We recently installed Wikipedia on DVD on our network and also made a copy available on loan in our school library.

It is available on the student desktops with an start menu icon next to the other 'encyclopedias'  Even though this is only a 0.5 version test release, I am impressed by how popular it has become with students.

The DVD is low on eye-candy and unnecessary graphics or movies so fast to use, great for students that have run out of Internet credit, free for them to take a copy home and I am pretty sure, you can edit the content on the local version.
     http://www.wikipediaondvd.com/site.php ...

Huge download but you only need to grab one copy to share.

Here is an interesting news hub. Looks a lot like Digg where readers can vote on and submit news articles. It is a community driven website about free software that can be readily used in schools or by students. Worth registering and keeping an eye on.

This is a screenshot of the software called jUploader that I am using to upload some photographs to a Flickr account. jUploader is free open source software written in Java and like all good software, it happily runs on Linux, Windows and Macintosh computers.

Cool FLOSS that I am also currently evaluating for installation on my Ubuntu computer.

I finally caught up and nearly finished preparing one of the VITTA sample examinations for VCE ITA. Well it is 90% done and I can take a breath for a week for a break.

The template I was given wasn't all that original so I doctored it up using open office, ODT and a set of custom style conventions. It might drive the others nuts but it is the way that I work best and makes as much sense as using CSS for web pages. Can easily be stripped out if needed.

Not one of my best efforts and it took a while to get beyond the first blank page. I finally had some fun getting into the swing of thinking good questions by starting with some issues and favourite topics. I know it wasn't very original but I did better to look at the text book and other examination questions for structure, ideas and inspiration.

This is a screenshot of the Nautilus file browser used with Ubuntu 6.10 that I used for a sample question and can be freely downloaded as FLOSS. Shown here are some files on the cdrom. From memory I wanted something generic and was asking a question about file types and sizes. I made this as I thought that it would be good to give the students something that steps slightly outside their familiar file browser comfort zone.

I have figured out that it better to call free, libre open source free software FLOSS instead of FOSS so that the emphasis is on Libre or freedom instead of the ambiguous word free. Nice FLOSS page on WIkipedia that explains this in more detail.

I occasionally need to explain the economic model that underpins FOSS. Enterprise Networking Planet has a nice article that explains some of the success behind Red Hat and other companies that produce free software. I particularly liked the last quote.

"If you don't trust your customers and have to treat them like criminals and have to continually tighten the screws, if you have to keep everything a big secret, if your product line is so unattractive you have to force people to purchase anything and lock them in to have even a chance of keeping them, perhaps the problem is not them derned defective customers, but your approach to running a business." reference

Somebody on a mailing list mentioned that their school IT manager had questioned the security credentials of Moodle. I havn't had a security problem with Moodle, neither does EdNA, Open University or probably the thousands of other sites that correctly deploy and update it. As even famous, commercial packages that come in shrink-wrap have security issues, this is probably one of those fluffy excuses to distract well meaning educators who start poking around beyond their cutting edge. (sigh)

Whilst working outside the box with disruptive Web2.0 technologies can horrify some IT managers and school technicians, it can also open up for schools many new and exciting opportunities to engage, connect and rethink their current practices. Last weekend the VITTA team and I were really engaged with this splendid multimedia video "The Machine is Us/ing Us", created by Digital Ethnography students at Kansas State University. Increasingly, the collaborative aspects of Moodle such as tagging, forums, wikis and galleries make good sense and use in my classes.

Saving money with FOSS then putting it back into a school sounds like a great outcome and win for all. The OpenSource mailing list members have organised a meeting on 21 March - the Equinox and Harmony Day. Hope to see some of you there :-)

I found and installed a BOINC manger for my Ubuntu OS powered computer, a free Linux distribution. Now I can use up those spare CPU cycles to continue my participation in some distributed computing projects such as SETI@Home and Climate Predicting.

This is a fascinating way to solve complex problems. Large problems are divided into many small problems which are distributed to many computers. Later, these small results are reassembled into a larger solution.

Wikipedia notes that on September 2006, the BOINC platorm has over 475,000 active host computers with an processing capacity averaging over 615 terraFLOPS. The fastest supercomputer today performance peaks out at one petaFLOP and a basic hand calculator grinds along at a few FLOP (FLoating point Operations Per Second).

It is exciting to be part of this worldwide "quasi-supercomputing" solution and work to help solve some real-world problems.

I am pretty sure that I found a light blue Ventura coach on route 747 on a Satellite image. Attached is a picture of what I am looking at on my computer running Google Earth on Ubuntu, a free Linux desktop distribution. You can also view a copy that I uploaded to the Google Earth Community at this location.

Google Earth enables users to virtually go anywhere on the planet and see places in photographic detail with a 3D model of the world based on real satellite images (I have a suspicion that this one is a year or two old). Users can zoom from space to street level instantly and then pan or jump from place to place, city to city, even country to country.

To get it working required me to install the 3D Nvidia graphics card driver setup and Google Earth release for the Ubuntu Edgy distribution that I am using. All the instructions are on the web although you should do your homework before fiddling about with X-Windows and commercial graphics drivers.

It would be fun to see if we can find some other buses. :-)

Our college has two sister schools in Cambodia (Sisowath High School and Beng Trabek High School, Phnom Penh) and we are one of the few schools in Australia that teaches Khmer as a LOTE subject to our secondary students.

I continue to be impressed with the continued team work by the Khmer Software Initiative that has enabled us to make a stable version of Cambodian available to our students for the first time. Already they have translated Kubuntu (KDE version) into Khmer and have yet to start on Ubuntu (Gnome version) Rosetta project. I have contacted somebody to see how we can help.

We are keen to set up a computer(s) with an Ubuntu operating system at our sister schools and organise Internet access. I hope that this group is able to help us out with the configuration, deployment over the next few months.

Some of my friends still have a problem understanding the logic behind Free Open Source Software FOSS or how anybody could make money from practically giving away the source code to their software.

I rather like the cake analogy used by the author in this FSM journal article "Beginners guide to understanding free software".

What do you want to bake today?

We are required to use a project management tool for our IT senior students. Our options have ranged from elaborate spreadsheets to a clumbersome MS Project that can only be used at school. GanttProject started a flurry of interest amongst Victorian IT teachers. It is easy to use FOSS that is free for students to take home to play around with.

Last night I created my first ever DEB package for GanttProject from an RPM software package and successfully installed then tested it on a Linux system running Ubuntu  6.10 - Edgy Eft. It was very easy to make the conversion from the RPM package hosted on Merlinux using Alien that I installed from the normal Debian repositories.

An advantage of distributing a software package this way is that it can be included in the Debian Synaptic Package managerthat comes built into the Ubuntu distribution. Non-technical users can then easily find, read about, install, automatically upgrade and cleanly remove the software with just a click of the mouse.

I hope that the authors take up my suggestion that they add a DEB version of their software package to the synaptic management repositories, joining other software packages such as Thunderbird, Firefox, Moodle, OpenOffice etc.

I did a bit-torrent download of the current Ubuntu version 6.10 Edgy Eft and was able to install it on my computer system. I decided that it wasn't worth messing about with the upgrade script, so I just backed up all my home directory files and did a clean install. As you can see it worked a treat!

I then had a go at installing the PDA sync option and using the gnome-pilot application. Took a few minor tweaks that I dug up on the Ubuntu forums until it was able to find my Palm Pilot and sync the data. Pictures here.

Very wise for Ubuntu to have a professional and stable distribution like Dapper for enterprises and cutting edge flavours like Edgy for geeks like me to tinker and customise to my needs.

Free to play, freedom to learn. :-)

Over the past few months I have tinkered with Ubuntu using a swag of different environments ranging from full installations, dual boot and virtual machines. I notice some blog posts by users that have struck some grief when they have attempted a dual boot Windows - Ubuntu setup. Although they often have a good technical background it seems that they still strike the odd problem with the grub, NT boot loader, drivers etc.

If anybody is interested in exploring or tinkering with a Linux installation on a laptop or work computer, I would highly recommend that they start with a virtual machine installation with software such as VMWare.

With VMWare, tapping Ctrl-Alt-Enter on my laptop keyboard switches to a full screen mode, tapping Ctrl-Alt switches between the two operating systems on the fly. Even just plugging in a plain old USB key allows files to be swaped between the two operating systems. A virtual computer HDD file can be copied to another computer, launched from an external USB HDD or recovered from a previous state with a snapshot restore.

Playing about with an operating system this way is a great way to learn without the fear of messing up an existing computer system. Running an operating system this way has also helped me to better appreciate the power of virtual computing.

I stumbled across this page, quite by accident. There is an official book about Ubuntu with lots of good advice for new users like me.

From the sample chapter that was published online, I learned how to download and install some missing fonts and some good steps to backup important parts of this Ubuntu system.

I might get our librarian or get a copy for our school, better make that a couple. :-)

• The Official Ubuntu Book

When I find an interesting webpage, I often create a social bookmark with Delicious and create a PDF printout to share with my students. This enables me to later find the file amongst the many in my personal collection using a desktop search tool.

I was curious how to make a PDF file with Firefox on my Ubuntu powered home computer (Dapper version). A cool post on the Ubuntu forums listed all the necessary steps to create a CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) printer that would automatically create a suitable PDF file in my Ubuntu home directory.

Ubuntu is a desktop operating system, open source sofware that is free to download and use.

This screengrab shows the default gThumb software. This allows users to browse the images on their computer. It includes some basic editing functions to crop, sort and rename image files.

This import management screen automatically appeared when I plugged in a digital camera to the USB port. It showed the photographs on my camera that can be downloaded to the computer and where to save them.

It was nice to see and easy enough to use this utility with Ubuntu.

I made a real mess of my Ubuntu setup on the home computer today. It was my fault really as I was happily ignoring warnings whilst manually updating drivers .. sadly, using the recovery update didnt work. Now, the easy thing would have been to reinstall the entire operating system but I was interested in bigger challenges.

Once again, the splendid online Ubuntu help forums came up with some answers and I picked up some cool tips along the way!

I learned how the graphical user interface is built upon the x window display system. The key file that controls the configuration settings is xorg.conf located in the /etc/X11 directory. I also discovered a cute trick Ctrl+Alt+F1 key to open a new terminal window to make these changes. I recall our technician Jeff showing me this a while ago.

Thus armed, I was also able open a command shell to rename a convenient backup version in the same location, reboot and restored :-)