Ubuntu 8.04 the party continues.

As promised I’ve posted more pictures of the New Mexico Hardy Heron release party.

It’s really been a great year, we started with just two of us and now we have over 30 active members, official status, and even have 2 Ubuntu official members with more on the waiting list. I’m real proud of what we have accomplished with the LoCo and can’t wait to see what we do next year. If Friday nights party was any indication it’s going to be a good year.

Click here to see what we did at our party…..

New Mexico Hardy Party Huge success

Hardy Release Party was a huge success we had over 25 people show up from all walks of life to celebrate the release of our favorite Linux distribution here is just a few pictures of the event.

Good food, lots of talks, lots of installs. I made 35 disk and they were all gone. W00T!

Great info on Hardy

lifehacker

If you’ve flirted with the idea of switching your desktop operating system to Linux but never took the leap, the time is now.

Is it taking to long to download Hardy RC, then check this out

Ubuntu Tutorials has a great way for you to speed things up.

Ubuntu is ready for the desktop, has been for a while.

So I’m reading the comments from this article on the CompterWorld’s web site.  Most people leaving comments get it, Ubuntu is so ready for the desktop, but some just don’t get it. Look I have Ubuntu installed on so many systems it’s not even funny. Desktops, laptops, and servers and yes a few things took me a little work but not any more work than windows did. I haven’t even looked at Hardy yet and everyone says this is the most compatible  operating system yet for Ubuntu when it comes to hardware. Can the FUD really be that bad, are the people leavening bad comments even using Hardy, which by the way is still just beta.

Here is the truth no FUD. WindowsXP great OS, lots of software, lots of hardware support. You can do just about anything you need it to do, but it will cost you. Vista will take the latest computer technology to get the most out of it and there have been driver issues, and it will cost you.

Ubuntu 7.10 great OS, lots of software, lots of hardware support. You can do just about anything you need it to do, but it is free. Ubuntu 8.04 will run with all it’s bells and whistles on much less than Vista needs, lots of new drivers, and it is free.

Today’s Ubuntu Community Counsel meetng

So I finally felt confidant enough to apply for Ubuntu Membership and added my name to the list last month. Yesterday like a bolt from the blue it was announced that a Community Counsel meeting would take place on the 15th at 11:00 UTC that’s 5:00am in good ol’ New Mexico. So with less than 24 hours notice I was able to let my Local LoCo know what was up ( A big thanks goes to Eric Krieger for alerting me ). This morning I was up bright and early had my cheering section in attendance ( again thanks to Eric ,Chris, and to Mike for wishing me well, good friends you all are).

Needless to say I and the other applicants got to be there when the whole process of how you obtain membership was changed, lucky us. Looks like we will have to wait till the region we live in has it’s new regional community council meeting. I personally think that regional Community Councils are a great idea and as Eric put it this morning Ubuntu is just experiencing “growing pains” and this type of evolution was bound to happen, but it sure would have been nice to know before my 4:30am wake up call.

Ubuntu is growing in leaps and bounds and more people than ever are applying for membership, LoCo’s are growing too. So the fact that we need Regional Community Councils and LoCo Community Councils to help us govern all that is going on is such a good sign I can’t help but feel a real since of accomplishment.

It just looks like I got to wait a little longer for membership.

New Mexico LoCo plans to Party Hardy.

This years Ubuntu 8.04 release party should be a good one for the New Mexico Team. This will be our second release party as a LoCo and the first one as an official loCo. We really have grown over the last year and continue to bring as many projects to our community as we can handle.

This year we are doing the release party in style. Here in New Mexico we have this great little chain of cafe’s called Flying Star. Just check out what the inside of this place looks like.

We also rented the meeting room so we can do demos, pass out CD’s, and with luck recruit a few new members. Check out the fancy meeting room.

So if you’re in Albuquerque, New Mexico on the 25th you better stop on by.

Where: Flying Star — Acequia De Corrales, at 10700 Corrales Road
When: Friday 4/25/08 at 6:30pm until 9:00pm click here for directions.
Check out the location here

A huge thanks to Eric Krieger, for getting all this organized.

The Unexpected (good) side effect of using Ubuntu

I am a Ubuntu believer, as one of those total converts for almost two years now Ubuntu has answered my every computing need. Even Ubuntu games are coming of age and I find myself not even using Wine but sticking to the native Linux games. Sure I knew the power of Ubuntu and run many of the critical applications my company relies on, on that very platform. Then something happened that I never expected. Slowly but surely as I involved myself with the Ubuntu community I started learning more about the world getting to know cultures and people from everywhere. I started this blog and then joined the Planet Ubuntu Users in doing so I met gouki I’m pretty sure from Portugal this guy runs the Planet Ubuntu Users, love his website it’s simple but fantastic. One day my post on the planet stopped working while trouble shooting this I found out that a few others post had stopped working as well one of those was Isabelle Duchatelle from France, was this person some kind of smart her post have taught me a thing or two, after a few emails back in forth we found the issue and where back on the planet as usual. Soon after I starting getting heavily involved in my local Ubuntu Users group and while asking some questions here and there I had some correspondence with the legendary Jono Bacon from the United Kingdom a man I found who is always willing to help or turn you on to a band you never heard of, for a guy like me who loves music that alone is worth talking him. Because of Ubuntu I got involved with Software Freedom Day, Document Freedom Day, and Open Discussion Day. All of which has introduced me to people from Nigeria, Malaysia, India, South America, and a host of other countries. What has happened with me on the local level is just as amazing my Local Ubuntu Users Group in New Mexico has become an official group and have started some pretty successful projects of our own. I’ve also gotten involved with the US Teams and met some great people like Aaron Toponce. So what’s the side effect you say? Well, when I used Windows I was in a cocoon plugging away day after day I sure never cared about a Bill Gates blog like I do a Mark Shuttleworth blog, and while I love other Linux distributions, ( I live in New Mexico so there is a special place in my heart for Gentoo ), Ubuntu has brought me into a community, a community of people that really do want to make computing free and open. A community that treats the newbie as respectfully as the seasoned users. I’ve learned so much in the past couple of years and this year I’ll be presenting at Ubuntu Live (hey guys in charge of Ubuntu Live, think we can get that registration price down a little) where I’ll be able to shake hands and say thank you to the community I’ve come to love. So I’d say a pretty good side effect for a guy who two years ago had no idea where Nigeria was.

Speaking at Ubuntu Live

What a good Friday, I just found out this morning I’ll be presenting at this years Ubuntu Live. I’ll be talking about the practical use of open source software. I’m very exited about the Ubuntu Live presentation. This month I presented at HDI 2008, but that audience was manly call center managers, Help Desk technicians, and had few if any network administrators in attendance. Ubuntu Live promises to be a much more technical group of people including developers of some of the software I use with my organization every day. I’ll primarily be focusing on nagios and network monitoring in general and I’d love to hear some of your experiences that I could include in my presentation. Hope to see you in Portland, Oregon July 21-22, 2008.

Hot on the heels of HDI is Ubuntu Live

Hot on the heels of my HDI 2008 Conference presentation, which I think went really good (but then again I think I might be a little biased) I was notified today that my presentation proposal for Ubuntu Live was put on the wait list. This is pretty cool, I mean it was not picked out right, but I’m pretty new at all this and I take it as a good sign, so wish me luck and I hope I get in at a later time. Now the trick is how do I convince the people I work for that I need to be in Portland, Oregon this June.