This laptop belongs to a good friend and she loved it when I told her that we can give a new life to her laptop using GNU/Linux. This is an Toshiba Satellite Sro 435CDS built around 12 years ago. Specs? Pentium 120, 32 MB ram, 4 GB Hard. Yes this laptop has been upgrade a few years ago to highest supported specs.
Not having a - functional - CD ROM nor a USB or even a lan card, we choose a DSL as our distro and used a USB external hard mount to write it on the hard.
With the help of my linux guru Irix (his weblog in Persian) we started a virtual machine on the host OS (debian), attached this 4GB hard as a main hard disk and mounted DSL’s iso and installed it on the hard. It installed smoothly but spit out this error during GRUB installation:
/dev/sdb does not have any corresponding BIOS drive.
remounting the external hard on the main Debian box and issuing
#grub-install –root-directory=/media/disk –recheck –no-floppy /dev/sdb
and then
#grub-install –root-directory=/media/disk –no-floppy /dev/sdb
solved this problem and installed grub successfully on it. We inserted our 16bit PCMCIA NIC in the laptop and after screwing the hard disk to it, rebooted the laptop. First boot attempt was unsuccessful but after changing the Kernel and Init parameters in the grub, everything went fine (hda instead of sda; DSL is based on 2.4 linux kernel).
DSL identified our NIC card and DHCP worked on the machine and our laptop was alive once more!
What a lovely box 
We felt being in a time machine. A 1997 laptop with Debian Woody on it! After installing apt (dpkg-restore) and a dist-upgrade, we have a old old laptop, alive with DSL / Debian Sarge. I have to find a usage for this box now
- Photos are taken by Irix/Abbas [FreeMind.ir (Persian)]
FOSS
This animation is really stunning. Very impressive and says a lot.
<object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/ehKA8vi2EbE&hl=pl&fs=1″></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/ehKA8vi2EbE&hl=pl&fs=1″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>
Parvin Ardalan pointed me to this animation and asked my idea about it. I really like the animation but had one criticism: Everybody is running from the problems. The signatures are helping people to escape bad situations and not solving the problems or changing the situation.
Parvin agreed and added one more point: All the problematic situations are happening in the 3rd world. It is not showing the problems in the western counties.
I do not know if I have to agree with her or not about this one. The first one (prison case) can happen everywhere but .. to some degree she is right cause the video is showing obvious Arabs and Chinese but no Americans or Israelis (say in Abu Gharib or Palestine).
Activists, international, media, NGOs
I’ve got one of those junk forwarding emails subjected “best photos of 2008″. Oh.. The photos were a collection of Iran’s photos. Some of them were political and some of them were about culture and nature. I think none of them speaks like this one:
government, media
After the blockage of my first weblog in Iran (around 2 years ago), I’ve started writing in English and also started a new Persian blog at the FreeKeyboard.net . I used to have 5000 unique visitors in my first blog and after a while, the second one also got this momentum and used to have around 3000 daily visitors a couple of months ago.
The first censorship was very difficult for me. After it whoever (including myself) who typed the URL (www.jadi.net those days), would see an annoying page.
I’ve lost around 80% of my internal readers. The second time happened a couple of months ago. This time I just continued writing in my blog based on the hope that more and more people are learning to bypass this silly censorship.
After two months, have a look at my weblogs stats:
Lovely chart! The censorship has no effect of the number of my visitors. I’m not happy just because I still have readers but I’m very glad to see that the majority of Iranian people are able to bypass regimes filtering.
Filtering is always silly. The regime may improve it’s technical abilities and may spend more and more money on censorship. It may even succeed in preventing people from reading about “other” ideas but filtering will still remain a silly act, because one day people will read whatever they want. And the loosed will be the person who is afraid of this.
Dear Censor! If you know that people will not accept your ideas if they read “other” ideas, it’s time to update yourself.
censorship, internet
Today my wife (Leila) and I went to a coffeeshop with a friend. In Iran and specially Tehran, coffeeshops are considered as a “meeting” place. I mean if I want to go somewhere with my girlfriend, coffeeshops are one of a few choices where I will be able to spend a couple of hours without disturbance of police or the government.
In a coffee shop, you can go and sit with your girl, spend a couple of hours and pay around 5′000 Tomans for each person (that is around 5USD). Practically you are not paying for the coffee or the ice cream. You are paying for a secure time with your friend! Coffee shop owners pays the police and they will let you have a free talk with your gf/bf.
But this time a new thing happened. We were there for a Hot chocolate after the daily work at the office but suddenly the worried owner came to our table and said:
- Moral police is comming! please check your Hijab!
The girls were fixed their scarfs. Same thing happened for the other tables too. Not 30 seconds later, two polices came in. They talked with the owner for about 5 minutes and then left. When leaving the coffee shop we found out that they’ve issued a penalty bill/ticket for this coffeeshop because of serving Bad Hijabs!
islam, moral police
From today I’m going to use Ecto as a 
blogging tool. I’ve found out that because of my domain bei ng blocked in Iran, I’m not writing that much in my english blog. It is difficult for me to use TOR (which is great but slow) to login into my blog and update it.
Today I’ve found a solution. Adding a SSL certificate (obviously uncertified) to my blog and using Ecto to update it. I will be able to write offline and post later. Ok… This might only be a test for a tool but I’m going to use it as a motivator. Hope it helps me to change this weblog from a Bad News Center to what I want it to be: A view of an insider to his everyday life.
mac
Ecotourism, Medical tourism and educational tourism are well known phrase nowadays. But nobody talks about the BandWidthTourism (aka BWtourism). OK! Maybe it is my invention
The word BWTourism came to my brain last week while I was spending a lazy time in a hotel room in Warsaw with a 6640kbps internet. I was going to spend the afternoon in the hotel room so I’ve started killing time on the Net.
I am from a country in which
- The minister of the communication has stated that the 128kbps is the limit for the home users (and I’m paying 27USD for it monthly)
- The internet is HIGHLY filtered/blocked. Many sites are filtered. This means if I type www.Youtube.com, www.flickr.com, www.facebook.com, … I will see a page saying “This page is blocked based on the law”.
- The internet is slow. This not only slows the Net but also changes it’s concept. Youtube is not a video source for me. It is a site with many videos which I get one of them in an email via a link. I have to click on it and wait 4 times the length of the video to load. Then I have to rewind the video and watch it. With this speed, it is impossible to search the videos and browse them. Or you can not just wander in the Facebook. You have to bypass the filtering, slowly accept your friends and upload a photo if you are lucky enough not to get a timeout.
Considering all the above, I coined the phrase Bandwidth Tourism when I was using a 6Mbps connection. I was able to open my own site without bypassing the Net, I was able to search for “U2 concert in warsaw” and watch all the videos or login into the Facebook and upload a couple of photos and search for friends or even test some of it’s apps.
I will be a TWTourism advocate from now on for my friends. I will tell them to take some time and experience the Net as it should be. Just like a person who takes time to visit the nature in it’s real state or going to a country to visit / feel it’s historical sites. I will dedicate part of my next travel to Bandwidth Tourism.
Here is the version which published in Iranian newspapers:
There is something fishy in this photo! Are they wearing trousers under their skirts ?! Google delivers the original photo:
Woww! So the problem is pornographic legs and that RED flag. You know? China is one of Iran’s best allies and Iran -being an pro Islam state these days- is one of the most anti-communism counties!
censorship, islam, media
My previous post was about V for Vendetta and music being illegal in that future UK society and it’s incident similarity to Iran today I was searching for the lyrics of Florent Pagny’s Ma liberté de penser but the first search result was blocked!
I’ve checked other sites and found out that many of the lyric sites are filtered in Iran, including:
No need to say that the www.Youtube.com is also filtered here but we can access it trough ca.youtube.com, uk.youtube.com and …
I’ve started reading V for Vendetta yesterday. On Page 27 it says:
[V]- But tell me, Evey, do you enjoy music
“I suppose so,” she replied, not entirely sure exactly what sort of music he had in mind. But the question brought back memories of her childhood; after all there was so much more music then. Jazz, reggae, rock’n'rool, world music… all gone now, and nothing left to be heard except the “approved” music they play on the government-controlled radio stations.
V For Vendetta, P. 27.
Wow… Cool… This is what we have in Iran Am I living in a Future UK?
I'm Jadi, an Iranian blogger from inside Iran. I'm blocked in my own country so I've decided to write in English for outsiders (