Next week I’ll be in Boston attending my first LinuxWorld conference. were I’ll be giving to presentation/demonstrations a day, plus plenty of public and vendor meet and greet. It should be insane. I’m pretty excited about doing a good job, but as usual I’m still not quite prepared. I’ve got to go through my slides and demonstrations a few times. Plus on Monday we have to install Linux on some loaner machines and test some tricks I have planned.

• The One Laptop Per Child project
• The OSDL’s recently announced Fellowship program
• Building consumer products with open source communities — the Maemo and 770 experiences
• And there is going to be a Mono booth as well, sweet!

I believe in computers, so when I heard about the One Laptop Per Child project, I got really excited. Then after reading the background of the project, I got even more excited. While these laptops are computers, the first intended use for them is not as a computer, but as an e-book reader. In the initially targeted countries they have a problem in acquiring textbooks, keeping up to date, especially in their native tongue.

This article by the highly respected Robin Miller, “Commentary: Gates wants poor to spend $600+, not $100 or $200, for computers” is disappointing. While properly skewering Bill Gates and his recent comments about the OLPC project, he throws in some FUD of his own. The bottom line is this: something close to 1 out of every 6 people in the world have never even seen a computer. The first one they do see, I want to run Linux and be full of other FOSS (Free and Open Source Software). Any deeper analysis than that, frankly, I don’t care to hear about. I believe in this project in my soul. I know it is the right thing to do. This is not a zero sum game. If this project wants to try and put a computer into the hands of millions of people, it doesn’t mean instead of providing people sustainable water and food. Who know? Maybe providing computers to more people will help us find out how to provide water and food; by none other than the people that receive these computers and most need it.

On Thursday Paco helped me fix the last problem with my Mono installation. In the httpd.conf file to configure Apache with mod_mono, besides the usual Alias, MonoApplications I needed to have the following lines in the directoy tags:

Order allow,deny # Security issue with mod_mono
Allow from all # Provided by Paco Martinez

This fixed the problem I was having, which was security related. I was receiving a 403 forbidden message from Apache.

So all was right with the world until Friday after lunch SuSE started freaking out. I started getting error messages while reading OpenOffice files and finally was unable to proceed. I restarted Linux (In the open source and Linux communities we say restart instead of reboot. It makes us believe that we’re above the old Windows creed, “If windows is freaking out, just reboot” That will fix it! In the end it is same thing.) and then all hell broke loose. I got a strange message during the boot that there was an error reading or mounting the reiser file system, which seemed bad, really bad. Linux automatically rebooted and then more weirdness ensued. To cut a bad story short, after trying a few things with PJ Cabrera’s (my partner at SNAP) help, we concluded that the filesystem had been turned read-only and there was no way (among us mortals) to remove the setting.

After spending three weeks and probably 25 to 30 hours working on my Mono installation for the LJ article, I had to re-install SuSE. What a blow! Looking back I have no clear idea what happened, but my best guess is that I let the battery get too low on Thursday night.

I had attended the first workshop for the EnterprizePR 2005 business plan competitionand used the laptop. I wanted to generate some buzz about open source and Linux so I took notes on the laptop during the presentation, hoping someone would ask about . I got a warning at 10% battery remaining and proceeded to suspend to disk. Everything looked fine after plugging in Friday morning and working for a few hours. Later after another unsuspend from disk, Linux was operating very slow and then wham, disaster. I’m not sure if I could have done anything different; It would be all second guessing. Luckily I was able to get my most recent data off of the machine but Mono was lost.

Frankly I’m at a loss to share any grand insight I learned from the experience. I would have to say simply “When Linux works, it works great. When things go wrong, they go really wrong. There doesn’t seem to be much middle ground.” As with all computing, when your pushing the envelope you have to expect to crash sometimes. So always be prepared for the worst.