experiences at foss.my, people they met, old friends that haven’t changed much and the lame old jokes about windows bsod and how penguins weren’t hurt behind the scenes while preparing the slides [1]
Overall I find the conference impressive awesome! Kudos to the organizers who did the whole thing in like 3 days or something hehe. Here are my thoughts about the event in point-form.
The most educational and enlightening talk has got to be the Open Source and OCRA Screen Reader by Kaeru. The best part was the live demo on how difficult it is for visually-challenged people rely on the screen reader to do their work on the computer. Kudos to the gentleman from the Malaysia Association of the Blind and Kaeru. Totally ‘menginsafkan’!
I love the lightning talk slots. They were simple, short, lively and the speakers don’t have much time to digress haha. Fadil (the Debian-using DJ?) who MCed the slots made it even more livelier. I also did a quick one on plotting stuff on googlemap for security visulization.
I didn’t quite get the last keynote by Jayakumar. Hmm.
The event gathered a lot of people from various communities and organizations. I was able to attach (nick)names, blogs, to faces. Coolness!
Some of the talks didn’t like start on time for whatever reasons. However what was more annoying is when you hear the MC saying things like ‘oh this is Malaysia bla bla bla’ (not once ok!). This is your event, hello!
Anywyas, I felt the the two-days was well worth it. I’d come again next year. I would also like to thank the crazy crowd (Amran, Shakir and some other folks) for helping me to win an OLPC for my son. More on our adventure with the OLPC later.
End Notes
[1] Making fun about other OSes or Distros is soo 90’s! In reality, at work people work with a couple of OSes/Distros – BSDs, Linux, Windows, Symbian etc, to get the job done!
Gmail sekarang sudah menyokong tema. Saya mencuba tema ‘console’ kerana sentimen akarumbi command_line masih kuat haha. Akan tetapi tak bertahan lama kerana tak sesuai untuk mata, cukuplah dengan GNU screen + xterm untuk kerja-kerja lain. Letih! Saya dah beralih ke tema ‘Ninja’!
I just registered and paid to attend foss.my this weekend ! I hope to see and catch up with people and maybe learn a new thing or two. Any other 3bosser going (or alive?
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Overall I find the conference 
