linuxNUS Turns 4!

Posted on Oct 7 by Ruiwen

Four years ago to this day, 7 Oct 2005, linuxNUS was officially born. That is to day, of course, that we were officially recognised as a Student Special Interest Group. Of course, that doesn’t mean that we weren’t around before that. linuxNUS first came into existence on 6 Jul 2005, as our Yahoo! Group, which still serves as our primary mailing list till this day. Before 7 Oct though, we were a loosely organised, but nontheless motivate bunch, determined to bring the value and benefit of open source software to NUS.

We’ve come a long way since then, of course. From a single humble mailing list, we then set up our main site, linuxNUS.org, our wiki - Opensource@NUS, forums and our IRC channel, #linuxnus on irc.freenode,net (which you can join by clicking “Chat” at the top of this page).  We’ve ridden the recent social wave as well, turning up on sites such as Facebook and Twitter!

In this time, we’ve never stopped trying to promote, advocate and educate people about the use of open source software, organising activities that hopefully brought value to all involved. We organised Installfests, workshops and Hackfests, and even brought in external speakers to share their pet projects with us,  such as Mario Behling on LXDE, Ole Tange on OpenMoko, and Harish Mallipeddi on developing Facebook applications with Django. linuxNUS also produces a podcast, where we talk about stuff related to open source in Singapore. The linuxNUS Podcast has covered groups and events like the Free and Open Source Alliance of Singapore (FOSA), Software Freedom Day 09, and we even managed to squeeze in an interview with Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat, when he was in Singapore.

It’s been a blast for us so far, and for those of you reading who have been part of activities, we really hope that you enjoyed the experience, and more importantly, gained something from it.

With that, we leave you know with a little something to mark our journey through the years