jonathan carter

Ubucon

Saturday I went to Ubucon here in Sevilla, and saw Fabian talk about Canonical support, and Jono giving a community talk, “Herding Cats”. Both were quite good, I got them on video, and will upload them as soon as possible (most probably in a week from now).

Edubuntu on Classmate PC!

Oliver got a basic form of Edubuntu running on the Classmate PC. According to the Intel representatives, you will be able to buy them in South Africa soon. I’m quite eager to get my own one for a bit of hacking. And since I’m joining the bandwagon and planning on getting a Dell Ubuntu laptop as soon as it’s released.

Ubuntu Tour

Last night, Canonical organised a tour at Alcazar Castle for the attendees of the Ubuntu Developer Summit. It was the highest concentration of Ubuntu members I’ve ever seen in my life. I love the sense of humor that many of the Ubuntu developers have, we had a good time. There was a LOT of camera flashing going around!

Guadalinex tour

Guadalinex gave the Ubuntu Education (website coming soon) team a tour of their support center this morning. Their operation is very impressive. They have 1100 schools across Andalusia, and 40 staff members taking calls from the schools. They never miss ONE call. They also have a small testing center there where support staff can experiment before giving advice on tricky issues.

The plan was to get a new ultra-compact IBM X60 (the non-tablet version). I figured it would be nice to have an ultra compact laptop that has long battery life, so that I can comfortably work on long flights or at conferences where plugs are always a problem. Unfortunately there were no local stock of X60’s.

But then I found something interesting, the Sahara CJ55. It’s the same size, and specification as a X60, but exactly half the price. The only thing that I don’t like about it is the keyboard. It’s decent quality, but they’ve made the shift keys smaller to make space for the Windows keys (yuck), and it’s a UK layout keyboard, which would normally confuse me, but I just mapped it out to a US keyboard style. Perhaps now is a good time to (finally) switch to Dvorak.

The build quality is good though, and it has a very “Apple-like” feel to it.

The new one is the one to the left. It has a 12″ display, while the MSI S262 has a 14.1″ WXGA display. The Sahara battery lasts 3 hours and 50 minutes, while the MSI’s battery only lasts 1 hour and 20 minutes. The Sahara came with Windows XP Media Center edition. I didn’t delete it yet, I’ve been having trouble getting my video camera working properly in Ubuntu. I was glad to see Mark Shuttleworth’s post on hardware compatibility, part of a series of posts about challenges that need to be overcame to win the hearts of the desktop user. BTW, according to the frequency of those posts, post #1 should be there tomorrow. I’ve been wondering what his #1 will be. In my humble opinion, I think games is a strong #1. I know many, many high school kids who would instantly ditch Windows if their games worked properly on a GNU/Linux system. I’m sure that Windows won’t last long on my new laptop either. I’ve been enjoying being completely Microsoft-free for the last 4-5 years, and with the efforts of the free software community, that silly old legacy system will be trashed again soon.

BTW- as soon as I can find a X60, and have some money, I’m getting one of those too, they are seriously cool.