J_K9 @ Linux

Day 5: The Failed Excursion

The Museum of Flight on the outskirts of Seattle is one of the largest air and space museums in the world (according to its site, in any case), and so it was on our list of attractions to see. We left the hotel in Redmond at 9.30pm and set off for the Museum of Flight.

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Preview of Ubuntu 7.04

Ubuntu 7.04 Beta was released just two days ago, and a brilliant article entitled “What You Should Expect From Ubuntu 7.04″ outlines the additions and changes in this new version of Ubuntu which should surprise you if and when you install the final version, which will be released on the 19^th April.

I can’t wait for this new version of Ubuntu - it will make it so much easier to achieve a completely functional desktop Operating System, down to the installation of proprietary codecs. For more information, see the article!

Day 4: Exploring Seattle

The lie-in this morning allowed us to regain our energy and leave the jet-lag effects behind us. Despite the potential for a long lie-in, I was only able to sleep from midnight until 7am, at which point I could sleep no longer and so I reached for my laptop and went online for a good few hours. At 11am (I wasn’t online for ALL of that time!), we met at the reception desk and not long after set off in our two mini-vans to Seattle’s city centre. Our first stop was Pike Market.

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Day 3: The Labs

Today (i.e. yesterday) was Friday, in case the times and date at the top of this post are confusing. We saw some amazing technologies and demos and we also learnt a lot in the process. We also had the chance to see Microsoft’s Saturn Lab, large server rooms with racks stretching out in long rows, and much more.

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Day 2: First Impressions

Today we had our first visit to Microsoft’s campus at Redmond. First impression? It is enormous - there’s no other word for it. It comprises dozens of different buildings, each with a different purpose and for specific businesses or brands of Microsoft’s empire.

We woke up at 7am, showered, got dressed and arrived at Microsoft at 8.30am. I’m going to leave times out of this post and focus on the actual events and places rather than the time at which they occurred, although they will be written in the same order. So, what came first? An introduction to Microsoft, of course.

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Ubuntu Webserver Overload

The Ubuntu website is currently experiencing too many concurrent connections and, as such, is displaying error messages. I’m not sure whether a [distributed] denial of service attack is underway or if there are simply too many people trying to access it, but it’s very odd one way or another - I cannot remember the last time this happened to Ubuntu (has it ever?).

Screenshot below:

How odd. Keep your eyes on the news

Seattle 2007: Day 1

We, that is twelve students and three teachers, set out from school at 10.20am during the second class. I did some last minute packing, got changed into my casual clothes and walked over to the meeting point. From there, we took a mini-van to Terminal 4 of London Heathrow airport, checking that we had our passports, wallets and other valuables with us on the way in case we had to rush back to the school to pick up an important possession which had been left behind. Being such a large group, we had to check in at BA’s Customer Service and World Traveller [Plus] desks. This did not take long, and we were then given the privilege of going through the “Fast Track” lane to get to the security checks without having to wait in line. After the security checks, we were allowed to split up into groups to have lunch at a cafe of our choosing on the condition that we met our teachers at the flight gate at 1.15pm. The plane, BA 49, was scheduled to take off with destination Seattle, WA at 2.15pm.

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Off To Seattle, WA

If you’re wondering why my posts have been few and far between recently, it has been a combination of work, Mira mockups and (until recently) taking part in the development of a presentation which will be displayed to a board of directors at Microsoft.

Believe me, the fact that I, an Open Source/Linux evangelist, am going to Seattle to visit Microsoft sounds as ironic to you as it does to me, but it’s the truth! Visiting Microsoft and several of its departments are in the itinerary of this school trip, as is visiting Boeing’s HQ. Taking a look around the headquarters of these two giants, one of which has slightly sharper fangs than the other, will be interesting to say the least.

We will also be the first school ever to have been granted access to some of the more secretive of Microsoft’s departments, such as the Home and Office of the Future areas. Despite there being pictures of the former on the internet, we have had to sign confidentiality agreements to agree not to disclose anything about either of those two sections, so I’m afraid you’ll be hearing little more than a mention from me (whether that is a good or bad thing is for you to judge).

I leave the UK on Wednesday and shall be returning a week later, and I’ll keep you updated as the days go by - this time, do keep your heads up

Linux on Dell: Get Voting!

It appears that Dell have taken the community’s request for Linux on Dell computers seriously and have now set up a survey to discover what exactly its customers “want from a Linux desktop,” in the words of Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, who blogged about this survey yesterday.

From the Dell blog post announcing this survey:

Your feedback on Dell IdeaStorm has been astounding. Thank you! We hear your requests for desktops and notebooks with Linux. We’re crafting product offerings in response, but we’d like a little more direct feedback from you: your preferences, your desires. We recognize some people prefer notebooks over desktops, high-end models over value models, your favorite Linux distribution, telephone-based support over community-based support, and so on. We can’t offer everything (all systems, all distributions, all support options), so we’ve crafted a survey to let you help us prioritize what we should deliver for you.

Get voting!

By the way, I also recommend you take a look at the announcement on Dell’s blog - few times have I seen that many comments in reply to a post

MiraGroupware.org: Registered And Ready

Mira Groupware, an Open Source alternative to Groove, now has its very own website which will be its centre of information and development. There you will find Mira’s forum, documentation wiki and hopefully some more community-orientated services in the near future. A nice touch is that MiraGroupware.org will change colour as it progresses through the stages of development: Planning, Alpha, Beta, Pre-Release and Stable, so do keep an eye out for that.

The Planning stage is arguably the most important stage of Mira’s development. It’s where both you and I get to decide what features are implemented by default, how Mira operates, how scalable it will be, how you would like to use it, how you would like it to look and discuss everything relating to its architecture and design. For this reason I encourage you to post what you want Mira to be like in Mira’s forum, so that the developers may consider as many ideas as possible and thus set out the blueprints for the future versions of Mira, and indeed the first.

User interface mockups, such as the one above, are also welcome, as we may then decide which interface is the easiest to use and is also visually appealing so that Mira does not become a bore to operate. It should have a professional look, but it shouldn’t be too dull either.

I have high hopes for Mira, as do others, and I’m sincerely hoping that our efforts will pay off and that, perhaps in a few months or years, you will have an Open Source alternative to Groove which is more scalable, more powerful and more complete than the competition on your desktop.