Ah, good fun. I am finally doing stuff I thoroughly enjoy doing.

Naturally, it involves Linux And it has two fronts going – both linked together.

Next month (July), I go back into the seminars circuit, as promised a few months back. And I start with The Exocore Professional Linux Administrator Workshop – a workshop aimed at professional corporate sysadmins whose organisations are deploying Linux.

This workshop isn’t your usual “let’s ride the Linux wave”, “what is Linux” kind of seminar.

For one, it includes virtually zero philosophy and ideology. This is pure practical stuff – the kind of stuff my team and I excel at.

While most people these days know me more for my corporate Linux advocacy, I am as comfortable (if not more so) with sharing knowledge with people. After all, that is what I used to be known for, and the stuff I enjoy doing the most – sharing knowledge, getting people productive. That is what COMversations was all about and that is what all my Linux articles in PCQ have been all about.

If all goes well, this workshop will go on the road later this year, to be held in key cities around India.

Linked to this workshop is our annual Linux distribution. For years, the PCQuest Linux Initiative has been the Linux distribution that all others are measured against. Few people realised that the entire PCQLI was actually created and run by us – and this includes the highly customised Linux distributions (known to people as “PCQ Linux”).

We haven’t heard from PCQuest about this year’s issue, and there is a solid need for an updated distribution, so we are working on it.

The distro (provisionally named “Exocore Linux” or “exolinux”, but codenamed “that thingy” by Shanu is based on RedHat Linux 7.3, but RedHat will instantly disown it after they see the changes we have made. Already the betas are something we can crow about, and things are just getting better every day.

“That thingy” will debut at the EPLAWS – in fact, it is being built for exactly this reason – to support the workshop. So if you look at the course contents, you’ll get a hint at the numerous goodies and changes participants will encounter.

Will this CD set ever be distributed by PCQuest? We don’t know yet. You’ll have to check with the PCQuest Editor.

In other news – Gopi has successfully invaded the USA, where he will be speaking at the IPv6 Deployment Summit 2002, before scrambling back to India to get ready for his sessions at the EPLAWS.

On the music front, we have silence again. I am honestly way too busy to do anything serious right now. I did fix the stuff my dog had chewed up, and spent a few minutes jamming by myself this evening, but it isn’t quite as much fun alone.

On the family front – my parents-in-law are visiting, which means way too much good food! Tomorrow, i.e. Sunday, we get my mother-in-law’s patented mutton biryani. Yum! (And if you are reading this from the USA, and are related to me – eat your heart out, kids