Informatics student invited to speak at world's largest technology festival
At the recent Campus Party Europe in London, Sam Nazarko, an undergraduate student in the Department of Informatics at King’s, was invited to speak about RaspBMC, a Linux distribution created by Sam for the Raspberry Pi (a credit card sized computer created by the Raspberry Pi Foundation with the aim of making programmable computers cheap and accessible). Sam also gave a workshop about Linux at the event.
Campus Party is the world’s largest technology festival and aims to bring together thousands of like-minded geeks to promote science, creativity, innovation and free software. This year, Campus Party Europe was held at the O2, London from the 2nd to the 7th September and attracted over 5,000 visitors. Sam Nazarko spoke about his RaspBMC project and the topic of free software, discussing the challenges of developing for new and upcoming platforms such as Raspberry Pi. See a video of his talk here.
Sam said that it was “fantastic to see Campus Party encourage the development and use of free software”. Sam also gave an introductory workshop to Linux, teaching basics such as updating packages and using the command line, remarking that “with just a quick primer it is easy to show new users that Linux does not have to be daunting and can be used on the desktop”.
Sam, who is only 19, has developed two Linux distributions: Crystalbuntu and RaspBMC, which bring XBMC (a free and open source software media player and entertainment hub) to the Apple TV and Raspberry Pi respectively. Sam also authored the book “Raspberry Pi Media Center” and regularly develops embedded Linux systems for a wide variety of bespoke use cases. Sam is very interested in virtualisation and cloud computing and a great advocate of Linux, which he feels will have a great role in the evolution in computing.
RaspBMC is now the 2nd most popular Linux distribution for Raspberry Pi (after the official education distribution) and has been installed over 1 million times. Contact Sam for further information on this work (sam.nazarko@kcl.ac.uk) or check out www.raspbmc.com.