El Mundo Libre

I'm really enjoying the Ubuntu Open Week so far. I'm fortunate to live in a UTC+1 timezone so I can grab most of the sessions live. I only have to miss the first half hour due to work. It's a little bit sleep depriving, but as they say: you can sleep when you're dead. Jono and Marks sessions have been the most fun (and the most popular: 500 people online for "Ask Mark"). Jordi and Simon did the sessions on the areas I would like to contribute to. Actually, every session was great, although "Patching Packages" was a little fast. I don't think Martin prepared it on a clean Edgy install. I'm very much looking forward to the LoCo sessions tomorrow and Saturday.

This week is also kind of my maiden voyage on IRC. I've been using it for 3 days now, and my opinion of it hasn't changed since I first encountered it a few years ago: it still sucks! It's too fast, it's hard to see who's talking to who, there's a lot of event noise, people change names all the time, whois information varies wildly and what's the difference between a username, a nickname and a real name? I first tried xchat-gnome, which makes everything suck even more because of the lack of features and documentation (what do the colours and asterikses and arrows mean?). Gaim is slightly better and xchat is slightly better still. I suppose there is no good client available because you can't 'fix' IRC with it. Yeah well, maybe I will come to like it after a while.

I hope you'll be joining in as well on #ubuntu-classroom the next few days and ask some great questions. See you there!

Wie gaat er trouwens naar T-DOSE in Eindhoven? Misschien kunnen we samen rijden?

I've been wanting to join the Libre Software community for a while now (almost since I have known about it, in fact). Somehow, I have never seemed to get around to it. I think the main problem is that I'm not really someone who takes the initiative. I'm a bit of a perfectionist and so I don't start something unless I'm pretty sure how to do it. But some things can only be learnt be doing them and being a usefull member of the community is probably one of them.

So it basically comes down to taking the plunge and starting to swim. There are two ways you can do that: you jump for yourself of you wait for someone to push you in. I need someone to push me in. I have even asked a few people to push me. But most of 'em weren't interested or barely touched me. But now, there is an excellent opportunity to get pushed by a mass of people, because next week is the Ubuntu Open Week. I'm not a big fan of IRC, but I'm planning to be online as much as I can. So if you're a newbie who wants to join in on the Libre fun, fire up your favourite IRC program on Monday and start asking questions. Maybe I'll see you there!

As promised, here's my review of Ubuntu 6.06 on an Acer Aspire 5024 WLMi laptop. This is not my machine, so I was a bit less inclined to experiment with it. The important stuff works, but I'll be grateful to anyone who can fill in the missing pieces.

YES!! ROCK!! Oh baby, yeah! Right there!
It took them a whole lot of time, but they finally did it: Sun released the Java source code. And what really made it worth the wait is that they released under the GPL. Who would have thought, or even dreamt? Sun has been very friendly with the community over the last few years (OpenOffice.org, OpenSolaris, OpenSPARC). This, however, skyrockets them way past IBM to the top of the Libre Software Community Street Cred Olympus and into a throne right alongside Canonical.