Unix the revolutionary OS turns 40

June 8, 2009 at 7:53 am (FOSS, GNU/Linux)

Forty years ago, Ken Thompson wrote a small operating system that eventually got named as Unix. An article at ComputerWorld describes the history, present, and future of what could arguably be called the most important operating system of them all. ‘Thompson and a colleague, Dennis Ritchie, had been feeling adrift since Bell Labs had withdrawn earlier in the year from a troubled project to develop a time-sharing system called Multics. They had no desire to stick with any of the batch operating systems that predominated at the time, nor did they want to reinvent Multics, which they saw as grotesque and unwieldy. After batting around some ideas for a new system, Thompson wrote the first version of Unix, which the pair would continue to develop over the next several years with the help of colleagues Douglas McIlroy, Joe Ossanna and Rudd Canaday. During its 40 years the Unix got evolved into many different versions and it made way to various modern operating systems that facilitate the world to do wonders specially in the fields of military, research, education, etc…


Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie

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Sahana @ Unlocking Young Minds ~ 2009

May 17, 2009 at 2:27 am (FOSS, GNU/Linux, SAHANA, University)

Last Thursday was a very busy day for me specially because it was the starting day of our exhibition. I was responsible for designing the brochure and getting the content finalized and few other designs which needed to handed over to Sanjaya to get them printed on previous day (Wednesday).

The FOSS lovers of my batch got together and decided to do something valuable of what we know during the exhibition by having a section called “Open Source Software” to educate the public about the importance and the benefits they can gain for their daily life. Glimpse into what Sri Lankans have given to the world community. We planned to have the section as follows:

  • Free Operating Systems and their usage
  • FOSS tool for our daily work
  • Sahana Project

In the Free OS section we demonstrated Minix, Free BSD, Sun Solaris, Fedora and Ubuntu by Kalana and Yoshan. In most cases majority of them were surprised about the functionality and the capabilities inherited in them because they had only experienced and exposed to the Windows XP. In the next section people got the chance to get to know and experienced the FOSS alternatives for Office Productivity(OpenOffice Suite ), Image and Video Manipulation(GIMP, Inkscape, Blender, etc..), Internet (Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird, Pidgin, etc..), Entertainment(VLC, Amarock, Mplayer, etc..), Education, Emulation Engines(Wine), etc.. to name a few, it was conducted by Uthpala.

I took myself the opportunity of explaining and demonstrating the Sahana, which came as a result of Asian Tsunami devastation that took quarter a million of human life away. With the help of the documents received from Chamindra I prepared a poster highlighting its special milestones and its functionality.

Sahana Poster :1

Sahana Poster : Part 1

Sahana Poster :2

Sahana Poster : Part 2

To make the session more interesting I took the OLPC running Sahana on it, and Sahana running from an USB to show them and make them feel how the system can be used in real life situations. I’m happy to say that out of the people I spoke to most showed their interest towards joining the community, especially by students. I’m happy to say that I got an invitation from a school at Rathnapura to do a demonstration of the Sahana project at their exhibition which will be held on 22nd of June, I’m looking forward to it.

During the three days I got the chance to get to know various people and majority of them haven’t even knew that such a project exist and it had done so much of service to the world. So I’m very happy that I got a chance to convey the importance and the services it had given to the world community. I got the chance to talk with Mr. Wasantha Deshapriya the Director, Re-engineering Government Programme Information & Communication Technology Agency(ICTA). He appreciate the effort rendered by the Sahana community to make it a globally acclaimed project.

I had to run to Motorola (Pvt) Ltd Sri Lanka. to collect some of their equipments(various kinds of Bar-code Scanners, Wearable Computers and several other hand-held devices – happy to say that most of them are designed and developed here at Motorola Sir Lanka) during Wednesday. I must especially thank Mr. Ruwan Jayanetthi(who teaches us Embedded Systems) and Mr. Damith Jayawickrama at Motorola (Pvt) Ltd for the support given to me despite their busy schedule.

Memorable moments

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me-sahana-olpc

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Sahana Conference 2009 – Day 1

March 24, 2009 at 7:02 pm (FOSS, GNU/Linux, Life, SAHANA)

The final semester started off yesterday, first subject offered was Robotics – where I’ll get a chance to learn the methodologies and principles used i n the process of developing robots. Next was the Theory of Programming Languages, but unfortunately I heard that this time also it’s not going to get offered.

Today I attended the inaugural Sahana Conference 2009, which took place at the conference hall at HNB tower, Colombo, Sri Lanka. It was attended by distinguishing practitioners of disaster management around the world, academia, local government representatives, students, etc…

The gathering was warmly welcomed by Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana, with an enlightening speech. The Keynote speech for the day was delivered by Mr. Brent Woodworth highlighting key aspects of modern disaster management with special reference to most popular GIS applications. Next, Mr. Chamindra De Silva spoke about the history and evolution of Sahana and its community from its inception to present, highlighting how & where its was used to elevate and minimize the impact of human sufferings in the aftermath of disaster situations, which occurred during the past couple of years.

Next Mr. Mifan Careem delivered his speech on the theme “Veni, Vidi, Sahana“, highlighting the operations and ground work that took place at the DMC just after the Tsunami devestation that took place on 26th December, 2004 and how it helped to capture and formalized the exact requirements for initial stage of the project. Next Mr. Dominic Konig shared his experiences, value and importance of localization for a system like Sahana when the end users are not a native English speaking person.

After the lunch break, the ICTA representative Mr. Wasantha Deshapriya discussed about the current status and the progress gained by the e-Sri Lanka and other government sector agencies. Next Mr. Martin Thomsan shared his experiences about On-site operations and co-ordination activities that was carried out during post-disaster situations. Although it was scheduled to have speech by Mr. Mifan Careem on “GIS in Disaster Management”, instead Mr. Brent Woodworth delivered a speech on “Contingency planning in disaster situations “. Lastly Mr. Ajaya Kumar shared his Sahana deployment experience at Bihar and other FOSS experiences in India.

Looking forward for another day of exciting day of events on Sahana Conference 2009 – day 2. But I have a little concern in my mind regarding the end result of the series of events in the coming days because I feel like some parties will get left behind :-( .

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Distributed Processing in action

February 10, 2009 at 12:44 pm (FOSS, GNU/Linux, University)

This semester I took to follow the Distributed Processing module as one of my level four subject. It gave the opportunity to explore into most of the high-end Supercomputers that are in used around the world for carrying out massive amounts of processing in the range of Petaflops. According to a recent article IBM corporation has started to built 20 Petaflops Computer for the US Government. At the moment Roadrunner, Jaguar and Pleiades tops the list of top500.org as at 11/2008.

During the lecture series we had hands on experiences with PVM under a local network infrastructure with MS Windows and GNU/Linux environments. We experiments on how to send and receive messages across each other in a parallel and distributed fashion. Users of GNU/Linux(Ubuntu) can very easily install it to your machine as follows:

sudo apt-get install pvm

Our lecturer introduced to us about the BOINC project that heavily use the principles of Distributed Processing for making use of individual’s idle computer processing power, distributed across the world to help fulfills the massive requirement of computing power for complex scientific research. The BOINC project was initiated at Berkeley University California, led by Dr David Anderson who started one of the original volunteer computing projects called SETI@home. The BOINC software just runs in the background and only get active once the computer gets idle for sometime, it provides the user the total control to define how its computing power should be distributed and the only requirement is to have the machine connected to Internet while on idle. Currently I’m volunteering my computer’s processing power for:

  • SETI@home – ‘a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence(SETI)’ and
  • Quake-Catcher Network – ‘It is a collaborative initiative for developing the world’s largest, low-cost strong-motion seismic network by utilizing sensors in and attached to internet-connected computers to provide better understanding of earthquakes, give early warning to schools, emergency response systems, and others’

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Howto: HUAWEI E220 USB modem on Ibex(ubuntu 8.10)

January 23, 2009 at 3:39 pm (FOSS, GNU/Linux)

Few months back I discussed about how to configure the HUAWEI E220 USB modem on Hardy Heron, and to my surprise I found that many people found it very useful ( through there feedback and by analyzing the search quires they used to find my previous article (10 views per day on average) – thanks to WordPress stats :-) ). While analyzing these search queries I found that some of them are looking for getting the HUAWEI E220 USB modem configured to run with Interpid Ibex. With Interpid Ibex they have made our life easy by providing a new network applet (GUI) to get the thing done with minimal effort. It lets you create profiles for different kinds of network connections depending on your requirements (such as for Wired, Wireless, Mobile Broadband, VPN and DSL connections ). Ok let’s see how to get this done.

First of all you need to connect your HUAWEI E220 USB modem to your Ubuntu box through any of your USB interface having inserted the sim with 3G support.

Next you need to open up the Network Configuration applet, which you can find under System » Preferences » Network Configuration. Then you will see a window gets opens up.

Network Configuration Applet

Network Configuration Applet - Step 01

In the Network Configuration Applet select the Mobile Broadband tab, as you can see on the above case. In my case I have already created one profile and named it as “Dialog Batta”.

To create a new profile clock on Add, then you’ll see a new window get open. There you click Forward.

Step 2

Welcome - Step 02

Next you’ll get the window where you have to select your country and your service provider based on your package and click Forward. In my case it’ll be Country – Sri Lanka and Provider – Dialog GSM (Post Paid).

Country and Service Provider

Country and Service Provider - Step 03

Next you will see a summary of the profile you have just created. Under the Name you can give a name of your choice to identify the profile or leave it as it is, which you can change it later through the Network Configuration applet. Proceed by clicking on Apply.

Summary - Step 04

Summary - Step 04

You have successfully cerated the profile. Next on your top Panel of your desktop click on the Network configuration icon. On the dropdown menu select the profile Dialog GSM (Post Paid) under Mobile Broadband category you have just created, enjoy :-) :-)

To automatically activate the Mobile Broadband profile (in this case Dialog GSM (Post Paid)) once you connect the modem to the machine, once again open the Network Configuration applet and select the Mobile Broadband tab. There select the profile you wants and click Edit. On the coming window select the Connect automatically option and click OK.

batta-on-ibex-06

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