On (Ed)Ubuntu again! =)
Several years back I had tried installing and using Ubuntu on an old Toshiba laptop. This was in 2007, and it was Ubuntu’s Feisty Fawn that I had received free cd’s after having signed up for them on the Ubuntu Website.
Four years later and we’re into Ubuntu Lucid Lynx, released in April of last year. I hear the Maverick Meerkat is out and it’s only going to be a matter of time before I update this laptop, provided for (albeit temporarily, until June) by the iSchools Project of the Center for Information Communication and Technology at the National Computer Center in Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines.
The iSchools Project is the brainchild of former CICT Commissioner Emmanuel C. Lallana. Dr. Lallana recognizes the need to modernize the educational system. He believes that education, like medicine and business, should take advantage of the benefits of ICT and explore what ICT has to offer. According to Dr. Lallana, unlike the other fields, the educational system is still stuck with 19th century methods of teaching and learning. It’s time to bring education to the 21st century.
I was taken in as a writing and technical consultant in the last five months of the project, and to help me do my work I was issued an HP 6530b laptop with Edubuntu installed. I’m not sure if it was my familiarity with Ubuntu or its closeness to the Windows environment that had me jump into work right away with nary a learning curve on how to use the free and open source software operating system.
But it all came back to me: Synaptic package manager, sudo apt-get, gimp and open office. I even remembered how to put in a new root password for su. Well, I really didn’t remember on my own, but I did find a place on the ‘net that reminded me.
Launch a shell as root. Therefore, using sudo you can type:
~$ sudo passwd
Password:
Enter new UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:
-from Ubuntux.org
So here I am typing happily away, browsing with Chromium (Chrome for Linux) and getting my domain mail via IMAP on Thunderbird.
Long live FOSS!