Today I had the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to attend a meeting with the director of my college to present the CMS solution for our institute that we had been working on for the past 6 months. It was a wonderful experience and it opened my eyes to what was actually happening “in the boardroom” all this while.

The meeting started off with everybody introducing themselves, and then proceeded with the actual presentation. At first I thought that the director was only giving part of his attention, but surprisingly, he had carefully analysed every point presented and raised his very valid concerns at the end of the presentation! Experience does matter; this was my first such meeting, but he would have attended thousands of such presentations.

Some of his questions were however, outdated. He was still concerned about security: “How safe is the system against hackers?”. How is one supposed to convince someone in non-technical terms how secure a system is? No system is foolproof, everyone knows that. We have to take the plunge, and he simply has to trust us and believe that we’ve taken a lot of precautions against any unwary event.

Also he didn’t quite digest the idea of a CMS: “Anyone can change the content of the website?”, well, we explained that it was not quite “anyone”, but only people authorised to do so, such as the heads of departments. He still insisted on a “webmaster”, a final authority through which all changes have to approved and only then published to the main website. This defeats the purpose of a CMS itself and the concept of distribution of work; here the webmaster will again be burdened with the task of maintaining an institute’s website and approving every single change or addition of notices: however big or small they may be.

And on the other end we have Wikipedia flourishing!

Probably things might not change until the next generation take up important administrative positions, people who are more open to solutions that technology can offer. I still have professors in my college who are not entirely convinced that computers indeed offer better and efficient solutions to existing problems and would rather do things the “Good old way”.

But of course, I still remember of how my own parents were apprehensive of using the credit card online a few years back. Today, my mother buys even the grocery online!

I guess time heals all!

That being said, the college is in good hands, the hands of an experienced person who deals issues with caution. Right in his own manner.

Ah, the big question. I had a fierce debate with a friend over this one. I’m +1 for Gentoo but that’s a biased vote.

It’s quite simple really. The choice depends on who you are and what you want. Me being a developer and a linux enthusiast found the Gentoo installation in itself a very enlightning experience, which is nothing short of nightmare for a person who wants to switch from windows. Sure, it took 3 days, but I sure learnt a lot.

Of course, saying that Debian is linux not suited for developers is stupidity, it is after all one of the most preferred and popular distros out there which has managed to capture both the hardcore dev crowd as well as the n00bs. But I found it quite silly that I had to “apt-get install” to get “make” or “autoconf”. Ubuntu was even sadder. Not even a kernel source!

The point is not that you can’t do something in Debian, the point is that Gentoo forces you to do it. The installation is in itself a “Linux Tutorial”, you learn the nitty-gritty of kernel configuration, learn about gcc flags you never thought existed, learn about configuring your obscure graphics card to work with X. Truly eye-opening. And this is the advantage people who installed and work with Gentoo have over those you pointed-and-clicked their way through Debian, Ubuntu and RedHat: Complete control and Knowledge of your PC, apart from the happiness; “YES! It Works!”. So what if I couldn’t sleep for 3 days?!

The final word? Here it goes:

Developer + Guts = Gentoo
Developer + Lazy + [Wimp] = Debian
Newbie = Ubuntu/RedHat/Whatever

And arguing that Gentoo is “not meant for server-class installation” is total crap. More on that later though…

Yep, that’s the killer phrase that convinced me to dump windows and get GNU/Linux (as it rightly should be called!)

I now happily run Gentoo on my PC and was able to make the switch complete by removing Windows. I did that as soon as I realised that there was nothing I couldn’t do on Gentoo that I previously could on Windows. Quite the contrary, there is much more that I can do on a *nix but not on a Windows PC.

Apart from the fact that the installation itself took days and that I took weeks to customise it to my liking, the point that it changed my life: productivity, fun and happiness wise, remains undisputed. More people should make the switch, and I have already convinced some of my friends to do so. “Switch” means removing Windows, not dual booting! I wish more people had the courage to do so.

There is no point in great speeches about free software or advising people to use free software if you dual boot with Windows at home.

The only way MS will learn its lesson is complete boycott.

Hello everyone and welcome to my fresh blog. So I’ve finally decided to join the blogging bandwagon, and let the world know what I’m upto. See you next post, until then, Just keep on being Happy!