Teaching Digital Arts With Ubuntu

By boredandblogging | Published: 2006-03-23

NewsForge reports a wonderful success story for an Iowa art professor who migrated his students from Mac OS X to Ubuntu for their digital arts course. Way to go!

I’m an art professor, and last semester I embarked on an exciting new adventure by erasing Mac OS X from nearly all of the Macintoshes in our digital media lab and installing Ubuntu in its place.

I began seriously planning this change last school year, when I realized how fully the current feature sets of free software programs could satisfy the technical needs of the students in my classes. I decided that the time had come to teach our undergraduate art students about free software programs such as the GIMP, Scribus, and Quanta Plus, instead of proprietary programs such as Photoshop, QuarkXpress, and Dreamweaver.

The switch to free software has been a big success here in the Department of Art and Design at Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa. This semester I plan to take the switch further in my video classes by replacing Avid DV Express, Final Cut Express HD, Soundtrack, and iDVD with Kino, Cinelerra, Rosegarden, and DVDstyler.

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New MEPIS Linux Test Version Uses Ubuntu Base

By boredandblogging | Published: 2006-03-21

Great news for lovers of Ubuntu and MEPIS:

MEPIS founder Warren Woodford has announced a test release of SimplyMEPIS 6.0, incorporating software from the Ubuntu Dapper package pools. This is the first version of SimplyMEPIS with an Ubuntu base.

Ubuntu has a 6 month stable release cycle that will enable MEPIS to offer its customers a dependable release schedule. Woodford states “The switch to the Ubuntu pools was made to provide our users with a more stable underlying system. Of course it’s important for our users that MEPIS remains true to its unique vision. I believe this release demonstrates that we can combine the magic of the MEPIS user experience with the goodness of the Ubuntu foundation.”

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Meet the SABDFL at LUGRadio Live 2006

By boredandblogging | Published: 2006-03-21

Say it loud, say it lewd! The cheeky pranksters at LUGRadio let us know that the sabdfl will be making an appearance at LUGRadio Live 2006, which takes place in Wolverhampton, England on the weekend of the 22nd and 23rd July. The sabdfl was at last years event and according to all reports, captivated the audience throughout his inspiring talk.

LUGRadio Live 2006 follows on from last year’s inaugural community event for Free Software and Open Source fans. This year over 40 speakers, an exhibition and BOF sessions are packed into the event. You’ll recognise some Ubuntu names among the speakers, such as Scott James Remnant, Matthew Garrett and Jonathan Riddell. Also appearing will be Simon Phipps, Michael Meeks, Sarah Ewan, Christian Schaller, Gervase Markham… and many more.

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Let Them Eat Cake

By boredandblogging | Published: 2006-03-21

Fridge undercover reporter Jonathan Carter reports that the Ubuntu cake war is on! What is it about Ubuntu that inspires such delicious sugary treats? Only Fabio has made Ubuntu Bolognese. What will be next — an Ubuntu layered cocktail? Breakfast cereal? Soup? Now there’s a challenge.


Update: Gauntlet thrown, challenge met!

Quintet rushes to Network Manager Glory

By boredandblogging | Published: 2006-03-20

NetworkManager is a tool that was designed to make managing wireless networks easy, particularly for laptop users. Unfortunately the tool has always needed some work to get it working right in Ubuntu, seemingly always releasing at the most inopportune time in relation to the Ubuntu schedule, or depending on some development driver in a far away land …

This time, however, things are looking up. Johan Kiviniemi, Mario Danic, Adam Conrad, Luka Renko, and Anthony Mercatante have volunteered to get Network Manager 0.6.1 packages up to shape, with the intent to make it in time for the final release of Dapper. They've put in a ton of work patching code, testing cards, and packaging it all up for testing. Unfortunately, time not particularly abundant these days, but Matthew Garrett was quick to point out:

This is entirely a community contribution, but now that the hard work has been done it should (with luck) be possible to squeeze this in. If people could test the packages and find any bugs as quickly as possible, that makes things a great deal more likely.

The team has put up pages for for NetworkManager (the GNOME front end) and KNetworkManager (the KDE front end) with instructions on how to get started. Bugs can be reported to debian (AT) johan.kiviniemi.name. You can also find _ion and Pygi on Freenode (irc.freenode.net) to report bugs. You'll also find more information in the dicussion thread below.

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