Ubuntu Bangladesh organised a workshop at East West University yesterday, titled “Linux for Home Users”. 108 undergraduate and graduate level students from from 9 departments participated on this day-long workshop, where various issues of FOSS and Ubuntu Linux were discussed.

I initiated the discussion by talking about the FOSS philosophy, history of Linux, Ubuntu and it’s variants, and why Ubuntu is “better” then other distros. The students were very enthusiastic, and asked a lot of questions. This interactive atmosphere made the program very stimulating.

The next presentation was provided by our member Mr. Rafiq-ul-Islam, who explained why switching over to Linux is important for students and how it can help them in their future career. His presentation was highly acclaimed by the participants and he received a great deal of applause.

Light refreshments were then served to the participants, after which I demonstrated the installation of Kubuntu. I took special care in explaining the partitioning part, as this is where all the newbies get stuck. After the installation was over, I demonstrated programs available under Kubuntu that the novice users would possibly use in their everyday lives. The Ubuntu Live CD was also demonstrated, so that the students get to know the difference between the KDE and GNOME environment.

Five more workshops are scheduled over the next four months in this University. We believe that as we inform them about foundational topics about Ubuntu Linux and steadily progress towards more advanced ones, these students will be able to obtain a thorough grounding about Ubuntu Linux.

My appreciation goes to all the volunteers of East West University Telecom Club, who worked hard to make the program a resounding success. Pictures of the event are available at http://gallery.linux.org.bd/thumbnails.php?album=33 (sorry about the picture quality, taken with a mobile phone).

This is an addition to my this 2007 resolution: I’m going to get at least three of the following certifications by December 31st:

• Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP): (70-270)

• CompTIA Linux+ (XK0-002)
• Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) (RH302)
• Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) (640-801)
• CompTIA Network+ (N10-003)

My dream is to get the Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE) certification, which I should be bagging by 2010!

This meeting was a follow-up my e-mail to the BLUA mailing list regarding availability of Mandriva 2007 DVD. The respond was huge, so I decided to call for a meeting.

The meeting was held at Boomers in Banani. The people who joined in were all new faces. We talked about various issues including OSS development, bootloader, firewall, various distributions, and more. What was special about this meeting was presence of a female member, first time in our meeting history. We ain’t got much female Linux users in the country.

Uptime-Project is for you if you rarely if switch off your computer. If you’re proud of your system uptime, and want the world to know about it, then get yourself an account now. Once registered, all you have to is to run a small client application on your machine which will send your uptime data to the project’s server at a regular interval. This application is available for all platforms including Linux, BDS, Solaris, and of coarse Windows.

Once your first uptime data is sent to the server, you’ll be placed on the rank list with over 24,000 other users. Auto updating dynamic images will also be created for you which you can use on your website or blog or even as your forum signature. There’s a variety of design to choose from, among which I liked this one:

If you a have a great uptime, then go ahead and participate in this project. Compete with users with astonishing uptime like current winner with the uptime of 6 years 58 days 10 hours and 52 minutes!

Update on February 14, 2007:

Uptime-Project team sent an e-mail announcement today declaring closure of the project on March 1, 2007. It is to be noted that this successful German project has been running for 5 years now with 1.7 million data records.

It is my pleasure to announce the official Ubuntu Bangladeshi mirror at http://bd.releases.ubuntu.com — now on a new server with a larger hard drive!

Our sincere thanks to BDCOM Online Limited for sponsoring the server and the bandwidth.

Please share the link with your friends, and download the latest ISOs faster than ever! Don’t forget to harness the power of jigdo and torrent files as well!

We initially planned to organise the monthly meeting on October 14th. However, few things messed up and we had to shift it to today. 12 members were present in the meeting, which was held at Metronet office in Gulshan 2. We started at 17:00, and mainly discussed about our upcoming projects, which are:

• Royal Bengal Linux

• Creative Commons
• Mirror Server Project
• Media Distribution Project

There was a lot of brainstorming, and we got some good ideas and suggestions form our fellow members. My appreciation to everyone who joined on the meeting, specially to Mr. Rafiqul Islam who acted as the event manager and Mr. Ferdous Azam Khan, CEO of Metronet who was our host. Sorry, no pictures of the event as none of us were carrying a camera!