I must post before the end of 2009!

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.

Instalasi default hanya memerlukan kurang dari 2.5 GB. Memang handal!

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

1. send car for repair at workshop
2. help wife with Tadika stuff
3. take kids to taman
4. apt-get upgrade the debian on Latitude X1

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

adli@an-nahl:/$ cat /etc/issue
Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 \n \l
 

Salam Ma’al Hijrah!

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 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?

Tetapi bagaimana jika terlalu ramai hati yg keruh. Jgn putus asa. Tanggungjawab manusia adalah berusaha. Kita akan disoal kelak jika tidak berusaha, sebaliknya tidak akan dipertanggungjawabkan jika tidak berjaya.

…

Baru Teguh Peribadi(pi ramli)

The web application on http://e.hasil.org.my  is definitely my favorite one . More or less around this time, a year ago I remember blogging on this topic. This time around I just reused the same image that I  created last year with Qemu. The certificate, browser and what not are already there. I’ll just have to make sure that this image is safely copied somewhere and that I won’t forget my own password or its hint for retrieving forgotten password, next year.

I also did my annual Windows update for the image .  Since this is a last minute affair, I really didn’t have time to check if you could just do it directly with Firefox (or Iceweasel) on Linux. There shouldn’t be any issues i think.

Kita boleh letakkan <ip> <nama> dlm /etc/hosts utk memudahkan pengguna.

Masalahnya fail /etc/hosts ini hanya boleh di edit oleh root privileges. Jika anda hanya pengguna biasa, tak boleh lah tambah entry di fail ini.

Penyelesaiannya boleh dilakukan dengan ~/.ssh/config

$cat ~/.ssh/config
Host namabaru
       Hostname 202.188.0.133
       User bukangodam
       Port 8888

$ssh namabaru

Arahan di atas sama hasilnya dengan yang dibawah:

$ssh 202.188.0.133 -l bukangodam -p8888

Ah, been a while, I know. After a few months on Enlightenment (E17 to be precise , I’m now back on Fluxbox!