The Ubuntu Users Day will also be held in Spanish! Diego and his team invited me to host a session and I gladly accepted to host the same I will be doing in English. My deepest appreciation to Pablo Rubianes who started this initiative for the Spanish Ubuntu users.

I’ll be teaching / chatting / taking questions about how to best choose your hardware so it works with Ubuntu. It’s on January 23rd, save the date!

“Support” includes of course going through help requests we get over the phone or via Landscape, escalating bugs and working with developers to deliver fixes for our customers (and to Ubuntu public updates), but also helping other colleagues within Canonical (a benefit for all staff), review and write technical documentation, help with training, playing with some awesome hardware I can’t quite blog about and more… including coming to UDS and raise our issues while catching up with what’s going on in the Ubuntu galaxy.

We’re extremely lucky we are at freedom to chose how and where we participate in UDS. I personally consider it to be 50% social, 50% technical. There are some obvious places where it’s easy to jump in (such as Tools for better X.org bug triaging and diagnosis), because they are closely related to our troubleshooting process and how we approach problems. Others are not as easy to spot. Going together to a shooting range sure beats many bonding exercises I’ve attended before. You learn a thing or two about the great community folks and about your colleagues in-between shots As a side note, I have to say although I don’t particularly understand the reason fire arms exist, this is one of those things I wanted to try.

Another interesting, unique experience is meeting our actual customers at support! You know who you are! It’s a bit crazy and it feels like it’s the Academy Awards – an expression Jono used this morning much to our enjoyment – and we’ve won a prize consisting of meeting face-to-face. I also see quite a bit of Québécois here which I am very proud of, as I am a Colombian living in Québec for 20 years now. And of course sabdfl is still very much part of UDS, not only for the obvious reasons but because you’ll actually see him busy at his keyboard and getting into many sessions giving his opinion and participating in lively discussions.

My first day at UDS started with the plenary, where Jono presented the seven tracks UDS follows, giving the opportunity to all ~300 participants to know the differents team leads and what their people do. Mark Shuttleworth also spoke about Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and how those three letters make it special in its very own way. We all have a lot of work ahead. I liked it a lot when Jono said this event consisted of one-hour chunks and we needed to make the most of every single one of those chunks. And stealing everyones’ hearts or something to that effect!

Then started the actual meat of this event. Here are the sessions and activities I was part of today:

• Ubuntu Foundations team roundtable, where I learned a bit more about services and their management
• Meeting with a few customers and gathering their goals and objectives for the week
• Catching up on all the free, open source community fun & positive gossip
• Sharing mneptok‘s hilarious and irreverent jokes
• How to Run a Good Session, Software Center Roadmap and Opportunistic Programmer plenaries
• Server usability papercuts
• Requirements for Update and Upgrade Experiences
• Landscape for Lucid

Back to back, it’s lots of talking, listening, agreeing and disagreeing, documenting, chatting, introductions, translating and catching up to do. It’s also useful to keep up with regular email. All incredibly useful & productive, if a bit intense. I tried to leave a trail of it on my micro-blogging backyard like others at http://identi.ca/tag/uds.

The day ended at the firing range as I mentioned before, followed by some relaxing time at the lobby and watching some TV while preparing this post. I hear we’ll have interesting visitors tomorrow, can’t wait! Until then, I can’t repeat enough – Thank You Canonical !

Yesterday my pre-UDS day kicked off at the Festival del Tamal that was happening right across our hotel. From Wikipedia,

“The terms Chicano and Chicana (also spelled Xicana) were originally used by, and in reference to U.S. citizens of Mexican descent. The term began to be widely used during the Chicano Movement mainly amongst Mexican Americans, especially in the movement’s peak in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The self-identify term Chicano is still of popular usage today. [1]“

I initially thought “mhh Latinos… there must be food”. I knew tamales where a key component of Latin American food but I’ve never ever seen so many people lined up to get their piece of it! There must have been a few thousand people and I truly felt I was in Mejico, not in the U.S. as I typically imagine them and see them in the news. But as we cruised the venue I also noticed a lot of stands and kiosks offering help & services for landing immigrants, and NGOs of all types and origins. We felt the strange contrast of a huge happy family reunion and people struggling to just make it- while keeping a huge smile.

Going into my third year at Canonical in a few days, I still feel the same excitement and anticipation about spending a whole week (and then a bit more) having 100% one-to-one bandwidth with many of the essential individuals that are the driving force behind our favorite operating system – and freedom culture evangelization tool. After a few tamales and being immersed in this huge latino crowd I couldn’t help but see some parallels between the Chicano social liberation struggle and the Free Software movement.

I even got a TShirt from this nice gentleman who kindly explained to me why there was a Chicano Activist Convention a few months ago right here in Tejaztlán. They have these student groups called Mechas who meet regularly and discuss and further issues they face daily (and have for a few decades now). “Wow,” I thought to myself..”this is kinda like our LoCo teams and Bug#1!”. Except on a very different social (and technical) scale, of course. Here, meet the Mecha of Tejaztlán group.

Aztlán, by the way, “is the legendary ancestral home of the Nahua peoples, one of the main cultural groups in Mesoamerica. “Aztec” is the Nahuatl word for “people from Aztlan.”[2].  So you can see a bit of where the Tejaztlán word came from.

He looked at me with a “where the hell have you been” face, but was nice anyways, as my Latino looks couldn’t get him through the notion I was completely ignorant of the Chicano movement to the extent I still thought yesterday it meant “any Mexican in the US” when in fact it means a lot more. I remembered how patient and welcoming we must be to every person that is new to Ubuntu and I felt welcome to further my knowledge and fix their Bug #1.

Going back to the hotel I thought I’d wear the Tshirt on my first day at UDS, if only to honor this land that welcomes us, and in a way, knows what we are up to this week. I am hoping to meet members of the Ubuntu Texas Team and perhaps they’ll help me better understand their very own ecosystem, and if I was wrong in any of my first impressions at my pre-UDS kickoff day, it wouldn’t be my first time. I love being in that position, and having the ensuing discussions, specially when they revolve about Freedom.

Oh, and if you have any Apple hardware, please know I will be nice to you anyways, I don’t hate Apple or you – buy me a beer and we can have that discussion too

And I won’t be the only one

All details can be found on the Quebec Team Ubuntu Global Jam page.

Where:

École de technologie supérieure (http://www.etsmtl.ca/)
1100 rue Notre-Dame Ouest
Salles/Rooms A-1300 & A-1238

When:

Friday Oct 2- Sunday Oct. 4 (check the Quebec Team Ubuntu Global Jam page for full schedule info)

See you there!

Open this post on my blog to see image captions.

Imagine a few hundred people gathered in a big conference were presentations go from Android on Ubuntu to Making Ubuntu family-friendly to Ubuntu One development to Mastering Unicode to project updates … well you get the point. Oh, and everyone of them is a colleague. The challenge here was to go beyond shaking as many hands as possible and trying to find out what we all had in common to best push Ubuntu forward, while looking at our best shots without losing sight on things to improve and innovate on.

Pfew! If that sounded like an intense few days, it was. I am glad I planned on sleeping very little.

I hope this gives a small insight into how great this big Canonical-family meeting was.

Now UDS follows, although I won’t be attending I trust my many mates will drive this one home too.

Cheers to all and see you soon, somewhere

I think what you put in your laptop tells a bit about who you are or what you do

So here’s my current laptop:

One more thing, I got a zebra-themed vinyl skin applied on the laptop, which protects the machine – the stickers are on that vinyl layer.

Clicking on the image will bring you to Flickr where I added some notes.

What’s on your Ubuntu laptop ?

The Colombian LoCo Team has been very actively preparing for this event, they even lined up some sponsors. There will be 2 separate conference tracks and one workshop track, and the event will be streamed live. This looks to be a lot more than an informal gathering! All details are available on the website.

It’s exciting to see local business and enthusiasts getting together around Ubuntu. Make sure you file the registration form if you’re attending.

I’ll be stopping for a few days in Guatemala on my way back to Canada and I dropped an email to some ubunteros in Guatemala – it looks like we’re going to have a nice gathering there too! I’ll be presenting but mostly meeting the local community and learning about them. What a weekend!

So… if you’re in San Salvador or Guatemala city this weekend… come and spend some time with the local Ubunteros.

See you there!

I’ll be spending next week in San Salvador and I thought it would be nice to meet some Ubunteros there. I wrote to their mailing list, one thing led to another and *boom* ! Having presented at Ubucons in Seville, New York City and San Francisco before I am really happy to add one to my list ! I am trying to think of any sentence in this post I wouldn’t end with an exclamation mark but I can’t !!!

A few emails and IRC chats were enough to settle on having a round table to discuss Ubuntu’s place in free software, Celvin Rivas will also be presenting about the state of Ubuntu in El Salvador. If there’s enough people interested there’s discussion about having some workshops – gotta love last minute things

From “Running an Ubucon“:

An Ubucon is a community driven, community organised event that is all about Ubuntu. These events often include a number of speakers, BOF sessions, demos, social events and more, and they are excellent ways to grow the Ubuntu community in your area, and to build an interesting and fun event. Ubucons are different to large Linux expos and conferences in that they are uniquely community focused and driven, and uniquely Ubuntu.

Today while reading Planet Ubuntu and Canonical joining the Linux Foundation I remembered visiting their booth at LWE and seeing Linux Foundation’s new Linux Developer Network (Beta) which just launched.

From the site:

The Linux Developer Network (LDN) is the online community for Linux application developers and independent software vendors who want to start or continue their journey developing applications for the Linux platform. In other words, if you or your company wants to work with Linux, this is the place to be.

The LDN’s goal is to empower developers to target the Linux platform. A platform is only as strong as the applications that run on top of it, and the LDN wants to make sure those developers have everything the need to successfully and cost-effectively target Linux. One of the ways LDN will help developers accomplish this is to help them build portable Linux applications.

LDN is also about giving developers the tools they need to create the best Linux apps possible, no matter which platform developers want to work with. We’ve designed the LDN to be flexible and go where the community wants it to go. Mobile, embedded, driver development, cloud computing–keep an eye out for what’s next in the world of Linux.

Here on LDN you will find in-depth articles, white papers, and howtos that describe the latest practices of Linux development. Blogs from top kernel and application developers help round out the expertise.

It’s not just talent and advice; LDN also offers tools and documentation to determine just how distribution-portable your current application is, and outlines ways to make it more portable. If LSB certification is your goal, then the LSB Software Development Kit is available for new applications, with guidelines and demos available on how to port existing apps to the LSB.

Join Today!

Linux is about the strength of community, so LDN also provides developers with peer-level support, through forums and mailing lists, as well as tips, tricks, and tools to create and discuss the hottest brainstorm ideas in the community. You can even get your own blog started, hosted by LDN!

In fact, community is such a huge part of what LDN is all about, we’ve started the LDN Rewards Program–a way to earn points, gain visibility, and enhance your professional reputation in the Linux community. Get points for posting in the forums, adding to the brainstorms, writing articles–however you want to contribute. Monthly point leaders will be eligible for LDN-exclusive prizes, and top participants will be eligible for trips to Linux Foundation events!