By Rajeen Prasanna There was a 3 day FOSS workshop for IT teachers in Embilipitiya educational zone on 04th of June 2010. The workshop held at the computer unit of Embilipitiya maha vidyalaya. More than 40 IT teachers were attended to this event. Inservice adviser of IT Mr. Thushara has organized the workshop and Rajeen Prasanna (http://rajeenprasanna.com) & Reka Sandaruwan (http://openmindsl.wordpress.com) participated as resource persons to this event. The following topics were discussed at this event. !Introduction to FOSS !Open source Operating systems & Software. !Ubuntu, OOo and other FOSS software. !Linux file system & file permissions. !Working in Linux environment. !Foss communities in Sri Lanka. !Linux Terminal Server Project (K12LTSP) !Apache, PHP, MySQL in linux. !Introduction to Open source CMS (WordPress, Joomla) This is the 2nd FOSS workshop in Embilipitiya area which done by above mentioned resource persons. They were able to complete the first one for 75 participants in November 2009. The participated IT teachers for ...

By Ramindu Deshapriya VLC Media Player, an open source media player developed and distributed by VideoLAN Inc, is an impressive little open source tool that virtually everyone who uses their computer for multimedia purposes has used or at least heard of. It is lightweight and easy to use, and has support for almost every codec on the planet out of the box. VLC Media Player has also been renowned for its extensive language support which allows it to be used by a multitude of users who are not that familiar with English. Many enthusiasts of VLC Media Player in Sri Lanka would be overjoyed to hear that VLC Media Player will soon be available in Sinhalese as well. The project of translating VLC Media Player to Sinhalese has been undertaken by Uthmax, whose blog can be found at http://uthmax.blogspot.com/2010/06/vlc-media-player.html. As of now, ...

By Arunoda Susiripala How you guys earn money from Open Source? My Friends always asks from me when I talk about Open Source. And it is extremely hard for me to answer them. Some times its even harder if they know little about Open Source. My Answer I tell them, some may do Open Source just for their fun or serve to the community even in-order make a open standard product. And it involves no profit model. But It's not always like that. There are profit models which engaged with Open Source and it looks promising and works great for some but not for all. I've identified two of such and listed below. 1. OpenSource Business Model 2. OpenCore Business Model So in following sections I'll show you what are Open Source Business Models.

by Kathiravelu Pradeeban So here comes Lucid Lynx, an LTS (Long Time Support) version of Ubuntu after two years, giving so much of expectations. I can see many whistles such as the new theme which tries to wrap Ubuntu in a non-geeky cover, specially the shift from brown to purple. Twitter integration, UbuntuOne, Mac like theme, which still seem whistles to a user, unless he is literally a kid which can rarely be the case for a Linux user. Ubuntu 10.04 was released on 30th of April, with the code name Lucid Lynx. This has become the long time support version of buntu after Ubuntu 8.04, known as Hardy Heron, making a huge expectation from the user base. I did upgrade my operating system from Ubuntu 9.10. The upgrade had introduced me few bugs, which I have fixed without much difficulty. As ...

By Kalpa Pathum What is Fedora? Fedora is one of the major distributions of GNU/Linux. It is developed by the community with the help of the Fedora project and is funded by RedHat. According to distrowatch, Fedora is in the second place of the top 10 distributions. At the time of writing Fedora is in it's 12th release and the next release which is code named "Goddard" is scheduled to be unveiled in a weeks' time. Fedora, as many of the other GNU/Linux distributions are done, is released every six months and provided with a maintenance period of 13 months per version. Furthermore, Fedora serves the community both with a live CD and a install DVD. If you are new to GNU/Linux or just about to migrate to GNU/Linux you can either try with the live CD or install Fedora with Windows, ...