Don’t ever let yourself be put down because other people say it can’t be done.

This is a simple story of how leveraging open source technologies can bring you to heights and depths you thought you could never reach.

Around 2002, November, I was asked by one of our ministry head to think of a way to make a new website geared for students. When I think of now, it was really like a social network on a much much smaller scale.

The situation here on the student network’s proposed site was this: they had already searched for a software development firm in Manila and asked for a quotation and timeframe of the work. They said it would take 3 months, and about a six digit amount to get it done. Since that was way too much, they decided to look into the outreach here in Cebu and ask around if there were any people somehow knowledgeable enough to take the challenge.

A few months before, where I was working, I had started studying and implementing some LAMP architecture on the corporate website. Mind you, my skills then were not so mature yet. PHP was still version 4.x and there were even some 3.x versions around. You can even call me a greenhorn (newbie) during this time – on the company I was in, all I had was Dreamweaver 4 to work upon the website, and some tutorials from the web on how to set up and program in php.

To make the long story short, I and two other people from the community (serving in ministry work), were tasked to do what one would have thought to be impossible to do during that time – make the student network site, complete with interactive forums and one login registrations to be part of the site, and with ALL content in less than one month. Yes, that’s right, the site was going to be launched a little bit after Christmas.

Since I was working then, we had to take turns in programming and developing the site. I was the head then of the 3 person team in Cebu. The two were not working yet, so I tasked them to make the different sections of the site. We were working at my home (no problems, I was single then ). Some people from our main branch in Manila were sending designs for us to cut and slice and place in the site.

After of almost a month of non-stop work on the site. It was done, and uploaded to a shared server through dialup (it would take 3-4 hours to update the whole site).

What’s the lesson of this experience? If I were to use proprietary software and languages it would be a whole lot more expensive (I knew there was asp, and coldfusion, but hosting for that was expensive). We had to use the one available on most cheap servers at that time, and that was a LAMP based server. We leveraged free forum software and modified it and integrated it into the site’s one login and registration. If we had started from scratch we wouldn’t have had finished the site on time. Open Source is all about collaboration, and this experience has taught me a lot about coordinating remotely too.

Looking back, I was to lead the original web team here for about 2 more years, before moving on (by then they had grown to more than 5) – after which, I was still assigned to the original website which we made, and helped worked on two more sites and administered the ministry’s server (which was now a dedicated server). The site which we first started won the Catholic Mass Media Awards for Best Website for 3 straight years before becoming a Hall of Fame Awardee. I was incidentally there using a borrowed suit during the first time we won (it was held in Ateneo and televised nationwide, hosted by some guy and Donita Rose), and that by itself was an experience I’ll never forget. You can get the list of winners during the first time the site won at the cmma foundation website here.

Dream Big. It can be done.

Another short post.

I added some forums to my blog. Nothing much – if you have any questions, suggestions, or just want to talk away, feel free to do so.

From a comment in one of my blog articles, WINE 1.1.40 is now available on the official aLinux rpm repository. Please update your aLinux 12.9 through synaptic now!

Hi all,

I added Gambas2 for moblin with a few caveats:
- no mysql for gambas
- no kde for gambas
- no firebird for gambas

This is because these libs are not available in the official moblin repository, and I, as much as possible follow dependencies on the main repository.

For those who don’t know what Gambas is, it is a free development environment based on a Basic interpreter with object extensions. I call it like VB on linux. You can make GUI programs in Qt or GTK+ and save your compiled application in RPM format.

Also, the moblin repository for ostalks is now in ibiblio. It should be up shortly (I’ll update this blog when the files are fully uploaded).

Update: Moblin rpms are now hosted at ibiblio

Just copy and paste this text for your moblin repository.

[ostalks_moblin]
name=OStalks Moblin Repo $releasever – $basearch
baseurl=http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/pub/mirrors/ostalks/moblin/RPMS/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0

It should be available here:

http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/pub/mirrors/ostalks

Have fun!

I’ve been experimenting with linux since mid to late 1990s and started with single 3.5 linux disks. I remember fondly downloading for over an hour using dialup trilinux and monkeylinux and experimenting with the command line on such curiousities for hours on end.

It was on those times that I stumbled upon a minimalist hobbyist linux distribution named Peanut Linux. It was one of the more well-known linux distributions during its time for sporting a spiffy desktop and easy to use installer. During that time, the Peanut Linux community was a lively band of people from different walks on life looking for the best linux desktop experience ever. Mind you, these were the days when Red Hat was still available in boxed form, Caldera was still around, and most of the installs were done using text displays.

From its minimalist origins (the first Peanut Linux version I used was 8.4, if I remembered correctly), running enlightenment, the distribution went on from being a distro of only about a little less than 100mb to about 700mb in 12.4, while changing it’s name to aLinux from Peanut Linux (we acquired the name to use Peanut Linux in pnutproject from Jay 5 few years ago, since like what he said, the Peanut was now like a Watermelon in size).

It has also changed considerably from being a tgz based package to an rpm one in 9.x and in 12.3, through last time efforts to revitalize the sagging aLinux community, a few of us experimented and suggested with Jay that he implement apt4rpm (using synaptic and rpm repositories).

Why am I blabbing this out? Peanut Linux was what started me fully in experimenting and implementing linux on my desktop, and indirectly introduced me to learn server administration on my own.

I even made a respin of Peanut Linux for use in the company I was working with to be used as promotion materials (rebranded of course to show our company logo as wallpaper). The company I was working for had short courses and I was tasked to develop a module to teach linux basics to students (linux during that time was only known to systems administrators and practically the Philippines during that time was largely – and still is – a Microsoft country). The teaching module I made for the short course was based on, as you may have guessed it, Peanut Linux. Jay even helped me out with the respin.

Anyways, back to the present, a few weeks ago, I talked to Jay (we remained friends during the years), and asked him if he can package up the unreleased version of aLinux for me to give a short review. aLinux was considered a dead distro; practically all of us from the Peanut Linux community moved on – some even joined the PCLinuxOS community, others created their own Linux distribution from scratch, a person I know moved to BSD (he was one of those responsible for testing apt4rpm on aLinux 12.1/.2, along with Craig and I). Jay always preferred to work alone – we can only suggest, it was his baby.

And so on February 22, 2010. aLinux 12.9 stable was released to the public on ibiblio, after practically 3 years of waiting.

Is aLinux radically changed, sporting a new GUI installer or live cd mode? This I can say, if you’ve used Peanut/aLinux before, expect the install process to be wholly the same.

Cd boot screen is now a little bit prettier.

Installs are practically the same

aLinux is indeed a blast into the past. Whereareas grub is used by practically all distributions nowadays, aLinux still uses lilo.

It is also one of those distributions which still uses KDE 3.5.10 as it’s main DE. Call me old school, but I still prefer KDE 3.5.x over 4.x.

For such a hobbyist distribution, you may wonder why the size of the cd installer is over 1 Gig. It is because the whole development system of aLinux is included by default.

I always reminisce and smile whenever I see the apt4rpm system that we helped tested and ported to aLinux – those were the good old days of pnutproject, when I had so much free time, unfortunately, real life came and well, I got married, and got busy with my work as well.

How did I find aLinux 12.9? It surprisingly worked real well, for a hobbyist distribution. Packages were as usual, a hybrid of pretty old stuff and new libraries. GCC is a bit outdated; WINE is included in the install as well (it’s old though).

The planets screensaver for the screensaver settings in KDE always crashed for me. Other than that, all else worked fine.

Playing with it, I’d have to say that it’s pretty good and fast, once you get over the outdated install. All in all, if you want some distribution just to play around and experiment, this might be an option for you.

What’s next for aLinux? I frankly do not know. Jay pops in and out of the picture more often than not, and sometimes disappears for months at a time. He releases whenever he likes.

For me, all I can say is this: without hobbyist distributions like Peanut/aLinux in the past, I wouldn’t have learned about linux and use them for practically all of my work now (servers and the like). I only keep windows for web development and the games – all licensed of course. Thanks for all the fish!

Just a short post.

I’ve been working on getting my small, but hopefully growing moblin (but soon to be meego) rpm repository hosted somewhere. It’s still not final yet, but I’ll keep you posted.

Exciting times indeed.

Update: The kind guys at ibiblio have decided to host my little repository on their mirror list. I’ll be recompiling and re-uploading those files soon to the new location.