Photo Credit: Andrey Kuznetsov

With San Francisco LinuxWorld Expo barely having finished, the Ubuntu camp have picked up their bags and headed across town for the world-famous Ubucon.

Thanks to the brilliant directions (courtesy of SVLUG, the Silicon Valley Linux Users’ Group) everyone made it safely to their destination: The Googleplex HQ in the heart of Mountain View, Californa, west-coast USA.

Upon arrival thirsty people grabbed a snack and drinks, Google apparently have both Pepsi and Coke on tap amongst their other unlimited treats for staff. After refreshing themselves serious disscusion ensued, with those present all keen to see the new T-shirts. The floor apparently turned into “a mosh pit down there, when they opened the boxes up”, described one exhilarated attendee. Ubuntu is about equality and there were shapes size for both genders, it was pointed out that they were “T-shirts for human beings”! On the front they have our circular logo over the word Ubuntu, on a light-tan coloured material and around the back, the question “Do you Ubuntu?”. I think the people that didn’t get one are secretly holding out for real Goobuntu t-shirts, perhaps next year?

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The previous time the Geeks and Nerds challenged each other at dawn, it was MySQL vs. Oracle. This time at the Penguin Bowl there ensured an all-out battle of the Desktops as the sci-fi and tech questions rained in: Novell’s Open Audio team vs. the Ubuntu takedown squad.

Once again, Samba founder Jeremy Allison was the multi-skilled host and appeared by storming onto the stage wearing a full Astronaut suit surrounded by the opening music from 2001: A Space Odyssey as the competitors assembled facing each other. Behind the bench for the Nerds were Ubuntu’s Jorge Castro, Corey Burger and Canonical’s Malcolm Yates (aka “mdy”).

It turns out that Malcolm is just the type of guy you want for a quiz. When the next question is “What does SuSE stand for?”, it’s useful to have formerly worked for the company in question! Malc even knew the obscure Bill Gates’ OS/2 quote “this is the most significant OS in our time”, again, that’s what you get for being a product manager back at IBM in the past.

Apparently there were no Steve Ballmer questions (of Microsoft fame) and no chair throwing, but at the end, the contestants got handed black turtle-neck sweat shirts and were invited to “dance the iPod dance” in the chosen style of Steve Jobs. Perhaps the best bit was when the Suse team were “shocked” to find that their victors, Corey and Jorge are both volunteers and not paid (Ubuntu is just that good that we like working for free!) The low bit could be said to when Corey forgot the name of the ship from Firefly in front of the huge audience. [Ed: I didn’t know either…]

After Ubuntu cruised to victory nearly 5,000 points ahead, the final score closed at 25,750 points vs. 21,000 for Suse’s Geeks. Ted Hedger of Novell admitted afterwards on his podcast, that “we got our butts kicked”, the Geeks one redeeming feature came when then won the Lego bridge building round by making a longer arch out of the small colourful plastic bricks.

You can find a short review over at download squad, get those photos uploaded to flickr!

The Magazine poll to produce a name has now finished; a third of you loved “Ubuntu World”, 21% liked the plain name “Ubuntu Magazine” and almost one-in-six appreciated “Ubuntu Full Circle”. The magazine team are thankful for your vote and who knows, your name may come out on top.

For our new poll, kiko from the Launchpad.net team has asked for a hand and some feedback on what font/typeface style should be used for displaying bug reports.

The system has now been switched to to look plain-text email, so that when you visit a bug report, such as https://launchpad.net/bugs/1 the text is displayed without any wrapping like you get in a word-processor. The result may also look like more like other Bugzilla bugtrackers.

Changing the style from variable-width to fixed with probably has as many advantages as disadvantages, so you should vote and make your thoughts heard. You can also contact the team directly over at the Launchpad feedback page.

By the way, if you haven’t seen the famous Bug #1 before, be sure to check out the report and see if you can lend a hand to help!