Linux Basement Presents: Chad’s Blog

My wife is a geek. No doubt about it. We met ten years ago on the web, playing MUDs. I’m sure you have no idea what I’m talking about when I say MUD, but it was actually a game where you used your imagination. You know how when you watch a movie, that is based on a book? It’s not quite as good is it? Well, that’s what modern day MORPGs are to me now. Give me graphics, and I remove the illusion that my brain created with text based games. Also, the element of intimate customization is gone. I had literally hundreds of macros when I used to play MUDs. That quickly dwindled when I moved to everquest, DAOC, WOW.

I digress. My wife is a geek. Yesterday, I scored a 100 dollar laptop. The thing had been in repair, and the person who had it in repair got impatient, and bought a new laptop, and then got this one back. It seems to be working perfectly with linux. It was not working perfectly with Vista. In fact, I could not even get the control panel to come up. I had to run dxdiag just to find the system specs. So I bought the sucker and put Linux Mint 5.1 on it immediatly. Last night, I explained to the wife, I can put XP or vista back on it, but I don’t have time until the weekend. So for now, try out Mint. Also last night, I saw her install scriptmonkey on FireFox3. Nice. Like I said, she’s a geek to. I just have to reel her in.

Sure enough, today, she was playing Kingdom Of Loathing on that sucker happy as can be. Then, the big question. “Does it have FreeCell?” Oh cripes. Well let me show you the beauty of Linux my love, my dearest, my inquisitor. And thus I showed her the wonderful power of apt. At first, I could not find free-cell, but we left gnome-games package running to install lots of game goodness.

Tomorrow, providing free-cell is really there, I expect the person I last expected to move to linux so easily, moved to linux, so easily.

Hmm, I guess I’ll give some of her geek cred back. After all, I did marry a wood elf.

Want to install Banshee 1.0 on Hardy?

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

add this

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/banshee-team/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/banshee-team/ubuntu hardy main

Then do

Sudo apt-get update
Sudo apt-get install bashee-1

Have fun!

One of my favorite songs ever. And my favorite version of it.

This picture says it all…

At some point, something went very wrong. The vision of the One Laptop Per Child project went well beyond giving consumers a “usable XP laptop”. Instead, by fostering the concept of giving third world countries’ children a free and open source platform to learn and work on, we are setting a low barrier to entry for them for the rest of their lives, to use and develop these open technologies.

From an article on CNN Money.

“Microsoft’s Utzschneider says government technology ministers and other leaders have long been attracted to the XO’s innovative design, but were also partisans of Windows. They worried, he says, that support would be a problem, and also wanted students to use software they would also be using later in life. These are clearly reasonable concerns.”

This statement by Microsoft is case and point. The fact that they believe that a proprietary system is more supportable by people in a third world country is absurd. Opening source code to your operating system allows anyone who is willing to know the inner workings of a system. What exactly is the support structure for a nearly obsolete operating system (XP) on the OLPC? It is a laughable notion that a child in Chile who’s family  makes 50 dollars a year is going to get any support from Microsoft when his XP OLPC blue screens. By making the system free and open, a support structure can, and has been built around the communities that receive the OLPC.

Microsoft wants these students to use software they will be using later in life? Putting children that will be reaching the corporate world in 10 years on windows XP benefits no one. It does not benefit the child, and it certainly does not benefit the countries they live in. Putting them on a free and open system that embraces web technologies built into the operating system embraces the future of computing. It is more important that children learn the underlying foundations of technology, and not the superficial layer on top. That is to say, they should be learning how to word process, not how to use Microsoft word. They should be learning how to surf the web, not how to use Internet Explorer. The argument that the OLPC is “hard to use” comes from people who do not have vision, and do not allow change. You have to look at these technological tools from the perspective of a Child who does not have preconceptions of what a computer is, or what a computer should be.

Unfortunately I think that bad business decisions have put the One Laptop Per Child program in jeopardy of failure, and now they are grasping at anything to keep afloat. This latest move clearly undermines the foundations that the project was built on, and it saddens me to see such a brilliant project become part of the proprietary grind.

It is true that many Governments will not purchase computers unless they have a Microsoft label on the box. However, this is a fault of government agencies being tied into monopolistic bad decisions. Many governments are now seeing the folly of relying so heavily on an operating system. As Web services and cloud computing become ever more prevalent, this reliance on proprietary software as a fundamental norm will go away, and I am hopeful, for all of us, that in the future we will not see such a pure project become corrupt by Corporate Giants.

Several Quotes in this article credited to http://money.cnn.com/2008/05/15/technology/microsoft_olpc.fortune/