Ms. Quynh Ngoc from VTV visited my Linux lab at the American International School today through a referral by An Nguyen of SaigonLUG. Though we knew about it for a couple days, we only received permission from the school at the last minute. My students were not prepared but since this was a normal lab day, I was not worried.
This is actually my third academic year using Linux and open source software at AIS. For their ICT projects, the majority of my students are using either Synfig Studio, Blender and/or GIMP this quarter on either Ubuntu Linux or Windows platforms. I am impressed at how fast they transitioned to Linux and open source software. My 10th, 11th, and 12th graders this year are definitely my brightest open source users to date. I will blog about some of their projects in late January, 2010.
The visit by VTV was went okay. They just visited one class and got the footage they needed. Long, my ICT student, and I were interviewed outside the classroom. That was a little nervous for a guy who hates cameras. 
I am glad that Vietnam is taking a stronger look into open source now. I also thank AIS for supporting open source and Linux from the first day I started there back in 2006. Our students will be some of the leading IT experts in the future, in my opinion…
Today I attended the Saigon Software Freedom Day 2009 organized by the Saigon Linux User Group at the University of Education in District 5. This is actually my first ever SFD that I attended. It was nice to meet Prof. Nguyen Thai Son again, a long time advocate of open source and Linux in Saigon. I made many valuable contacts from this event today including the Ubuntu-VN team.
Hats off to An Nguyen, the main organizer for the Saigon SFD and leader of the rejuvenated SaigonLUG for doing an excellent job. He did an amazing job and he is only 19 years old! Organizing an event in Saigon is not easy but he pulled it through. He is definitely one of the future “Who’s Who” of the free and open source community in Vietnam. I expect SaigonLUG and future SFDs in Saigon to be highly successful. He even got a potential sponsor for SaigonLUG.
Congrats An!
(Saigon Software Freedom Day 2009 had a large turnout)
(Ubuntu-VN team, a valuable asset to the Ubuntu community in Vietnam)
Here is an update from VietnamNet Bridge: First free software festival in HCM City
Well, I just completed week 3 at the American International School here in Saigon, Vietnam. I signed a one year contract to teach 2 ICT classes part-time for about 40 high school students ranging from the 9th – 12th grades. This most likely will be my last year teaching IT at this school do to my limited amount of time I have outside of my company.
This year my curriculum and syllabus were prepared for me before the school year started. As usual, I decided to add an open source component to my curriculum. My students were very receptive and by the end of week 3, the majority of my students already installed Ubuntu Linux on their laptops or netbooks. Ubuntu has come a long ways since my first Vietnamese student installed Ubuntu nearly two years ago. I only had to take about 4 netbooks home the last week to get them running properly, mostly just wifi issues. One of my brightest student was able to get the hda sound card to work after some tweaking. He also had the coolest laptop running Compiz. Yes, I allowed the Mac users to keep running their Macbooks in class
For the individual IT projects, I decided to make it interesting for most of my students. My students had to either design an airplane with X-Plane’s Planemaker, design their future Saigon house with QCad, or edit music with Audacity. For the first quarter, I want them to learn how to use their chosen software (over half decided to use QCad which surprised me). The goal by the end of the year is to match the Audacity students with the Planemaker and QCad students. I want all the student groups to create a movie of their QCad or Planemaker projects. This seems quite exciting from an IT teacher’s point of view.
For me, one of the goal of these IT projects is to get my students to teach themselves how to learn the new software. You will be amazed at how fast Vietnamese IT students can learn new software. I also found them some really nice YouTube tutorials as well that will help them thanks to the help of my students (See below).
I am looking forward to my final year with my IT students. Hopefully by the end of the year, I will post some good movies of my student’s IT projects.
Audacity Tutorials
Planemaker Tutorials
QCad Tutorials
With just less than one month left of class, I decided to see if my 8th Grade students at the American International School in Saigon would be interested in learning Linux. I am glad I tried because these kids seemed to be having a lot of fun.
This week I just wanted them to learn the basic Linux command line. Since the school only uses Windows XP, I worked with the IT staff and got Putty installed on all of the student computers. They then used Putty and and secure shelled to my Easy Peasy Ubuntu Netbook. I just created one generic username and password for my 8th Graders. Next week they will all get their own accounts on my Netbook. I just wanted them to get a feel of Linux first.
Last Friday they had fun playing with the mkdir command as you will be able to see in the below photos. My students are very bright and quick learners. Most aced my first Quiz on the command line last Friday as well. My goal for this month is to teach my students how to create a simple webpage with the command line and the text editor, nano. That is what they really want to learn anyway, making their own webpages
Next year if I have these students, I will have them install Ubuntu Linux on their laptops. Add another 50 new Linux users in Vietnam…
Fun with mkdir and Putty
(Read the directory -> kevinxauzhai means Kevin is Ugly )
Today I installed Fedora 10 on my desktop. I need to spend some months working with Fedora to prepare for my Red Hat Certified Engineer exam which I will hopefully take this summer.
I immediately had sound problems. Luckily, I was able to refer to my old posting from one year ago for the fix. This is just an edited version of that post.
My desktop is currently using the Creative Audigy SE sound card (ca0106) which can be very un-Linux friendly. As I mentioned 9 months ago, I was able to get sound from my front 3 speakers but I wanted all 5 speakers to work as well (5.1).
With Arch Linux and Gentoo Linux, I was able to get surround sound on all five speakers with the following .asoundrc file and saved it to my /home directory:
pcm.!dmix {
type plug
slave {
pcm surround51
channels 6
}
}
pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm “dmix”
slave.channels 6
route_policy duplicate
}
With Fedora, similarly to Ubuntu, I was not getting surround sound with the above file.
I remembered that I needed to add the following to /etc/pulse/default.pa:
load-module module-alsa-sink device=”surround51″ channels=6 sink_name=sur51
Still, no surround sound. Then I reread my old post and realized that I needed to add the entire contents of .asoundrc to /etc/asound.conf as well to make the settings system wide.
I rebooted and got all 5 speakers to work. Thank God for old posts
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