My Selection of Linux Utilities that should make a Standard Linux Distribution-Internet-05-Update

Earlier I have refrained from including internet  browsers and due to lot of them making subtle intrusion into ones private life and feed ones  interests to the commercial elements I decided to update this category.

My personnel preference is Iceweasel of Debian and Dilo of Puppy (good old days).

I was off the track of Linux for some time since Bunki Moon was playing Pandu and Chuckgudu with 20 million peace loving people not knowing whether he is moving forward or backwards in time. He is a confused man like a CEO who is waiting for his removal or extension in office with so much anxiety created within himself which he is trying to divert into body politics of U.N.O.

Time will tell his strategy of securing his job first and then think of 20 million people and their welfare second would work.

Probably not.

Coming back to Linux distributions and essential utilities, I am a believer in time to come all O.E.M products should have Linux Internet utilities as default (no cost to them0 even without installing any OS one should be able to browse Internet by default.
In that context, Debian’s Iceweasel (or even Dilo) should be the one that should be ported with the O.E.M with all the unnecessary cookies removed and probably Dropbox (or a cloud entity) also accompanied with the basic (minimal) kernel.

till then the list of Internet utilities should be as follows with no intention of giving any merit to any but despising all the utilities that track the uses interests and feed them back to commercial entities to make inroads by way of subtle advertisements.
I believe user is now mature enough to chose what s/he wishes to have in his system.
Without any intended recommendations or of any perceived benefits to me or the user are as follows.

1. Putty.
2. Kget
3.KTorrent
4. Transmission bit torrent
5. FilZilla
6. Kmail
7.Thunderbird
8. Opera
9. Firefox
10. Chromium Browser
11. Skype
12. Vodafone
13. Dropbox
14. Pidgin
15. Web Editor- Bluefish editor

I personally go for Iceweasel or Dilo since that do not have intrusion utilities embedded in them for tracking the user unnecessarily.

Lost Opportunity for Indians-Cricket World Cup

I am made to believe that India is the home for computer experts and it has a home base of IT literate who can dish and dash Linux at the drop of a hat.

I have to reserve that judgment now.

I have been looking at who is grabbing the opportunity that Linux has opened up.

It is not India.

It is not Pakistan.

It is not Sri-Lanka.

It is not Bangladesh.

To my surprise who is leading the field.

It is America.

Obama is quietly but effectively spreading the message of wisdom.

Education, Education in IT.

I won’t tell you how I gather the information.

That is top secret.

Even though, it is not at all significant statistically and in numbers who are the people who visit my blogsite with Linux information.

It is again Americans who top the list.

I have been very vocal and forthright with American diplomats and their way of dealing with international affairs.

 

If one is an American he or she would be very annoyed with what I usually write about Americans but I am glad I have to complement the Americans who would search, gather information and reach for anything that is useful academically.

Then who are the people who disseminate this information to others.

It is again Americans.

It is not these big Universities like Harvard that spread the message.

It is the up and mobile ordinary Americans.

Thanks guys, even though some of your diplomats and politicians are bringing bad name to America you guys are spreading the message of goodwill, especially related to Linux.

Why I say Indians lost a trick.

This is the time all the guys from the West come here to watch cricket and enjoy the warm holiday.

All of them love to carry a netbook or a laptop with them.

Indians could have sold large number of netbooks and laptops to these guys for a very cheap price, if they mastered the Linux Operating System and Utilities.

 

The idea that the operating system is free could have galvanized them and the amount of saving on each buy / or purchase would have made them to buy not one but three for the price of one they pay in their countries.

Once they got the idea of the price and the use of Linux they would be coming back to Asia for bargains for the next 10 to 20 years to come.

 

All they have to do is to entice the buyer with wireless dongle and a Flashy Linux Distribution installed in the laptop or the netbook. If they provided a flashy media player to watch the matches (recording and playback) and the value added would have been infections.

This could have been easily accomplished in India, Bangladesh and Sri-Lanka.

But nobody wanted to explore and promote Linux in this part of the world.

In Sri-Lanka the reasons are many and I do not want to waste my time discussing that.

Why Indians lost this trick is my amazement.

There is no incentive to learn Linux in Asia because of pirating of software.

There has been an explosion of Linux utilities from last December to now, to Music, to Guitar, to Video to Graphic Rendering like Maya.

 

If the can at least sell some netbooks with GutaristX installed, that will get the ball rolling, even now.

 

It is not too late, even now but one should sell the hardware for OEM price and show that you are a good an honest businessman.

We are lacking that type of gentleman businessmen too due to pirating.

For the visitors who come to enjoy cricket and holidays I have a warning,

Please do not buy laptops and netbooks with pirated copies installed.

You cannot take them back to your country. You will be charged at your airport of entry. Same for videos and music and films. Watch them, listen to them while you are here but drop them to a dustbin before you leave.

 

But if you get a computer with Linux installed, buy that without any fear or get somebody to install Linux for you here. We have few guys in the University (undergraduates) who can do that for you and most of our Sri-Lankan vendors are clueless as regard to Linux.

But please make sure to install KDE desktops like PCLinux, Suse, Mepis in additions to Ubuntu which is Gnome and perhaps Pinguy for glamor.

 

For information as regard to Linux visit my blogspot at Google (parafox) or WordPress (asokaplus).

 

In the 6 weeks you are here if you can learn Linux (it can be achieved in 4 weeks) that is something that you can take home without any fear.

Good Lick with Cricket and Linux.

E-governance and white lies

Please note that this is an update for a post on parafox and it is very easy to find a daily topic to write daily unlike in the West but it is very difficult to find a true story and I have decided to write a few of my fantasies related to my work with Apaya and Heaven. I have not decided whether to join Apaya or Heaven but like a true diplomat I prefer to shuttle in between them not knowing whether it is a fantasy or a real lfe situation.

I am bit confused but following is a true story and factually correct about E-Governance and downloading for a fact.

Uploading is no better.

Comment I wrote for a National Daily not published due to its banal content.

It is very difficult to differentiate a lie from a the word E-governance in Sri-Lanka.

I prefer E-Governance  for a white lie because it is like WiKi Leakes very difficult to differentiate whether an American (for that matter any European diplomat) diplomat is talking through his Mouth or MOUSE or ASS.

I think they are trained not to talk from birth but to lie by all means.

Unlike our diplomats who do not know how to lie like Goerge Washinton in his prime and if they do lie it looks just like plain truth and nobody including Bun Ki Moon belives it a lie or not  a lie.

Whereas our politicians are trained to lie from birth and it is that their birth right.

If one cannot lie he or she is not good enough to be in the parliament or President House. Average Buddhists except Colombo 7 elite do not lie as a habit but only on demand by politicians at election meetings and political rallies.

Our national papers for their own survival lie on a regular basis like our George Bush they do not know how to tell the truth in plain English or Sinhala. We  are now portrayed as the heaven on Earth but if one goes to Batticoloa or North East the plain truth is evident in abundance.

This is just a big joke. i.e. E-Governance in Sri-Lanka is a plain lie but what I state below is truth and nothing but truth.

It takes almost 7 days to download 1.1 GB of Kororoaa of out of 1.5 GB and god only knows how long it takes to finish.

I was down with a miner flu and for three days I managed to download Light House Puppy of 223 MiB through Firefox and in spite of the computer being on overnight for three days. I am trying to download PocketWriter-Salix and it is stuck at 280 MiB currently and Saline was disconnected without completing three times.

Now I am talking about Saline like Predient Reagon our Health minister could not say the difference between a truth and a lie.

Our Health Statistics is the Biggest Lie of all which the WHO is very fond of exaggerating!

It is 3 am in the morning and I got up to empty my bladder.

Checked to see K-torrent is working (do the downloads only after midnight).

NO.

I stopped the normal download to read the English daily but Apache at their site is broken.

I have 250 paused downloads for the month of December (for updating current Linux distributions which I do at the end of each year).

K-torrent is inactive.

Firefox download speed is below 5KB per seconds.

I pay over Rs.7000/- to Telecoms and Rs.10,000/- electricity.

If I save three months of these bills and buy a ticket to Singapore I can download all these in the airport lounge for nothing but in triple not double quick time.

It is a shame that a National Paper not highlighting how Buddhists are downloading porn at Nanasalas.

Even we have 10,00,000 NanaSalas without English we cannot progress in IT industry.

All the alphanumeric characters are in English not Sinhala.

Progress does not come from data or rhetoric.

They come through hard work, dedication and concrete actions!

All my downloads are inactive at 3,30 am and bare bone facts speak for themselves.

Temptation

It is time for me to approach the internet activity in totally different perspective.

I was one who was hooked to the computer over the past 18 months to promote one single addiction of mine.

That is to promote live CDs except Ubuntu (nothing against Ubuntu and it is doing a yeoman service to Linux and the Open Source Community).

My antipathy for Ubuntu is based on few basic infrastructure details which are fundamental to Linux.

One is root logging.

That is dropping the root (administrator protocol) and using sudo instead.

Having used to old ways of Linux with solid security management, this I consider still a big oversight. After seeing WiKiLeaks and the security leaks and leeches I am more than convinced my reservation is well founded and is substantive now than before.

It can be corrected easily with few changes in the scripts, tool kits and libs and I hope in the coming year the Canonical will look into my grouse.

Having said that it is not the intention of this piece of writing.

The intention is far more academic and contemporary.

For a starter internet is basically for luring and attracting  the kids and the young  under its fold and umbrella. Old people because their inability and resistance to change are actually not reaping the full benefits of it especially in the East.

Its content is not scrutinized according to the age and maturity.

It becomes a way of life and an addiction.

It gives way to a deprivation syndrome and people tend not to read books or critically analyze the contents with the false belief that, it is in the web and it got to be true.

I can go on and on but I think my point should be clear without any more elaboration.

My intention here is how we can resit the temptation not to indulge in excess and make creative ways to make the user understand the logic of  use of modernity in moderation.

My next piece tomorrow will be on intuitive ways to make the kids collaborate with my philosophy but it will be useful to adults too.