Open Source Alliance Cyberjaya

Quanta, the company manufacturing the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project’s XO laptops, plans to begin selling low-cost budget mobile computers for $200 later this year. According to Quanta president Michael Wang, the company plans to leverage the underlying technologies associated with OLPC’s XO laptop to produce laptop computers that are significantly less expensive than conventional laptops.

The OLPC project, which hopes to bring inexpensive Linux-based laptops to the education market in developing countries, selected Quanta (the laptop manufacturing company that produces mobile computers for HP, Dell, and Acer) to produce the individual XO laptop units. OLPC project founder Nicholas Negroponte says that OLPC has no plans to make XO laptops, which are “designed for the poorest and most remote children in the world,” available to ordinary consumers in developed countries. OLPC plans to sell the laptops in bulk to governments, which will then distribute the hardware to school children.

Quanta’s announcement will be welcomed by the throngs of technology enthusiasts in the US and elsewhere who have expressed interest in acquiring one of the OLPC’s budget-friendly laptops for personal use. Quanta plans to create a new “emerging PC” business unit to focus on establishing a new global market for low-cost computers. Although few details are available at this time regarding the software that Quanta will ship with its own XO-like laptops, it is known that the company intends to use open source software. Since virtually every element of the OLPC platform (including the unique user interface) is available under various open source licenses, Quanta could easily ship its own computers with the exact same software used on the XO.

With luck, Quanta’s increased involvement in the low-cost mobile computing market will allow the company to further decrease manufacturing costs and help the OLPC project reduce the XO’s total cost per unit. This move by Quanta could also help make modern technology more accessible to underprivileged families around the world.

Source: Ars Technica

MMU CITS:

Dear All

We have upgraded the VPN server for MMU Cyberjaya campus. As such, all MMU Cyberjaya VPN users will need to install new VPN client software to connect to the campus network.

For more details, please go to http://access.mmu.edu.my/vpnconnect.php

Thank you.

Rgds
CITS

MMU Bulletin Board:
http://bulletin.mmu.edu.my/v3/view/bulletin_main.mmu?s=43936&by=today

LXer.com recently published a news story that revealed Microsoft’s attempt to “train” its sales force and customer-base in “fending off the Linux Surge”.

Did you get that? Microsoft has decided that Linux is indeed a threat to their monopoly and that extreme measures are indeed in order. Here is the joke most of us aren’t getting. We argue, scream at one another, and basically run the topic into the ground. “Is Linux Ready For THE DESKTOP???”

So busy are we chomping and changing over this issue, we completely missed the fact that Microsoft itself made the decision for us. Oh…I did say “more on that in a bit”, didn’t I? The Novell Treason. But are you up on the latest? It wasn’t enough that Novell signed a potentially incriminating agreement with Microsoft. It wasn’t enough that Novell allowed the trojan horse through the gates, permitting contaminated code to enter the pheriphery of Suse Linux. Novell is now “agreeing” that Microsoft has a lower “total cost of ownership (TCO) than Linux. You think I’m kidding huh? Just take a look here.

Anyway,… apparently Microsoft finds Linux good enough to sell via Novell. MS found a way to make money off of Linux while you and I scratch and scrape for a new graphics card or monitor so we can test and include the drivers for our latest releases. That’s hysterical.

Kind of like finding out your high school rival is schtupping your girlfriend in the car you loaned him.

Source: Helios

Hello everybody,

Friday the 23rd of March will be a Universe Hug Day again! You’re all invited to help to fix bugs in Universe and Multiverse.

We put quite some work into tagging bugs as
* ‘bitesize’, if they’re suited for newcomers,
* ‘packaging’, if the bug is packaging related.

Also we want to take care of crasher bugs. Lots of them were filed and lots of them were retraced by Martin’s excellent retrace service already, so we’ll have an easy job to find duplicates and either forward upstream or grab the fix from upstream.

If you pondered joining the MOTUs, this might be the best time. Grab a bug from https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MOTU/TODO and join us in #ubuntu-motu on Friday, 23rd of March.

Have a nice day,

Daniel Holbach <daniel.holbach(a)ubuntu.com>

Latest News: Postponed. Read here.

Linux Special Interest Group (LinuxSIG), Multimedia University Melaka Campus will be organizing Open Hack competition as part of the Hack Attack 2007 Challenge which will be carry on at Melaka campus from 26th till 28th of March 2007.

The competition is open to Multimedia University students both in Melaka and Cyberjaya campus. Cyberjaya students not in hostel lan network are able to connect using VPN, http://student.mmu.edu.my/vpn.

Prize:
A Seat to Hack In The Box Security Conference 2007.

Prizes sponsored by Hack In The Box and Advanced Integrated Software Technologies.

More details can be found at LinuxSIG Hack Attack 2007 Challenge website: http://hackattack07.linuxsig.net.
Last year’s Open Hack solutions can be viewed at Aphesz.org.

Join the IRC channel #linuxsig @ irc.freenode.net for real-time conversation with the LinuxSIG and OSAC members.

The acronym LAMP refers to a solution stack of software programs, commonly free software programs, used together to run dynamic Web sites or servers:

• Linux, (referring to the operating system);
• Apache, the Web server;
• MySQL, the database management system (or database server);
• PHP (Sometimes Perl or Python), the programming language.

The combination of these technologies is used primarily to define a web server infrastructure, define a programming paradigm of developing software, and establish a software distribution package.

Details:

Linux-Apache

Date: Wednesday, 28 March 2007
Time: 8:00 PM – 10:00 PM
Venue: Microsoft .NET Lab (FIT AR 2004), Multimedia University, Cyberjaya

PHP-MySQL

Date: Thursday, 29 March 2007
Time: 8:00 PM – 10:00 PM
Venue: Microsoft .NET Lab (FIT AR 2004), Multimedia University, Cyberjaya

Speakers:

• Mohd Syazli Mahmud <syazli7(a)yahoo.com>
• Sam Ng <samngnet(a)gmail.com>

Linux Distribution:

• Fedora Core 6.

Please be early around 7:45 PM to be able to finish it on time.

Registration Status:
Linux-Apache: 9 Seats Left!
PHP-MySQL: Class Is Full.

Registration:

Register yourself by contacting Suhashini <suhashini84(a)yahoo.com>

Class limit: 30 persons.

IT Society and Open Source Alliance Cyberjaya members: Free
Non-IT Society and Open Source Alliance Cyberjaya : RM 3 for each sessions.

Registration management: IT Society.

Suhashini
suhashini84(a)yahoo.com
+60 (16) 320 3391

Winnie
chiawinnie86(a)yahoo.com
+60 (12) 608 7345

Thank you.

Unfortunately LAMP Workshop session 1 Linux-Apache which scheduled this Thursday night (22 March 2007) is postponed because the venue, Microsoft .NET Lab (FIT AR 2004) has an exam scheduled that night. Please be informed. I dunno how that happen. Replacement date will be notified latest by tomorrow (Thursday, 22 March 2007).

Registration for the LAMP Workshop please contact Suhashini <suhashini84(a)yahoo.com>.
Note non-members registration is RM 6 for both sessions of LAMP Workshop.

Thank you.

Mohd Syazli Mahmud

For the past 3 years since 2005, Google has been supporting Open Source projects in the form of the Summer Of Code.

==
What is Google Summer of Code?=
Google Summer of Code is a program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects. Google will be working with several open source, free software and technology-related groups to identify and fund several projects over a three month period. Historically, the program has brought together over 1,000 students with over 100 open source projects, to create hundreds of thousands of lines of code. The program, which kicked off in 2005, is now in its third year, following on from a very successful 2006.

While the majority of past student participants were enrolled in university Computer Science and Computer Engineering programs, GSoCers come from a wide variety of educational backgrounds,from computational biology to mining engineering. Many past participants had never participated in an open-source project before GSoC;others used the GSoC stipend as an opportunity to concentrate fully on their existing open source coding activities over the summer.

Several 2005 students went on to become mentors in 2006.

Personally, I had a friend from MMU who successfully apllied and participated in SoC both in 2005 and 2006. Do take note that each successful completed project will be rewarded with a stipend of USD$4500.

Student Applications are open now and will be closing by March 24th. Please take note in this case Open Source covers everything from Linux, to Open Source Website Frameworks, Content Management Systems, Graphic software and lots others not mentioned here. So if you are interested, do take a look at http://code.google.com/soc/ as soon as possible.

Important timelines of the project can be seen at http://code.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=60325&topic=10729 .

=Open Source Alliance Cyberjaya=
http://groups.google.com/group/osa-cyber/

Sam Ng

Correction: It’s freenode.net not .org

There is an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel created under the Freenode server, irc.freenode.net and the channel name is #linuxsig. Linux Special Interest Group (LinuxSIG) is a special interest group of Linux at Multimedia University Melaka Campus.

IRC details:
Server: irc.freenode.net
Channel: #linuxsig

There’s a HOWTO guide posted in the mailing on how to connect to the channel.

Open Source Alliance Cyberjaya will be using this IRC channel to combine LinuxSIG and OSA-Cyber together.

Quoted from Ian Murdock’s Weblog:

“And, so, I’m excited to announce that, as of today, I’m joining Sun to head up operating system platform strategy. I’m not saying much about what I’ll be doing yet, but you can probably guess from my background and earlier writings that I’ll be advocating that Solaris needs to close the usability gap with Linux to be competitive; that while as I believe Solaris needs to change in some ways, I also believe deeply in the importance of backward compatibility; and that even with Solaris front and center, I’m pretty strongly of the opinion that Linux needs to play a clearer role in the platform strategy.”

Source: Ian Murdock