I was looking forward to hearing about the joggler alarm clock, I recently removed the screen from mine and put a photo behind the glass, works surprising well :-P.

I ran various netbook remixes on my jogger, but in the end didn’t think it was a good fit. Although it worked/ran fine its too hard to use, it’s all too small. Although I do have very big hands**.

I tried Android, hard work to get it up and running and when I did it would not find the wifi. Shame as I think android would be much better. I’ll come back to it when I have more time, maybe they’ll have done a bit more work on it by then.

Maybe you could talk about tablets, there are a load of new Android ones coming out, Morgan, and Next even have some – yes the clothes people! Anyway would be interested to hear your thoughts….. and if you dont, I will stop listen to the podcast…or leave it somehow…

Any off to file some bugs,

Keep up the good work

*well he’s alright, but I head recently that people don’t like change, you know.
**inserts “wink, wink, nudge, nudge” here.

However, even though this is a city of close to half a million people I don’t think there is anyone who will do this sort of desktop office worker training for Linux. You can take courses locally on Linux server administration, and there are companies using Linux in their products and infrastructure, but for normal office use you’re on your own.

Asking the IT department to handle that isn’t realistic. They haven’t got the manpower, the experience, or the time for it because it isn’t something that they do now for Windows. If your network connection doesn’t work, the IT department will fix it, but if you can’t figure out how to schedule a meeting in Outlook that isn’t the IT department’s problem.

Developing training courses takes a lot of time and money. Training companies aren’t going to invest money into this without significant demand, and it is difficult to develop demand without this sort of ecosphere. A lot of what proprietary software companies do is to have their marketing reps go out and organize these sorts of things. Microsoft, Adobe, AutoCAD, and other large companies all put a lot of effort into this.

Canonical has training partners set up, but they appear to be oriented towards training IT departments to set up and maintain the systems. That is something that is essential, but it doesn’t address the sort of training that a normal office worker could use. Keep in mind that we’re not talking about how to set up servers. We’re talking about how to use OpenOffice, send e-mails, or copy files.

Training is part of the boring but necessary business development effort that has to be done, and it takes a long time for the investment in it to pay off. For any company that wants to compete in the office desktop market however, it is something that has to be done.

It seems to me that the latest LTS of Ubuntu should always be the public face of the Ubuntu distribution. However, now that 10.10 is out, it seems to be all but forgotten with every tutorial, blog entry, and articles regarding 10.04 abrubtly end on 10/9/10 (or before.) I personally consider the distros between LTS releases to be feature development releases not ready for the normal needs of production centered users. This is very disheartening as user who likes to get comfortable with his OS for a bit. I don’t start using a new distro until it has been out for at least 2 months before installing it so that the majority of significant bug fixes can find their way into the updates. The Ubuntu releas model just seems to be a programmer/developer centric way of doing things and not an end user friendly way. Why can’t the main website feature the LTS on the splash screen with a button somehwere saying, “Help Develop Ubuntu. Get on the cutting edge here” or something similar. As an end user primarily concerned with being productive on my PC, I find this constant change a bit fatiguing. Indeed it leaves me with the feeling that my current OS has just been discarded since new packages for applications (firefox, libre office, latest software center) only seem to be developed for the lastest and not for the long term…repeat….long term support edition.