nubae's Habari | Linux and Education

Seeing as I recently purchased a macbook Pro for the nice price of 600 euros, I searched around for the easiest way to create a dualboot system, one with osx, the other with the latest Ubuntu. The procedure was actually ridiculously simple.

They really couldn't have made it much easier than that...

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Until now I've always looked at making my Linux environment as windows friendly as possible, using tools like Samba for file and printer sharing, as well as domain joining with or without the help of LDAP (an ldap client will go a long way to help with attaining a truly single sign on system if your server happens to be windows based. Other tools like Wine, Crossover, Cedega and windowblindas (I do believe the latter has recently changed named) help run most windows apps natively without an emulator. Then you can always install a virtualisation solution for those truly troublesome apps that absolutely must have a windows environment. These usually amount to older proprietary applications. The installation of Vmware, or preferably (at least imho) virtualbox. There is always KVM or XEN for those wanting true CPU based virtualisation. In any case, the point is, one can pretty comfortably create an environment where windows applications can live inside a truly Linux operating system.

Recently though, I have tried doing the reverse, in which I create a Linux like system running on top of a windows environment like windows XP (which I still have to admit has its advantages in many cases, especially those where either specialization is required (A music media machine, or high end graphics machine [think auto cad]), or the needs of the frequent gamer are met. As I am a computer specialist, requiring many different kinds of applications, a bash environment along with the tools that go with it, as well as the many open source applications I use from day to day, I seriously wondered if the latter would be possible. I am happy to say that with today's grat efforts at cross platforming, this has become a reality, and I find myself oddly attracted to such a system.

Where I do draw the line is on the server machine, which I cannot foresee running anything non Unix like. But with today's many tools, it is easy to work on a windows XP based desktop, which has been highly modified to resemble and duplicate the functions of a Linux desktop (reading and writing to Linux partitions, virtualisation for compartmentalizing Linux services and applications, and running a host of QT and GTK based apps which though originally written for Linux will run on Windows too. On the fly virtualisation like Quemu is of great help too, especially in the case of multi-partitioned usb sticks. Installing a bash environment with bash tools along with my essential programming kit (Python and LAMP, along with nice IDEs like Eclipse or more specialised ones like Wingware for python and phpeditor for php) are a must, but are also relatively stable and workable.

Since we are now in a relatively ancient incarnation of the best functioning windows (XP), it too can be tweaked to behave like Vista and Windwos 7 without adding all that unnecessary bloat, yet still giving a modern look and feel, as well as some essential tools that were lacking in the original incarnations of windows XP. Granted, it takes a good 2 days to get a working windows XP environment that contains all the elements of a Linux system, as well as the many open source tools one needs, integration with a Samba server, LDAP and LTSP if one so desires, but the outcome seems to be well worth it. From the XP distribution I am using (Dark edition V 6) I can create an ISO of the highly tuned system, so I can then revert to a working system should anything mess up my system (this is windows after all, and I can only trust it so much.)

Anyway, for the time being, I'm working with this environment so as not to have to constantly dual boot, or sacrifice my game time (the only real reason for running windows), but at the same time, I feel the system runs a tiny bit more smoothly when it comes to playing video across the network, or listening to music across the network. Perhaps its a novelty thing, but I hate to admit I would actually recommend a similar system to computer engineers requiring a plethora of tools, networking with a unix or linux server, and the occasional gameplay, alongside a system optimized for web/design, system administration and programming work.

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Hi folks,
A lot of my time has been taken up lately by 2 external projects that are quite neat, and could use volunteers. One is the creation of a python based generic lesson plan creator. Its actually more simple than that, its basically an image a teacher loads up, places some points on, and then labels. He can then pass that on to the kids so they can fill in the labels collaboratively (like in those TV quiz shows when questions get passed from one user to another and they can ask for some letters which takes away some points.) Or the teacher can simply print these out and let the kids fill out the answers by hand (still working on the print/pdf module) You can see pyclic advances here:

http://www.launchpad.net/pyclic or here
http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/pyclic

The other thing I've been working on is a very complete Moodle that should contain courses about everything related to education and Linux. One of the latest things I did was add courses on how to create the perfect Ubuntu and Opensuse desktops, and a database of linux commands and their usage (lots of loving is needed for this project, so please email me if you want to get involved....) It doesnt take long to make a course and there is even how to copy courses from other sources into Li-f-e there:

http://www.linux-for-education.org/course/view.php?id=69

and a course on why to use moodle here:

http://www.linux-for-education.org/course/view.php?id=9

enjoy

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It turns out, even though its not advertised anywhere, the Chrome browser, based on Chromium, Google's great open source browser project, is available for download. It has been available for windows for a while now and work on Linux just fine via crossover or Wine.

Although I had to link a couple of libraries to get it working on my openSUSE machine, it was not a lot of work, and I have to say my first impressions of it are very good. It is a lot faster than Mozilla in both starting up and then the rendering of pages. It seemed to be about 2 to 3 times faster and tracking its CPU and memory usage showed it was less resource hungry than Firefox too. It is of course lacking a lot of features including plugin support (think flash), printing, gears support, etc.

The most noticeable feature was the visual cache u have of sites you visit most often. This creates a kind of dynamic favorite bookmarks page, which seems vey useful (to me at least.) It seems they are building various snapshots a day, making it a project that is clearly very active. If you'd like to get it running on openSUSE, follow these instructions once you've downloaded the file chromium.zip from the latest snapshot directory: ( http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-linux/ )

cd /home/_user_

wget http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-linux/_latest-snapshot_/chrome-linux.zip

Make sure you replace _latest-snapshot_ with the latest snapshot number from the page, and _user_ with your home directory

unzip chrome-linux.zip
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libnss3.so /usr/lib/libnss3.so.1d
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libnssutil3.so /usr/lib/libnssutil3.so.1d
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libsmime3.so /usr/lib/libsmime3.so.1d
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libssl3.so /usr/lib/libssl3.so.1d
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libplds4.so /usr/lib/libplds4.so.0d
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libplc4.so /usr/lib/libplc4.so.0d
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libnspr4.so /usr/lib/libnspr4.so.0d

You should now be able to run chrome via command line or by clicking on the binary. If you are on Ubuntu, there is a PPA where u can download the latest version: https://launchpad.net/~chromium-daily/+archive/ppa

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