With San Francisco LinuxWorld Expo barely having finished, the Ubuntu camp have picked up their bags and headed across town for the world-famous Ubucon.
Thanks to the brilliant directions (courtesy of SVLUG, the Silicon Valley Linux Users’ Group) everyone made it safely to their destination: The Googleplex HQ in the heart of Mountain View, Californa, west-coast USA.
Upon arrival thirsty people grabbed a snack and drinks, Google apparently have both Pepsi and Coke on tap amongst their other unlimited treats for staff. After refreshing themselves serious disscusion ensued, with those present all keen to see the new T-shirts. The floor apparently turned into “a mosh pit down there, when they opened the boxes up”, described one exhilarated attendee. Ubuntu is about equality and there were shapes size for both genders, it was pointed out that they were “T-shirts for human beings”! On the front they have our circular logo over the word Ubuntu, on a light-tan coloured material and around the back, the question “Do you Ubuntu?”. I think the people that didn’t get one are secretly holding out for real Goobuntu t-shirts, perhaps next year?
We got lots more reports, “Google HQ was big and kind of confusing” and everyone was told that they had to stay “within the blue area on the map” in case bad things happened. Luckily, Google lived up to their do no evil slogan and along the way there were a few sneaked glimpses of the hotly-rumoured Goobuntu, Google’s internal version of the Ubuntu system. For the choice of desktop, KDE (aka blue) and GNOME (aka brown) desktops on Goobuntu are apparently fairly well balanced, each with about a 50/50 split. Although alot of people outside Google engineering use something else …other than GNU/Linux.
Aswell as the Jim’s of LTSP fame, Alex Martelli and Anna Ravenscroft, authors of the Python Cookbook were in attendance. They were to be blown away when it was revealed to them that the very latest version of Python 2.5rc was already residing in Ubuntu. Sitting there ready for the release, in the development version (codenamed edgy eft)!
At Ubucon, scheduling turned out to be fairly relaxed. Owing to a delayed-arrival, the initial State of Ubuntu immediately got shuffled from its Friday morning slot to the end of Saturday, to be replaced by organiser John Mark introducing the proceedings! After that, two streams were running most of the time, topics being split between a Beginner track and a more Advanced one.
On Friday morning there began a session on Ubuntu Power Management, nicked name “Fix my Laptop, Please”, always a good challenge for veteran Ubunteros wishing to flex their skills and locate a few more laptop bugs for extermination. Over at the advanced side, the collaboration tools that we use, Launchpad and our from-the-ground-up bug tracker, Malone, got introduced to the audience with two of the Ubuntu community doing a tag-team effort. The Launchpad team are presently working on “wikifying the whole system so that wiki-power can get used at every step.
When the clock ticked toward lunchtime, Jordan Mantha (aka LaserJock) noted that the Google food was top-notch and much better than at the Paris summit held 3 months ago. We can believe it, the list goes on; BBQ chicken and Salmon topped off with pizza, snacks, drinks and accompanied by a live local band playing.
After lunch, talk turned to What do non-Geeks want, starting from the current Blueprint specification of ideas. Owing to mostly non-geeks showing up, some interesting insights came out, particularly relating to documentation and installation. It turned out that alot of people didn’t realise that when you boot up the Desktop CD, Ubuntu isn’t actually installed.
Many people didn’t know that a LiveCD (such as the Ubuntu Desktop CD) runs without touching the hard-disk of the computer, just running in the computers temporary memory and will be lost with a reboot. From discussion, it turned out that a large amount of the requested feature ideas are items already being worked on for Edgy. This was good outcome, showing that where Ubuntu is concentrating development effort closely matches users’ desires.
The Ubuntu community’s thanks go to John Mark Walker (who incidently was the conference organiser for LWE the week before) for getting the arrangements together, along with Google’s Chris and Leslie for the venue. The publishers O’Reilly and No Starch Press both sent donations of their lastest Ubuntu-related books. From Prentice Hall, the editor of the Offical Ubuntu Book, Debra Williams, finally got to meet some of the members of the community who had prepared and contributed parts of the book and the main authors went out to lunch the night before aswell.
The day went on, Friday evening turned into nightime, but still the revelling continued with large about of beer flowing around, with some interesting results. “So, what’s Ubuntu?” is apparently now a chat-up line. Our chief technician Matt Zimmerman managed to fine-tune his vocal chords for a duet with the bar’s delightfully elegant singer—Matt seemed to be enjoying himself.
We’re hopefully looking forward to seeing Ubucon at Google HQ again next year and especially one of those Goobuntu t-shirts (hint, hint!).
