In this interview Daniel Bray (Lupine) of the Ubuntu Florida LoCo Team explains how he was able to use Ubuntu instead of Microsoft to complete his college degree. In an era when almost all schools in the United States require that its students use either Microsoft or Mac based technical solutions, Bray finds a way to exercise his freedom of choice and use Free and Open Source software to complete his degree.

Question: Can you please tell me a little about yourself?

Daniel Bray: My name is Daniel Bray, I’m 35, I live in Rockeldge, Florida with my wife Kristyn. Currently, I’m working full time for Harris as a Systems Engineer. I’m the team lead for a great group of guys, and our primary responsibilities are taking care of Health First, Inc. (a health care provider for Brevard County).

Question: What school did you attend? What is your major?

Daniel Bray: UCF. B.S. in Information Systems Technology (December 2008) M.S. in Digital Forensics (in progress)

Question: Did you attend classes online or in a classroom setting? If both what was the ratio? Was having the option to do both important and why?

Daniel Bray: The entire B.S. degree was online, as is the M.S. degree. With my work schedule, a 24/7/365 hospital environment, attending classes online is the only option that fits into my schedule.

Question: How many of your classes “required” that you use Microsoft applications to complete your assignments? What were the challenges you faced being told you had to use something other than Open Source Software to complete your classes?

Daniel Bray: It’s hard to put an exact number the classes. Probably about 90% of them stated they “required” MS Office. However, after questioning the professor, they all accepted PDF format for my papers, so I just used LibreOffice to export out. Other requirements were the ability to view proprietary PowerPoint files, which again, LibreOffice took care of for me. Probably the biggest thing that jumped out at me, is that the web portal that UCF uses, to this date, still states that I’m running an unsupported OS.

Question: Since you chose to use Ubuntu in school what were the biggest obstacles you faced as a user and how did you over come them?

Daniel Bray: Obstacles? What are those? Ubuntu removes obstacles, it doesn’t create them. Seriously, other than some annoyances of disheartening “Supported OS” documentation (see link above), I can not recall any thing that I could label as an obstacle. True, every now and then I needed to use Wine to check out a Win only based forensic tool, but that was never too difficult to setup and get running. Other tools like VirtualBox was a must have when doing network related examinations (studying Wireshark captures). There was never really an obstacle, just a different way of doing things. I felt like it was just all part of the learning process.

Question: Since you graduated what field are you currently employed in? Can you tell readers the technologies you use at work? Does this differ from what you use at home if so how? Why?

Daniel Bray: I am employed in the same field I graduated in, which is Information Technology. At work we use a vast variety of technologies. I primarily stick to my Ubuntu laptop to get my day to day work done. I bring it back and forth to home, so that I can keep a familiar and efficient environment with me at all times. A lot of the development work I do, web apps, etc. all follow me wherever I go.

Question: Since you currently work as a Systems Engineer and developer, what applications have you developed? Are they Web based? What languages the applications written in and what tools are needed. What are some of the security challenges you faced during development?

Daniel Bray: For my work based applications, I pretty much stick to the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack. However, I’ve had to tackle various tasks with scripts written in Perl, Bash, and Python. I have a pretty firm hold on what security requirements are required for the organization, so I was easily able to accommodate those needs into my web apps. For example, all web-based authentication is accomplished using a TLS secured LDAP connection. This is all seamless, and occurs in the background.

Another work related tool I use on a daily basis, pyconnmgr, is written completely in Python, and with a Glade frontend. This is a huge time saver for me, as I constantly have to SSH, SFTP, SMB, FTP into various servers throughout the day.

Question: What do you want other students faced with similar difficulties to understand about this process and your continued success with using Free and Open Source Software via Ubuntu as a solution.

Daniel Bray: Don’t believe anything, until you try it for yourself. Make smart, educated choices, and you will usually be happy with the results. You can always have a safety net like VirtualBox standing by, which I had to use a few times for various “network intrusion assignments”, so there really is nothing to fear. Most things are going web based, and FireFox is FireFox, so if the web app says that it supports that, then just ignore the incorrectly labeled “Required OS”.

Question: Is there anything else that I haven’t asked you about your success story that you would like to mention now?

Daniel Bray: A success story, me? I wouldn’t go that far. Honestly, I don’t even look at using Ubuntu as being different anymore. To me, it’s just a way of life. I mean, at this point, I think it would be more difficult to start using proprietary OSes and software. And why would I want to create problems for myself. Some people tell me they “just use Windows because it’s easier”. Well, after using Ubuntu for a few years now, I have the exact same argument. I just use Ubuntu because it’s easier.

Many thanks to Daniel Bray and Chris Crisafulli for making this interview possible.

For more info on how you can participate in and contribute to Ubuntu, visit: http://www.ubuntu.com/community/participate.

Originally Posted here on 2011-09-27

In this interview with Strategic Architect for Ubuntu One, Stuart Langridge, I kick off the first of a series of articles about Ubuntu One.

Today, we’ll learn a little more about Langridge and his involvement with Ubuntu One and a brief overview along with future plans for this personal cloud service.

Naturally we can’t cover all the ends and outs of Ubuntu One in one interview, so hopefully we’ll be able to highlight one feature per article over the next few weeks. We’ll also begin to cover how the community can get involved in the process.

Amber Graner: Stuart what is your role at Canonical?

Stuart Langridge: I’m the strategic architect for Ubuntu One, and I run the Futures team. What this means is that I’m responsible for working out what Ubuntu One should do, working with partners and developers and the community to make that happen, and talking about it to people. I also run the App Developer Programme, which is a new thing to help people add the personal cloud to their applications and to bring Ubuntu One to new places.

Amber Graner: How long have you been involved with Free and Open Source Software and what made you get involved? When and how did you get involved with Ubuntu?

Stuart Langridge: At university in the mid-90s, I found myself for the first time using Unix machines (HP and Sun), and then I discovered that I could do the same things on my own machine, first with Minix, then Slackware, then Debian. I gradually grew to want the power that my machine gave me and to love the concept of open source, but also to want a machine which didn’t make me be super-technical every day just to get that; it’s nice to not have to, even if you can. At almost exactly the same time, the first release of Ubuntu came about, and I never looked back.

Amber Graner: As one of the lead developers for Ubuntu One can you tell readers what Ubuntu One (U1) is?

Stuart Langridge: The website’s got a good description here: Ubuntu One is the personal cloud that brings your digital life together, so you can enjoy your content, your way, wherever you are. With our suite of cloud services including storage, sync, sharing and streaming – you have immediate access to your music collection, favorite photos, videos, important documents and more, at any time and from any device.

Amber Graner: What do you believe the biggest advantage Ubuntu One offers end users? Why would a user want to choose U1 over dropbox, Amazon or similar services?

Stuart Langridge: Ubuntu One is a whole personal cloud. Most of the other services don’t encompass as much: file sync OR music streaming OR being integrated into your desktop OR apps that can live on desktop and web and mobile and share data, but not all of them.

Amber Graner: In addition storage solutions offered, tomboy note and automatic file syncing what else should users know about U1?

Stuart Langridge: The thing I personally find most useful with Ubuntu One is music streaming; I uploaded all my music into the personal cloud and now it’s all available to me to play whenever I want. I never have to "sync" my phone, plug a cable in, any of that. It’s really handy! I also publish files a lot; if I want to show someone a picture or something, I just tell Ubuntu One to publish it and that gives me a URL for it that I can send to others. Publishing’s easy — I’ve already added most of the folders with stuff that I care about (Pictures, Documents, and so forth) to U1 so that that stuff’s available everywhere to me, which has saved me on a number of occasions where I don’t have my laptop but was able to grab something from my phone or someone else’s web browser.

Amber Graner: How can users use Banshee and U1 to manage their music needs?

Stuart Langridge: Banshee’s got some interesting ways to organise your music; its automatic scoring gives you a way of working out what you *actually* listen to a lot, and creating playlists. It’s also where I buy music; the Ubuntu One music store being built-in to Banshee means that I’ll fairly often just buy songs on a whim, which is handy; instant gratification! I’d love to see closer integration between Banshee and U1 music streaming; at the moment they’re separate but complementary, and it’d be great if they worked closer together. This seems like a great project for someone to hack on as part of the app dev program 🙂

Amber Graner: What are the plans for U1 for 11.10 and how can the community help? What can non-developers do to help with U1? What do you need from developers?

Stuart Langridge: What I’d love to hear from developers is ideas and how they want to work on them. I’ve got a good understanding of the Ubuntu One APIs (and am trying to gradually document them at https://one.ubuntu.com/developer ) and I’d love to chat to people about their ideas for how they can make their apps better with Ubuntu One, or what cool apps you can build if you have syncing and data and music capabilities built in.

Thanks Stuart and I look forward to learning more about Ubuntu One and sharing it with the community. More information about how to get involved with Ubuntu One can be found on both the Ubuntu One website and wiki page.

Originally Posted here on 2011-09-20