Logiciel Libre

I’ll be giving a couple of lectures/seminars this week in the Twin Cities. The first is tonight at the U of M (topic: Selenium), the second will be Saturday morning (topic: Vim). See here for announcements about future talks and materials from talks past.

Keeping me up late… keeping me from working on my upcoming Vim and Selenium talks. This time with fast-booting desktops!

Found on this Slashdot thread:

1. ASUS motherboards now ship with an embedded mini Linux distribution to give you Web browsing and Skype in seconds
2. A pretty cool-looking bootable os and desktop written entirely in assembly

Based on this review I bought a Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000. I ignored all the red tape and “Run The Installer First!” warnings on the packaging, and plugged it in to my Ubuntu 8.04 laptop. And it worked immediately. Yay! Skype, Cheese, both work. Video sharing via Flash (like for Dimdim) doesn’t work, so no extra credit, yet. :)

My face with edge effects

Encryption is a nice security feature that makes it significantly harder for someone to mine your data if, for instance, your latptop is stolen.

If you install Ubuntu with the alternate installer disk, encryption takes only a few keystrokes. Here are two tutorials with screenshots.

If you only need to encrypt a single file, just right-click on the file in the File Browser and click “Encrypt”.