it.gen.nz

I’ve just finished attending Linux.Conf.Au 2010, the southern hemisphere Linux conference, here in Wellington. I really enjoyed myself, talked to some fantastic people and learned a lot. Nice.

There were some highlights: listening to the people who have built New Zealand’s free software high school, Albany Senior High. Linux desktops and servers. A great saving for the taxpayer and more money left for educating the kids. Some very committed people showing the way.

Glyn Moody, a UK journalist and activist, talked about how a culture of sharing underlies science, technology and the arts. He’s a fascinating person and I was delighted to be able meet him. He also put my points about ACTA rather more eloquently than I could in my own presentation.

Jeremy Allison and Andrew Tridgell, the men behind Samba (the program which lets Linux servers talk to Windows desktops) both were there and did their own presentations. Andrew talked about teaching the community development model used by Free Software at university; Jeremy recounted some of his experiences in fighting for open standards and made some predictions.

As for the penguin? Tux is the Linux mascot. He was there as well.

All the presentations were captured on video. They’ll be available on the conference website soon.

I was really impressed by the efforts of the organizers. A bunch of volunteers put together an experience that was the equal of many professionally-organized events I’ve been to.

And it was a blast.

I went yesterday to the media event which Telecom set up to reveal more about its XT network.

The event was held in the Westin Hotel in Auckland. Paul Reynolds, the Telecom CE, and Alan Goudie, Head of Retail, sat behind a coffee table and spoke reasonably informally to 30-40 media and technology types sitting on brightly coloured cubes. Telecom staffers in branded t-shirts hovered around the edges of the room, ready to show of their new wares. A couple of TV cameras were set up among the audience.

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Today on Radio New Zealand National I’ll talk mainly about a free stuff you can use and downoad legally from the Internet. My point is that a huge amount of useful and world-class stuff is just there for the using. No cash required. Who said the best things in life weren’t free?

I put out a call for suggestions for this program by email and on my blog a few days ago. If you were one of the helpful people who replied – thanks. This program’s yours as much as mine. Don’t you love the Internet!

Listen live at 11:05 or download the audio as Ogg or MP3.

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Last weekend I was lucky enough to see La Bohème at the St James in Wellington.

I should start by saying that I’m not an opera buff. I go to the ones I’ve heard of, on the grounds that there must be something in their popularity. Usually I have a good time, but I’m very much on the outer of the opera crowd. I tend to think “use it or lose it” – I’m glad there is real opera performed in Wellington, so I should patronise it. And it was on this basis that I bought tickets for La Bohème.

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Having just returned from Summer break with my family, I thought I’d list the top ten wonderful New Zealand experiences we’d had. But I couldn’t whittle it down to ten so there are a few more in the list. What a fantastic country we live in!
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I’ve been fiddling with Linux for a decade now. And, frankly, back then it was a total bear to get it working – you had to really, really, want to. Once you could get Linux to fire up, it was rock solid of course as it has always been, but the process of installing it was challenging even for geeks. Then you had to figure out how to get it to use your screen as anything more than a line by line device – Linux could and can do this beautifully and flexibly, but you had to know so much about your hardware and edit the configurations just so before it would go.

How things have changed! First Mandrake through the early noughties, and now Ubuntu are making wonderfully good and easy to install CDs of Linux. (Just a note to the side – Linux is just the kernel or core of an operating system, and you need a lot of other software to make it work. A lot of that software comes from the GNU project, so it’s more proper to refer to GNU/Linux. And that’s how the different flavours, or distributions of GNU/Linux differ – it’s all a matter of which additional programs are supplied with the kernel, and how it is packaged up for installation.)

Ubuntu was founded by Mark Shuttleworth, a South African man who made a lot of money in the dot com boom and has obviously decided to put something back. And with its latest release, Ubuntu has surpassed the ease of use of Windows in many respects – especially those annoying registrations and activiations, because Ubuntu is totally free.

The latest release of Ubuntu, which goes by the names 7.10 or Gutsy Gibbon, is very good indeed. It installs easily, and provides access to an ocean of free software, some of which is of the highest quality, through the menus. You can try Ubuntu without installing it on your computer, or you can install it side by side with Windows, or you can put Ubuntu on first, then virtual machine software from Virtualbox and re-install your Windows in a VM so it lives in a window under Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is a 700 megabyte download or a $15 CD purchase delivered from LinuxCDMall or Copyleft. Give it a go!

I confess: despite loving Shakespeare, I had never really “got” Lear before. I know, it’s supposed to be the greatest of the four great Shakespearean tragedies. But it never connected with me viscerally the way the others do – I never got that feeling that, hey that could be me out there behaving like that.

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