Preparing Training Materials for Linux Workshop in my workplace

Hey there,

I’m given roughly one month to prepare training material for an in-organization Linux training workshop in my workplace. Target audience are mostly from non-IT background who wished to know more about GNU/Linux based operating system.

I was given freedom to choose any Linux distro that I see fit for the workshop and for that matter I choose Ubuntu as it has an ultra friendly Wubi Installer that would simplify the installation exercise during the training session.

Other than that, i’m still struggling with the materials to be included during the one day (8 hours) workshop aside from Ubuntu installation.

Suggestions from Ubuntu’ers are welcomed as I’m pretty swamped with other work while working on this workshop.

Linux Laptop Hardware Compatibility List

If you are a serious Linux user, probably the first thing that come across your mind when shopping for a laptop is how compatible it is with GNU/Linux operating system.

Fortunately sites like The Linux Laptop Wiki, Ubuntu Linux Hardware Support and Mandriva Hardware Database provides a good starting point to find out about your laptop hardware compatibility with Linux.

As for my personal experience, I find out most hardware incompatibility ranges from unsupported 56k softmodem driver to unsupported hard-disk controller which i consider as the worse case scenario.

So please bear this in mind that not all laptop are 100% compatible with Linux. Do ask around, and check for its compatibility status before you finally made a decision to purchase a new laptop.

Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex has been released, but my pc died!

Probably most of you have heard about the latest Ubuntu release – Intrepid Ibex, with all of its nifty features, including :

  • The new Network Manager 0.7 (which supports 3G broadband connection)
  • Support guest login support
  • Encrypted private directory support (via encryptfs)

The only thing that might need a little bit polishing is Cruft Remover tool, which happily classify important files as unneeded files to be deleted (which is dangerous).

but the sad part was….

I don’t know if this is a coincidence or otherwise, but my 7 years old Pentium 4 1.8 GHz died shortly before Intrepid Ibex release. I’m now left with an aged laptop and unreliable wifi internet access at my current workplace to surf the internet.

Bottom line – I might need a new PC.

How to change Google Chrome user-agent

Changing user-agent in Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer may be an easy task for most of the people as it only requires you to change certain settings in the browser option or in the registry.

However changing Google Chrome’s user agent might not be as straight forward as it has no obvious way to alter it through the browser’s interface.

Fortunately, Digital Inspiration website has written a guide on how to change Google Chrome user-agent string, you can refer directly to their article – How to Change User Agent String in Google Chrome Browser