Right now Arjun, Manu, Vivek and me are in the process of migrating our (National Institute of Technology, Hamirpur) computer centre to GNU/Linux. We have chosen Ubuntu as the distribution, since the uninitiated find it easier than the rest. In case you are already hopping about the 'non-freeness' of it, let me tell you that we have removed the multiverse repository from /etc/apt/sources.list.

Till now things have been going on well, except some teething problems with NIS (we will solve it once the installation is over) and some interference from Mr. Rajiv Kumar regarding the need of having GNU/Linux in the centre.

Lets hope this is not a one-off venture.

Well I think this is the first time I am going to write something Googlish that Vijay Mateti (http://geek-tale.blogspot.com/) has not already written about.

So this one is about Goobuntu- the so-called Ubuntu by Google. I had been hearing rumours about Google's plans of getting into the OS business, and only this morning I read an article which claims the existence of Goobuntu. Now I would not talk much about what Goobuntu is, since Google itself will throw out innumerable search results for it. What is interesting to note is the following article on Mark Shuttleworth's (the guy who owns the company behind Ubuntu) personal blog at http://www.markshuttleworth.com/.

"I keep getting asked about Google’s “distribution of Ubuntu”, so perhaps this is a good place for me to say that as far as I’m aware there is absolutely no truth to the rumour that Google plans to distribute a derivative of Ubuntu as a Google OS. As exciting as that may be for Linux, it wouldn’t make sense for Google, and so far they’ve been pretty sensible about their projects.

Google uses lots of Linux internally, I imagine they also have their own versions of Red Hat, SUSE, Debian, perhaps even Gentoo and of course Ubuntu. So don’t read too much into their use of Ubuntu - it’s just part of the picture, and nothing to get overly excited about. The “goobuntu” you may have heard of is just a modified version of Ubuntu. Technically, there’s likely to be a “goobian” and a “goohat” too . The good news is that the guys there have been good about sending us patches, and we do our best to integrate them into mainstream Ubuntu and push them on to Debian and upstream.

I’m sure this won’t stop the rumours, but if you hear them, you can point here for a dose of reality."

I am sure Mark is not goofing about the whole thing, but then it would be a good thing for the community if Google joins the GNU/Linux bandwagon in a big way. Whether they meet RMS's criteria for Free Software will be something I would not bet my money on. ;-)

I finally got to see my Ubuntu CDs yesterday, which had arrived a few weeks ago. There they were, nicely tucked into my drawer with the envelope in which they had been shipped still in place. My parents had called my up in college just after the packet had come, but that was almost twenty days ago and I had nearly forgot about its existence till I happened to see the white envelope in my drawer. Within a few minutes, the packet was torn wide open and the Live CD for 32 bit machines was inside our family desktop's CD-ROM.

Everything went on fine till I hit the login screen. How am I supposed to know what user name and password to enter when I had not created any user, not even the super user, and am booting the machine from a CD which is being distributed all over the world? Typing strings such as 'ubuntu' for username and password gave rise to another funny situation. A message popped up saying that my login session had not lasted more than ten seconds, and there might be a problem with my start-up scripts or I had run out of disk space. Now what am I supposed to make of that? Except, probably that my default Windows system, which was severely virus infected, was the root of all these problems. Now even the most hard core of Linux addicts would agree that it would be unfair to Micro$oft to say such a thing. However sadly for Bill Gates, the only way I could do anything about it, was to format my faulty Windows installation and hope that the Live CD would behave itself.

Since yesterday, I have formatted and re-installed my Windows system, but have not yet tried the Live CD again. The idea is to ask someone who has used the thing before, as to how to use it. That would also be a fair enough way to avoid heaping curses on Micro$oft unnecessarily! I just mailed Mateti Vijay Kumar regarding this and as soon as I find a way out of this problem I would post the solution here.