nixternal

No you geeks, that wasn’t the beginning of a math equation, that is when the next release of Kubuntu will be out. Yes that’s right, Kubuntu! Everyone else shows off the brownage, except for a select few of us, we prefer the blue.

Some of the new things you can expect with Kubuntu 7.10 are KDE 3.5.7, Amarok 1.4.7, Dolphin (new default KDE file manager - Konqueror is still there, don’t worry), digiKam 0.9.2, maybe some Strigi goodness, a new GDebi KDE front end for easy .deb file installation, and so much more. If you are interested in seeing how the changes have been moving along, feel free to read over the following release notes of the development releases:

• Tribe 1
• Tribe 2
• Tribe 3
• Tribe 4
• Tribe 5
• Beta

You know, honestly the release of 7.10 doesn’t excite me much anymore, what does excite me is the day they open up the repos for developers to start working on 8.04. Then a week or so later, it is dist-upgrade time. Hard for me to stay on a “stable” system, even though I have yet to really run into destruction with development snapshots (”knock on wood”).

Anyways, if you are in the Chicago land area on October 21, 2007 between the hours of 10am and 4pm, we will be holding a 7.10 release party as well as an install fest. Where you ask? At the College of DuPage in the SRC building, room 1544. If you are interested, keep an eye out on our broken Ubuntu Chicago website, or take a look at the CoDLUG website. If you can’t wait, this weekend at the University of Illinois at Chicago, I will be giving a KDE 4 talk. Interested in showing up to the talks and the install fest? Take a look at the Install Fest website.

UBUNTU!

Only two Linux distributions participated in our Battle of the Distros competition. The two competitors were Red Hat Linux and Ubuntu Linux. Representatives from both distributions had an opportunity to give a fifteen minute presentation on why their distribution is best. While both distributions had its advantages, the audience chose Ubuntu Linux as the overall best distribution.

Earlier this year the University of Illinois at Chicago’s ACM group put on a very nice “Open Source in the Business” conference. The conference, called Flourish, went off without a hitch and had plenty of people show up. Last I heard roughly 200 people showed up, which isn’t bad at all, considering they held it on Easter weekend, yes the one Easter weekend where all religions who celebrate it had it at the same time. Not to bad.

Ubuntu vs. Red Hat. It was a great opportunity to show off Ubuntu as well as Red Hat (Fedora) as two amazing operating systems. Tom “spot” Callaway from Red Hat give his part about Red Hat and did an amazing job. He showed off some coolness with Fedora that made me actually like the way Gnome looked. What started out as a competition really turned into a pretty cool little talk between the two distros. Ubuntu Chicago gave their talk, after a five minute episode of “Ubuntu doesn’t like this LCD.” Tom fired up Fedora and right away it was up an rocking on the LCD. OUCH! So, to prove our point, we simply asked, “Who here is using Ubuntu or one of its projects?” Pretty much everyone raised their hand. And out of all of them people who raised their hand, I can comfortably say Xubuntu was the majority. Xfce and Xubuntu are pretty big here in Chicago among the developers it seems. Our other point was a funny really. We googled “Ubuntu sucks” and “Red Hat Sucks”, and Google showed that Red Hat had roughly 400,000 more hits for the search topic Thanks to Tom of course and to the Ubuntu Chicago guys who kicked arse. Truthfully, Tom was outnumbered, but I feel that overall his presentation(s) were excellent, and Tom if you just happen to read this, Ubuntu Chicago would love to call it a tie and share the award with you. Even though we offer the battle as a tie, don’t think we won’t rub it in every chance we get when you are around

Also, who took pictures of Tom and I in a deep, loving, embrace? It was a show of Linux force If you have those pictures, because I seen the flash bulbs (so 1970s) going off, send them my way or link me to them please. You can view pictures as well as the talks via Google Video by visiting the Flourish Media page.

Not chicken! ShyCon

That’s right, the Chicago community is currently planning a conference to be held sometime in 2007 for free software enthusiasts. Right now it is in the beginning stages and hopefully we can make this a reality. We are in the process of spamming the Chicago mailing lists and hopefully soon we will have a site and mailing list up for this. So if you are in Chicago and are interested in helping plan such a feat, or have some great ideas on what you would like to see, please stop by #chicon on IRC at chat.freenode.net and say hi. Thanks everyone!

P.S.  November 2007 is the first date thrown out as a time line.

That’s right, Ubuntu Chicago invaded this weekends Barcamp Chicago event in style.

From left to right: Francisco (aka OmniColos), Freddie (Admiral_Chicago), Eddie (posingaspopular), Rich (nixternal), and Jim (j1mc).

Or for the image above, in terms of operating systems, from left to right you have: Ubuntu (tablet pc), Kubuntu, Kubuntu, Kubuntu, and Xubuntu! And the install fest, I seen plenty of Ubuntu and Kubuntu booting up on peoples laptops.

Plenty of excellent talks, cool people, good pizza, great beer, and a patio that was about to collapse! There should be some great video posted this week as well as more images, so I will keep you informed.

Also, great news. The University of Illinois Chicago are planning a bigger Flourish Conference for 2008. This past conference had Chris DiBona, Peter Brown, and other great speakers, and for 2008, there are 2 people they are really interested in getting, Mark Shuttleworth, and/or Jono Bacon. We would love to have Peter Brown from the FSF back again, but I also mentioned that Mako Hill is a killer free software speaker and they are interested as well. The UIC ACM will have a definite date set this week, so more information will be made available.

Thanks to everyone I hung out with yesterday and met yesterday. Thanks for the beer and food, and for the good times! Here is to Barcamp Chicago 2008!