Today is the Free Software Day. The Swathanthra Malayalam Computing group had arranged a program in Trichur corresponding to it. Its for the first time, I am attending for such a function. Thanks for Shyam for telling me about SMC group, by joining which, I had the opportunity to attend this function. My friend Krishnaraj was also with me.

It was an informative one. I could know more about the history of Swathanthra Malayalam Computing and about the ASCII and Unicode fonts. There was also an exhibition of Swathanthra Malayalam softwares, for studying Malayalam typing, Spell Checking, and many more. Shyam also had a project related to speech recognition.

I was glad to hear that about 80% of words in Linux has been translated to Malayalam. I do installed the latest version of IT @ School GNU/Linux last day and thought it would be better if I can change the interface to Malayalam.

May be some day I can also contribute to them…

For photos of the function at Trichur, visit: http://picasaweb.google.com/santhosh00/SMCSFD07

Project Site: https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/smc

Wiki: http://fci.wikia.com/wiki/SMC

Mailing List: http://groups.google.com/group/smc-discuss

Today, I got the chance to install two new OS’s. One is the 3.0 version of IT@School GNU/Linux(2007) and the other, proprietary OS, Microsoft Vista. As, I decided to shift completely to Linux, Vista was not installed in my system, but for a customer of my relative’s computer shop. Also, I was happy to get it cracked. The crack works by resetting the timer which count down the activation time and every time it will be the same as 30 days. More details regarding it can be found here:

The IT@School GNU/Linux uses the Linux kernel – 2.6.18-4-686. Even after installing about 930 packages, including all the default packages like OpenOffice, Gimp, etc it took only about 2.9GB, which is about quarter of the space used by Vista OS basic home edition itself, without any extra softwares. Linux has developed much as the installation is much faster, the boot up time is about 40 seconds only, mounts partitions automatically – including FAT32 partitions and has much more tools.

Even though its better than Windows, I do have some problems in it. I am unable to configure my modem properly. I have been to configure it for about two years, since I first installed Linux. Only Linspire was able to automatically detect and configure my internal dial up modem. Another problem I face is that only root has got the permissions to edit the files in FAT32 partitions. I tried many ways, still I couldn’t make other users too to do so. May be some day near, I can fix these…

I also got three DVDs, full of Debian softwares (I think I don’t have that much Windows softwares with me). Thanks for Shyam for giving them to me.