Ubuntu Open Week – Day 1 Session Reviews and More

[originally posted on ubuntu-user.com You-In-Ubuntu Blog]

Ubuntu Open Week – Lucid Lynx, kicked off this week in the syncopated rhythm of the 6 month cadence that Ubuntu Users have come to march and tap their keyboards too. Ubuntu Open Week serves to drum up enthusiasm, encouragement, and education resources for users, contributors and developers alike.

Today’s band of merry music makers consisted of the Jorge Casto, David Planella, Daniel Holbach, Stuart Langridge, Dustin Kirkland and Mike Basinger. However, the melody of instruction and information that was performed today would not have sounded nearly as great had it not been for the talents of Nathan Handler and Chris Johnson who have been instrumental in getting Classbot written and implemented for use during classes that are offered in #ubuntu-classroom and #ubuntu-classroom-chat on Freenode.net. That’s not all though, joining to chorus is the maintainers and developers of Lernid. Lernid is a tool that makes connecting to online learning events such as UbuntuOpenWeek simple, easy and fun. Lernid gets you immersed in the content quickly and hassle free.

And now today’s session summaries.

Today’s session kicked off the and Introduction to Open Week, and a general Open Week and Ubuntu question and answer session. While Jono wasn’t able to make it his awesome team of horseman took the reins and and welcomed the community to Ubuntu Open and and answered questions with humor and insight kicking off what I am sure will an informative and instructive week. There were some great questions and the excited tone and enthusiasm lasted throughout out all the sessions today.

Up next was Stuart Langridge with an Introduction to Ubuntu One. The buzz surrounding Ubuntu One this cycle has been the Ubuntu One music store, however, it is more than just the music store. The Ubuntu One wiki page introduces Ubuntu One this way: “Ubuntu One is a suite of online services from Canonical.The service enables users to store and sync files online and between computers and share files and folders with others using file synchronization. Unlike the traditional storage application and service, what sets Ubuntu One apart is additional features like the integration with other services. Ubuntu One offers integration with Evolution for syncing contacts and with Tomboy for notes due to the access to the local CouchDB instance. Further possibilities include the capability of editing the contacts, as well as the Tomboy notes, online via the Ubuntu One Web interface.”

Following Ubuntu One, was the Social From the Start session, Jorge Castro stepped in and did a great job of discussing Social from the Start. The Lucid Lynx Technical Overview had the following to say about Social From The Start– “We now feature built-in integration with Twitter, identi.ca, Facebook, and other social networks with the MeMenu in the panel, which is built upon the Gwibber project, which has a completely new, more reliable backend built on top of desktopcouch. Gwibber now also supports a multi-column view for monitoring multiple feeds simultaneously.”

Dustin Kirkland followed with a session on Byobu. Dustin used screenbin and conducted a shared byobu session over in EC2. According to Launchpad Byobu is described as – “Byobu is a Japanese term for decorative, multi-panel screens that serve as folding room dividers. As an open source project, Byobu is an elegant enhancement of the otherwise functional, plain, practical GNU Screen. Byobu includes an enhanced profile and configuration utilities for the GNU screen window manager, such as toggle-able system status notifications.” Dustin’s session went smoothly and Dustin was able to demonstrate how effect and easy byobu could be. There was a lot of interaction and questions during this session as well.

In the last session of the day, Mike Basinger an informative session on Finding Help in Ubuntu. This session was about how to assist new users find community based support for Ubuntu Linux. It covered where to find help, how to search for answers for Ubuntu related problems, and how to provide the right information when asking questions.

Ubuntu One and Social From the Start two of the newest features in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. Dustin’s session on Byobu shined a light on EC2 as his session was conducted in the cloud. Ubuntu open week is not only educational and full of all sorts collaborative instruction it also points to the focus of Canonical in conjunction with the Ubuntu user community. In Mike Basingers session he also mentions the pay for support that is available individual users beyond the free support of the community. I happen to think it is awesome the way the community driven events can highlight corporate goals and in the same light the corporate goals can help sustain a vibrant community. It’s music to my ears! Speaking of music here is what the Ubuntu Open Week set list for tomorrow, May 4th, 2010 looks like?

1500 UTC – Wine Q&A – Scott Richie

1600 UTC – Marketing Your LoCo Team – Leandro Gomez

1700 UTC – Patch Review Team – Nigel Babu

1800 UTC – Adopting a Package and being and Upstream Contact – Jorge Castro and Sense Hofstede

1900 UTC – Desktop Q&A – Rick Spencer

For more information on Ubuntu Open Week got to: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOpenWeek

For more information on the sessions and session leaders please go to:https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOpenWeek/Lucid/SessionLeaders

Along with Ubuntu Open Week there is also Ubuntu Open Week in Spanish. To find out more about Ubuntu Open Week in Spanish please go to: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOpenWeek_ES

To get Ubuntu 10.04 LTS go to: http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu

To find out more about Ubuntu and how you can participate, contribute or just download it please visit:http://www.ubuntu.com/community/participate

If you have questions, comments or suggestions please email: amber [at] ubuntu-user.com