A Fedora day

Today I spent the whole day with new people at the Linux User Group of the quarter where I live in. We have spoken about Free Software and about Fedora community.
During the morning I have met a guy who contacted me weeks ago after he saw the LUG advertising poster I putted down the street.
He is a power user of Linux, very informed about the history and the actual general situation of Free Software community. In real life it is not common to meet people with a big knowledge about such things, I really enjoyed speaking with him. Actually he is involved in Core Linux development community.

In the afternoon I installed Fedora to a my friend that has a Samsung N150 netbook as personal computer. Such computer with its original operating system is very slow since its memory amount is only 1 Gb. We solved this problem by installing Fedora LXDE. Since my friend does law related studies, I installed Lyx - LaTex editor (together with the classic Libreoffice) on his computer in order that his thesis will have a wonderful aspect.
Later in the day, a man come to visit the LUG, he is about 70 years old, but he is very smart about Free Software :D He used Ubuntu in the past, but he was not satisfied about it, so I suggested him to try Fedora, he accepted so I installed Fedora KDE on his machine.

He also asked me to try if his external wireless adapter could work on Fedora. He took a very big antenna from his backpack and we successfully tested it on Fedora. He told me that he uses this antenna to share internet connection with other friends that live in the building in front of his apartment :D Great!

After some days he called me at the telephone to tell me that he really enjoyed Fedora and he told me that in next days he will come again to the LUG to install the operating system also on other computers :-)

I am truly trusting about the future spread of Fedora in the panorama of the operating systems.

Easy share HSDPA internet connection

During these days I passed in my country house, I had some troubles with internet connection: in that area, there is no ADSL connection, so the only way to connect to the internet is using a HSDPA device. After some days, friends come to my house to pass some days with me. One of them carried with him his computer, so I setup a shared internet connection to let him connect to the internet. I connected both computers to an ethernet switch...

Then I connected my computer to the internet with the USB HSDPA device, I opened internet connection tool selecting “manage connections”

Then I created a new shared internet connection under “cable connections” tab

Then to enable the shared connection, I selected the just created connection.

 So this is a very smart way to share internet connection in places where you don't have ADSL connection :-)))

Holidays time!

Now it is holidays time, so I moved away from Rome, and I went to an Italy region where my family has its origins. I have carried with me all things for my university studies but above all a disc of Fedora. I hope to find here a lot of new opportunities to introduce people to this wonderful operating system. I am pretty sure that I will do it :-)

Games to introduce a boy to Fedora

Some days ago, I introduced my girlfriend's cousin to Fedora. He is a 13 years old boy, who goes to school and like to play video games. He really likes horror games so I let him know that he can run his favourites games also under Linux (those games series are available for all main operating systems) So I installed Fedora on his laptop and actually he is heavily using it instead of the previous proprietary operating system. I am happy I introduced a young boy to Fedora. Next step will be to inform him about Free Software topics. On September he will start a kind of high schools that is specialised in information technology, so I thought this first step in Free Software is pretty important for him.

Introducing a teacher to Free Software

Yesterday I installed Fedora on two machines owned by a person who teaches English language in schools. She almost didn't know anything about Free Software, since I think that teachers are very important people which to teach free software topics, I spent some hours with her, giving her some useful infos about it. I also introduced her to a important website about free software usage in schools and I told her the hazards of teaching propertary software to children. This website is: http://www.dossierscuola.it/


I also introduced her to LaTex, since I seriously think every teacher should known it perfectly. I noticed she really enjoyed it, and I gave her some guidelines to start working on it.

Her machines which I installed Fedora on, are:

• Acer laptop with Core 2 Duo CPU and 4 Gb RAM memory. I installed KDE spin since the RAM amount was very good.
• HP laptop with Pentium M 1.8 Ghz CPU, and 1 Gb RAM memory. I installed LXDE spin since the RAM amount was not so high.

Another person introduced to Fedora

During this week I have been contacted by a doctor who works in a hospital in Rome. He told me his Sony Vaio laptop (owned by the hospital) he uses for work was very slow. The computer had the factory-OEM propertary operating system that I replaced with Fedora KDE. The moment I returned the laptop to him, I also introduced him to GNU Health in the hope he could spread the voice around in healthcare enviroment.
He really enjoyed the speedness of Fedora and he was very curious about the community, the free software and many things we really care about. So I spent some time introducing it to the world of global benefits of free software.

Old Pentium III 256MB ram brought to life

Some days ago a person, who owns a private philosophy school, asked me if could manage to let a laptop work again. It is an old Fujitsu-Siemens Pentium III with only 256MB of ram. She did not have any hopes since the computer is rather old. I told her I would have installed Fedora LXDE on that computer and I did it. I used a workaround since Anaconda does not allow to install Fedora on computers with less than 512MB ram, so I had to use the command:

liveinst --nomemcheck

Now the computer runs rather fast, and this is the ram usage in idle

[user@computer ~]$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           243        223         20          0         13        127
-/+ buffers/cache:         82        160
Swap:          510          0        510

The following day I returned the computer to her and she liked a lot that she can use again this computer, that in other circumstancies would have been carried in rubbish dump.

Linux best friend of enviroment!