FOSS in Tassie

I’m in Tasmania all this week on a mini holiday, actually I’m going to be doing Shaolin Gung Fu training with a master I used to study with 10 years ago. It was certainly fun transporting my weapons by plane 😉 Hooray! I’m staying in St Helen’s and travelling through Launceston to get here and back.

Anyway, back to FOSS. I have a smallish hard disk in my laptop (40GB) which has pretty much filled up. I bought a new 160GB hard disk ($85, bargain!) but didn’t bring any bits to do the transfer to Tassie with me. St Helen’s is a very small town. About 7,000 people (only a little bigger than my hometown). Anyway, I thought I’d try my luck and see if there was a local computer shop. Bingo! I went in and they had the parts I needed and then came the hard part:

“Do you have any Linux CDs”

The man looked at me a little confused at said “I don’t think there is a difference between CDs that work on Linux and ones that work on Windows”. My heart fell but I persevered with “no, I mean a CD with a Linux operating system, preferably bootable”. He had a spark of recognition and referred me onto one of his workmates who, lo and behold, had many versions of Linux on hand! Rock! We then had a great chat about FOSS, I mentioned that linux.conf.au is in Hobart in January, and why they should _all_ go along. I also invited them to a talk I’m giving at Launceston to TasLUG folks about FOSS, the Census and the OLPC project. They were very interested which was cool, and I think I convinced them about the value and fun of participating in the community 🙂 Hopefully we’ll have a few more enter the fold, mua ha ha!

4 thoughts on “FOSS in Tassie”

  1. I, for one, welcome our new FOSS overlords!

    Coincidentally, I grew up in St. Helen’s; It is quite a nice town.

    Hope you have fun training, but please don’t bring your weapons to the meeting! Looking forward to catching up.

    – Josh

    (nah, I’m kidding… bring the weapons, we may need them to fend off the insect overlords)

  2. It was great that you could make the time, to give such an informative talk. I’d downloaded your report, to read ‘later’, but now you’ve piqued my interest to read it more closely. : )

    It was much appreciated to get a better feeling for the local scene, that it’s not all about observing from afar, and looking further afield.

    Likewise it was great to finally see an XO in person; thanks very much to Josh on that point.

  3. What a shame I am so slow at reading my feeds. WHat a shame you are too! Perhaps you’re not tracking my blog? I was in Tazzy that week too. Gave a talk to Skills Tasmania. Not quite as big as Teaching as Dead Long Live Learning, but had in it a big push for adopting FLOSS and Standards in Tasmanian IT. If you are still down there please let me know so I can arrange for you to meet with people in Skills Tasmania and TAFE Tasmania.

Leave a Reply to Leigh Blackall Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *