My Ubuntu Blog

On Saturday 8th May 2010, Ubuntu Pakistanis from three major cities of Pakistan gathered to celebrate the release of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx. This was for the first time that we arranged a release party and we were very excited about that. However, our Loco Team administrator did not share our enthusiasm but that didn’t stop us.

In Karachi, Me and Haroon Idrees organized the event at arranged it McDonald’s Stadium Road, Karachi. The community’s response was great, the event was attended by students, IT professionals, bloggers, journalists and local IT companies that provided open source solutions to government and private organizations. Discussions revolved around creating awareness about free and open source software in general and promoting Ubuntu in particular.

We were really excited to meet Dr. Athar Mahboob. He is the president of IbnKhaldun Systems, and he is a legend in Pakistan for the work he has been doing since last three decades. Specially the work he has done on Linux, for example his company recently developed a network for EOBI – Pakistan, which has branches all over the country and all of them are connected using workstations and servers running a slightly modified version of Ubuntu Linux.

In Lahore, Mustufa took the responsibility of organizing the event. Mustufa is a young IT student and he is very energetic and talented. He single handedly organized the event, gave a small presentation and entertained the guests. Again there were students from universities and IT professionals and the event was also covered by a TV news channel.

In Islamabad Waqas and Babar Zahoor of Pakistan Open Source Foundation hosted the event. In Islamabad they discussed Ubuntu’s WUBI installer and open source alternatives to Microsoft applications.

Pictures:

For more images and details please visit and join our facebook group Ubuntu Pakistan User’s Group.

Haroon Idrees answering a question raised by a new Ubuntu user

Sir Syed University's Students Joined in

Mustufa Sitting left in blue jeans and Ubuntu users from Lahore showing Free CDs

Mustufa giving his introductory presentation

Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx has arrived and it is getting rave reviews. It is quick and easy to install, boots faster and has a clutter free desktop. But, instead of writing a review for 10.04, which I am using for last whole week now, I decided to write a review of Google Chrome and how great it works with Ubuntu 10.04.

There are many issues with Firefox, it takes a lot of memory, it is slower and does not fit well into over-all desktop environment. On the other hand, Google Chrome fits well into Gnome since it has an option to use either default theme or the GTK Theme. Chrome’s GTK theme fits perfectly well and attempts to blend in beautifully. It is much faster and uses less memory than Firefox.

As you all know Google is working on releasing an Open Source operating system of its own which is currently called ChromeOS. A sneak preview of this operating system can be seen here. Those who want to try its very early alpha builds should follow these instructions.

ChromeOS is basically a browser based operating system that uses the web as its hard disk. It is focused around working on the web. Google already has many tools available that will be part of this operating system. Such as Gmail which will be used as the email client, Google Docs will be used as an office suite, Picassa as photo manager, gtalk as instant messaging client, and so on.

This operating system will have linux at its core and the web browser, Chromium or Google Chrome. So may be this is the reason that Google Chrome performs better on Ubuntu Linux.

I have started feeling that may be I am using two operating systems at once. Google OS and Ubuntu Linux. I am using Google Chrome to access Gmail, Google Docs, Gamil Chat, Google Search, and keeping in touch with my social networks. I use Google’s Picassa photo manager. I ocassionally use Movie Player to watch movies, I use Empathy for voice chat with my gmail contacts. So basically I use Google OS components more than I use default desktop applications. So can I say that I am actually using Google Operating System on Ubuntu Linux platform?