DVC-RPE Prof. Easther Murugi Kahangi and the exhibitors in JKUAT Tech Expo It

It was a great honor for Jkuat Linux users Group(JLUG) to be the first ever club to host the DVC-RPE Prof. Easther Murugi Kahangi and the exhibitors in JKUAT Tech Expo
scheduled for October, 2010.
She had the some encouraging message to the exhibitors who were JKUAT student.
She said, “We have to be creative to drive the Kenyan economy and make Kenya a
paradise just like or even better than USA.”
She said she was amazed at the students’ initiative and supported it since it will breed a culture of innovativeness in the University and by extension to the society we live in.
She went ahead to say that in fact the University management was happy and were
considering introducing an innovation academy in JKUAT that will cater for the
students on their innovation and offer all technical support towards success of their
ideas so long as they address a current issue or problem in the society. According to
JLUG that is a step in the right direction.
The exhibitors who were in attendance were extremely happy and felt encouraged by
the DVC-RPE. Some were quoted as saying “We never imagined she(DVC-RPE) could
show up in this meeting and interact with us in that manner. We feel honored.”
From this statement bit show statement we ascertained her attendance did actually
make an impact.
Besides her we had our patron Mr. Harrison Kaguongo who encouraged the exhibitors
to utilize the resources and skills they have to make a change. He even cited the BillGates encounter with White house who rubbished his idea but Gates persisted and
that’s why we use computers today in the world and ironically USA over relies on
them.
Prof. Kahangi and Mr Kaguongo had the same parting shot “Lets change Kenya”
Indeed we can so lets get to work.

GoogleCL

Posting from the command line :)

A Tale of four Distros

GENTOO
I was having an interesting discussion with Allan recently about Gentoo Linux and he pointed out its newbie unfriendliness, and I want to reiterate his opinion :), albeit half-heartedly. Well since the beginning of the Gentoo journey as with all other OS's (OSi? :) ) is the installation, I decided against reinventing the wheel by writing an installation guide. So head on over to THIS link and READ. Thing about the gentoo install is its majorly manual, what has been automated in other distros with intelligent scripts some even graphical, you have to do entirely by hand the good ol' UNIX way, with commands (Can you see the size of my grin? :D ). Ok. maybe I'll mention a wee bit about the installation;

After prepping your disk for installation [refer to the aforementioned guide] you'll get to a stage where you shall be required to compile your system (this is the mad cool part). You'll often hear gentoo referred to as a compiled Linux distro as opposed to the Debians and redhats which are a bunch of binaries compiled for a 386 system. You are most likely running on a Pentium class processor so this step right here makes all the difference and sets Gentoo apart from the other distros since you are essentially being allowed to custom make it for your hardware. All produced binaries shall be optimised to run on your hardware. [if that sounded like gibberish to you I advise you to skip the Gentoo section and scroll down to Sabayon :) ]
Oh and here's a gem I stole from a gentoo enthusiast's site
"Yea, I really don't understand all the complaints about the time to install gentoo. It is like complaining about your Ferrari because the dealership was so far away."

Lemmi rant on a bit about Gentoo's super deliciousness. Indulge me:

Sourced-speed
So like I said gentoo is a compiled linux distro. What this means for you is that every level of your system shall be optimised to run on your hardware, right down to the drivers that run everything. Zoooooom!!! So yeah the first merit of Gentoo is that its a speed demon. :D Interested yet?

waving CFLAGS vs. USE
I won' lie to you, I am by far not gentoo'd enough to make the difference clear here but I'll try my best. Besides, if you're still reading, it probably means this stuff isn't complete Greek to you :). So Gentoo has this giga-nifty feature called USE variables. What these things do is make it easy for you to choose what is and isn't important in your system, and as a consequence you end up with as Allan likes to put it, "A leaner and meaner" system that serves only your needs and scraps out all the manure that clutters up your system. Example: You don't have a printer at home, and you don't desire one either hehe, so why get all that stuff compiled into your system taking up space and using resources since CUPSd is started by default on most linux distros, USE -cups and you'll have none of that, in the event you require CUPS you just compile it into the system and viola! The debian/redhat equivalent is CFLAGS (which by the way you won't have the option of using at install time since everything comes in pre-packaged binary form) , you might have come across them if you compile stuff for yourself, they are WAY more tedious to use, take it from me. Enough about that you must be getting cross with me by now :).

Watching sh*t scroll by for hours makes me a Linux expert overnight!

Hehehehe!! Yeah, gentoo isn't really your newby friendly distro, but darn it to heck you get to learn a whole load of *NIX gooie while using it. So yeah, I recommend it for anyone hungry to learn their way around the UNIX wilderness. Another thing I'll squeeze in to this point is that Gentoo is extremely developer friendy, comes with all the necessary headers that you need for compiling stuff for yourself and you can for get that "Your headers are out of date" message that you risk running into when using debian's "build essential". Golly I'm falling in love with this thing already!! I know you are too :).

Emerge!
Gentoo has a package manager called portage not unlike apt-get (which I applaud Debian immensely for) but far beyond what debian's apt-get can do. . .you can update your whole bl00dy system with one command!! emerge --update world, now tell me that isn't awesome!! Huh?

Ok. I can go on and on. . . .but the purpose of this post was whet your appetite and get you to find out more about Gentoo on your own as well as experiment with it. So errrr that's the end of my Gentoo rant :).

I started out thinking that I'd do it all in one fell swoop but I'm starting to tire, so I'll do the remaining 3 distros later.

Preview:
. . . . .Puppy Linux: If you've ever watched Major Payne (That Damon Wayans should be locked up :D) you probably remember the part Payne was telling that story of the little engine that could, that was creepy right?With his squeaky voice and all hehe, anyhow Puppy linux is the Little Distro that can, Its all I use. . . .

More next time.

if you have mplayer on your linux distro try this:
$ cd your_music_folder
$ find . -iname '*name of song/musician*' -exec mplayer {} +

:D

Sayanora peeps, till next time.

SCOSIT vote re-run!! at 5pm

Hi guys, as had mentioned earlier, the SCOSIT chairmen who had contested last week ended up in a tie. So, a re-run was set for today and I have just been informed that this will be held at 5pm Today. Please come and vote. All IT, CT and Comp. Science students are eligible for voting so everyone is welcome. Remember, we need a vibrant society and that can only be achieved through a candid leader.
See you at five.

VOTING RESULTS

So yesterday, as expected, the voting went on very well. I must admit that it was very peaceful and fairly conducted. The voter turn out was also pleasant, making SCOSIT probably the largest gathering in the name of a club in JKUAT right now. We hope this will be replicated all through it's endeavors.

Apparently, it was a very tightly contested vote which resulted to the two contesting chairmen tying with 80 votes each. This was quite shocking. With this, people have to vote for the second time next week on Tuesday.
There had been a consultation about having to register before voting but I've already been informed by some reliable sources that it will not be there, though it was decided that in the next voting people must produce their school IDs.

All the other posts were grabbed with very smart and promising people who we hope will steer the club into some pleasant fortunes.

We can only wait and see. Meanwhile, the contestants are allowed to do anything in their power to amass as many people as possible. Thanks to all those who came in strongly to vote.

Have an "Open Source Weekend!".

The voting is on tonight.

Finally, the SCOSIT officials are being voted in today at 8pm. All the contestants are ready. We as JLUG members we can only wait and see. Will blog more as the proceedings go by and also after the actual voting.

Lets see who wins.