Free Software

[Background: Kannada, like probably many other Indian languages, has seen its days run out completely as the primary language used to store, record knowledge. It may have been due to several factors, but back to local view of the world: local news, local language, local perspectives and everything local has now been catching up. Even FM radios in the city have switched back to the local language as the primary language of broadcast. Well, is it time the local language is also used more and more to document knowledge? and to think back about those aspects of knowledge that stays beautiful when written in local language, the aspects that make people more comfortable with it to sit back and listen, or grab a book or news paper to read. Whatever is, people thronging in the local language communities on-line or otherwise would have certainly observed this change of discussing certain aspects of technology, science or software (that make their presence felt in everyone's lives) in local languages just because the conversations happen effectively.
Localized software, support for languages on software has added up to this. These are most definitely good signs for that large mass of rural students who are primarily educated in local language and for those people who are more at comfy with their mother tongue. Since this percentage of population who are more at ease with the local language is more in the rural areas, towns and smaller cities, it becomes even more important to log technology, science or the basic knowledge surrounding it in local languages to spread it across the state, create awareness about the sea of change that is sweeping each day with new technologies, concepts and innovations.
A good instance would be going about creating awareness about free software (free as in freedom) and the alternative it provides for a free world and about how the rural India could benefit from it.]

It *is* a challenge to reach out to people from our own community, an informal community bound by a common factor - the language surrounding which we grew up. Although we were let down by numbers in terms of how many participated in the discussion, we had some excellent discussion about 'Writing Technology, Science in Kannada". The focus was obviously on using Internet to do that and gradually taking it from there to elsewhere, where Internet reach is minimal. The discussion happened at Center for Internet and Society, Cunningham Road on Sunday, 29th.

It was a busy weekend, last one. On Saturday morning I had to dust curtains, vacuum the floor of the entire house as my sister had called up and said she would be moving in for couple of days to be with mother. She wouldn't like it if it isn't clean and things aren't organized! And then Murali was here to discuss about Tech Sampada, which is a new initiative on Sampada that we're coming up with (with an ambitious plan of getting people to write about technology, and developments surrounding technology in Kannada). Interviews we had recorded with Prof. U R Rao, Prof. C N R Rao (in Kannada) would be featured during the launch of the portal.

But of course, Saturday evening was the program where Professor Eben Moglen was to give a talk. I was listed as a guest on that program despite me insisting strongly that I would rather just join in like everyone else. Professor's talk was enlightening. The clarity with which he spoke was so good that people listening to him seemed overwhelmed and filled with admiration. Not many among that audience, I bet, would have known much about the Professor before. The event was arranged by Avadhi originally for Kannada bloggers, but I couldn't see many familiar faces in the audience. Many of those who participated were from the Free Software Users Group. And I felt that there wasn't much Kannada audience too. Hence, when my turn came for the talk (and since I was supposed to talk in Kannada), I just kept it to the basics and spoke for 10 minutes or so.

When in school, college, the lengthy hours of (load shedding) power cuts in the evenings stealthily served a purpose - dragging us to the rooftop to gaze at the stars.

In Bangalore though, gazing at the stars is not quite the same because of the all the glow from the city side, even during a power cut. But here's a software that lets you browse through the spectacular objects in the space serving just like a planetarium but on your desktop!

What more, the software is as free as it gets (free as in freedom).

On Debian or Debian like GNU/Linux, all you have to do is this:
$apt-get install stellarium

to get it installed and running!

Note: The software is available for Windows and Mac users too.

It is the Independence day today. It is the 15th birthday of Debian tomorrow. You see the connection. :-)

On this occasion, I decided that I would switch completely to Debian (from Ubuntu) on my work Computer. And what better option than Debian testing version "Lenny"?

It was a long time since I installed debian on my laptop. Unsupported hardware issues dogged it the last time I tried it on this (which seems years back). But this time, it was really worth giving a shot.

I found Debian sleek, more nostalgic than any other present distribution. It is probably the best distribution to work with.

But the old kernel that is shipped with etch had some ACPI related issues. And sound wasn't there. I had to download and compile the latest Kernel after which everything is good. Pidgin has to be compiled if you don't fancy gaim. iwp2200 wasn't working fine, but did after installing the firmware. And that is about my log of installing Debian etch on my old laptop. :-)