OLPC makes its entry into India - finally!

When the OLPC first made news, a prominent official in the HRD ministry of the Indian government had gone on record snubbing the OLPC project ($100 laptop), even making a preposterous claim that work was under way to create India's own $10 laptop. But as things have worked out, OLPC has already made an entry into India in the form of a pilot project in a rural primary school in a village in the state of Maharasthra.

The OLPC is currently being field tested at the Khairat primary school. The smiles on the children's faces indicate that this is going to be a very successful project if implemented judiciously - ie making sure the long tentacles of corruption do not touch the project.

Fig: Group study in progress

Fig: A student proudly displaying her XO laptop

Fig: Another student with her XO.

Carla Gomez Monroy who is overseeing this project being implemented in India has provided a detailed writeup of the day-to-day functioning of the Khairat school, how the OLPC is put to use by the one and only teacher and the students in the school, the bond formed with the villagers and so on. A very fascinating read.

So you want to be a System Administrator ? Here is how ...

What is the job profile of a System administrator ? Obviously he is in charge of managing the servers and making them work flawlessly. But is that it ?

Ask a person like James Hicks who has over 10 years experience working as a system administrator and he will tell you there is a lot more to the job than just managing servers.

But lets start from the beginning; what does it take for a fresher to land a job as a system administrator ? First and foremost, you need three things namely, Intelligence, an interest in Computers and last but not the least people skills.

James has written a 3 part series [ Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 ] providing insights into the art of snagging, managing and thriving as a system administrator which is a worthy and informative read. He even gives his personal opinion about the various certifications in the market and their worthiness.

An excerpt from the article :

Good systems administrators in good companies spend the bulk of their time preventing bad things from happening and finding new ways for IT to improve their organization’s efficiency. Bad systems administrators or good ones in bad companies spend the bulk of their time fixing problems that come up - usually the same problems over and over again.

Take part in a book auction to benefit FreeBSD foundation

Are you an avid user of FreeBSD ? Perhaps you use FreeBSD more than even good ol Linux. Well, here is a golden chance to support your favorite operating system.

Book publisher No Starch Press of San Francisco, California will auction the first copy of the second edition of "Absolute FreeBSD" to the highest bidder with all the proceeds being donated to The FreeBSD Foundation which is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the FreeBSD Project.

If you are the highest bidder, then you will receive a signed copy of "Absolute FreeBSD" hot off the press and a Certificate of Authenticity. The ongoing auction at eBay runs through November 2, 2007. The latest bid as of this writing is $525. Now the big question is are you willing to up the ante and in the process contribute more to the FreeBSD foundation ? If you are interested, hurry because the auction closes on November 2 2007.

AMD / ATI release Linux drivers for their popular graphics cards

It is a common perception among Free software enthusiasts that AMD's acquisition of ATI bodes really good for Linux and Free software. This perception is bang on target because AMD has promised that it will be eventually providing open source drivers for all its graphics cards. Just yet, AMD/ATI has released Linux drivers for its popular range of graphics cards namely ATI Catalyst 7.10 graphics drivers.

So what is so unique about the ATI Catalyst ? Well, ATI Catalyst is a unified software suite which delivers a full software solution for supported Microsoft Windows and Linux operating systems. And AMD/ATI claims that all ATI products use the same Catalyst driver ensuring all products take advantage of the incredible performance, stability, innovative features, and visual quality that the Catalyst software suite have to offer. The latest version of ATI Catalyst is 7.10. It has support for AIGLX and ATI GPUs which translates to enhanced performance in playing 3D games such as Quake and Doom.

Fig: ATI Catalyst driver architecture

If you own a ATI graphics card, you may download the driver suite for Linux from AMD's official website. Of course, this driver has not yet been released as open source and is as proprietary as the Nvidia drivers. But with AMD in charge, one can say with certainty that ATI has become a lot more Linux friendly than it was before its acquisition.

Install Linux on Sony Playstation PS3 - a collection of tutorials

Do you own a Sony Playstation (PS3) ? If you do then here is some good news for you. Now it is possible to install your favorite Linux distribution on a Sony PS3. Then you may ask, what is so unique about PS3 and why should I bother installing Linux on a machine which is primarily designed for playing games, right ?

You see, PS3 has the PowerPC architecture underneath its hood. More importantly, it is powered by IBM's Cell processor. The same processor which will be powering future IBM mainframes. So if you own a PS3 why not harness this awesome power of its processor to run Linux ?

Sony has provided an open platform for Playstation 3 where you can get details of installing another OS on your Playstation.

Apart from the above link, I came across a number of resources which provide step by step explanation of installing a specific Linux distribution on the PS3. They are as follows :

• Install Fedora on PS3 [ Read the article ]
• Install OpenSuSE on PS3 [ Read the article ]
• Install Ubuntu on PS3 [ Read the article ]
  
• Install Gentoo on PS3 [ Read the article ]

The only prerequisites for installing Linux on your PS3 is that the distribution you choose should have a CD image available for the PowerPC architecture. Other than that, I think the steps are more or less the same.

A problem encountered by laptop users running Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon and a possible solution

A number of people are blogging about how running the latest version of Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon on a laptop could possibly end up causing an early demise of the laptop hard disk. The problem is that the hard disk essentially consists of a spindle and a bunch of disks stacked one on top of the other which rotate at high speeds. Now as with all objects which have moving parts, hard disk also faces wear and tear. The problem faced by Ubuntu laptop users is the aggressive use of hard disk by Ubuntu thus shortening the life of the hard disk.

A bug submitted at launchpad confirms this anomaly. So what is the solution to this rather irritating problem ?

Use hdparm; a command line tool to disable advanced power management (APM). This is achieved by running the following command :

$ sudo hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda

Here the -B option is used to set the APM value. A low value means aggressive power management (that translates to more wear and tear for your hard disk) and a high value means better performance (but more battery consumption). By setting the value as 255, we have disabled the APM all together. Over 2 years back, I had written an article explaining how to improve your hard disk performance using hdparm. And if you are interested in knowing more about hdparm, you may read the article.

I run Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon and it doesn't cause this problem on my desktop PC.

Check out the opinions from two sources [ linux hero and Planet Beranger ] to get a different angle.

GIMP 2.4 finally released

It has been quite some time (somewhere around 2 or 3 years) since the last release of GIMP which was version 2.2. But the GIMP team has finally made it across the finishing line by releasing yet another stable version of GIMP namely ver 2.4.

But even though GIMP 2.4 has been officially released only now, if you are using the latest version of any of the major Linux distributions, then chances are you already have a release candidate of GIMP 2.4 installed on your machine.

The most visible features in GIMP 2.4 for me are the following :

• Rectangle and Ellipsoidal selections can be resized.
• Foreground selection tool - Select a region containing foreground objects.
• Healing tool - Heal image irregularities.
• Perspective clone tool - Clone from an image source after applying a perspective transformation.
• Alignment tool - Align and arrange objects and layers.
  

Then via the menu, you now have access to a red eye removal plug-in. This is a very useful addition for the simple reason that many photos snapped by amateurs like us often display the red eye phenomenon and now it can be corrected in GIMP with a simple mouse click. Earlier this required several steps.

Fig: GIMP 2.4 toolbox

The screenshot plug-in now features more sophisticated options. Now there is an option to grab a region rather than just the whole screen or a particular window.

These are the new features that I noticed when I used GIMP 2.4 but there are a slew of less visible but equally useful features that are incorporated in the new version which is listed in the release notes at GIMP website.

Overall, I am very pleased with GIMP 2.4 and even though there are a lot of features yet to be added to bring it at par with Adobe Photoshop, this is a big step in the right direction.