Wee!! Despite the lack of heavy publicity and the very short notice, we still managed to collect $100. Many thanks to:

Mei Hua: $5.00
Kevin: $10.00
Ruiwen: $15.00
Junhao: $20.00
Lu Feng: $20.00
Rey: $20.00 + 10% of total sum

We bought the foodstuff at Cold Storage (Ngee Ann City) as it is a very central location and has a gigantic donation booth right in front of the shopping mall. =)

In total we donated 60kg of rice, 2 big tins of Ovaltine, and 5 big boxes of cereals. Lu Feng has the receipt, so he should be posting the exact prices soon. =)

Thank you everyone!

Update: We bought 60kg of rice for SG$64.75, 3kg of Ovaltine for SG$18.10, 400g of Kelloggs H/Flakes for SG$4.75, 340g of Oreo cereals for SG$4.40, 368g of Cocoa Crunch for SG$4.20, 368g of Fruity Pebbles for SG$4.20. Total cost is SG$100.40. You can see the receipt if you want

Hi everyone

Just read in today’s papers that the Sharity Gift Box is still short of food item donations for needy households. We would like to organise a shopping outing to buy food items (such as rice, milo, etc) and drop them off at Ngee Ann City Sharity Gift Box on 20 Dec 06. That will be the last day for donations.

For those who cannot make it on the day, you are most welcome to donate any amount of money and we will do the rest. Donations can be sent via interbank transfer to POSB/DBS/UOB/MayBank accounts (email us for bank account details). We will keep all receipts and records of donations received for the sake of accountability.

Let’s all do something meaningful and help the less fortunate this Christmas! If each of the 150 members in this list donates $10 (hardly enough for 2 fast-food meals), we will have $1500 to donate! That can buy us about 100 kilos of rice, or 150 tins of Milo!

All it takes from you is an email to contact @ linuxnus.org to register your interest to attend or donate! Include your contact number in the email. Do register your interest early because we have only 2 days left!

More details can be found at the Boys Brigade Sharity Gift Box

Dear linuxNUS friends,

With all the CAs and assignments during these few weeks, I am sure many of us are really in need of a break. With this in mind, linuxNUS is organising a pizza party in our clubroom (at SoC 1 Level 3) on 26 Oct 2006 at 6.15pm. The idea is to have an evening of relaxation and casual chatter about our upcoming plans.

We will also be unveiling our T-Shirt design for the linuxNUS community.

Tentatively, the idea is for a pizza party, but do feel free to reply to this mail if you have any suggestions about what else we can have for dinner, as well as the venue.

Kindly email us to let us know if you are coming. Please RSVP by 25 Oct 06 so that we can make appropriate F&B arrangements. The point of contact for this meetup is Lu Feng (HP: 91292492).

We look forward to meeting all of you.

I had to rush back to SOC1 after my training for the Workshop. I arrived at #03-17 in the nick of time. Phew. I popped Knoppix 5.0.1, which Junhao insisted I used, into the CDROM drive of and rebooted the computer.

“It’s much better than Ubuntu,” he said, giving his usual toothy grin.

The screen resolution was pretty small. It was probably around 800 X 600. Darn. I should have stuck to the Ubuntu livecd, which I tested out yesterday. By this time, the room was filled with 10 participants already (I was pleasantly surprised to see a lady, but that’s besides the point) I decided to forget about switching over to Ubuntu. That piece of bloat takes quite a while to boot up.

I quickly made a quick introduction and explained that I didn’t have any slides. The objectives of the session was to share and troubleshoot configurations.

You should have seen the -_- look on many faces. Shock. Surprise. Just plain stunned. Think NUS has yet to get used to the idea of unconferencing yet.

Anyway, the room was left with just 3 participants.

I asked Binh if he had any configuration problems. He showed me his Fedora laptop and explain his difficulties in connecting to SoC wireless network using openvpn. A shell commands later, his network was up. Yay!

I interacted with Jason who shared with me details of his startup using Linux. It’s has potential. But I think I shall not provide too much details here. Trade secret. But basically, he was at the workshop to network with people who may be interested in coding for his project.

Not long after, Edward strolled in. He is the TA of CS2106. He is still running Fedora Core 1. (OMG!) He was with Mathias, (hope I got the spelling right) an exchange student from Norway. Mathias runs Arch Linux on a funky looking laptop. It’s not much bigger than an A4 piece of paper. I really should have asked him the brand and model.

I took the chance to find out if his University provides support for Linux users. Unfortunately, he said that the situation was fairly similar to NUS.

One of Edward’s students dropped in (I had real problems pronouncing his name. The rest just ask me to call him Smiley). He just started using FC5 on a virtual machine. He had some queries about the installation of Adobe Reader. He also had fears of losing Windows. I left the task of “counseling” to Edward and Mathias,

I sat next to David who had just entered the room. He is an exchange student from Canada. He had used Linux for seven years. But he was now using a Mac. I realised that he was good recruitment for Jason, and so I directed him to Jason, who was having an active discussion with Harish.

I then walked over to Luqman, who was showing Jasir(I hope I got this right) Ubuntu using the livecd. Unfortunately, network was not up since openvpn was not installed. I wanted to install the packages manually. But looking at the list of dependencies, I decided that it was not productive. Besides, it is a livecd.

I then turned to give a hand to Junhao, who was helping Anoj with his ATI 9200 graphics card configuration. While it seems that the display was fine. It gets pixelated when Anoj runs a 3D game. After googling, I directed him to the ATI Linux driver wiki.

Anyway, he happens to be running an old version of Red Hat. Nothing wrong except that he had no yum. Junhao immediately recommended Centos, which was basically RHEL of sorts.

Hope everyone had fun!

Photos coming soon….