ctrl.altered.mind

A few weeks back, the tech community forums were abuzz with the news about Kerala, India’s most literate state, having chalked out a plan to migrate all of its high school students to open source platforms over the next three years. While the computer market in India harbors its own sub-industry of software piracy, the prime reason for this is the fact that bloated software prices have been taking a toll on most consumer budgets. It is, after all, hard to justify paying a price for intangible software that rivals the cost of the hardware itself. The good news about the planned move to open source software, is the fact that budgets of educational institutions would not be blasted out of proportion by high licensing and technical support fees. The savings could be applied towards purchasing additional hardware (as an example, the Cotton Hill Girls High School in the southern city of Tiruvananthapuram has 4000 students and just 21 computers).

On slashdot today, slashchris84 mentions a BusinessWeek article about the growing role of Linux in the classrooms of India.

Amidst the sea of comments, those of humphrm (18130) particularly stand out:

There is another angle, though. Maybe you dismiss it, but to some India is one of the hottest technical development centers in the world. And this is a country that highly values education and generally does a better job of providing it to even it’s poorest constituents than the “Developed Countries”. Having just returned from Hyderabad, I witnessed kids crawling out of what could only be described by a Westerner as a mud hut, with a sparkling clean and pressed school uniform on, ready to go to school. In America, these kids would probably not qualify for most public schools because they don’t have an address.

Then, they go on to higher education… and guess what schools are being built fast in India? Technical schools. Lots of them.

My point is, your “backwater” country is doing a better job of educating it’s masses than most western countries, and the tools that these kids learn today will shape technology tomorrow.

MadPenguin.org has a report on Suse’s new Enterprise Desktop 10, and reviewer Adam Doxtater is convinced that Suse has a winner on their hands, with what could be the most impressive distribution released ever. Suse already holds that distinction with Suse Linux 10.1, which is currently ranked second-best (with Ubuntu on top). Just reading the feature list for the new SLED 10 has me convinced as well, and this is one release I will be really waiting for.

SLED 10 is a stellar release and Suse’s attention to detail is praiseworthy (as the article mentions, for example, the desktop reflects the color of the ipod thats plugged into the system, even after hot-swapping black and white ipods). The biggest (and most prominent) change is the desktop switch, with Suse moving away from their KDE-centricity and defaulting to GNOME this time.

While SLED 10 may not be a Vista-killer in the true sense of the term - although its only a matter of time before Windows stagnates into oblivion, unless Microsoft can get its act together and revamp from the ground up. The industry is already going as far as calling the unreleased Windows Vista operating system a ‘Windows Me 2.0′, the most bloated Windows release of all time (they’ve moved from CDs to DVDs now), with features that just about bring the beast on par with OS X (Tiger, not even Leopard) and other popular linux distributions.

Link to the article (a highly recommended read), with installation and interface screencasts (the article has links to more).

Yahoo! Finance has a story reporting that GoDaddy.com , the world’s leading domain name registrar, plans to migrate its Linux server portfolios to Windows-based hosting, in an effort to maintain providing low-cost solutions. As a highly satisfied Linux-hosting services customer, I’m having a mixed reaction towards this decision. GoDaddy.com currently offers ASP and .NET support for Windows-based hosting, and PHP for Linux-based hosting services. Hopefully, they would be able to offer PHP support for no extra cost on Windows, and I’d be really happy. Anything else would not make much of a difference to me, its not like server downtime would affect me in any way - I’m not running an internet business here.

GoDaddy.com to Migrate Entire Hostname Portfolio Onto Microsoft Solution for Windows-Based Hosting

There’s an update to the spicy rumor about Google’s next big thing. The story is that a new OS designed by Google (originally for internal use) will be hitting the marketplace soon, as a competitor to Microsoft Windows. While this is old news, the twist is that this unnamed OS now has a title - Goobuntu! As the name hints, this OS is supposedly developed by Google based on Ubuntu Linux (which is great) and the Gnome desktop.

Goobuntu: coming soon to a desktop near you? - Engadget

I have always used Bittorrent while on Windows, probably because of the high bandwidth connection at work, when I need to work on Matlab and Labview. However, I just recently tried out KTorrent - the default Torrent handler for KDE - and the experience was very impressive. KTorrent goes a step further than other clients such as ABC (Another Bittorrent Client), Azureus, and even Shareaza. The feature that I liked the most, is the ability to selectively download files within a torrent bundle. The latest version of KTorrent is 1.2rc1, and has an official SUSE 10.0 rpm for download, which was nice :-). Also, KTorrent allows integrated custom searches for torrents using your preferred engine. Google and Bittorrent.com are no-brainers, but you might also want to add sites such as OpenWares.org and Sourceforge.

I needed to take a few screenshots while running Linux, and thought I’d mention the process since I thought this was much more beautiful and nicer than doing the same on Windows, and even OS X. If you’re running KDE, run ksnapshot by pressing Alt+F2, which brings up the Run Application dialog window. On Gnome, a similar program is invoked by the PrtSc (Print Screen) key. However, I found Ksnapshot to be much more smooth (I guess I’ll always choose KDE over Gnome).