Many of you know Akshat Jain, who goes by ssj6akshat on IRC and frequents the #omg!ubuntu! and #novacut channels. He lives in rural India, is learning programming, and just turned 14 today. Happy birthday, Akshat!
Amazingly, Akshat has done so much for Novacut already with an 8 year old desktop with 512MBs of RAM. But he can’t play HD video with his current computer, and certainly can’t edit HD video. So we’re going to buy Akshat a new laptop.
If anyone would like to help out, we have a crowdfunding page setup just for Akshat. Not only would you be helping a budding member of the Ubuntu community, you would also be helping Novacut, as Akshat truly is one of Novacut’s greatest assets.
We’ve scrapped together enough cash that we will get Akshat a laptop either way, but with your help, we can get Akshat a better laptop. Thanks to Manish Sinha’s research, it seems the most cost effective route would be to buy a laptop from Dell India. But in Akshat’s perfect world, he would get a laptop with Ubuntu pre-installed, and that laptop would be the new System76 Bonobo Professional. The big downside to this is if we ship a laptop from the United States, we would have to pay import duties (which will be about 35%, if I’m not mistaken). But the plus side is we could add some other goodies to Akshat’s care package and load up his hard drive with HD video for testing, like all the video we shot at UDS-N. If anyone has advice on the best route to take, please let us know in the comments!
Happy birthday, Akshat! Thanks for helping Novacut so much!