Debian

The premier IT conference in Australia, LCA, commences tomorrow with several mini-confs covering subjects such as Linux in Education, GNOME, Debian, MySQL and Linux research to name but a few.

This year I've splurged on a professional ticket and it appears that was a bit of mistake - because as a result of election campaign, crop growing and client commitments, I am going to miss large chunks of the conference. I'm hoping to at least make the open day and the Penguin Dinner. While these are good events to make, they will not make up for all the great presentations I'll miss.

There's one talk that I consider a "must see" for conference goers - Carston Haitzler's Desktops on a diet. Carston not only regularly challenges the accepted norm of Linux, Apple and Windows desktops with brilliant insights but also backs it up with code, as anyone has run the pre-releases of Enlightenment 0.17 will attest.

See you there (at times!)

I've just spent the last two days at the Education Expo, volunteering at the Linux Australia stand. Much unlike CeBit or Linux World, where most people have at least heard of Linux, almost none of the attendees that I spoke to at the Education Expo had ever heard of Linux. It certainly was outreaching to the masses of Australians who needed it most.

It was a long and rewarding weekend for the Linux Australia team, all of whom worked tirelessly and energetically, with special mention for Sara's excellent "Parent's and Teacher's Guide for Educational Outcomes" using Edubuntu. This document, combined with the excellent Edubuntu distribution, knocked the socks of both parents, teachers and kids who got their hands on the system. Many kids had to be practically dragged away by their parents, with all of them making sure that they had their copy of Edubuntu firmly in their grasp.

Showing the ease of switching languages (I had pre-installed Chinese and Arabic language packs) along with anecdotes that the demonstration machines were not only my kids machines but they (as 8 and 6 year olds) had actually installed it themselves also went a long way towards impressing people.

My favourite quote from Saturday - "You have changed my life, thank you! thank you!"

My favourite quote from Sunday - "Thank you for your enthusiam and your passion. This stand was the best thing about the entire Education Expo"

The demonstrations we made and the time we took to outreach and communicate with the people we were giving Edubuntu packs to has made lasting impressions on everyone the team talked to. Everyone who worked on the Linux Australia stand should be proud of the excellent work they did.

Great work everyone!

I've just spent the last three days volunteering for Linux Australia at the CeBit 2006 exhibition. Linux Australia had two stands, a standard sized stand with the LA banner floating across the back and a larger, triple-sized stand labelled as the "Linux Demo Zone". Both stands were ably manned by volunteers too numerous to name, although James does capture quite a few here, and were consistently packed with personal and business attendees wanting to know more about Linux, how it can work in their personal and professional lives and to see it first hand, many for the first time. The Linux Demo zone was providing hands-on experience with a variety of Linux Desktops, Linux thin-clients and clustering solutions from UNSW. As I understand, it over a thousand copies of Ubuntu 5.10 were given away and the demonstration of the Ubuntu 6.06 beta left many people eagerly awaiting this release and relishing a chance to run Linux now that many of their doubts and concerns had been satisfied. The demo stand was also distributing linux.conf.au, OSIA and OpenSkills material which disappeared nearly as quickly as the Ubuntu CD's did. I'd like to congratulate all the volunteers, organisers and the producers of the handouts that proved so informative and useful to the people who were taking them so quickly that I never had to hand one out. Another facit that I was impressed with was the spirit amongst the Linux vendors and members of OSIA working or running stands at CeBit. There was a healthy, genuine spirit of of co-operation and competition amongst them and a readiness to share skills and ideas freely. It's truly impressive to see the spirit of the Free Software movement translate so successfully into the business world. I have already benefitted greatly from advice and experience shared with me over those three days and expect to return it in kind when the opportuinity arises. Great work everyone :)

Today's Register has a great three page article doing some serious analysis and a little speculation on the upcoming Cell processor from IBM, Sony and friends. This is the most interest I've had, no that ought to read "this is the only time I've been interested" in a chip since the days when the Pentium 1 was first launched. This is the new chip that's going to power the Playstation three as well as the next generation of Nintendo and Xbox consoles. The *potential* impact of this chip is what makes it interesting. It was preceeded by this article which is also a good read.

A few SLUG events got announced or posted in the last week. The February Codefest was announced at a very different venue to where we've been before. I'm expecting it to be a successful venue and I think the location will generate more interest after some press is generated on Monday. Earlier today the details for this months DebSIG were announced and we'll be having what promises to be an interesting talk.

A week late but I've been waiting on photo's to go online...... January DebSIG kicked off the year in fine style. There was plenty of interest in the issues that were discussed and quite few people interested in becoming involved in the campaign team. The ball will start rolling on this one very soon and we ought to start seeing the fruits of it by mid year.  The post-DebSIG events were up to their usual high standard.

I've finally cracked the problem of hwclock hanging during startup and locking hard during shutdown on DELL Dimension 4700's running Ubuntu. You need to add --directisa to tzsetup, hwclock.sh and hwclockfirst.sh. I've put a more detailed answer on this page. Yay, one more bug down. Don't know whether this is a bug that needs to be logged against Warty or not but I'm happy it's resolved.

The things you do when you're watching data copy across the network. I've put up another document, this time it's Making a Debian or Ubuntu Machine an LDAP Authentication Client which details the steps required to, well, make a Debian or Ubuntu machine an LDAP client for authentication purposes :)