Just a quick thank you to the crew over at System76 for the flyers and the “Powered by Ubuntu” stickers for the Ubuntu Chicago Gutsy Release Fest and the CoDLUG Install Fest. If you are in the Chicagoland area, please stop on by. Bring a computer and lets install Gutsy!
Here is the flyer!
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.
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!
Yet Another Open Week Post…
Tomorrow, Friday, April 27th, I will be giving a talk for the Ubuntu Open Week on the Ubuntu Documentation Project. On Saturday, April 28th, I will be giving another talk on Creating an Ubuntu Local Community Team. Now prior to, in between, and after my talks there are many other amazing talks. Check out https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOpenWeek for more information on the talks. If you see a talk that you missed, don’t worry, they are publishing the logs and I heard they are going to extend some of the talks into next week for a second go round. I look forward to seeing you all there.
Here is what you do to come see the talks (via IRC):
The Flourish Conference, put on by the University of Illinois at Chicago, was a great success. Today had many interesting speakers such as Chris DiBona from Google, Peter Brown from the Free Software Foundation, John Quigley from Cleversafe, Tom Callaway from Red Hat, John Doppke from IBM and others. A special thanks goes out to UIC members such as Samir Faci and Thomas Sakkos. They did an amazing job for their first ever Flourish Open Source business conference.
I would also like to thank all of the Ubuntu Chicago crowd who came out, and when I mean came out, they came out. We knew of 8 of us for sure, but upon arriving the Ubuntu area was flooded with members and visitors. I feel bad for Fedora as they had only 1 guy with some CDs, shirts, hats, and one of the “One Laptop Per Child” laptops. He was pretty much sitting in the den of Ubuntu. Battle of the Distros went off with a hitch, which somehow ended up with me and Tom Callaway from Red Hat/Fedora hugging and showing that Ubuntu and Fedora can play nice together! Tom great hug by the way Special thanks to Freddy and Chad for a great Ubuntu talk, Matthew for letting us use his laptop (even though he had some of the ugliest wallpapers I have ever seen) to show off Ubuntu. During the battle of the distros, Freddy asked the crowd how many were using Ubuntu, and I would approximate 90% of the hands went into the air. I am almost willing to bet the other 5 or so that didn’t raise their hand were running either Windows or Mac OS X. Oh, and then there was Tom running Fedora of course.
I learned a ton today. I got to see the latest Fedora Core 7 update and I must say they are on the ball. The artwork is simply wonderful and the fingerprint scanner to log in was awesome. So if you have a laptop with the fingerprint scanner, you will be asked to type in your password, or scan your finger. How cool is that? Tom also did a talk on virtualization in Linux and I was impressed big time. His talk was brilliant. He talked about VMWare, Xen, KVM, and Parallels. It was awesome to see how Xen uses its own Linux kernel and the hypervisor to communicate directly with the hardware. Good stuff.
There should be images soon as well as video of pieces of the event that I will eventually link to. Before I go though, I want to leave you with what is the quote of the day that occurred during the battle of the distros, by who else, ME!
“I am not a fan of battle of the distros for a couple of reasons. First we have media outlets such as Slashdot, Digg, and OSNews that do enough by spreading FUD and starting flamewars between the different distros. I don’t care which release you use, as long as it is a free and open source solution and you like it. I would rather see the distributions coming together and collaborating more instead of constantly arguing who is the best and who isn’t.”
That isn’t spot on, but it is damn close. I was also quoted for responding to the Fedora presentation when they stated that they are based off of Red Hat which has more than 10 years under its belt, and my response was “and Ubuntu is two and half, and ummm, 8 million plus users, and constantly rated number one!” I had to get a little fun in there. All in all great day and a lot of fun. Hopefully next year we can get some famous Ubuntu speaker (*cough*Mark*cough*) to give a talk
Oh, one more quote that I thought was great from a Xubuntu user, wow there are a lot of Xubuntu users in Chicago, and mostly on brand new hardware. Anyways, when talking about desktop environments, and GNOME, KDE, Xfce, Fluxbox and what not and who was the best, his response was, “same cat, different skin. You can only skin it so many ways, it is still the same damn thing.” So true!
“Flourish - to grow luxuriantly, to thrive, to achieve success, to reach a height of development or influence.”
Flourish! will be held April 6th and 7th at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Some of the speakers include:
The venue includes a lot of great speakers as noted above as well as some intermingling time, a hack-a-thon, and a Battle of the Distros (so far Ubuntu vs. Linspire vs. Fedora/Red Hat). So if you are in the Chicagoland area these 2 days, stop on by and say hello. I will be hanging out with the Ubuntu Chicago and the Chicago GLUG crowds, as well as participating in the Battle of the Distros (I am throwing Kubuntu into that mix by the way).
