No Speaker: Intro Music
DW: Welcome to the Ubuntu UK Podcast, you're greeted here by myself Daviey, Tony
TW: Hello
AP: Alan
DW: and Ciemon
CD: HelloSo, why am I here?
TW: Good question
AP: Well, about a year ago, or thereabouts, well actually probably longer ago than that on the Ubuntu UK LoCo team mailing list we've talked about having a podcast in the past and we've had a number of aborted attempts at making one
TW: ..and now we're having another one..
AP: .and now we're having another one which might actually result in some contentWe've got everything in place, an email address, and four microphones
TW: ..and a website..
AP: Yeah. I think that's enough isn't it?
TW: So Alan, you involved in the Ubuntu UK community?
AP: Yes.
TW: And Daviey you are?
DW: Yes, I am.
TW: Ciemon?
CD: Yeah, on the periphery.
AP: Tony, you're not are you?
TW: No, I have helped out with the Ubuntu UK stand at the Linux Expo
AP: Oh you did, yeah, that was good fun.
TW: Yeah, and I'm an Ubuntu user.And I'm quite happy to contribute to the discussion
DW: So what is this podcast going to bring us today?
TW: Brainstorm, what that's all about
DW: FOSDEM of course
TW: Yeah we've got a big package on FOSDEM
CD: Swindon's Ubuntu Demo Day in April
TW: And contributions from you lot.
DW: Sounds like a fun packed show
No Speaker: Bumper music
TW: Now Alan, you're involved in the Brainstorm Project, now what is it for a start?
AP: It's a website, http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com it was setup by some guys who work in the testing team for Ubuntu and it's been live for a couple of weeks now if that. It's modelled on some of the other idea pool and idea storm websites that other companies have had, I know Dell have had an Idea Storm site and I think Lenovo have had a kind of, more of a blog, to gather information from people from the public about various topics
TW: So this is for Ubuntu ideas?
AP: Well, yes it seems that way. It's "Ubuntu and related stuff" ideas. The idea is that a member of the public, a user or a potential user of Ubuntu can go to the brainstorm site and search for an existing idea that they may already have like they may want something improved in some way for example they might want the webcam support to be improved in Ubuntu in some particular way so they might search for their webcam and find that nobody else has suggested this and then they type a little bit of spiel about what they want. That goes into a queue with lots of others and other members of the public can go to the website and rate it up or down with little green or red arrows that they can rate up or down a bit like Digg
AP: Yeah, it's filling up with quite a lot of these ideas, there's about 3 or 4 thousand ideas in there at the momentThere are a lot of duplicates and we're trying to clear those up. I was recruited to be a moderator to help them clear out the duplicates.
TW: So anybody can go along, they don't have to be involved in Ubuntu, you don't have to have an Ubuntu login to submit ideas?
AP: No, if you're part of the testing team you probably have a login to the QA tracker, but for everyone else, you can just sign into the site http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com, register and start voting things up and down and start registering your own ideas as well.
TW: OK, so what do we think about this idea?
CD: Is it not too much? You see there are 3000 suggestions, I mean, are they going to be seriously looked at?
AP: Well the plan is that at the next developer summit which is in Prague in May I think it is. They are going to go through probably the highest rated ones over all time and the highest rated ones that month and so on and pick out some of these ideas and see if they have 'legs'.
CD: Should the guys be focusing on these new features when in launchpad there are _so_ _many_ bugs?
AP: Yeah, it's a good point. But some of the ideas are actually 'please pay attention to this bug' like a petition in a way to say 'please draw attention to this thing' and if you get lots of people rating it up there is an argument that quite a lot of people really do get impacted by that bug so perhaps we should pay more attention to that. Others are conceptual ideas others are difficult to categorise but some of them are quite hard to achieve. There's conceptual ideas like "make Ubuntu better" as an idea
DW: Vote down!
AP: ..or 'make it more like windows' or 'make it more like OSX' and some of those are very hard to achieve, you can't just say 'OK, I'll work on that' making it better than OSX or like Windows and some people would argue against it anyway and say 'I wish it _wasn't_ like that' so some of them are just hard to achieve.
TW: Can people not make feature requests through launchpad?
AP: There is a system called 'blueprints' in launchpad where you can write a specification - and that's the recommended way to do it, and in fact building up to the Ubuntu Developer Summit it's a good idea to start now registering blueprints in launchpad and requesting that they get discussed at UDS
DW: But the thing I find really good about brainstorm is that some things that you wouldn't consider a bug, you wouldn't consider a feature request or a blueprint. One I'm looking at now whilst I'm talking is "Do not install support for Palm OS devices by default". Now, to me that's a valid point. I don't own a Palm OS device why would I want support for it? But I wouldn't be able to consider that a bug, and I wouldn't really consider that a feature request. So this brainstorm is actually a really good release for them little niggles that you wouldn't be able to put somewhere else.
AP: Some people find it difficult filing bugs, reporting bugs whereas the free-thought way of just brain-dumping what you think straight onto a page in a website is easier for a lot of people. You can see the popularity of forums, you look at how popular the Ubuntu forums are compared with mailing lists and IRC and other methods, there clearly is a number of people who benefit from feeling that they can release their ideas.
TW: It's easy to go onto a website and click up or down, you've not got a huge commitment.
AP: It's actually quite good fun! It's quite good fun to sit there and scroll through. There was a bit of a problem when it first started in that the day it launched there were two ideas on the site created by the people who set the site up and then the URL got passed around and very quickly it ballooned and it went from 2 ideas to 10 to 100 in a short space of time, and those 10 or 100 were on the front page and because they were the first ones you saw and the only ones you saw if you first visited the site people started rating those up because they sounded like a good idea. And I'm actually guilty of creating one of the very early ones and it shows up as most popular on the site not because it is really popular but because it was one of the first ones to be created it's the one that lots of people have seen. Which is a bit of a shame, so they've tweaked the algorithm, so it doesn't show
DW: It shows the most popular ones today by default does it?
AP: Something like that, I think it shows most popular ideas this week or the most popular today.
TW: So how many plus-ratings has the top one got?
AP: What, today?
TW: Yeah
AP: A hundred or so
TW: So a fair number of people must be visiting and clicking
AP: Yeah, in one day it was on the front page of http://digg.com, front page of http://slashdot.org.org and the front page of http://wired.com and the server kind of collapsed in a bit of a heap, but the Canonical system admins who host, well, Canonical host and the system admins look after it moved it to another server I believe which seems to be coping pretty well.
TW: OK, and what are the top 3 ideas
DW: The top 3 ideas of all time.. "Fix suspend and hibernate", I don't know if anyone here notices that their laptops often break
AP: Yeah, that's a perennial problem
DW: It needs a lot of focus.
AP: It's fair to argue that if you were to talk to someone like Matthew Garrett about that I'm sure he'd go off in a rage about how difficult it is to just say 'lets fix that' because there are so many problems
DW: Yeah, OK, I've got an IBM laptop here when I press 'hibernate', put it in my bag, I thought it would be switched off. It wasn't. I would have thought 'this works in windows' so there must be some sort of standard because there's no specific drivers shipped with that.
TW: There are.
DW: Are there?
TW: That's the problem, having heard Matthew (Garrett) talk about this basically every single laptop does it in a slightly different way and every single manufacturer puts different software on the Windows install to make it work.
DW: And that's actually bundled on the Windows disc is it?
TW: It'll be on the manufacturers utilities, and on the pre-installed image.
AP: I think I recall very recently Matthew Garrett giving a talk (for those who don't know, Matthew Garrett is a member of the Ubuntu community and he's very knowledgeable about suspend and resume, ACPI and those related issues) I remember hearing a talk, actually watched a video, so I know it was him saying it that someone asked the question 'what should I do if I want suspend/resume' and the answer was 'if you want reliable suspend/resume don't use Linux'. Because it doesn't work - reliably. So I can see why people made that the number one thing on brainstorm.
TW: OK, what's the next one?
DW: The next one is actually by our co-presenter here Alan Pope,
AP: This is the one that sneaked in at the top.
DW: 'Provide a simple graphical interface to manage _any_ type of network connection'.
TW: OK, so that would be including VPNs, mobile connections..
AP: Anything/Everything.
TW: 3G?
AP: If you look at Network Manager, it can do wireless it can do wired networks and it can do VPN and I believe it can do dial up as well and with a bit of monkeying around you can probably get it to do 3G and I don't know if you can but there's also the connection over bluetooth to a mobile phone, you know there's all kinds of different ways of connecting to the internet, or connecting to a network, and it would be lovely if there was just a one "thing", like, I hate to say it compared with Windows where there is "Network Places", OK underneath all of that there is loads of drivers and applets and rubbish, but there's one place you go to to dial-up, networking, maybe not bluetooth, but most of it is in one place and I think we need a "Make my network work" button, kind of thing.
DW: Does it bug anyone else you can't press 'refresh' to actually rescan the wireless networks in the area? You have to wait _so_ long in fact sometimes it's quicker to just press 'reboot'
AP: If you have a fast machine, yes.
DW: It does take an _age_ for it to refresh.
AP: Or you can kill network manager.
DW: Doesn't work
AP: Really?
TW: If you kill the GUI the back end is still running.
AP: No I meant kill 'sudo kilall NetworkManager '
DW: I'm pretty sure that .. oh? I just do killall nm-applet.
AP: No, you need to kill the NetworkManager process
TW: There's a little bit on the back end that actually does the scanning, although I can't say I have had that particular problem, it seems to come up quite quickly for me
AP: Or I just go and have a cup of tea and wait until the wireless network is back.
DW: Exactly, reboot!
AP: Well, yeah you could do that
TW: Ubuntu - helping tea drinkers everywhere! And the third one?
DW: Power management - 'Ubuntu needs to go green. Powertop and lesswatts.org and other tools..
AP: _fewer_ watts.. Sorry. It's just a knee-jerk reaction when someone says 'lesswatts', it's _fewer_ watts.
DW: OK, sorry, I thought I misread it then! Now I've completely lost my place. Thank you Alan.
TW: So it's all about improving the power management
DW: Yeah, basically it's what all green hippies want worldwide they want less power coming out of Linux.
TW: Well it sounds good with the increasing electricity costs I wouldn't mind some of that myself.
AP: I saw a funky fan that attaches onto the heat sink of a CPU in a computer recently. It's driven by some kind of convection motor and so the heat generated by the north bridge or the CPU or something causes this little motor to spin and causes the fan to go round and blow air so you don't need electricity , and it seemed kind of like a good idea and then when you think 'hang on that's a little 5v fan that draws next to no current, what about the CPU underneath it!' that's drawing like 50W!
DW: But look at it this way you could use that electricity to run all the LEDs inside your case, and have a side panel
AP: Your 'bling bling' desktop.
TW: OK, I think that's brainstorm then
No Speaker: Bumper music
AP: So you guys went to FOSDEM then?
TW: Yep, a couple of weekends ago, Dave and I went off with a group from Hampshire Linux User Group mostly and had a good time.
AP: What's FOSDEM then?
TW: FOSDEM is the Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting.
CD: Developers?
TW: Yeah, primarily developers although increasingly they talk about the related usability and accessibility things.
DW: I wouldn't say it was just for developers either although it's called FOSDEM. A lot of the presentations were 'this is a cool features that are coming, this is what's out there'. So a lot of the things weren't saying "you can help us develop, by doing this, this is what we need". They're saying "hey guys, this is what we've got, what do you think?"
TW: Certainly some of the bigger talks as well. But one of the unique things is - and we talk a little bit about this in the package - that there are developer rooms where lots of different projects have either a stream of talks or they will have developers talking to each other deciding how to go forward on a particular project. So in the bigger rooms yes it's very much 'here is out project' and doing a presentation to a couple of thousand geeks. Whereas in the smaller rooms it is a little bit more hardcore, there's coders talking about some of the software design choices
AP: So when is it, where is it and how often is it run?
TW: It's every year, has been for about 8 years. It's usually the last weekend in February and it's been in the University Libre De Brusselles, in brusselles. As far as I'm aware, ever since it started.
AP: And you did some recording of interviews while you were there?
TW: Yeah, we took along our little recorder and we spoke to a few people. Not people who are necessarily directly involved in Ubuntu but people who we think listeners to the podcast might be interested in.
AP: OK, shall we have a listen to that
TW: So we're here on the train to FOSDEM, the Eurostar, we've just come out of the tunnel, in France right now. I'm here with Dave and Adrian. I've been to FOSDEM, this is my third one I think. But Dave this is your first
DW: Yes, very much so.
TW: So as a FOSDEM-virgin, what are your hopes for the weekend?
DW: I must say looking at this years schedule compared to last year there's a lot more interesting talks, I don't really know where to start, there's so many clashing.
TW: So Adrian, what advice do you have for Dave as a first-time FOSDEM go-er. You've been for 2 or 3
AB: Yes this will be the third FOSDEM! Be up early for sandwiches! They get a bit busy, it's a mad rush.
TW: What about handling the talks, how do you choose what to go to?
AB: A dartboard is the traditional way to choose or roulette wheel. I've eliminated all the ones I'm not interested in and so that leaves me a few left
TW: It is quite tricky because there's 10 consecutive tracks at least of talks and they go from the gigantic through to the developer rooms where you might have 20 people in, and you can't always tell in advance whether a talk is going to be given well or poorly. Sometimes you end up stuck in a room with the talk that turns out to be not what you thought it was going to be in the first place and the speaker is between you and the door, there's not much you can do to get out of it other than smile sweetly and try not to look too conspicuous when you leave
AB: I would say it's useful to early on in the talk to figure out if you want to stay or not and in particular what level it's aimed at whether it's an overview, introductory talk or an advanced talk which generally you're interested in one or the other. If it's the wrong sort, leave early.
TW: Some of the bigger talks tend to be less in-depth and less technical so the ones in the larger auditorium is more of an overview
DW: So what you're telling me is that there's some in-depth talks, and some easy talks?
TW: Yeah, the technical complexity is inversely proportional to the size of the room.
DW: Hi, it's Dave here and I'm just joining Andrew Waffaa from the Bongo Project. He's the lead developer, do you just want to say hello?
AW: Hi. Just a quick point. I am not actually the lead developer, I am core contributor. My lead developer would be slightly miffed with me if I did not say so.Basically Bongo is a light weight email and calendering solution, its nice small footprint memory wise, there is no Java stack behind it, so we don't have Tomcat or anything like that. Completely open source, GPLv2 licenced, standards compliant, providing IMAP POP3 email and SMTP as well as CalDav calender client. So hopefully users of any desktop, any OS, should be able to interface with us quite happily and quite pleasantly if the want to use a fat client or use a lovely browser.
DW: It's got a little bit of a history behind it because it came originally from a closed source product, didn't it, from Novell?
AW: Yes, that's correct. Our roots trace back many many years, possibly around twenty years with Novell Nims, subsequently Novell NetMail. Novell then about three or fours ago open sourced chunks of NetMail into the Hula project, then for commercial reasons they had to sell off the Hula project to one of their partners, and just before that happened, we thought, 'we like what we have got here, we will continue it on', and created the Bongo project.
DW: One thing that particularly interests me, when the Hula project came to an end, how did your project get off the ground, how did you meet, how did you actually get the project started?
AW: The bulk of the guys actually worked on Hula, as the project was, and over the last few months of the Hula project the Novell guys just weren't available for what ever reason and there was discussions both on IRC and on mailing lists and off line about the progress of things, how to keep things going.There were several people that were championing forking and 'lets just do it our own way' kind of thing. We didn't just want to do it nonchalantly and go 'sod you Novell, thank you very much, we are going with the code' sort of thing, because we anted to keep things amicable and what not.We held a debate, effectively, and a vote, and the consensus was indeed to fork. So we tried to do it as politically polite, I think, as we could. Novell, in all fairness, were quite happy with that. They were quite pleasant and pleased to see that were continuing it as a completely open source project, and community based.
DW: And you have got quite a wide range of distros that you produce packages for as well, I saw in your lightening talk yesterday.
AW: Yea. A lot of the RPM based distros are supported thanks to Suse's build service. We support packages for up to 10.0 right the way through to the enterprise edition. We support Fedora 6 to 8, RedHat Enterprise 5, Centos 5. We have got Debian packages for Etch out there. Bongo is in Debian Experimental, and hopefully it will be in Fedora 9 as well from their own repositories.We aim to provide Ubuntu packages as well shortly. Unfortunately I am not very good with Debian based packages, and those that are are quite busy at the moment. It is coming in the short term.
DW: You are looking for developers, I assume?
AW: Yes. Developer help would be great, but also, testers. Anyone that wants to try it out, file a bug report, jump in IRC, forums, mailing list, and say 'look I have got a problem etc, can you help?'. We will do our best to help. It could be a new item that we have not encountered because we don't use it in a certain way, or whatever else. That would be great. If you are using it with a specific mail client, or calender client or whatever else, let us know how you get on. All feedback is welcome, but yea, some more fingers on the keyboards would be great.
DW: And it's a mixture of programming languages, isn't it. There's C, there's Python, there's JavaScript. Presumably you don't need to be an expert in everything to get involved and to help out?
AW: No, not at all, and if you want to learn programming in any of those particular languages, you know, I am sure we have got a million and one tasks that a beginner could help out with.So there are lots of jobs that need doing, some are complex, some are quite light weight. So, yea.
DW: In regards to the interface, you said there was a new version. Your interface is called Dragonfly, isn't it?
AW: Yep, the current one is called Drag only
DW: What new features will the new interface bring?
AW: Apart from a nice new look, we are hoping to be able to keep the code base a lot more maintainable from a developer point of view, but also potentially make it modular and plugable, so if you have got a new feature that you would like to have included, then you should be able to add that in without too much hassle.
DW: And where can people find out more, the website?
AW: It's http://bongo-project.org and there are links there to our forums, our planet, IRC channel, its #bongo on oftc.net
DW: Lovely. I must say thank you for your time. Thank you very much Andrew.
AW: Thank you.
TW: Hi. We're here with Becky Hogge from the Open Rights Group. Hi Becky.
BH: Hi.
TW: What is the Open Rights Group?
BH: OK, so the Open Rights Group is a grass-roots digital rights organisation.So, just to translate that a little bit.What that means is, we speak out every time consumer rights, civil rights or human rights are effected by either the poor regulation or the poor implementation of <unknown> works, digital technology.So we're talking about issues like privacy, data protection, data retention, copyright, intellectual property, software patents, electronic voting.These are all issues where we've been active on in the last 2½ years.We were founded in 2005 and we're sort of special because we exist because a thousand people thought we should.In 2005 a thousand individuals said that they would fund us to £5 a month each.So we're a press clearing house, we talk to ministers, we also talk to people who are concerned about their digital rights and show them what they can do to assert those rights.
TW: So there's quite a lot in common with the free software community, although it's not something that's inherently tied to it.
BH: That's right, I think without the free software community digital rights wouldn't be as high profile as they are.We're here in FOSDEM and it's the first time I've been to FOSDEM and I've just met so many engaged individuals from all over Europe.I heard a Danish group say today that privacy and freedom are the killer act of free software and I think that's right.
TW: So you're a UK based group but you also deal a lot with Europe and...
BH: This is really my first sortie into European legislation right now.Back on 2006 the Open Right Group ran a campaign against the extension of copyright term on sound recordings and we managed to, with the help of a lot of other groups and think tanks, persuade the government, what free software people will know all along, which is that copyright doesn't work like that.You don't extend the term retrospectively.That's not what it's for, it's about incentivising people to create work and Elvis Presley ain't goin' to record another track in 1958 if we extend the term now.So we, with the help of lots of other groups, win that argument in the UK and last week the European Commission announced they were going to look into this issue and propose legislation to extend term.At which point a booked a train to Brussels, FOSDEM was going on.I thought I'm going to come down to Brussels and see what's going on, see what's happening and organise a campaign to let the European Commission what we let the UK know on 2006.So in collaboration with the Electronic Frontier Foundations based here in Europe and also the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, we've developed a WEB site that we're going to launch sometime in the middle of next week, but that I'm soft launching here at FOSDEM this weekend.It's called http://soundcopyright.eu and what it asks, it asks the European Commission, the Parliament and the Council of Ministers, the whole EU shebang to keep copyright policies sound.Not just on sound recordings but, on all copyright policies.To make sure policies are made on evidence and all stake holders views are taken into account, not just the recording industry, who are desperate, desperate, desperate to keep hold of the Beatles back catalogue and ??? ??? on that and the minority of sound recordings that are still making money now.So I'm taking to people here, I'm practising my schoolgirl French, talking to some French activists.I'm talking to some very patient German activists in English and asking them to take a look at the WEB site, sign the partition and get their networks involved in this 'cause we've won the debate in the UK.But digital rights organisations across Europe car about these issues and we want to work in a kind of distributive but collective fashion to raise awareness about this over the coming months as the commission proposals go through the process.
TW: So the big counter argument is the Cliff Richard argument, you know, these old singers that live so long that they made recordings when they were eighteen that are now coming out of copyright and it's there pension. Sir Paul McCartney is going to need a few extra quid in the next few years isn't he.
BH: (Laughter)That's a very good point and yes that is a big argument.In fact what the pro term extension lobby have done is very clever they're putting forward the performers, the people that hold performance rights in this music first.So if you made a track in 1958 and if that track is still being played on the radio, if that track is still being used in movies or in advertising then you're likely to be OK.You're likely to be financially pretty well off.The minority of tracks that are still doing that, they are the ones that are going to get the benefit from this, the people that have been earning money from the records and that's unlikely to be the poor starving session musician that we here about.Because that poor starving session musician is poor and starving because for the last fifty years the music that he made in 1958 hasn't been giving the returns because maybe people don't like it, or maybe it was too experimental for 1958 so what ever.So that argument is a little bogus.The other thing, I think it's great that the European Parliament and governments want to support poor artists.I mean heaven knows if you choose to make you're life out of art, out of culture production it's not an easy life, it's even harder than say being a campaigner.It's not Foie gras and limousines for everybody right.However using the copyright system to support those artists, it's the wrong mechanism to use.How about reform the pension scheme.Most of us contribute to our pensions during our working lives.To say that Cliff Richards needs a pension through the copyright system, that just doesn't make sense to me.
TW: So I don't know if you want to talk about the news that came out last week, about the ISPs being held criminally responsible.
BH: Recommendation 39 of the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property was that,Internet service providers and rights holder groups need to cooperate in order to stop illicit file sharing on line and if they don't the government should step in in 2008, basically now.So we've seen a couple of proposals come out.We've seen what's called a three strikes proposal.So you have a contract with an Internet Service Provider and the rights holder finds a Britney Spears track on a P2P file sharing network and grabs a few IP addresses of people who have uploaded that track.Finds out who's assigned that IP address, writes to the ISP who's assigned that IP address.Look this IP address upload content, we want you to stop them because they're breaking your terms and conditions.Because most peoples terms and conditions with their ISP say you can't do this, infringe copyright.So the ISP says OK great, looks in their files, OK that's you.Alright I'm going to post you a letter, or I think it might be an email.It may be a letter which says. Oh. We've had this information.If you don't stop we'll switch of your internet connection.They'll do that three times.After they've sent you the third letter they'll say sorry you're cut of the internet.So I have problems with that.
TW: I want to say, thankfully there's a lot of ISPs in our country.
BH: That's right and if the government was serious about that I say just cut off peoples electricity, because it's much harder to get... You see that would really stop people from file sharing.Because it's much harder to get another electricity provider.Why doesn't the government do that ? Because it's disproportionate.Electricity is a universal service and the government has invested a lot of money in making internet for everybody, in putting it's government services on line.Businesses put their services on line.We even let criminals receive letters in jail.If you cut of someones internet connection, more and more you're going to be cutting off a life line and doing that, it just appears to us incredibly disproportionate.
TW: I'd also like to ask, on one final note, if people like what you're doing. How can they help?
BH: Yes. Thank you very much. Such a bad sales person.If you remember rightly I said the open rights group is funded by individual UK citizens.If you're not funding us, please do.The WEB site is http://openrightsgroup.org/support You can find out how to give us you're fiver a month.You can volunteer for us. You can join, we have wiki http://openrightsgroup.org/wiki go there, there's a volunteer section you can find out how to join in.You can join in even if you are not in London.Also you can join the discuss list, come and tell us about your ideas, about your rights.There's a way to join the discuss list on the front page of our WEB site, which again http://openrightsgroup.orgThanks so much for letting me speak to you today.
TW: Thank you goodbye.
DW: Hi, its's Dave Walker here from the Ubuntu UK LoCo, and I am here with Jan Claeys from the Ubuntu Belgian LoCo. He's the point of contact, and he is going to tell us a bit about his LoCo.
JC: Yea. We have a booth here, and there have been a lot of people who are interested in Ubuntu. We also sold a bit of posters, freedom posters, <UNKNOWN> posters in Dutch, and we had a couple of people who had problems with wireless.Many people talking have been talking with people from Canonical who were here also.
DW: It's been a busy weekend. You have had lots of people come by?
JC: Friday night beer event. It was three thirty when I left.
DW: How long has the LoCo been running in Belgium?
JC: Exactly two years, because we started two years ago at FOSDEM
DW: ...and is it a big team?
JC: For <UNKNOWN> it is big, but we have people who the core group, and then if we do local activities in cities <UNKNOWN> everywhere we have people that we can ask to come there to help. We do a lot of fairs, computer fairs, sales fairs where they have second hand computers and CDR's, cheap stuff.
DW: We have similar sorts of fairs.
JC: When you go to such fairs where we also talk to normal people about Ubuntu. We can get people from <UNKNOWN> not far away from there to help us.The core group is maybe twenty, or maximum thirty people.
DW: One of the things that has just occurred to me is that we have tables for things like Open Suse and Fedora, but they also have tracks. They have rooms where the speakers are always talking about...
JC: The dev rooms.
DW: The dev rooms, yea. There isn't any such things for Ubuntu. I wonder if that's something that would be of interest in future years?
JC: We could try to do something like that. We would have to talk to the Ubuntu developers first, if they are interested. Most of the Ubuntu developers are in the Debian dev room, the Gnome dev room, the KDE dev roomI know that a lot of the people who organise FOSDEM are also in the LoCo team of Ubuntu and I know from them there are already not enough dev rooms. So if we want a dev room, we would have to share with someone
DW: I heard that you had some quite large meets as release parties for Gutsy.
JC: I don't know how many there were in the largest release party because I wasn't there. We had like fifty people where I went, which is actually sort of a LUG.A LUG that tries to go to the people who are just beginning with Linux, so most of the people will see Ubuntu. There some others who use other distros, so it's Linux chat.We also did a small release party. There was one in Brussels also, I think, and one in Liège I think.They are cooperating for the largest one in Belgium, which for Hardy will be the only one. They cooperated with the Dutch one for getting speakers.
DW: So it's not just beer, there are speakers and talks and things?
JC: This year there are four speakers, I think, but otherwise there were some people where they can get help. There will just be some fun, of course, drinks and ...
DW: Yep, that's really good stuff. I must say thank you very much for your time, and it sounds like your LoCo is doing really well, so thank you. Thank you very much.
JC: Thank you.
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AP: Coming up in April, there is an event in ...
CD: Swindon
AP: Swindon
CD: Yup
AP: At the? Where is it?Museum of Computing in the city on the 26th April.
AP: ..and what is it, what's the event?
CD: It's an Ubuntu Demo Day.
AP: What's the plan? What are they doing?
CD: I think the plan is just to get people to see Ubuntu. Lots of advertising going on in the town, local press, an advert in Linux Format which is good. Really just making the community aware of Ubuntu. I think they're planning to have a big hall filled with monitors, screencasts running which obviously you know about Al.
AP: Vaguely, I'm aware of their work.
CD: Covering all aspects, everything from the absolute beginner. So you don't feel that "it's Linux, I wouldn't possibly know where to start".
AP: It's supposed to be family oriented isn't it, in some way?
CD: Yeah one of the organisers, Diane has gone out of her way to make sure that people can bring their families, and leave Dad to 'nerd out' whilst they go and do things in and around the town.
DW: So who has actually been to this Museum of Computing?
AP: I haven't.
DW: I've thought about it, it's a little bit out of my way
CD: It's about an hour from my place.
AP: So is it as expected, lots of glass boxes with computers in them?
CD: Yeah, everything, loads and loads of old stuff.
AP: You really can 'nerd out'.
TW: So who is organising it? Ubuntu UK LoCo?
AP: It's the Museum of Computing in Swindon
TW: They're actually doing the organising
CD: Yep.
AP: They've asked for help on the Ubuntu-UK LoCo mailing list, they've asked for help, and I know a few people have volunteered to go along and help out.
CD: Hopefully some of the local LUGs will pitch in. There's a couple of groups in and around the area, Wiltshire LUG and Wiltshire Computer User Group.
AP: Really?So when is that again?
AP: It's on Saturday the 26th of April and it goes from 10AM until 4PM at the Museum of Computing in Swindon
TW: ..and is there a website?There is, it's http://www.museum-of-computing.org.uk
TW: Marvellous, thanks very much Dave.
AP: Awesome
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AP: If you've got any feedback for us then we'd love to hear it, I'll give you the details in just a sec. We'd also be interested in getting any recorded material. If you've got any tips or reviews or maybe a rant you can get it down as short as possible, no more than a few minutes and let us have a copy of it. Our email address is podcast@ubuntu-uk.org, or you can come into our IRC channel which is on the freenode IRC network and it's #ubuntu-uk.
TW: Yeah, that sounds good, it'd be great to find out how people are using Ubuntu, what they think of it, if you can record that on your system and send it in to us that would be great.
DW: Or even just by email would be fine.
TW: Yeah, absolutely.
AP: If audio is a bit too 'new media' for you then feel free to send us plain text emails we'll maybe read them out on the show or answer them on the show.
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AP: It's worth pointing out that we do actually make this whole podcast using Ubuntu. The website is hosted on Ubuntu. The graphics for the website were created in Inkscape on Ubuntu.
TW: By Dave Murphy, thanks Dave.
AP: Oh we haven't mentioned his name yet.
DW: Name dropping..
DW: schwuk on irc, thanks very much for your hard work
AP: Yeah, it's fantastic, I love the new logo. Well, I say _new_ logo, we never had one previously did we? Because we didn't exist!
TW: Previous revisions
AP: ..you don't want to see them.
DW: He turned it around in about 3 days.
TW: Hard work, much appreciated.
AP: Yeah, so everything is done in Ubuntu and we're happy about that. It's hosted on Ubuntu as well, and hosted for free, we got a free virtual server from Bitfolk
TW: Thank you bitfolk!
AP: So the next episode, when is that?
TW: Well, we're hoping it's going to be in a couple of weeks time. But we shall see.
AP: Yeah, if we get loads of feedback to podcast@ubuntu-uk.org saying
CD: Don't bother.
AP: Don't bother making any more of these.
TW: Thanks for your time
DW: Close the door
TW: That was the worst half hour of my life. If we get lots of feedback and suggestions then we'll be able to put a show together quite quickly but keep watching the RSS feed, check the website
AP: The website is?The website is http://podcast.ubuntu-uk.org/The email address which Alan's already mentioned, send your tips, suggestions, any feedback to podcast@ubuntu-uk.org
DW: Links for everything discussed in the show are of course available on our website.
TW: So that about wraps it up thanks everybody for listening, see you next time
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