Ubuntu Education Summit a success!

By boredandblogging | Published: 2007-05-06

The Ubuntu Education Summit took place this week in Sevilla, Spain, and went smoothly. The Ubuntu Education team heard problems from educators and people working in education from around the world.

Problems and situations that people regularly face have been noted and will be taken into account during the developers’ summit, taking place this week.

The next Ubuntu Education Summit will be held in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, over 25, 26 October 2007. For more information, refer to the UES-Boston wiki page and the Launchpad entry. Ideas and suggestions from the education community are most welcome.

Mentoring comes to Launchpad

By boredandblogging | Published: 2007-05-01

There’s something new in Launchpad this week: mentoring.

The Ubuntu community is proof that free software works best when we work together. It’s not always easy for new participants to get started, though.

Launchpad’s new mentoring framework is a simple way to help new community members learn the ropes. With it you can:

  • Offer to mentor people who want to fix a bug or implement a blueprint.
  • Provide a list of items that are relevant to your project and for which mentorship is available.
  • Provide a list of items that would be a good starting point for someone who wants to join one of your teams
  • See what mentorship offers individuals are currently making.

Anyone who is a member of at least one Launchpad team can offer mentorship and there’s no admin for project or team leaders as it’s entirely based on commitments made by individuals.

You can find out more in the Launchpad guide to mentoring management.

The Launchpad team have been busy elsewhere, too! With three new code release recently, there’s a whole load of new features and bug fixes. Full details are in the release notes.

Weekly News: Issue 38

By boredandblogging | Published: 2007-04-30

Issue #38 of the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, covering the week of April 22th – 28th, 2007, is now available. In this issue you can find these stories:

  • Gutsy Gibbon Ready for Development
  • VMware server available for Ubuntu
  • Flisol 2007

If you have a story idea for the Weekly News please submit it via email or on the wiki!

The Weekly News is brought to you by the Marketing Team.

The battle for your desktop

By boredandblogging | Published: 2007-04-28

Information Week posted an article on a desktop battle between Ubuntu and Microsoft.

Is Linux finally ready to take on Windows as a desktop OS? We tried out both Vista and Ubuntu on individual PCs to see which works better. Here’s who won.

The articles covers the installations, hardware and PnP support, software installation and networking, word processing, multimedia and image management, as well as backing up and restoring. Overall a fair shake of the Ubuntu versus Microsoft battle with an outcome that is very respectful.

Ubuntu’s best strength is handling the ordinary task-based day-to-day stuff. Vista has a level of completeness and polish that some people find it hard to do without.

To read the complete review, take a look at the Ubuntu Linux Vs. Windows Vista: The Battle For Your Desktop.

Kubuntu an aKademy 2007 sponsor

By boredandblogging | Published: 2007-04-28

Kubuntu is once again a sponsor of the KDE conference aKademy 2007. Kubuntu shares sponsorship to this year's aKademy with others organizations such as Trolltech (the developers of Qt), the Linux Foundation, and Google. aKademy is the yearly meeting of the KDE community. This year's event will be held at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland, and will last 8 days from June 30th to July 7th. aKademy 2007 will feature talks and presentations by outstanding KDE developers, joint development, bug-fixing and coding sessions, workshops for all KDE contributors, and design, usability and polishing work. You can bet KDE 4 will be the number one topic of the event.