Perspective: Linux Tweaks Workshop

Posted on by Luther Goh Lu Feng

I had to rush back to SOC1 after my training for the Workshop. I arrived at #03-17 in the nick of time. Phew. I popped Knoppix 5.0.1, which Junhao insisted I used, into the CDROM drive of and rebooted the computer.

“It’s much better than Ubuntu,” he said, giving his usual toothy grin.

The screen resolution was pretty small. It was probably around 800 X 600. Darn. I should have stuck to the Ubuntu livecd, which I tested out yesterday. By this time, the room was filled with 10 participants already (I was pleasantly surprised to see a lady, but that’s besides the point) I decided to forget about switching over to Ubuntu. That piece of bloat takes quite a while to boot up.

I quickly made a quick introduction and explained that I didn’t have any slides. The objectives of the session was to share and troubleshoot configurations.

You should have seen the -_- look on many faces. Shock. Surprise. Just plain stunned. Think NUS has yet to get used to the idea of unconferencing yet.

Anyway, the room was left with just 3 participants.

I asked Binh if he had any configuration problems. He showed me his Fedora laptop and explain his difficulties in connecting to SoC wireless network using openvpn. A shell commands later, his network was up. Yay!

I interacted with Jason who shared with me details of his startup using Linux. It’s has potential. But I think I shall not provide too much details here. Trade secret. But basically, he was at the workshop to network with people who may be interested in coding for his project.

Not long after, Edward strolled in. He is the TA of CS2106. He is still running Fedora Core 1. (OMG!) He was with Mathias, (hope I got the spelling right) an exchange student from Norway. Mathias runs Arch Linux on a funky looking laptop. It’s not much bigger than an A4 piece of paper. I really should have asked him the brand and model.

I took the chance to find out if his University provides support for Linux users. Unfortunately, he said that the situation was fairly similar to NUS.

One of Edward’s students dropped in (I had real problems pronouncing his name. The rest just ask me to call him Smiley). He just started using FC5 on a virtual machine. He had some queries about the installation of Adobe Reader. He also had fears of losing Windows. I left the task of “counseling” to Edward and Mathias,

I sat next to David who had just entered the room. He is an exchange student from Canada. He had used Linux for seven years. But he was now using a Mac. I realised that he was good recruitment for Jason, and so I directed him to Jason, who was having an active discussion with Harish.

I then walked over to Luqman, who was showing Jasir(I hope I got this right) Ubuntu using the livecd. Unfortunately, network was not up since openvpn was not installed. I wanted to install the packages manually. But looking at the list of dependencies, I decided that it was not productive. Besides, it is a livecd.

I then turned to give a hand to Junhao, who was helping Anoj with his ATI 9200 graphics card configuration. While it seems that the display was fine. It gets pixelated when Anoj runs a 3D game. After googling, I directed him to the ATI Linux driver wiki.

Anyway, he happens to be running an old version of Red Hat. Nothing wrong except that he had no yum. Junhao immediately recommended Centos, which was basically RHEL of sorts.

Hope everyone had fun!

Photos coming soon….

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