Several years ago, I got the opportunity to visit a small foundation in the middle of the jungle in Mahavilachchiya that made a strong impression on me and my friends in the LKLUG. We were there to teach kids computers and introduce them to the wealth of free and open
An event to mark the Software Freedom Day was organized by the Free Software Foundation and held in Boston over the weekend. I felt that a long drive was just what I needed to get my mind off the series of mini catastrophes that have been taking place at work
Recently, I’ve been taking a look at tools to version control and maintain my Debian packages in git. Git, like mercurial, is a distributed SCM used to maintain the Linux kernel since version 2.6.12. Branching in git is very cheap, and merging is trivial and follows a
In a recent article, Ted T’so makes some interesting points on Sun’s motives behind OpenSolaris, and how it fares today in the FOSS ecosystem as a result. “Fundamentally, Open Solaris has been released under a Open Source license, but it is not an Open Source development community.” It’
Here are the steps to get Linux running on a Palm TX. For the approach described, you’ll need an SD card, an SD card reader and a Palm TX that you can hopefully live without. Remember, backup the handheld using a tool such as JPilot. It’s really quite
GPLv3 was launched on Friday (29) after close to eighteen months of public involvement in it’s drafting process. This has been an important milestone in the free software world as an upgrade to the GPL to address some of the more modern concerns have been a long time coming.
I attended the 2007 FSF members meeting today — codenamed “Year of the upgrade”. — snip — 09:15–10:00 Breakfast, registration, and pgp key signing 10:00–10:25 Peter Brown, Executive Director — “Libre Planet” 10:25–10:50 John Sullivan, Program Administrator -”BadVista and the Campaign for Free Software
Here’s a list of things I’d like to see in a future version of the Sony Reader. 1) Wireless — Not so much for surfing (although that would be nice), as transferring files from one device to another. Subject to DRM restrictions for files that are locked of course
The Sony Reader that I ordered last week has finally arrived and I’m quite impressed with the little gadget. The best feature of it is probably the screen. It’s unbelievably easy to read. If you’ve ever used LCD/CRT-based screens to read e-books, you know what I’
Yesterday was the second day of the FOSS-ed on Wheels at Mahavilachchiya. The kids were some of the brightest I’ve met and they pick things up in a flash. The night before, I did a programming primer to a group of lads and lasses, 18 years old on average.
I’m at Mahavilachchiya right now, at the Horizon Lanka Foundation, with the FOSS-ed on Wheels troupe. So far the experience has been breathtaking. Yesterday, we were at the Kekirawa Central College where we talked to a group of individuals eager to learn about FOSS. This group was very diverse,
Quilt is a great tool to maintain patchsets. For those new to quilt, let me brief you on how it works. If you take something like the kernel sources, you would eventually need to apply patches to give it functionality that has not made it to the official tree. Examples
